Copyright
Copyright © 2019 by Rutger Bregman
English-language translation copyright © 2020 by Elizabeth Manton and Erica Moore
Jacket design by Gregg Kulick
Jacket © 2020 Hachette Book Group, Inc.
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First ebook edition: June 2020
Published simultaneously in the United Kingdom by Bloomsbury Publishing
Originally published September 2019 in the Netherlands as De meeste mensen deugen by De Correspondent (de correspondent.nl), a member-funded journalism platform for independent voices
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ISBN 978-0-316-41855-3
E3-20200422-JV-NF-ORI
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
1. A New Realism
2. The Real Lord of the Flies
PART 1 THE STATE OF NATURE
3. The Rise of Homo puppy
4. Colonel Marshall and the Soldiers Who Wouldn’t Shoot
5. The Curse of Civilisation
6. The Mystery of Easter Island
PART 2 AFTER AUSCHWITZ
7. In the Basement of Stanford University
8. Stanley Milgram and the Shock Machine
9. The Death of Catherine Susan Genovese
PART 3 WHY GOOD PEOPLE TURN BAD
10. How Empathy Blinds
11. How Power Corrupts
12. What the Enlightenment Got Wrong
PART 4 A NEW REALISM
13. The Power of Intrinsic Motivation
14. Homo ludens
15. This Is What Democracy Looks Like
PART 5 THE OTHER CHEEK
16. Drinking Tea with Terrorists
17. The Best Remedy for Hate, Injustice and Prejudice
18. When the Soldiers Came Out of the Trenches
Epilogue Ten Rules to Live By
Acknowledgements
Discover More
A Note on the Author
Also by Rutger Bregman
Notes
To my parents
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‘Man will become better when you show him what he is like.’
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904)
PROLOGUE
On the eve of the Second World War, the British Army Command found itself facing an existential threat. London was in grave danger. The city, according to a certain Winston Churchill, formed ‘the greatest target in the world, a kind of tremendous fat cow, a valuable fat cow tied up to attract the beasts of prey’.1
The beast of prey was, of course, Adolf Hitler and his war machine. If the British population broke under the terror of his bombers, it would spell the end of the nation. ‘Traffic will cease, the homeless will shriek for help, the city will be in pandemonium,’ feared one British general.2 Millions of civilians would succumb to the strain, and the army wouldn’t even get around to fighting because it would have its hands full with the hysterical masses. Churchill predicted that at least three to four million Londoners would flee the city.
Anyone wanting to read up on all the evils to be unleashed needed only one book: Psychologie des foules–‘The Psychology of the Masses’–by one of the most influential scholars of his day, the Frenchman Gustave Le Bon. Hitler read the book cover to cover. So did Mussolini, Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt.
Le Bon’s book gives a play by play of how people respond to crisis. Almost instantaneously, he writes, ‘man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilization’.3 Panic and violence erupt, and we humans reveal our true nature.
On 19 October 1939, Hitler briefed his generals on the German plan of attack. ‘The ruthless employment of the Luftwaffe against the heart of the British will-to-resist,’ he said, ‘can and will follow at the given moment.’4
In Britain, everyone felt the clock ticking. A last-ditch plan to dig a network of underground shelters in London was considered, but ultimately scrapped over concerns that the populace, paralysed by fear, would never re-emerge. At the last moment, a few psychiatric field hospitals were thrown up outside the city to tend to the first wave of victims.
And then it began.
On 7 September 1940, 348 German bomber planes crossed the Channel. The fine weather had drawn many Londoners outdoors, so when the sirens sounded at 4:43 p.m. all eyes went to the sky.
That September day would go down in history as Black Saturday, and what followed as ‘the Blitz’. Over the next nine months, more than 80,000 bombs would be dropped on London alone. Entire neighbourhoods were wiped out. A million buildings in the capital were damaged or destroyed, and more than 40,000 people in the UK lost their lives.
So how did the British react? What happened when the country was bombed for months on end? Did people get hysterical? Did they behave like brutes?
Let me start with the eyewitness account of a Canadian psychiatrist.
In October 1940, Dr John MacCurdy drove through south-east London to visit a poor neighbourhood that had been particularly hard hit. All that remained was a patchwork of craters and crumbling buildings. If there was one place sure to be in the grip of pandemonium, this was it.
