YouSaid · the spoken record

Rutger Bregman

lines on the record: 52
first: 2020-08-28
most recent: 2020-08-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Well, just ask yourself the question What would it mean for my own life or the institutions that I am a part of, you know, the school that I go to or the university or my workplace or whatever? I mean, people are in many ways shaped by their institutions. What are the implications of a different view of human nature? Because I think that's always the most interesting that you can accomplish as a writer is that people take the ideas that you've taken from somewhere else, obviously, and they apply it in a different context. That's always what I'm most excited about, where sometimes you hear these stories on the other side of the globe, someone is, I don't know, start a new company or change his or her life. And in a way that you could never have imagined. And what I strongly believe that once you change your view of human nature, so many things change in your own life. And I think that in my book, it's only like a short explanation.”
2020-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · Rutger Bregman on Human Kindness in a Frightened World with Helen Lewis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just not really comfortable, whether it's CO2 storage and capture, which is really controversial, or nuclear energy. I mean, I'm not one of those people who's obsessed with nuclear energy and thinks it's the solution to everything. But when you're in an emergency, you just need everything, right? You're not in a luxury position where you say, oh, well, we'll just have some solar panels here and some windmills there, but only if they don't destroy my nice view of this landscape here. No, obviously you can't do that. You need everything and you need to do it immediately. And this is another one of those examples where people who care about climate change need to become way more realistic about the importance of uncomfortable compromises and building a bigger movement to actually be serious about this.”
2020-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · Rutger Bregman on Human Kindness in a Frightened World with Helen Lewis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the bizarre things that has happened in that debate is that people now talk about climate mobilization as if mobilization is some kind of happy clappy thing or people come together and have a wonderful time. Well, if you actually study mobilization, for example, wartime mobilization, this is the analogy that people are drawing all the time, you know, the wartime mobilization in the US or in Britain during the Second World War. Well, it wasn't nice. It was actually a really hard top-down process, you know, when individual liberties were limited, when people had to pay a shitload of taxes, you know, rates that even people on the left will become nauseous when they see them, right? Well, you'll get your 100% inheritance tax. Don't worry about that. So let's just start sort of the kind of action that you need is way more than people think. And you'd also have to accept solutions that are not.”
2020-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · Rutger Bregman on Human Kindness in a Frightened World with Helen Lewis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's what we need. Not optimism or pessimism or anything like that. This classic distinction between optimism and hope I've always liked that. And that's why the subtitle of my book is A Hopeful History, Not an Optimist History, but an Hopeful History.”
2020-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · Rutger Bregman on Human Kindness in a Frightened World with Helen Lewis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I totally agree. David Wall as well made this point. You know, he read the book The Uninabitable Earth, which such an extraordinarily powerful book about climate change. I read it after I finished this book and it was like, I'm only going to write about climate change after this because I think that very often people on the right, they're naive about climate science, but people on the left are totally naive about climate action. They think that solar panels and windmills are going to save us. But we need to sort of the kind of transformation that you need is so much more radical than people realize. And so he made the point somewhere, I can't remember where, where he says that, well, it doesn't seem as if there's enough fear or anything of this. And actually fear can be a motivating force as well, especially if you combine it with hope, right? If you're really afraid of something, but then someone can give you hope. Like we can actually do something.”
2020-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · Rutger Bregman on Human Kindness in a Frightened World with Helen Lewis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“beach, reading my book and feeling like you know, things are good after all. I don't really have to change my life or anything. Let's go get on with it. That's what I worry about.”
