Just consider: why would people hole up in cages we know as ‘offices’ for forty hours a week in exchange for some bits of metal and paper or a few digits added to their bank account? Is it because we’ve been won over by the propaganda of the powers that be? And, if so, why are there virtually no dissenters? Why does no one walk up to the tax authorities and say, ‘Hey mister, I just read an interesting book about the power of myths and realised money is a fiction, so I’m skipping taxes this year.’
The reason is self-evident. If you ignore a bill or don’t pay your taxes, you’ll be fined or locked up. If you don’t willingly comply, the authorities will come after you. Money may be a fiction, but it’s enforced by the threat of very real violence.33
3
As I read Dacher Keltner’s work and about the psychology of power, I began to see how the development of private property and farming could have led Homo puppy astray.
For millennia, we picked the nice guys to be in charge. We were well aware even in our prehistoric days that power corrupts, so we also leveraged a system of shaming and peer pressure to keep group members in check.
But 10,000 years ago it became substantially more difficult to unseat the powerful. As we settled down in cities and states and our rulers gained command over whole armies, a little gossip or a well-aimed spear were no longer enough. Kings simply didn’t allow themselves to be dethroned. Presidents were not brought down by taunts and jeers.
Some historians suspect that we’re now actually dependent on inequality. Yuval Noah Harari, for example, writes that ‘complex human societies seem to require imagined hierarchies and unjust discrimination’.34 (And you can be sure that such statements are met with grave approval at the top.)
But what fascinates me is that people around the world have continued to find ways to tame their leaders, even after the advent of chieftains and kings. One obvious method is revolution. Every revolution, whether the French (1789), the Russian (1917), or the Arab Spring (2011), is fuelled by the same dynamic. The masses try to overthrow a tyrant.
Most revolutions ultimately fail, though. No sooner is one despot brought down than a new leader stands up and develops an insatiable lust for power. After the French Revolution it was Napoleon. After the Russian Revolution it was Lenin and Stalin. Egypt, too, has reverted to yet another dictator. Sociologists call this the ‘iron law of oligarchy’: even socialists and communists, for all their vaunted ideals of liberty and equality, are far from immune to the corrupting influence of too much power.
Some societies have coped with this by engineering a system of distributed power–otherwise known as ‘democracy’. Although the word suggests it is the people who govern (in ancient Greek, demos means ‘people’ and kratos means ‘power’), it doesn’t usually work out that way.
Rousseau already observed that this form of government is more accurately an ‘elective aristocracy’ because in practice the people are not in power at all. Instead we’re allowed to decide who holds power over us. It’s also important to realise this model was originally designed to exclude society’s rank and file. Take the American Constitution: historians agree it ‘was intrinsically an aristocratic document designed to check the democratic tendencies of the period’.35 It was never the American Founding Fathers’ intention for the general populace to play an active role in politics. Even now, though any citizen can run for public office, it’s tough to win an election without access to an aristocratic network of donors and lobbyists. It’s not surprising that American ‘democracy’ exhibits dynastic tendencies–think of the Kennedys, the Clintons, the Bushes.
Time and again we hope for better leaders, but all too often those hopes are dashed. The reason, says Professor Keltner, is that power causes people to lose the kindness and modesty that got them elected, or they never possessed those sterling qualities in the first place. In a hierarchically organised society, the Machiavellis are one step ahead. They have the ultimate secret weapon to defeat their competition.
They’re shameless.
We saw earlier that Homo puppy evolved to experience shame. There’s a reason that, of all the species in the animal kingdom, we’re one of the few that blush. For millennia, shaming was the surest way to tame our leaders, and it can still work today. Shame is more effective than rules and regulations or censure and coercion, because people who feel shame regulate themselves. In the way their speech falters when they disappoint expectations or in a telltale flush when they realise they’re the subject of gossip.36
Clearly, shame also has a dark side (shame induced by poverty, for example), but try to imagine what society would be like if shame didn’t exist. That would be hell.
Unfortunately, there are always people who are unable to feel shame, whether because they are drugged on power or are among the small minority born with sociopathological traits. Such individuals wouldn’t last long in nomadic tribes. They’d be cast out of the group and left to die alone. But in our modern sprawling organisations, sociopaths actually seem to be a few steps ahead on the career ladder. Studies show that between 4 and 8 per cent of CEOs have a diagnosable sociopathy, compared to 1 per cent among the general population.37
In our modern democracy, shamelessness can be positively advantageous. Politicians who aren’t hindered by shame are free to do things others wouldn’t dare. Would you call yourself your country’s most brilliant thinker, or boast about your sexual prowess? Could you get caught in a lie and then tell another without missing a beat? Most people would be consumed by shame–just as most people leave that last cookie on the plate. But the shameless couldn’t care less. And their audacious behaviour pays dividends in our modern mediacracies, because the news spotlights the abnormal and the absurd.
In this type of world, it’s not the friendliest and most empathic leaders who rise to the top, but their opposites. In this world, it’s survival of the shameless.