So what did the doctor find, moments after an air raid alarm? ‘Small boys continued to play all over the pavements, shoppers went on haggling, a policeman directed traffic in majestic boredom and the bicyclists defied death and the traffic laws. No one, so far as I could see, even looked into the sky.’5
In fact, if there’s one thing that all accounts of the Blitz have in common it’s their description of the strange serenity that settled over London in those months. An American journalist interviewing a British couple in their kitchen noted how they sipped tea even as the windows rattled in their frames. Weren’t they afraid?, the journalist wanted to know. ‘Oh no,’ was the answer. ‘If we were, what good would it do us?’6
Evidently, Hitler had forgotten to account for one thing: the quintessential British character. The stiff upper lip. The wry humour, as expressed by shop owners who posted signs in front of their wrecked premises announcing: MORE OPEN THAN USUAL. Or the pub proprietor who in the midst of devastation advertised: OUR WINDOWS ARE GONE, BUT OUR SPIRITS ARE EXCELLENT. COME IN AND TRY THEM.7
The British endured the German air raids much as they would a delayed train. Irritating, to be sure, but tolerable on the whole. Train services, as it happens, also continued during the Blitz, and Hitler’s tactics scarcely left a dent in the domestic economy. More
detrimental to the British war machine was Easter Monday in April 1941, when everybody had the day off.8
Within weeks after the Germans launched their bombing campaign, updates were being reported much like the weather: ‘Very blitzy tonight.’9 According to an American observer, ‘the English get bored so much more quickly than they get anything else, and nobody is taking cover much any longer’.10
And the mental devastation, then? What about the millions of traumatised victims the experts had warned about? Oddly enough, they were nowhere to be found. To be sure, there was sadness and fury; there was terrible grief at the loved ones lost. But the psychiatric wards remained empty. Not only that, public mental health actually improved. Alcoholism tailed off. There were fewer suicides than in peacetime. After the war ended, many British would yearn for the days of the Blitz, when everybody helped each other out and no one cared about your politics, or whether you were rich or poor.11
‘British society became in many ways strengthened by the Blitz,’ a British historian later wrote. ‘The effect on Hitler was disillusioning.’12
When put to the test, the theories set forth by celebrated crowd psychologist Gustave Le Bon could hardly have been further off the mark. Crisis brought out not the worst, but the best in people. If anything, the British moved up a few rungs on the ladder of civilisation. ‘The courage, humor, and kindliness of ordinary people,’ an American journalist confided in her diary, ‘continue to be astonishing under conditions that possess many of the features of a nightmare.’13
These unexpected impacts of the German bombings sparked a debate on strategy in Britain. As the Royal Air Force prepared to deploy its own fleet of bombers against the enemy, the question was how to do so most effectively.
Curiously, given the evidence, the country’s military experts still espoused the idea that a nation’s morale could be broken. By bombs. True, it hadn’t worked on the British, the reasoning went, but they were a special case. No other people on the planet could match their levelheadedness and fortitude. Certainly not the Germans, whose fundamental ‘lack of moral fibre’ meant they would ‘not stand a quarter of the bombing’ the British endured.14
Among those who endorsed this view was Churchill’s close friend Frederick Lindemann, also known as Lord Cherwell. A rare photograph of him shows a tall man with a cane, wearing a bowler hat and an icy expression.15 In the fierce debate over air strategy, Lindemann remained adamant: bombing works. Like Gustave Le Bon, he took a dim view of the masses, writing them off as cowardly and easily panicked.
To prove his point, Lindemann dispatched a team of psychiatrists to Birmingham and Hull, two cities where the German bombings had taken an especially heavy toll. They interviewed hundreds of men, women and children who had lost their homes during the Blitz, inquiring about the smallest details–‘down to the number of pints drunk and aspirins bought in the chemists’.16
The team reported back to Lindemann a few months later. The conclusion, printed in large letters on the title page, was this:
THERE IS NO EVIDENCE OF BREAKDOWN OF MORALE.17
So what did Frederick Lindemann do with this unequivocal finding? He ignored it. Lindemann had already decided that strategic bombing was a sure bet, and mere facts were not about to change his mind.
And so the memo he sent to Churchill said something altogether different:
Investigation seems to show that having one’s house demolished is most dangerous to morale. People seem to mind it more than having their friends or even relatives killed. At Hull, signs of strain were evident though only one-tenth of the homes were demolished. On the above figures, we can do as much harm to each of the 58 principal German towns. There seems little doubt that this would break the spirit of the German people.18
Thus ended the debate over the efficacy of bombing. The whole episode had, as one historian later described it, the ‘perceptible smell of a witch hunt’.19 Conscientious scientists who opposed the tactic of targeting German civilians were denounced as cowards, even traitors.
The bomb-mongers, meanwhile, felt the enemy needed to be dealt an even harsher blow. Churchill gave the signal and all hell broke loose over Germany. When the bombing finally ended, the casualties numbered ten times higher than after the Blitz. On one night in Dresden, more men, women and children were killed than in London during the whole war. More than half of Germany’s towns and cities were destroyed. The country had become one big heap of smouldering rubble.