2020-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · Rutger Bregman on Human Kindness in a Frightened World with Helen Lewis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well I don't like either pessimism or optimism. I think they are both sort of forms of laziness. So the optimist is a little bit like, oh, things will turn out to be all right. Just look at the graphs. I recently let Red Hans Rosling's book or Stephen Pinker's book. And actually, did you know that the world is in a great shape today? Charmortelli is going down, so don't worry about racism or climate change. Actually, we live in the best of times. I never really liked that attitude because I don't think it's helpful and it's often, yeah, it makes people complacent. It's one of the things that I worry about the most actually right now with this book is that even though I do say this in my book is that people are not naturally good and that actually we often do very nasty things in the name of friendliness, etc. I worry about the image of people, you know, on a holiday at a”
2020-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · Rutger Bregman on Human Kindness in a Frightened World with Helen Lewis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have you written that piece already? Because there's so much truth in that. For me, it was one of the most fascinating discoveries. While researching this book, is that human beings that were pretty much the only animal in the whole animal kingdom who blush? I thought that was so fascinating. I mean bonobos don't blush, chimpanzees don't blush, but we do it. We involuntarily give away our feelings to someone else, probably in order to establish trust. How can that ever be an evolutionary advantage? Well, the hypothesis that biologists have now is that, as I said, it helps to establish trust, so it helps people to cooperate. But then these people at the top, they seem to have lost the ability to blush, right? Maybe they become orange sometimes, but not really red. That is such, I think that should be a good question as if you're a political reporter and you're interviewing a politician. Just ask the question, when was the last time you blushed? And how long they have to think about that? I think that tells you a lot.”
2020-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · Rutger Bregman on Human Kindness in a Frightened World with Helen Lewis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of empathy, they don't really light up anymore in powerful people, don't really seem to work that well anymore, as if they've become disconnected from society. They've become unplugged. Their Wi-Fi doesn't work anymore. Their social Wi-Fi. So I think that's a really important part of the explanation. But it's a terrible indictment of our sort of current political system. How is it possible that people who would have quickly been expelled in a hunter-gatherer environment who wouldn't have survived for long can now become president of the United States? How is it possible that we have the survival of the shameless process going on?”
2020-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · Rutger Bregman on Human Kindness in a Frightened World with Helen Lewis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the short summary of my book would be most people are pretty decent but Paul corrupts. That's sort of my getaway out of that question. So there's really powerful evidence now from psychology that power works like this drug that, I mean, damages the brain in a way. There's a research group in the US around Professor Dacher Keltner, who does some really interesting work. His book is called The Power Paradox, where he shows that actually people prefer to have leaders who are friendly and nice. And often these people rise, you know, in the hierarchy. But then when they're at the top, this is the dark irony. They often become corrupted by power. There is even some evidence from neurology, which I think you still have to take with a little bit of salt. It seems as if you had sort of the regions in the brain that are involved with female.”
2020-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · Rutger Bregman on Human Kindness in a Frightened World with Helen Lewis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so many people now think that this whole phenomenon of soldiers not shooting during wars, that that's just a myth, that actually we are born to kill and we quickly do that if we're drafted into the army. But I think that people are right when they say that Marshall didn't come up with convincing evidence, but it was an interesting hypothesis that he launched. And since then, many other people have actually come up with way more convincing evidence. I think show that he was at least eighteen ninety percent right. So that's sometimes also the problem with this debunking attitude is that we sort of, oh, that's been debunked. That's been debunked. Well, actually, sometimes even debunking can be a little bit more nuanced as well.”
2020-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · Rutger Bregman on Human Kindness in a Frightened World with Helen Lewis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A very telling quotation. You know what's interesting here is that what sometimes happens is that someone comes up with a really interesting theory but doesn't give the right evidence. So in this case, that was SLA Marshall, the American combat historian, who traveled with the troops in 1944 and 1945. It was one of the first people to notice that many of the soldiers didn't actually shoot during combat and said that they couldn't do it and came up with some kind of excuse. He was later criticized very strongly because he didn't really have...”
2020-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · Rutger Bregman on Human Kindness in a Frightened World with Helen Lewis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, has that story been I think actually the opposite is true actually for the Christmas truce thing, you know, because for years actually historians didn't pay any attention to it. And then the BBC in the 1980s, they were the first one to make a documentary about it. And for quite a while, it was quite controversial. And you can still find articles on the internet where even sometimes professional historians say, well, it was actually a myth. It didn't really happen and they didn't play soccer. Why is it a myth if you can find eyewitness accounts of people who have seen it and not just one but multiple? I mean, there's some really powerful evidence that even the soccer matches did happen. Now obviously there's very powerful evidence that the first World War happened as well. So it's just like a very small ray of light in a sea of darkness, but it still gives you some hope.”
