Humankind

by Rutger Bregman

  When Elliott appeared as a guest on the popular Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson a few weeks later, white America was outraged. ‘How dare you try this cruel experiment out on white children,’ wrote one angry viewer. ‘Black children grow up accustomed to such behavior, but white children, there’s no way they could possibly understand it. It’s cruel to white children and will cause them great psychological damage.’30

  Jane Elliott continued to fight this kind of racism all her life. But it’s crucial to bear in mind that hers was not a scientific set-up. She took great pains to pit her pupils against one another, for example forcing the blue-eyed kids to sit at the back of the classroom, giving them less breaktime and not allowing them to play with their brown-eyed peers. Her experiment didn’t answer the question of what happens when you split kids into groups, but don’t intervene in any other way.

  In the autumn of 2003, a team of psychologists designed a study to do precisely that. They asked two day-care centres in Texas to dress all their children, aged three to five, in different coloured shirts, either red or blue. After only three weeks, the researchers were already able to draw some conclusions.31 To begin with, as long as the adults ignored the difference in colours, the toddlers didn’t pay them any attention either. Nonetheless, the children did develop a sense of group identity. In conversations with the researchers, they called their own colour ‘smarter’ and ‘better’. And in a variation on the experiment where adults underscored the differences (‘Good morning, reds and blues!’), this effect was even stronger.

  In a subsequent study, a group of five-year-olds was similarly dressed in red or blue shirts and then shown photographs of peers who were wearing either the same or the other colour. Even without knowing anything else about the pictured individuals, the study subjects had a considerably more negative view of the children shown wearing a different colour to their own. Their perceptions, observed the researchers, were ‘pervasively distorted by mere membership in a social group, a finding with disturbing implications’.32

  The harsh lesson is that toddlers are not colour-blind. Quite the reverse: they’re more sensitive to differences than most adults realise. Even when people try to treat everyone as equals and act as though variations in skin colour, appearance, or wealth don’t exist, children still perceive the difference. It seems we’re born with a button for tribalism in our brains. All that’s needed is for something to switch it on.

  4

  As I read about the split nature of infants and toddlers–basically friendly, but with xenophobic tendencies–I was reminded of the ‘love hormone’ oxytocin. That’s the stuff found in high concentrations in Lyudmila Trut’s foxes in Siberia (see Chapter 3). Scientists now know that this hormone, which plays a crucial role in love and affection, can also make us distrustful of strangers.

  Could oxytocin help explain why good people do bad things? Do strong ties to our own group predispose us to feel animosity towards others? And could the sociability that enabled Homo puppy to conquer the world also be the source of humankind’s worst transgressions?33

  Initially this line of thinking struck me as rather unlikely. After all, people have another impressive instinct rooted deep in our puppyish nature: the ability to feel empathy. We can step out of our bubble and into someone else’s shoes. We’re hardwired to feel, at an emotional level, what it’s like to be the stranger.

  Not only can we do this, but we’re good at it. People are emotional vacuum cleaners, always sucking up other people’s feelings. Just think how easily books and movies can make us laugh or cry. For me, sad movies on flights are always the worst (I’m constantly pressing pause so fellow passengers won’t feel the need to comfort me).34

  For a long time I thought this fabulous instinct for feeling another person’s pain could help bring people closer together. What the world needed, surely, was a lot more empathy. But then I read a new book by one of those baby researchers.

  When people ask Professor Bloom what his book’s about, he’ll say:

  ‘It’s about empathy.’

  They smile and nod–until he adds:

  ‘I’m against it.’35

  Paul Bloom isn’t joking. According to this psychologist, empathy isn’t a beneficent sun illuminating the world. It’s a spotlight. A searchlight. It singles out a specific person or group of people in your life, and while you’re busy sucking up all the emotions bathed in that one ray of light, the rest of the world fades away.

  Take the following study carried out by another psychologist. In this experiment, a series of volunteers first heard the sad story of Sheri Summers, a ten-year-old suffering from a fatal disease. She’s on the waiting list for a life-saving treatment, but time’s running out. Subjects were told they could move Sheri up the waiting list, but they’re asked to be objective in their decision.

  Most people didn’t consider giving Sheri an advantage. They understood full well that every child on that list was sick and in need of treatment.

  Then came the twist. A second group of subjects was given the same scenario, but was then asked to imagine how Sheri must be feeling: Wasn’t it heartbreaking that this little girl was so ill? Turns out this single shot of empathy changed everything. The majority now wanted to let Sheri jump the line. If you think about it, that’s a pretty shaky moral choice. The spotlight on Sheri could effectively mean the death of other children who’d been on the list longer.36

  Now you may think: ‘Exactly! That’s why we need more empathy.’ We ought to put ourselves not only in Sheri’s shoes, but in those of the other children on waiting lists all over the world. More emotions, more feelings, more empathy!

  But that’s not how spotlights work. Go ahead and try it: imagine yourself in the shoes of one other person. Now imagine yourself in the shoes of a hundred other people. And a million. How about seven billion?

  We simply can’t do it.

