Humankind

by Rutger Bregman

  But hold on, there’s more to this story. Keltner also studied the effects of power once people have it. This time he arrived at an altogether different conclusion. Perhaps most entertaining is his Cookie Monster study, named for the furry blue muppet from Sesame Street.5 In 1998, Keltner and his team had small groups of three volunteers come into their lab. One was randomly assigned to be the group leader and they were all given a dull task to complete. Presently, an assistant brought in a plate containing five cookies for the group to share. All groups left one cookie on the plate (a golden rule of etiquette), but in almost every case the fourth cookie was scarfed down by the leader. What’s more, one of Keltner’s doctoral students noticed that the leaders also seemed to be messier eaters. Replaying the videos, it became clear that these ‘cookie monsters’ more often ate with their mouths open, ate more noisily and sprayed more crumbs on their shirts.

  Maybe this sounds like your boss?

  At first I was inclined to laugh off this kind of goofy experiment, but dozens of similar studies have been published in recent years from all over the world.6 Keltner and his team did another one looking at the psychological effect of an expensive car. Here, the first set of subjects were put behind the wheel of a beat-up Mitsubishi or Ford Pinto and sent in the direction of a crosswalk where a pedestrian was just stepping off the curb. All the drivers stopped as the law required.

  But then in part two of the study, subjects got to drive a snazzy Mercedes. This time, 45 per cent failed to stop for the pedestrian. In fact, the more expensive the car, the ruder the road manners.7 ‘BMW drivers were the worst,’ one of the other researchers told the New York Times.8 (This study has now been replicated twice with similar results.)9

  Observing how the drivers behaved, Keltner eventually realised what it reminded him of. The medical term is ‘acquired sociopathy’: a non-hereditary antisocial personality disorder, first diagnosed by psychologists in the nineteenth century. It arises after a blow to the head that damages key regions of the brain and can turn the nicest people into the worst kind of Machiavellian.

  It transpires that people in power display the same tendencies.10 They literally act like someone with brain damage. Not only are they more impulsive, self-centred, reckless, arrogant and rude than average, they are more likely to cheat on their spouses, are less attentive to other people and less interested in others’ perspectives. They’re also more shameless, often failing to manifest that one facial phenomenon that makes human beings unique among primates.

  They don’t blush.

  Power appears to work like an anaesthetic that makes you insensate to other people. In a 2014 study, three American neurologists used a ‘transcranial magnetic stimulation machine’ to test the cognitive functioning of powerful and less powerful people. They discovered that a sense of power disrupts what is known as mirroring, a mental process which plays a key role in empathy.11 Ordinarily, we mirror all the time. Someone else laughs, you laugh, too; someone yawns, so do you. But powerful individuals mirror much less. It is almost as if they no longer feel connected to their fellow human beings. As if they’ve come unplugged.12

  If powerful people feel less ‘connected’ to others, is it any wonder they also tend to be more cynical? One of the effects of power, myriad studies show, is that it makes you see others in a negative light.13 If you’re powerful you’re more likely to think most people are lazy and unreliable. That they need to be supervised and monitored, managed and regulated, censored and told what to do. And because power makes you feel superior to other people, you’ll believe all this monitoring should be entrusted to you.

  Tragically, not having power has exactly the opposite effect. Psychological research shows that people who feel powerless also feel far less confident. They’re hesitant to voice an opinion. In groups, they make themselves seem smaller, and they underestimate their own intelligence.14

  Such feelings of uncertainty are convenient for those in power, as self-doubt makes people unlikely to strike back. Censorship becomes unnecessary, because people who lack confidence silence themselves. Here we see a nocebo in action: treat people as if they are stupid and they’ll start to feel stupid, leading rulers to reason that the masses are too dim to think for themselves and hence they–with their vision and insight–should take charge.