2020-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · Rutger Bregman on Human Kindness in a Frightened World with Helen Lewis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what's it about? Basic income giving people free money. Oh, that's interesting. You should look this up. There's been an experiment in London. And I knew that they had read my article about it, but they had forgotten everything, right? Who I was, et cetera, et cetera. And that's so powerful about story, about stories. Even though they can obviously also be misleading. If you don't, if you write about the story but not include the meta-analysis, then I think you're failed as a writer. Yeah, that's, I guess, the trouble with some really good writers out there. And this is maybe the trouble with some of my writing as well, that I fall in love with the stories and sort of forget that it's not the whole of reality.”
2020-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · Rutger Bregman on Human Kindness in a Frightened World with Helen Lewis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's also a challenge as a writer, right? How important do you want the stories to be in your book? Because people remember stories. They forget all the statistics, but they remember the stories. I had this one story in my previous book, Utopia Friellus, where they gave free money to nine homeless men in London, three thousand pounds, completely unconditional. It was a quite successful experiment. Now, I believe that was the weakest sort of argument I made in my book because it was an unscientific experiment, like just nine men. You can't draw any conclusions out of that data. But I've actually been at a couple of, again, birthday parties where I was talking to people I had never met before, and they asked me, well, what do you do? And I say, I'm a writer. And so what do you write for? And I say, I write for the correspondent. Oh, never heard about that. So have you written any books? Yeah, yeah. Utopia is, oh, I didn't read it.”
2020-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · Rutger Bregman on Human Kindness in a Frightened World with Helen Lewis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lord of the Vice Children, and they're friends up until this day. That's not a scientific experiment. It's just an anecdote. But anecdotes can be very important and influential sometimes. And the real lord of the flies is the opposite of the fictional one. So I guess that's sort of my response. What's the antidote to cynicism? Well, let's tell different kind of stories because these stories can become self-affinning prophecies.”
2020-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · Rutger Bregman on Human Kindness in a Frightened World with Helen Lewis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Realism is the antidote to cynicism. You know, I think that often we humans, we are the stories that we tell ourselves. And for a very long time, we've been telling ourselves quite cynical stories. In the book, I give the example of Lord of the Flies, you know, the hugely famous novel about kids shipwrecking on an island, or, well, not actually shipwrecking. There's an airplane crash, and then they end up on that island. And they turn into savages. And millions of children around the globe up until this day still have to read it. I think it's a good book. I mean, it won a Nobel Prize for a reason, but then it would also be nice if people would know that actually the one time it really happened was in 1965, in 1966, near Tonga, six kids shipped on an island, and that was a very different story, because this was a story of friendship and survivorship and friendliness. I managed to track down some of these real life.”
2020-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · Rutger Bregman on Human Kindness in a Frightened World with Helen Lewis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if you're young right now and you're thinking about what you want to study, I mean, are you really going to say at that birthday party, well, oh, I want to become a banker? Well, maybe you still want to, maybe you'd still like the money, but you're not going to brag about it anymore, I think. So I was wondering whether the corona crisis could help to To move us into a different era that is more about cooperation or solidarity or sort of giving back.”
2020-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · Rutger Bregman on Human Kindness in a Frightened World with Helen Lewis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And fight for it. Maybe it's also accelerated by this crisis. What do you think? Because you recently, all these governments around the globe publishing lists of the so-called essential workers. And I was thinking like, this could be a sort of a defining moment for a whole generation. Everywhere in the news there were these lists like the teachers and the nurses and the care workers. And you didn't see the bankers or the managers or the telemarketeers on them. Sometimes I wonder whether in the eighties or the nineties there was a spirit like, okay, we had enough of the 60s. We just want to, we don't have ideals or anything. We just want to make money. Let's get on with it, right? We are generation nothing, as it was called in the Netherlands in the 90s back then. But now that sort of has not fashionable anymore. It's become much more fashionable to actually believe in something. And to have a job that's actually of social value.”
2020-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · Rutger Bregman on Human Kindness in a Frightened World with Helen Lewis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe it's a little bit of maybe now making anecdotes into a bigger thing, a theory. But yeah, there are these sort of younger female economists who really want results.”