12
What the Enlightenment Got Wrong
1
After my foray into the psychology of power, my thoughts returned to the story in the Prologue of this book. It struck me that, in essence, the lessons of the previous chapters could all be found in that tale of the Blitz, of what transpired in London when the bombs fell.
The British authorities had predicted widespread panic. Looting. Riots. This kind of calamity would surely set off our inner brutes, hurling us into a war of all against all. But the opposite turned out to be true. Disasters bring out the best in us. It’s as if they flip a collective reset switch and we revert to our better selves.
The second lesson of the Blitz is that we’re groupish animals. Londoners supposed that their courage under fire was quintessentially British. They thought their resilience was akin to their stiff upper lip or dry sense of humour–just another element of a superior culture. In Chapter 10, we saw that this kind of group bias is typical of humans. We’re all too inclined to think in terms of ‘us’ and ‘them’. The tragedy of war is that it’s the best facets of human nature–loyalty, camaraderie, solidarity–that inspire Homo puppy to take up arms.
Once we arrive at the front lines, however, we often lose our bluster. In Chapters 4 and 10 we saw that humans have a deep-rooted aversion to violence. For centuries, many soldiers couldn’t even bring themselves to pull the trigger. Bayonets went unused. Most casualties were inflicted at a distance, by pilots or gunners who never needed to look their enemies in the eyes. This was also a lesson of the Blitz, where the worst assaults came from up high.
When the British then planned a bombing campaign of their own, the corrupting influence of power reared its ugly head. Frederick Lindemann, one of Churchill’s inner circle, cast aside all evidence that bombs don’t break morale. He’d already decided the Germans would cave in, and anyone who cared to contradict him was branded a traitor.
‘The fact that the bombing policy was forced through with so little opposition,’ remarked a later historian, ‘is a typical example of the hypnosis of power.’1
A
nd that finally brings us to an answer for that question posed by Hobbes and Rousseau. The question whether human nature is essentially good–or bad.
There are two sides to this answer, because Homo puppy is a thoroughly paradoxical creature. To begin with, we are one of the friendliest species in the animal kingdom. For most of our past, we inhabited an egalitarian world without kings or aristocrats, presidents or CEOs. Occasionally individuals did rise to power, but, as we saw in Chapter 11, they were brought down just as fast.
Our instinctive wariness of strangers posed no big problems for a long time. We knew our friends’ names and faces, and if we crossed paths with a stranger we easily found common ground. There was no advertising or propaganda, no news or war that placed people in opposition. We were free to leave one group and join another, in the process building extended relational networks.
But then, 10,000 years ago, the trouble began.
From the moment we began settling in one place and amassing private property, our group instinct was no longer so innocuous. Combined with scarcity and hierarchies, it became downright toxic. And once leaders began raising armies to do their bidding, there was no stopping the corruptive effects of power.
In this new world of farmers and fighters, cities and states, we straddled an uncomfortably thin line between friendliness and xenophobia. Yearning for a sense of belonging, we were quickly inclined to repel outsiders. We found it difficult to say no to our own leaders–even if they marched us onto the wrong side of history.
With the dawn of civilisation, Homo puppy’s ugliest side came to the fore. History books chronicle countless massacres by Israelites and Romans, Huns and Vandals, Catholics and Protestants, and many more. The names change, but the mechanism stays the same: inspired by fellowship and incited by cynical strongmen, people will do the most horrific things to each other.
This has been our predicament for millennia. You could even see the history of civilisation as an epic struggle against the biggest mistake of all time. Homo puppy is an animal that has been wrenched from its natural habitat. An animal that has been turning itself inside out to bridge a cavernous ‘mismatch’ ever since. For thousands of years, we’ve been striving to exorcise the curse of disease, war and oppression I wrote about in Chapter 5–to lift the curse of civilisation.
And then only recently, it looked as if we just might do it.
2
In the early seventeenth century, a movement began that we now call ‘the Enlightenment’. It was a philosophical revolution. The thinkers of the Enlightenment laid the foundations for the modern world, from the rule of law to democracy and from education to science.
At first glance, Enlightenment thinkers like Thomas Hobbes seemed not so different from earlier priests and ministers. All of them operated on the same assumption that human nature is corrupt. Scottish philosopher David Hume summarised the Enlightenment view as ‘every man ought to be supposed a knave, and to have no other end, in all his actions, than private interest’.2
And yet, according to these thinkers, there was a way we could productively harness our self-interest. We humans have one phenomenal talent, they said, a saving grace that sets us apart from other living creatures. It’s this gift that we could cling to. This was the miracle on which we might pin our hopes.
Reason.
Not empathy, or emotion, or faith. Reason. If Enlightenment philosophers put their faith in something, it was in the power of rational thought. They became convinced that humans could design intelligent institutions which factored in our innate selfishness. They believed we can paint a civilising layer over our darker instincts. Or, more precisely, that we could enlist our bad qualities to serve the common good.