  But isn’t it precisely the other way around? Isn’t it power that makes us short-sighted? Once you arrive at the top, there’s less of an impetus to see things from other perspectives. There’s no imperative for empathy, because anyone you find irrational or irritating can simply be ignored, sanctioned, locked up, or worse. Powerful people don’t have to justify their actions and therefore can afford a blinkered view.

  That might also help explain why women tend to score higher than men on empathy tests. A large study at Cambridge University in 2018 found no genetic basis for this divergence, and instead attributed it to what scientists call socialisation.15 Due to the way power has traditionally been distributed, it’s mostly been up to women to understand men. Those persistent ideas about a superior female intuition are probably rooted in the same imbalance–that women are expected to see things from a male perspective, and rarely the other way around.

  2

  The more I found out about the psychology of power, the more I understood that power is like a drug–one with a whole catalogue of side effects. ‘Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,’ British historian Lord Acton famously remarked back in the nineteenth century. There are few statements on which psychologists, sociologists and historians so unanimously agree.16

  Dacher Keltner calls this ‘the power paradox’. Scores of studies show that we pick the most modest and kind-hearted individuals to lead us. But once they arrive at the top, the power often goes straight to their heads–and good luck unseating them after that.

  We need only look at our gorilla and chimpanzee cousins to see how tricky toppling a leader can be. In gorilla troops there’s a single silverback dictator who makes all the decisions and has exclusive access to a harem of females. Chimp leaders also go to great lengths to stay on top, a position reserved for the male who’s the strongest and most adept at forging coalitions.

  ‘Entire passages of Machiavelli seem to be directly applicable to chimpanzee behavior,’ biologist Frans de Waal noted in his book Chimpanzee Politics, published in the early eighties.17 The alpha male–the prince–struts around like a he-man and manipulates the others into doing his bidding. His deputies help him hold the reins but could just as easily conspire to stab him in the back.

  Scientists have known for decades that we share 99 per cent of our DNA with chimpanzees. In 1995, this inspired Newt Gingrich, then Speaker of the House of Representatives, to hand out dozens of copies of De Waal’s book to his colleagues. The US Congress was to his mind not much different from a chimpanzee colony. At best, its members exercised a little more effort to hide their instincts.

  What was not yet widely known at the time is that humans have another close primate relative that shares 99 per cent of our DNA. The bonobo. The first time Frans de Waal saw one was back in the early seventies, when they were still known as ‘pygmy chimpanzees’. For a long time, chimps and bonobos were even thought to be the same species.18

  In reality, bonobos are an altogether different creature. In Chapter 4 we saw that these apes have domesticated themselves, just like Homo puppy. The female of the species seem to have been key to this process, because, while not as strong as the males, they close ranks any time one of their own gets harassed by the opposite sex. If necessary, they bite his penis in half.19 Thanks to this balance of power, bonobo females can pick and choose their own mates, and the nicest guys usually finish first.

  (If you think all this emancipation makes for a dull sex life, think again: ‘Bonobos behave as if they have read the Kama Sutra,’ writes De Waal, ‘performing every position and variation one can imagine.’20 When two groups of bonobos first meet, it often ends in an orgy.)

>   Before we get too enthusiastic: humans are clearly not bonobos. Still, a growing body of research suggests that we have a lot more in common with these sociable apes than we do with Machiavellian chimpanzees. For starters, throughout most of human history our political systems much more closely resembled that of bonobos. Just recall the tactics of the !Kung tribe members (see Chapter 5): ‘We refuse one who boasts, for someday his pride will make him kill somebody. So we always speak of his meat as worthless. This way we cool his heart and make him gentle.’

  In an analysis of forty-eight studies on hunter-gatherer societies, an American anthropologist determined that Machiavellianism has almost always been a recipe for disaster. To illustrate this, here are some traits that, according to this scientist, were needed to get you elected leader in prehistory. You had to be:

  Generous

  Brave

  Wise

  Charismatic

  Fair

  Impartial

  Reliable

  Tactful

  Strong

  Humble21

  Leadership was temporary among hunter-gatherers and decisions were made as a group. Anyone foolish enough to act as Machiavelli later prescribed was risking their life. The selfish and the greedy would get booted out of the tribe and faced likely starvation. After all, nobody wanted to share food with those who were full of themselves.

