Humankind

Rutger Bregman's Humankind: A Hopeful History advances a provocative thesis: the central tragedy of modern history is not that humans are inherently selfish or cruel, but that we have spent centuries building institutions on that false assumption. He argues for what he calls a new realism—one grounded in science and history—that shows people are fundamentally decent, cooperative, and capable of extraordinary kindness when treated as such.

Across experiments, evolutionary theory, disasters, and political case studies, Bregman reveals that human beings are wired for sociability. Our history is not a chronicle of savagery restrained by civilisation, but one where systems founded on trust, equality, and cooperation repeatedly outperform those grounded in suspicion or punitive control. Instead of asking how civilisation suppresses barbarism, he asks how false cynicism breeds it.

From Hobbes to Homo Puppy

Bregman contrasts two philosophical archetypes: Thomas Hobbes, who imagined prehistory as a brutal war of all against all, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who believed humans were cooperative before hierarchy and property. Archaeological evidence increasingly confirms Rousseau’s intuition. For 95% of our species’ past, people lived in small, egalitarian foraging bands where sharing and mutual oversight were normal. Only with farming and private property did greed and coercion institutionalize.

Evolutionary science adds a twist. Humans, Bregman argues, are not Homo sapiens so much as Homo puppy —a species domesticated by its own friendliness. Studies from Dmitri Belyaev’s Siberian fox experiment and Brian Hare’s dog cognition research show that selection for sociability reshapes bodies and minds. Compared to Neanderthals, we may have been smaller and weaker, but because we were friendlier and learned from one another faster, we became the world’s dominant animal.

Evidence from Disasters, Wars, and Myths

If decency is our evolutionary inheritance, why don’t we see it? Because institutions, media, and theory have trained us to miss it. Bregman revisits the London Blitz and Hurricane Katrina to show that ordinary people respond to catastrophe not with chaos but mass cooperation. Citing seventy years of disaster research, he demonstrates that looting is rare, altruism abundant, and crowd panic nearly mythical.

He reexamines cultural myths that misrepresent human nature. Lord of the Flies taught generations that children left alone turn savage, yet the real-life 1965 case of six Tongan boys stranded for a year shows the opposite: teamwork, caregiving, and resilience. Similarly, stories like Easter Island’s collapse are misread cautionary tales; the islanders were resourceful, undone less by their own folly than European slavery and disease. These corrections matter because narratives govern expectation—and expectation becomes policy.

Why We Misjudge Ourselves

Cognitive biases deepen pessimism. The news industry amplifies negative exceptions; psychologists call this the availability and negativity biases. When you constantly absorb images of cruelty, you develop what Bregman terms a social nocebo: expecting the worst in others, which then draws it out. Likewise, psychological research—from Milgram’s obedience studies to Zimbardo’s prison experiment—has been overinterpreted to suggest that people mindlessly follow orders. Closer scrutiny reveals manipulation and performance, not inevitability. Real history, like Denmark’s rescue of its Jewish population in World War II, offers counterexamples of ordinary courage.

A Blueprint for Trust-Based Civilization

For Bregman, this is not naive positivity but empirically grounded realism. If you assume selfishness, you design coercive systems, and people adapt to them. But if you assume decency, you build frameworks that unleash cooperation. He collects modern examples—Buurtzorg’s nurse-led teams, participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre, Norway’s prisons—that prove institutions built on trust, autonomy, and compassion outperform those organized around suspicion and punishment.

The new realism in practice

Bregman’s realism asks you to act as though people are good until proven otherwise. The change is profound: in classrooms, boardrooms, and governments, that simple shift can transform outcomes. It invites a politics of trust, a management of empathy, and education rooted in curiosity rather than control.

Humanity’s story, then, is not one of taming beasts but of rediscovering our social genius. By replacing the old cynicism with evidence-based optimism, you don’t deny evil—you disarm it, by designing for the better angels that have been with us all along.

The claim that humans are basically good rests on biology as much as philosophy. Bregman synthesizes comparative anthropology, primate studies, and evolutionary psychology to explain how our species evolved friendliness as its survival strategy. Instead of glorifying dominance, human evolution rewarded cooperation.

The Domestication Hypothesis

In Siberia, Dmitri Belyaev’s famous fox domestication experiment showed that selecting animals for tameness alone transformed not only their behaviour but their appearance: soft features, wagging tails, spotted coats. These physical changes came as side effects of lower stress hormones and increased sociability. Humans underwent a parallel process; our flatter faces and smaller teeth compared to Neanderthals suggest self-domestication. Bregman calls the result Homo puppy: a species whose friendliness turned out to be its competitive edge.

The Social Learning Advantage

Studies by Brian Hare and Joseph Henrich reinforce this thesis. Dogs surpass chimpanzees at reading human gaze and gestures because domestication favored social learning. Likewise, humans excel not by individual genius but by being hyper-imitation machines, copying, combining, and improving ideas. This collective brain effect explains why Homo sapiens, though not the strongest or smartest primate, became the most adaptable.

