Libertarian Reading of HumanKind: A Hopeful History

Rutger Bregman argues that people are fundamentally good

My favorite books challenge my preconceived notions. In HumanKind: A Hopeful History, Rutger Bregman delivers an intriguing alternative view of history. 

The common wisdom in academic and popular culture is that humans are fundamentally flawed wicked creatures. Without a leviathan to lord over us, we will live in a nasty, brutish, and short Hobisan hellscape. Proof can be found from the Nazi concentration camps to the research of Stanley Milgram.

Bregman disagrees, and asks the question: what if humans are fundamentally good? To make his case, Bregman goes back to our origin story. Humans have evolved to connect as a group and share information, a skill set other primates lack. When the whites of our eyes connect, our tribe feels greater than the sum of its parts. Group connection sends serotonin spiking.

According to Bregman, this invisible kindness can be seen in the unlikeliest places. On the field of battle in World War II, only about a quarter of soldiers fired their weapons. Even in life or death situations many soldiers could not take another’s life. 

This is also seen in quotidian economic activity. Increased wages are not as important as autonomy, respect, and mission for many workers. Bregman takes issue with the value maximizing system of “rational choice” economists impose on us. 

Before you accuse him of being naive, he does provide a couple big caveats. Humans are tribal, and we feel best in groups who are like us. This leads to Carl Schmitt’s us vs. them system of societal organization. We gather to combat the “other”. 

The second big caveat is that villains never see themselves as villains. I always think about this when I watch Lord of the Rings, why are the bad guys so obviously bad?  With a platform of pure evil, how does Sauron get any followers? 

Hitler saw himself as a hero saving the German people, So did Eichman. The saying “the road to hell is paved with good intentions” is a cliche for a reason. If you’re a libertarian you intuitively get it, how well meaning big brother intervention can have all sorts of unintended consequences.

Bregman’s book will annoy people on the right and on the left. Conservatives will scoff at his hippy views on crime and punishment as well as his critique of free markets. Liberals won’t like being told that technocratic “public policy” can’t solve the world’s problems with top down solutions.

For me, this book can be applied on two levels, the personal and societal. As a guide to acting as a member of society, this book is a great source of motivation and wisdom. On the more challenging societal questions, Bregman raises a lot of important points, but his conclusions are not always convincing. 

Personal Choices: Why the most rational life philosophy is to be irrationally optimistic.

A few weeks ago I was sailing in the Greek Islands. It was supposed to be an idyllic trip, enjoying post covid travel with long missed friends, but it didn’t go that way.

The winds were literally not in our favor. A strong north to south breeze was making it difficult to get from Santorini to Ios to Milos as intended. We essentially had two options, one to take it in stride and enjoy the island we were on, or to fret and seeth.

My friend chose the latter. He believed an indolent crew, rather than a hostile wind, was holding us back. He saw the worst in these Greek sailors, believing they were conspiring against him. He chose to sulk.

I did not know what to do, I didn’t think the crew had malicious intent and did not know enough about sailing to contradict them. My friend was convinced otherwise, and pushed me hard to agree with him. To appease him I pushed the crew to move on. The crew sulked, my friend sulked, and I suffered for attempting to make everyone happy.

In the end my friend left the boat without warning. The next day the weather changed and my girlfriend and I continued on a magical vacation. We apologized to the crew, treated them with respect, and all of a sudden received amazing service. Secret beaches were found, exclusive restaurant reservations reserved.

I have not spoken to my now ex friend since, but his negative outlook stuck with me. He believed the world in general was an evil place out to trick him. You had to push back hard, manipulating people with economic and psychological brute force to get what you wanted. Otherwise, you’d be steamrolled.

My darker side agreed with him. What if my niceness was actually a weakness?

It forced an internal reckoning of what I value in the world. Should I be more alert to threat or open to opportunity? In this crisis, I came to Bregman’s work. He writes:

“If you go around forever doubting other people, you’ll behave in ways guaranteed to make you disliked. Things like friendship, love, trust and loyalty become true precisely because we believe in them.”

I began to see a through line in my ex friends life. Bad things just always seemed to happen to him. He did not get into the schools he wanted, got robbed, lost a business in the coup in Myanmar (will say he is negative but also interesting), Generally he seemed to always have bad luck. We actually initially bonded by bitching about grad school at NYU.

Was all of this misfortune by chance, or was there something driving it? Bregman introduces the Golem effect, where negativity breeds more negativity in a spiral of destruction. Did my friend have a negative outlook because of misfortune, or misfortune because of a negative outlook? 

The opposite of the Golem effect is the Pygmalion Effect, and we saw it in full effect after my friend’s departure from the boat. We decided to trust the crew completely, giving them respect and responsibility. Very quickly their attitude changed, and the remaining days aboard became a complete pleasure.

One idea hammered home in this book is that you win by being optimistic and trusting. Let’s say you get screwed ten percent of the time (a high number), you still come out ahead because you get so much more from people by trusting them. When I’ve tried this I have seen great results, and I it’s a key takeaway for my personal life from this book.

In the end the truly brave person takes the risk of trusting, it is counterintuitive but the easy path is to be hateful and mistrustful.