  A further indication that human behaviour more closely resembles that of bonobos than chimpanzees is our innate aversion to inequality. Do a search for ‘inequality aversion’ in Google Scholar and you’ll find more than ten thousand scientific articles about this primordial instinct. Children as young as three already divide a cake out equally, and at six would rather throw a slice away than let one person have a larger portion.22 Like bonobos, humans share both fanatically and frequently.

  That said, we also shouldn’t exaggerate such findings. Homo puppy is not a natural-born communist. We’re fine with a little inequality, psychologists emphasise, if we think it’s justified. As long as things seem fair. If you can convince the masses that you’re smarter or better or holier, then it makes sense that you’re in charge and you won’t have to fear opposition.

  With the advent of the first settlements and growth in inequality, chieftains and kings had to start legitimising why they enjoyed more privileges than their subjects. In other words, they began engaging in propaganda. Where the chiefs of nomadic tribes were all modesty, now leaders began putting on airs. Kings proclaimed they ruled by divine right or that they themselves were gods.

  Of course, the propaganda of power is more subtle these days, but that’s not to say we no longer design ingenious ideologies to justify why some individuals ‘deserve’ more authority, status, or wealth than others. We do. In capitalist societies, we tend to use arguments of merit. But how does society decide who has the most merit? How do you determine who contributes most to society? Bankers or bin men? Nurses or the so-called disruptors who’re always thinking outside the box? The better the story you spin about yourself, the bigger your piece of the pie. In fact, you could look at the entire evolution of civilisation as a history of rulers who continually devised new justifications for their privileges.23

  But something strange is going on here. Why do we believe the stories our leaders tell us?

  Some historians say it’s because we’re naive–and that might just be our superpower as a species.24 Simply put, the theory goes like this: if you want to get thousands of strangers to work as a team, you need something to hold things together. This glue has to be stronger than friendliness, because although Homo puppy’s social network is the biggest of all primates, it isn’t nearly large enough to forge cities or states.

  Typically, our social circles number no more than about one hundred and fifty people. Scientists arrived at this limit in the 1990s, when two American researchers asked a group of volunteers to list all the friends and family to whom they sent Christmas cards. The average was sixty-eight households, comprising some one hundred and fifty individuals.25

  When you start looking, this number turns up everywhere. From Roman legions to devout colonists and from corporate divisions to our real friends on Facebook, this magic threshold pops up all over the place and suggests the human brain is not equipped to juggle more than a hundred and fifty meaningful relationships.

  The problem is that while a hundred and fifty guests make for a great party, it’s nowhere near enough to build a pyramid or send a rocket to the moon. Projects on that scale call for cooperation in much larger groups, so leaders needed to incentivise us.

  How? With myths. We learned to imagine kinship with people we’d never met. Religions, states, companies, nations–all of them really only exist in our minds, in the narratives our leaders and we ourselves tell. No one has ever met ‘France’ or shaken hands with ‘the Roman Catholic Church’. But that doesn’t matter if we sign on for the fiction.

  The most obvious example of such a myth is, of course, God. Or call it the original Big Brother. Even as a teenager, I wondered why the Christian Creator I grew up with cared so much about humans and our mundane doings. Back then, I didn’t know that our nomadic ancestors had a very different conception of the divine and that their gods took scant interest in human lives (see Chapter 5).

  The question is: where did we get this belief in an omnipotent God? And in a God angered by human sin? Scientists have recently come up with a fascinating theory. To understand it, we have to backtrack to Chapter 3, where we learned that there is something unique about Homo puppy’s eyes. Thanks to the whites surrounding our irises, we can follow the direction of one another’s gazes. The glimpse this gives us into other people’s minds is vital to forging bonds of trust.