The Neanderthal Lesson

Neanderthals had larger brains and muscular bodies, yet died out. Their networks were thinner; their cultures spread innovation more slowly. Sapiens’ friendliness—the ability to form alliances beyond kin, gossip, and teach—produced exponential cultural evolution. Cooperation, not aggression, proved the fitter strategy.

Friendliness as power

Our species' genius lies in empathy calibrations: we bond, imitate, and punish defectors. But modern culture often celebrates the exact opposite—dominance, selfishness, and zero-sum competition—misreading what evolution was actually selecting for.

When you understand that evolutionary success came from cooperation, not conquest, you begin to design norms that align with that heritage: collaborative education, community-democracy, restorative justice. To thrive in the future, Bregman suggests, humanity must remember how it evolved—not as wolves, but as puppies.

Bregman dismantles the cultural myths that shape our cynical assumptions about people. Each myth—from Lord of the Flies to Easter Island, from Hobbes’s state of nature to popular war psychology—has anchored the idea that humans need strict control to behave decently. When you dig into history, however, those stories collapse under evidence.

Children of 'Ata vs. Lord of the Flies

Golding’s fiction imagines marooned boys turning violent without authority. Yet in 1965, six Tongan schoolboys actually lived that plot for fifteen months and turned it into a model cooperative. They established schedules, gardened, tended fires, and resolved disputes peacefully. Their survival shows that when stripped of societal hierarchies, humans often default to collaboration, not savagery. The contrast matters: the stories we tell sculpt our policies, from classroom design to penal systems.

The Easter Island Revision

The island’s supposed ecological suicide has long served as an allegory for greed. Yet primary logs from Jacob Roggeveen and research by Jan Boersema paint a different picture: fertile soils, robust inhabitants, and collapse that came centuries later from European slavery and disease. This pattern—mythmaking to confirm pessimism—mirrors how leaders justify top-down control: by insisting ordinary people can’t be trusted.

Why Soldiers Rarely Shoot

Even on battlefields, Bregman finds decency. Colonel S.L.A. Marshall reported that only a fraction of WWII infantry fired their weapons directly at enemies. Later evidence—from Gettysburg muskets double-loaded but unfired—confirms our innate aversion to killing. People must be conditioned to override it. This shows moral restraint is our default, not an imposed veneer.

The pattern beneath the myths

Every pessimistic myth about collapse or cruelty hides a data story about community—neighbors sharing, soldiers hesitating, children cooperating. The moral: suspicion blinds you to the quiet ordinary good that keeps humanity going.

To rethink human nature, you must not replace pessimism with naive optimism. You replace it with curiosity for data, awareness of narrative bias, and confidence that, nine times out of ten, people do the right thing when given trust and dignity.

Civilisation, Bregman warns, was not purely progress. Settling, property, and hierarchy created prosperity for a minority but eroded equality, health, and freedom for most. Archaeology and anthropology reveal that foragers not only lived more egalitarian lives but also avoided structural power imbalances that plague modernity.

From Equality to Inequality

For thousands of years, mobile hunters practiced rotating leadership and shared resources. With agriculture came storage, property inheritance, and therefore power consolidation. Rulers created taxation and armies, while most people worked harder for less variety and poorer health. Pandemic diseases—measles, smallpox, influenza—thrived in dense, sedentary settlements.

The Mirage of Progress

Göbekli Tepe and other early monumental sites prove that social cooperation preceded kingship or writing. Hierarchy, not collaboration, was the later innovation. The lesson is humbling: many dysfunctions of modern society—patriarchy, authoritarianism, institutional violence—are not eternal but contingent creations of post-agrarian life.

Learning from our ancestors

Hunter-gatherer ethics—rotating leadership, ridicule of arrogance, generosity as prestige—can inspire modern democracy and workplace reform. By rediscovering their lessons, we temper civilisation’s excesses without discarding its gains.

The curse of civilisation isn’t cities or science but institutionalised inequality. Progress endures when social trust and equality restrain power. This echoes Bregman’s refrain: the design of systems, not the nature of humans, determines whether compassion or corruption wins.

To prove that a hopeful view of humanity can work in practice, Bregman showcases organisations and governments that build on trust instead of control. These case studies—Buurtzorg’s nursing teams, Zobrist’s FAVI, participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre—demonstrate that when people are trusted, results improve and corruption fades.

Intrinsic Motivation and Autonomy

Psychologist Edward Deci’s experiments showed that external rewards can crowd out intrinsic motivation. Buurtzorg, a Dutch home-care organisation, applies this principle by letting nurses self-run teams without central managers. They plan schedules, hire colleagues, and coordinate care. The result: greater satisfaction, lower overhead, cheaper care for the state—a living proof that autonomy works better than bureaucracy.

At FAVI, a French factory, abolishing bonuses and boss hierarchies brought similar gains. Teams ran themselves, pride replaced pressure, and productivity increased. These examples echo Daniel Pink’s later framework of autonomy, mastery, and purpose as the true motivators of human effort.

The Commons and Participatory Democracy

Elinor Ostrom’s fieldwork overturned Garrett Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons.” She found communities capable of sustaining shared resources through clear rules and transparency. Porto Alegre’s participatory budgeting illustrates this principle in politics: citizens directly decide spending, reallocating funds to sanitation and education while lowering infant mortality. Such initiatives grow social trust in ways that top-down governance cannot.