2020-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · Rutger Bregman on Human Kindness in a Frightened World with Helen Lewis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Incredibly productive and wrote this hugely influential book, The Entrepreneurial State, where she shows that most fundamental innovations come from the government and not from the business sector. What I find most interesting about her is that she's a networker and incredibly proactive networker. She's not interested in just writing a book. She wants to go to the World Economic Forum in Davos and speak to as many people as possible and not like me have like a 15 seconds of fame, but like have genuine influence, not just one viral moment, right? But just, yeah, talk about where are the billions of dollars in euros going to go next year. That is interesting. I think this many of the economists behind the Green New Deal are sort of, I think this...”
2020-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · Rutger Bregman on Human Kindness in a Frightened World with Helen Lewis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Focus on the goal instead of the method or on the purity of the people you'd have to work with. I guess that would sort of be the right issue. Even though there are good examples of people who understand this. I recently read this essay about sort of what I call maybe a bit prematurely the end of neoliberalism, where I looked at two different groups of economists. On the one hand, you have this French trio of Thomas Piketty, and I mean, he became very famous with his book, Capital of the 21st Century, and his colleagues, Emmanuel says and Gabriel Zuckman, Gabriel Zuckman is hugely influential. I mean, on tax evasion, he's on so many very important publications just to show how big this phenomenon is. And then also you have this other group of female economists where I think Mariana Matsukato is the most important one. She's an American intelligent economist.”
2020-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · Rutger Bregman on Human Kindness in a Frightened World with Helen Lewis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The people who hate me the most actually agree with me on ninety percent of all issues or ninety eight percent of all issues, but just disagree with the way I, you know, a specific kind of concept I use, or think that I don't tweet enough about this, or that I tweet about this, but that I should also tweet about this, I don't know, something like that. And I guess that happens a lot. And it's not really helpful if you want to build a bit broader movement. Maybe that's just me being annoyed at Twitter because actually you could also argue that, I mean, in a way, we're getting much better at building movements. Just look at these huge peaceful protest movements across the US, for example. But that's sort of my hunch. What do you think?”
2020-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · Rutger Bregman on Human Kindness in a Frightened World with Helen Lewis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've got a theory about it, I'm not really sure whether it's correct, but I think that if you I mean, if you want to go from the exciting idea that's moving into the mainstream to actually wielding political power, then at some point you have to make compromises and to build a movement that's bigger. That's what I loved about one of the first chapters in your book where you talk about women's suffrage and how all these really difficult compromises had to be made between aristocrat women, you know, high up in British society and then working class women. And that actually many of these compromises didn't last for long and that after a couple of years, they still hated each other. I guess that people on the right are often better at that, that they just happy agreeing that those other people, they're the enemy and we don't really care about our own differences. Where on the left with progressives, it's often you get this what Freud called the narcissism of minor differences. This has always puzzled me is that”
2020-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · Rutger Bregman on Human Kindness in a Frightened World with Helen Lewis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We live in this very strange period where it seems to me that left-wing political parties are not doing good at all, but left-wing political ideas are actually having quite a good time. It's a very strange paradoxical situation. I mean, in the Netherlands, I can't imagine, you know, left-wing political parties getting a majority anytime soon. Actually, it's been declining. But then if you look sort of at the center of politics and sort of our climate policies, inequality, anti-poverty measures, the social welfare state that used to be much more about what we call warfare, you know, where it's all about distrusting those who are on benefits and trying to force them to work more and work harder, that's really been going in the other direction. We're not nearly there yet. But I think the momentum is there. If you would just look at the poles, you wouldn't really see it.”
2020-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · Rutger Bregman on Human Kindness in a Frightened World with Helen Lewis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Also, these movements from the past couple of months after the George Floyd killing, I mean, how many George Floyds have there been before George Floyd that didn't cause this huge peaceful outbreak of protest, right? How many have there been? Well, a lot. So that is sort of the thing that you got to try and wrap your head around, that even though, yes, we should be really, really angry and worried and not be optimistic at all. I mean, you don't have to be an optimist, but you can find some hope in the fact that actually these movements represent some genuine progress.”