  When we began living together in large groups alongside thousands of strangers, everything changed. Quite literally, we lost sight of each other. There’s no way you can make eye contact with thousands or tens of thousands or a million people, so our mutual distrust began to grow. Increasingly, people started to suspect others of sponging off the community; that while they were breaking their backs all those others were putting their feet up.

  And so rulers needed someone to keep tabs on the masses. Someone who heard everything and saw everything. An all-seeing Eye. God.

  It’s no accident that the new deities were vengeful types.26 God became a super-Leviathan, spying on everyone twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Not even your thoughts were safe. ‘Even the hairs of your head are all numbered,’ the Bible tells us in Matthew 10:30. It was this omniscient being that from now on kept watch from the heavens, supervising, surveilling and–when necessary–striking.

  Myths were key to helping the human race and our leaders do something no other species had done before. They enabled us to work together on a massive scale with millions of strangers. Furthermore, this theory goes on to say, it was from these great powers of fabrication that great civilisations arose. Judaism and Islam, nationalism and capitalism–all are products of our imagination. ‘It all revolved around telling stories,’ Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari writes in his book Sapiens (2011), ‘and convincing people to believe them.’27

  This is a captivating theory, but it has one drawback.

  It ignores 95 per cent of human history.

  As it happens, our nomadic ancestors had already exceeded that magic threshold of one hundred and fifty friends.28 Sure, we hunted and gathered in small groups, but groups also regularly swapped members, making us part of an immense network of cross-pollinating Homo puppies. We saw this in Chapter 3 with tribes like the Aché in Paraguay and the Hadza in Tanzania, whose members meet more than a thousand people over the course of their lifetimes.29

  What’s more, prehistoric people had rich imaginations, too. We’ve always spun ingenious myths that we passed down to each other and that greased the wheels of cooperation among multitudes. The world’s earliest temple at Göbekli Tepe in modern-day Turkey (see Chapter 5) is a case in point, built through the
concerted efforts of thousands.

  The only difference is that in prehistory those myths were less stable. Chieftains could be summarily toppled and monuments speedily torn down. In the words of two anthropologists:

  Rather than idling in some primordial innocence, until the genie of inequality was somehow uncorked, our prehistoric ancestors seem to have successfully opened and shut the bottle on a regular basis, confining inequality to ritual costume dramas, constructing gods and kingdoms as they did their monuments, then cheerfully disassembling them once again.30

  For millennia, we could afford to be sceptical about the stories we were told. If some loudmouth stood up announcing he’d been singled out by the hand of God, you could shrug it off. If that person became a nuisance, sooner or later he or she would get an arrow in the backside. Homo puppy was friendly, not naive.

  It wasn’t until the emergence of armies and their commanders that all this changed. Just try standing up to a strongman who has all opposition skinned, burned alive, or drawn and quartered. Your criticisms suddenly won’t seem so urgent. ‘This is the reason,’ Machiavelli wrote, ‘why all armed prophets have triumphed and all unarmed prophets have fallen.’

  From this point on, gods and kings were no longer so easily ousted. Not backing a myth could now prove fatal. If you believed in the wrong god, you kept it to yourself. If you believed the nation state was a foolish illusion, it could cost you your head. ‘It is useful,’ advised Machiavelli, ‘to arrange matters so that when they no longer believe, they can be made to believe by force.31

  You might think violence isn’t a big part of the equation any more–at least not in tidy democracies with their boring bureaucracy. But make no mistake: the threat of violence is still very much present, and it’s pervasive.32 It’s the reason families with children can be kicked out of their homes for defaulting on mortgage payments. It’s the reason why immigrants can’t simply stroll across the border in the fictions we call ‘Europe’ and ‘the United States’. And it’s also the reason we continue to believe in money.