When institutions mirror human nature

Designing for cooperation amplifies cooperation. Systems that presume honesty breed it; those that presume deceit incentivize deceit. Trust is not idealism but infrastructure.

Trust-based institutions aren't luxuries—they're efficient. Whether in hospitals or municipalities, they lower costs, raise accountability, and restore dignity to work and citizenship. When power decentralises, people remember they’re partners, not problems to be managed.

Good people can become bad leaders. Drawing on Dacher Keltner’s research, Bregman explains the power paradox: the traits that earn someone trust—empathy, generosity—often fade once they gain authority. Power numbs empathy, fosters impulsivity, and attracts the shameless.

Why Shamelessness Wins

Modern systems reward audacity more than honesty. Media attention and shareholder logic make narcissism lucrative. Studies suggest an outsized number of CEOs score on sociopathy scales. Historically, shame and gossip constrained ego in small tribes; today, distant hierarchies remove those checks. Without proximity, shamelessness becomes adaptive.

Restoring Social Antibodies

Bregman doesn’t suggest puritanical shaming but rebuilding local accountability—whistleblower protections, open budgets, deliberative forums—so that character still matters. Elinor Ostrom’s findings again apply: small groups with shared monitoring deter abuse better than bureaucratic oversight. When leadership rotates and transparency is built-in, the corrupt lose their hiding places.

The moral

Humility isn’t weakness—it’s a structural necessity. Societies that design antidotes to power’s corruptions secure the benevolence that kings, CEOs, and politicians too easily lose.

The paradox of power proves Bregman’s larger point: human decency is real but fragile under bad systems. The challenge isn’t changing nature—it’s creating structures that keep it visible.

Bregman explores how empathy, expectation, and context shape moral behavior. Empathy, though central to social life, acts like a spotlight: intense for individuals, weak for groups. Meanwhile, your expectations—of yourself and others—act as self-fulfilling prophecies shaping performance, prejudice, and civic life.

Empathy and Its Limits

Psychologist Paul Bloom argues empathy can mislead by focusing moral attention narrowly. You might act compassionately toward one child while ignoring fair policies that help many. Bregman acknowledges empathy’s evolutionary roots but urges coupling it with reason and institutional safeguards against bias. The paradox: feeling for individuals is vital, but moral societies rely on fairness systems that outlast feeling.

The Power of Expectation

Robert Rosenthal’s Pygmalion experiments demonstrate that belief creates reality: rats labeled 'bright' performed better because handlers treated them kindly; students told certain children were 'gifted' raised their IQs with attention alone. The inverse, the Golem effect, destroys potential. In organisations, managers or teachers who assume mediocrity often manufacture it. This principle links back to Bregman’s broader thesis: how you see people dictates what they become.

Pluralistic Ignorance and the Nocebo Effect

Dan Ariely’s classroom experiments show how silence reinforces false consensus. If no one dares question a bad idea, the group behaves as though it were true. The same dynamic corrupts companies or nations. Media alarmism and cynical politics feed social nocebos—self-fulfilling distrust that breeds the very behaviours feared.

Belief as architecture

Expect the worst and you’ll design prisons; expect the best and you’ll design schools. The stories societies tell themselves are their operating code.

From empathy’s beam to expectation’s mirror, Bregman teaches a moral engineering lesson: recalibrate vision first. What you believe about people—students, employees, citizens—decides whether hope flourishes or fails.

The final pieces of Bregman’s argument show how a politics of trust operates across domains: childhood, criminal justice, and peacebuilding. Whether raising children or negotiating with enemies, decency succeeds where domination fails.

Play as Education

In play, children train democracy. Anthropologists describe foragers’ mixed-age free play as the birthplace of moral learning. Modern schooling’s obsession with testing suppresses curiosity and collaboration. Schools like Agora in the Netherlands and junk playgrounds based on Carl Sørensen’s 1940s design restore autonomy and resilience. Kids there learn cooperation through freedom—an experiment mirroring the societal reform Bregman advocates for adults.

Humaneness in Justice

Norway’s prisons at Halden and Bastøy practice "dynamic security": guards share meals with inmates, cells look like dorms, and focus is on reintegration. Recidivism drops to one-third of US levels. What looks lenient proves cheaper and safer. Violence, when met with trust, withers.

Turning Enemies into Neighbors

Noncomplementary behavior—the refusal to mirror hostility—can defuse conflict. Aarhus’s deradicalization program offered dialogue and jobs instead of surveillance, and recruiting collapsed. Colombia’s “Operation Christmas” used empathy-laden gestures to help FARC fighters demobilize. Mandela’s outreach to Afrikaner generals embodied moral realism: respecting adversaries to secure peace. When applied systematically, this principle builds nations as well as classrooms.

The trust revolution

To change society, you do not need softer hearts but smarter systems—ones that recognise decency as material to work with, not a miracle to hope for.

From education to prisons to postwar peace, turning the other cheek is not theology—it’s strategy. Empathy, play, and forgiveness, structured through trust-based design, achieve what fear-based systems never could: enduring humanity.