All the while, only a small contingent of the Allied air force was actually striking strategic targets such as factories and bridges. Right up through the final months, Churchill maintained that the surest way to win the war was by dropping bombs on civilians to break national morale. In January 1944, a Royal Air Force memo gratifyingly affirmed this view: ‘The more we bomb, the more satisfactory the effect.’
The prime minister underlined these words using his famous red pen.20
So did the bombings have the intended effect?
Let me again start with an eyewitness account from a respected psychiatrist. Between May and July 1945, Dr Friedrich Panse interviewed almost a hundred Germans whose homes had been destroyed. ‘Afterward,’ said one, ‘I was really full of vim and lit up a cigar.’ The general mood following a raid, said another, was euphoric, ‘like after a war that has been won.’21
There was no sign of mass hysteria. On the contrary, in places that had just been hit, inhabitants felt relief. ‘Neighbours were wonderfully helpful,’ Panse recorded. ‘Considering the severity and duration of the mental strain, the general attitude was remarkably steady and restrained.’22
Reports by the Sicherheitsdienst, which kept close tabs on the German population, convey a similar picture. After the raids, people helped each other out. They pulled victims from the rubble, they extinguished fires. Members of the Hitler Youth rushed around tending to the homeless and the injured. A grocer jokingly hung up a sign in front of his shop: DISASTER BUTTER SOLD HERE!23
(Okay, the British humour was better.)
Shortly after the German surrender in May 1945, a team of Allied economists visited the defeated nation, tasked by the US Department of Defense to study the effects of the bombing. Most of all, the Americans wanted to know if this tactic was a good way to win wars.
The scientists’ findings were stark: the civilian bombings had been a fiasco. In fact, they appeared to have strengthened the German wartime economy, thereby prolonging the war. Between 1940 and 1944, they found that German tank production had multiplied by a factor of nine, and of fighter jets by a factor of fourteen.
A team of British economists reached the same conclusion.24 In the twenty-one devastated towns and cities they investigated, production had increased faster than in a control group of fourteen cities that had not been bombed. ‘We were beginning to see,’ confessed one of the American economists, ‘that we were encountering one of the greatest, perhaps the greatest miscalculation of the war.’25
What fascinates me most about this whole sorry affair is that the main actors all fell into the same trap.
Hitler and Churchill, Roosevelt and Lindemann–all of them signed on to psychologist Gustave Le Bon’s claim that our state of civilisation is no more than skin deep. They were certain that air raids would blow this fragile covering to bits. But the more they bombed, the thicker it got. Seems it wasn’t a thin membrane at all, but a callus.
Military experts, unfortunately, were slow to catch on. Twenty-five years later, US forces would drop three times as much firepower on Vietnam as they dropped in the entire Second World War.26 This time it failed on an even grander scale. Even when the evidence is right in front of us, somehow we still manage to deny it. To this day, many remain convinced that the resilience the British people showed during the Blitz can be chalked up to a quality that is singularly British.
But it’s not singularly British. It’s universally human.
1
A New Realism
1
This is a
book about a radical idea.
An idea that’s long been known to make rulers nervous. An idea denied by religions and ideologies, ignored by the news media and erased from the annals of world history.
At the same time, it’s an idea that’s legitimised by virtually every branch of science. One that’s corroborated by evolution and confirmed by everyday life. An idea so intrinsic to human nature that it goes unnoticed and gets overlooked.
If only we had the courage to take it more seriously, it’s an idea that might just start a revolution. Turn society on its head. Because once you grasp what it really means, it’s nothing less than a mind-bending drug that ensures you’ll never look at the world the same again
So what is this radical idea?
That most people, deep down, are pretty decent.
I don’t know anyone who explains this idea better than Tom Postmes, professor of social psychology at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. For years, he’s been asking students the same question.
Imagine an airplane makes an emergency landing and breaks into three parts. As the cabin fills with smoke, everybody inside realises: We’ve got to get out of here. What happens?
On Planet A, the passengers turn to their neighbours to ask if they’re okay. Those needing assistance are helped out of the plane first. People are willing to give their lives, even for perfect strangers.
On Planet B, everyone’s left to fend for themselves. Panic breaks out. There’s lots of pushing and shoving. Children, the elderly, and people with disabilities get trampled underfoot.
Now the question: Which planet do we live on?
‘I would estimate about 97 per cent of people think we live on Planet B,’ says Professor Postmes. ‘The truth is, in almost every case, we live on Planet A.’1
Doesn’t matter who you ask. Left wing or right, rich or poor, uneducated or well read–all make the same error of judgement. ‘They don’t know. Not freshman or juniors or grad students, not professionals in most cases, not even emergency responders,’ Postmes laments. ‘And it’s not for a lack of research. We’ve had this information available to us since World War II.’
Humankind Page 1