  In practical terms, says Professor Bloom, empathy is a hopelessly limited skill.

  It’s something we feel for people who are close to us; for people we can smell, see, hear and touch. For family and friends, for fans of our favourite band, and maybe for the homeless guy on our own street corner. For cute puppies we can cuddle and pet, even as we eat animals mistreated on factory farms out of sight. And for people we see on TV–mostly those the camera zooms in on, while sad music swells in the background.

  As I read Bloom’s book, I began to realise that empathy resembles nothing so much as that modern-day phenomenon: the news. In Chapter 1, we saw that the news also functions like a spotlight. Just as empathy misleads us by zooming in on the specific, the news deceives us by zooming in on the exceptional.

  One thing is certain: a better world doesn’t start with more empathy. If anything, empathy makes us less forgiving, because the more we identify with victims, the more we generalise about our enemies.37 The bright spotlight we shine on our chosen few makes us blind to the perspective of our adversaries, because everybody else falls outside our view.38

  This is the mechanism that puppy expert Brian Hare talked about–the mechanism that makes us both the friendliest and the cruellest species on the planet. The sad truth is that empathy and xenophobia go hand in hand. They’re two sides of the same coin.

  5

  So why do good people turn bad?

  I think we can now start to frame an answer. In the Second World War, the soldiers of the Wehrmacht fought first and foremost for each other. Most were motivated not by sadism or a thirst for blood, but by comradeship.

  Once in combat, we’ve seen that soldiers still find it hard to kill. In Chapter 4 we were in the Pacific with Colonel Marshall, who realised that the majority of soldiers never fired their guns. During the Spanish Civil War, George Orwell noticed the same thing, when one day he found himself overpowered by empathy:

  At this moment a man […] jumped out of the trench and ran along the top of the parapet in full view. He was half-dressed and was holding up his trousers with both hands as he ra
n. I refrained from shooting at him. […] I did not shoot partly because of that detail about the trousers. I had come here to shoot at ‘Fascists’; but a man who is holding up his trousers isn’t a ‘Fascist’, he is visibly a fellow creature, similar to yourself, and you don’t feel like shooting at him.39

  Marshall’s and Orwell’s observations illustrate the difficulty we have inflicting harm on people who come too close. There’s something that holds us back, making us incapable of pulling the trigger.

  There’s one thing even harder to do than shoot, military historians have discovered: stabbing a fellow human being. Less than 1 per cent of injuries during the battles at Waterloo (1815) and the Somme (1916), for instance, were caused by soldiers wielding bayonets.40 So all those thousands of bayonets displayed in hundreds of museums? Most were never used. As one historian notes, ‘one side or the other usually recalls an urgent appointment elsewhere before bayonets cross’.41

  Here, too, we’ve been misled by the television and movie industries. Series like Game of Thrones and movies like Star Wars would have us believe that skewering another person is a piece of cake. But in reality it’s psychologically very hard to run through the body of another person.

  So how do we account for the hundreds of millions of war casualties over the past ten thousand years? How did all those people die? Answering this question requires forensic examination of the victims, so let’s take the causes of death of British soldiers in the Second World War as an example:42

  Other: 1%

  Chemical: 2%

  Blast, crush: 2%

  Landmine, booby trap: 10%

  Bullet, anti-tank mine: 10%

  Mortar, grenade, aerial bomb, shell: 75%

  Notice anything? If there’s one thing that ties these victims together, it’s that most were eliminated remotely. The overwhelming majority of soldiers were killed by someone who pushed a button, dropped a bomb, or planted a mine. By someone who never saw them, certainly not while they were half-naked and trying to hold up their trousers.

  Most of the time, wartime killing is something you do from far away. You could even describe the whole evolution of military technology as a process in which enemy lines have grown farther apart. From clubs and daggers to bows and arrows, and from muskets and cannon to bombs and grenades. Over the course of history, weaponry has got ever better at overcoming the central problem of all warfare: our fundamental aversion to violence. It’s practically impossible for us to kill someone while looking them in the eyes. Just as most of us would instantly go vegetarian if forced to butcher a cow, most soldiers become conscientious objectors when the enemy gets too close.

  Down the ages, the way to win most wars has been to shoot as many people as possible from a distance.43 That’s how the English defeated the French at Crécy and Agincourt during the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453), how the conquistadors conquered the Americas in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and what the US military does today, with its legions of armed drones.

  Aside from long-range weapons, armies also pursue means to increase psychological distance to the enemy. If you can dehumanise the other–say, by portraying them as vermin–it makes it easier to treat the other as if they are indeed inhuman.