Society Level: Questioning Established Truth

I love Bregman’s ideas on a personal level, but I have mixed feelings about his thoughts on society as a whole.

For a writer so focused on locating the positive within the individual, I find it amazing he takes such a pessimistic view of capitalism. He posits that the state and big business worked hand in glove to force populations into servitude. While he has a romantic take on common spaces such as parks, public spaces, and our communal hunter gatherer past, He doesn’t really find communism appealing either.

His vision seems to map with Tolstoy’s agrarian anarchistic views expressed in The Slavery of Our Time. They’re both more nostalgic for the village artisan and yeoman farmer, while communism is about increased mass industrialization in the context of collectively owned means of production. Lenin did not want to go back to the farm, instead he wanted to share the wealth of the factory.

Maybe what Bregman is struggling with is the difference between corporatism and capitalism. He writes with incredible clarity about corporatism:

“Could it be that’s also driving a big part of our so-called ‘knowledge economy’? That pedigree managers and consultants make simple things as complicated as possible so we will need them to steer us through all the complexity? Sometimes I secretly think this is the revenue model of not only Wall Street bankers but also postmodern philosophers peddling incomprehensible jargon. Both make simple things impossibly complex.”

These are the leeches who occupy what anthropologist David Graeber described as “bullshit Jobs.” Byzantine levels of bureaucratic complexity beget more useless bureaucrats. They do not produce anything but somehow are always positioned in a way that makes them too big to fail. 

This is the private sector version of the rot centralized planning cultivates in socialist societies. These jobs provide financial income but are fundamentally corrosive to the human soul and destructive to the institutions they supposedly serve.

Real capitalism is far from this. It is optimistic, bold, and horizontally organized. It’s the developer working on a new dating app, it’s the rocket company sending satellites into space, It’s the retiree starting a bookstore to make their local community better. 

There is dignity in capitalism, and a unique self reliance that ennobles men and women to be more kind in their day to day life. Capitalism does not deserve Bregman’s cynicism.

While I tend to disagree with Bregman’s view of the system, I think he makes many truly insightful comments on sub-state level institutions.

I love what he has to say about schools. There is something particularly soul crushing about the militaristic discipline imposed by the bell. Students in a class mid lessons rush onward like Pavlovian puppets. This is not about pedagogy or academic achievement, but instead is designed to turn wild, free children, into suppressed worker bees. We use standardized tests to create standardized soldiers for the frontlines of postmodern capitalism.

Especially in the U.S., the education system is failing students. Teachers unions and government bureaucrats push one solution; more of the same. More school days, more tests, more homework. Maybe it’s time to try something new?

As Bregman discusses, some schools in the Netherlands are choosing to be different. He describes a school with no grades and no classes, one that is organized directly by the students. Students follow their own passions and creativity, guided only by weekly meetings with mentors at the school. Students set goals around their own interests and learn the skills and knowledge necessary to meet them. They are allowed to be creative.

According to the book, the outcomes are almost uniformly positive. Kids struggling in the traditional system turn their lives around. These alternatives however are under attack by the same bureaucrats who feel anything new challenges their legitimacy and budget.

Another area that needs a fresh look, Bregman says, is the prison system. 

Bregman describes prisons in Norway that take an entirely different approach from those in the United States. Prisoners have their own comfortable rooms (better than many NYC Studios) and are treated with dignity by the guards. They are allowed to be outside, work with power tools, and move around the prison complex freely. Shockingly, the prisoners often make friends with the guards. When prisoners leave, they are generally not stigmatized in society.

This seemed stupid at first. People are in prison for a reason and need to be punished. As a paleo conservative I see weakness as the mother of criminality and social decline. Surely a soft prison must embolden criminals in their nefarious ways?

According to Bregman, this is not the case. Norway has much lower levels of recidivism than the United States. In our Prison industrial complex, we have a system of increasing harshness that somehow also does not serve as a deterrent. The revolving door doesn’t seem to serve society or the prisoners. 

Again, we see a large government bureaucracy entrenched and resistant to change.

Seeing the World Rationaly: Silence of the Lambs Vs. Love Actually

In the book, Bregman points out something fundamentally obvious, but almost entirely overlooked; We irrationally fixate on the negative.

Cheekily, Bregman compares the romcom Love Actually to a horror movie. He points out that while the horror film is seen by critics as a gritty look into the real world, Love Actually is dismissed as pure fantasy. How many people fall in love every day in cities, vs how many are murdered by serial killers, Bregman asks rhetorically? 

It’s easy to see why we think the world is going to shit when you watch the News. Mayhem, disease, and conflict dominate the headlines. But in reality we live in the richest, healthiest, and most peaceful time in human history. Fundamentally our culture is telling us the wrong things about the world.

Both on a personal level and on a societal level the first thing we need to do is look at the world rationaly. We must make a conscious effort to escape our cognitive bias towards negativity.

My takeaway from Bregman is that before you can make any judgments, you must embrace positive rationality. Institutions and Individuals both need to learn to trust people. This will only be possible if there’s a fundamental shift in perception.

I recommend everyone read this book, not for the specific policy ideas, but for the positive lens it gives you to view the world.