If there was one sin that Enlightenment thinkers espoused, it was greed, which they trumpeted under the motto ‘private vices, public benefits’.3 This stood for the ingenious notion that behaviour which was antisocial at the individual level could have payoffs for wider society. Enlightenment economist Adam Smith set out this idea in his classic The Wealth of Nations (1776), which was the first book to defend the principles of the free market. In it, he famously wrote: ‘It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages.’
Selfishness should not be tamped down, modern economists argued, but turned loose. In this way, the desire for wealth would achieve what no army of preachers ever could: unite people the world over. Nowadays, when we pay for our groceries at the supermarket, we’re working together with thousands of people who contribute to the production and distribution of the stuff in our trollies. Not out of the goodness of our hearts, but because we’re looking out for ourselves.
Enlightenment thinkers used the same principle to underpin their model of modern democracy. Take the US Constitution, which is the world’s oldest still in effect. Drawn up by the Founding Fathers, it is premised on their pessimistic view that our essentially selfish nature needs to be restrained. To this end, they set out a system of ‘checks and balances’, in which everybody kept an eye on everybody else.
The idea is that if those in power (from right to left, Republicans and Democrats), across top government institutions (the Senate and the House of Representatives, the White House and the Supreme Court), keep each other in check, then the American people will be able to live together in harmony despite their corrupt nature.4 And the only way to rein in corruptible politicians, these rationalists believed, was by balancing them against other politicians. In the words of American statesman James Madison: ‘Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.’
Meanwhile, this era also witnessed the birth of modern rule of law. Here was another antidote to our darker instincts, because Lady Justice is by definition blind. Unencumbered by empathy, love, or bias of any kind, justice is governed by reason alone. Likewise, it was reason that provided the underpinnings of our new bureaucratic systems, which subjected one and all to the same procedures, rules and laws.
From now on, you could do business with anyone you’d like, no matter their religion or creed. A side effect was that in those very countries with a strong rule of law, assuring regulations and contracts would be honoured, belief in a vengeful God diminished. The role of God the father was to be supplanted by faith in the state. In the wake of the Enlightenment, religion consequently adopted a much friendlier demeanour. These days, few states still defer to the judging eye of God, and instead of calling for bloody crusades, popes give heartwarming speeches about ‘a revolution of tenderness’.5
Can it be a coincidence that the largest concentrations of atheists are to be found in countries like Denmark or Sweden? These nations also have the most robust rule of law and most trustworthy bureaucracies.6 In countries like these, religion has been displaced. Much as mass production once sidelined traditional craftspeople, God lost his job to bureaucrats.
So here we are, a few centuries into the Age of Reason. All things considered, we have to conclude that the Enlightenment has been a triumph for humankind, bringing us capitalism, democracy and the rule of law. The statistics are clear. Our lives are exponentially better and the world is richer, safer and healthier than ever before.7
Only two hundred years ago, any kind of settled life still meant extreme poverty, no matter where in the world you lived. These days, that’s true for less than 10 per cent of the global population. We have as good as conquered the biggest infectious diseases, and even if the news might lead you to think otherwise, the last few decades have seen rates for everything from child mortality and starvation to murders and war casualties plummet spectacularly.8
So how can we live harmoniously if we distrust strangers? How can we exorcise the curse of civilisation, disease, slavery and the oppression that plagued us for 10,000 years? The cold, hard reason of the Enlightenment provided an answer to this old
dilemma.
And it was the best answer–until now.
Because, let’s be honest, the Enlightenment also had a dark side. Over the past few centuries we’ve learned that capitalism can run amok, sociopaths can seize power and a society dominated by rules and protocols has little regard for the individual.
Historians point out that if the Enlightenment gave us equality, it also invented racism. Eighteenth-century philosophers were the first to classify humans into disparate ‘races’. David Hume, for instance, wrote that he was ‘apt to suspect the negroes […] to be naturally inferior to the whites’. In France, Voltaire agreed: ‘If their understanding is not of a different nature from ours, it is at least greatly inferior.’ Such racist ideas became encoded in legislation and norms of conduct. Thomas Jefferson, who penned the immortal words ‘all men are created equal’ in the American Declaration of Independence, was a slave owner. He also said: ‘Never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration.’
And then came the bloodiest conflict in history. The Holocaust unfolded in what had been a cradle of the Enlightenment. It was effectuated by an ultra-modern bureaucracy, in which management of the concentration camps was tasked to the SS Main ‘Economic and Administrative’ Department. Many scholars have thus come to regard the extermination of six million Jews as not only the height of brutality, but of modernity.9
The Enlightenment’s contradictions stand out when we examine its portrayal of human nature. On the face of it, philosophers like David Hume and Adam Smith took a cynical view. Modern capitalism, democracy and the rule of law are all founded on the principle that people are selfish. But if you actually read their books you come to realise that Enlightenment authors were not diehard cynics at all. Seventeen years before publishing The Wealth of Nations (destined to become the capitalist bible), Adam Smith wrote a volume titled The Theory of Moral Sentiments. In it, we find passages like this one:
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