  You can also drug your soldiers to dull their natural empathy and antipathy towards violence. From Troy to Waterloo, from Korea to Vietnam, few armies have fought without the aid of intoxicants, and scholars now even think Paris might not have fallen in 1940 had the German army not been stoked on thirty-five million methamphetamine pills (aka crystal meth, a drug that can cause extreme aggression).44

  Armies can also ‘condition’ their troops. The US Army started doing this after the Second World War on the recommendation of none other than Colonel Marshall. Vietnam recruits were immersed in boot camps that exalted not only a sense of brotherhood, but also the most brutal violence, forcing the men to scream ‘KILL! KILL! KILL!’ until they were hoarse. Second World War veterans (most of whom had never learned to kill) were shocked when shown images of this brand of training.45

  These days, soldiers no longer practise on ordinary paper bullseyes, but are drilled to fire instinctively at realistic human figures. Shooting a firearm becomes an automated, Pavlovian reaction you can perform without thinking. For snipers, the training’s even more radical. One tried-and-tested method is to present a series of progressively more horrific videos while the trainee sits strapped to a chair and a special device ensures their eyes stay wide open.46

  And so we’re finding ways to root out our innate and deep-seated aversion to violence. In modern armies, comradeship has become less important. Instead we have, to quote one American veteran, ‘manufactured contempt’.47

  This conditioning works. Set soldiers trained using these techniques opposite an old-school army and the latter is crushed every time. Take the Falklands War (1982): though bigger in sheer numbers, the Argentine army with its old-fashioned training never had a chance against Britain’s conditioned shooting machines.48

  The American military also managed to boost its ‘firing ratio’, increasing the number of soldiers who shoot to 55 per cent in the Korean War and 95 per cent in Vietnam. But this came at a price. If you brainwash millions of young soldiers in training, it should come as no surprise when they return with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), as so many did after Vietnam.49 Innumerable soldiers had not only killed other people–something inside them had died, too.

  Finally, there’s one group which can easily keep the enemy at a distance: the leaders.

  The commanders of armies and of terrorist organisations who hand down orders from on high don’t have to stifle feelings of empathy for their opponent. And what’s fascinating is that, while soldiers tend to be ordinary people, their leaders are a different story. Terrorism experts and historians consistently point out that people in positions of power have distinct psychological profiles. War criminals like Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels are classic examples of power-hungry, paranoid narcissists.50 Al-Qaeda and IS leaders have been similarly manipulative and egocentric, rarely troubled by feelings of compassion or doubt.51

  This brings us to the next mystery. If Homo puppy is such an innately friendly creature, why do egomaniacs and opportunists, narcissists and sociopaths keep coming out on top? How can it be that we humans–one of the only species to blush–somehow allow ourselves to be ruled by specimens who are utterly shameless?

  11

  How Power Corrupts

  1

  If you want to write about power, there’s one name you can’t escape. He made a brief appearance in Chapter 3, where I discussed the theory that anyone who wants to achieve anything is best served weaving a web of lies and deception.

  The name is Machiavelli.

  In the winter of 1513, after yet another long night at the pub, a down-and-out city clerk started writing a pamphlet he called The Prince. This ‘little whimsy of mine’, as Machiavelli described it, was to become one of the most influential works in western history.1 The Prince would wind up on the bedside tables of Emperor Charles V, King Louis XIV and General Secretary Stalin. The German Chancellor Otto van Bismarck had a copy, as did Churchill, Mussolini and Hitler. It was even found in Napoleon’s carriage just after his defeat at Waterloo.

  The big advantage of Niccolò Machiavelli’s philosophy is that it’s doable. If you want power, he wrote, you have to grab it. You must be shameless, unfettered by principles or morals. The ends justify the means. And if you don’t look out for yourself, people will waltz right over you. According to Machiavelli, ‘it can be said about men in general that they are ungrateful, fickle, dissembling, hypocritical, cowardly, and greedy’.2 If someone does you a good turn, don’t be fooled: it’s a sham, for ‘men never do anything good except out of necessity’.3

  Machiavelli’s book is often called ‘realistic’. If you’d care to read it, just visit your nearest bookshop and head for the eversellers. Or you can opt for one of the multitude of self-help book
s devoted to his philosophy, from Machiavelli for Managers to Machiavelli for Moms, or watch any number of plays, movies and TV series inspired by his ideas. The Godfather, House of Cards, Game of Thrones–all are basically footnotes to the work of this sixteenth-century Italian.

  Given his theory’s popularity, it makes sense to ask if Machiavelli was right. Must people shamelessly lie and deceive to gain and retain power? What does the latest science have to say?

  Professor Dacher Keltner is the leading expert on applied Machiavellianism. When he first became interested in the psychology of power back in the nineties, he noticed two things. One: almost everybody believed Machiavelli was right. Two: almost nobody had done the science that could back it up.

  Keltner decided to be the first. In what he termed his ‘natural state’ experiments, the American psychologist infiltrated a succession of settings where humans freely vie for dominion, from dorm rooms to summer camps. It was in precisely these kinds of places, where people meet for the first time, that he expected to see Machiavelli’s timeless wisdom on full display.

  He was disappointed. Behave as The Prince prescribes, Keltner discovered, and you’ll be run right out of camp. Much as in prehistoric times, these mini-societies don’t put up with arrogance. People assume you’re a jerk and shut you out. The individuals who rise to positions of power, Keltner found, are the friendliest and the most empathic.4 It’s survival of the friendliest.

  Now you may be thinking: this professor guy should swing by the office and meet my boss–that’ll cure him of his little theory about nice leaders.