2020-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · Rutger Bregman on Human Kindness in a Frightened World with Helen Lewis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, this is another example where just I think five, ten years ago, there wasn't much discussion around tax evasion. It's one of the paradoxes. This is true for the Black Lives Matter movement as well, is that the moment we get angry about something or there's a big movement and you sort of have the feeling, well, things are worse than ever. In reality, that is actually the moment when things are improving. Because if you think about tax evasion, obviously 10 years ago, that was in many ways that was actually worse than it's now. We've made some progress since then. Switzerland, for example, used to be this tax paradise with bank secrecy. Well, it's gone. You know, it's the US and the FBI on the debt pressure. They just didn't last and now it's gone. And people said for decades, well, that will never be gone. That will always be the case. Switzerland will be this tax paradise with bank secrecy. Not the case anywhere. So that is very counterintuitive.”
2020-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · Rutger Bregman on Human Kindness in a Frightened World with Helen Lewis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“High quality education, but do much more in terms of research and social welfare and et cetera, et cetera. And I was like, is this real? Like, who wrote this? And I think it just shows you that indeed, there are some really interesting things that happen happening. And that is the process that has always fascinated me, sort of how that happens.”
2020-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · Rutger Bregman on Human Kindness in a Frightened World with Helen Lewis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly, exactly. So that is the process that has always fascinated me, how it's possible that, yeah, things that just a couple of years ago are seen as unrealistic or bizarre or unreasonable can somehow enter the mainstream. And, you know, what a fascinating moment was, I think, the beginning of April, this editorial in the Financial Times, where, you know, this is, what is it, the world's most influential business paper that said that we need to, quote, reverse the policy direction of the past forty years, think about a basic income, higher taxes on the rich, a green new deal that we completely need to rethink, you know, the role of the state, not the state as some kind of facilitator of business where sort of the state gives, makes sure that there's good infrastructure, people have Wi-Fi, and, you know,”
2020-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · Rutger Bregman on Human Kindness in a Frightened World with Helen Lewis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Satisfying. And it's interesting that with theories of human nature is that something that is totally obvious when we think about our friends or our colleagues or when we think about ourselves, something we forget that when we think about society in general. I experience this a lot when I talked about basic income to people and you ask the question, well, what are you going to do with a basic income? And people have all kinds of wonderful ideas and dreams and well, I'm going to start a new company. I'm going to do this course into blah blah and etc. And then you ask the question, well, what will other people do? Well, my friends, I've heard they've got some dreams too, but most other people, you know, they'll waste it on drugs or alcohol, whatever. So I guess that's the problem often.”
2020-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · Rutger Bregman on Human Kindness in a Frightened World with Helen Lewis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. They're not savages and they want to be helpful and etc. They have feelings of empathy, et cetera. But that's not the same as being a hero. And I think this is, I mean, this is the message that you have in your own book, Difficult Women, which I, you know, after I read your book, I thought that I was wondering whether I should have emphasized that a bit more, because I only do it like in the epilogue. But a lot of progress actually comes from people who are rather nasty and unfriendly. And as you say, difficult, right? And that so often friendliness sort of stands in the way of progress because, you know, if you're at a birthday party and then you're racist uncle starts going again, well, then maybe you have to sort of yeah, sort of how do you say that in English? Say something about it, and then it's not going to be a very friendly and nice party anymore.”
2020-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · Rutger Bregman on Human Kindness in a Frightened World with Helen Lewis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A bad thing. You know, there was actually a little bit of a translation issue with the title of my book. Because in Dutch, and I originally wrote it in Dutch, the title is most people, where D ⁇ ren is a verb that you can't really translate.”
2020-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · Rutger Bregman on Human Kindness in a Frightened World with Helen Lewis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To let these soldiers keep on fighting. Now, obviously, that explanation doesn't work for the fanatical gamp guards or the SS high ranking SS officers, et cetera. There you need a very different explanation. But what I do try to point out in the book is that very often we do the most horrible things, not in the name of sadism or because we enjoy being violent or anything like that. That's actually a very, very rare phenomenon. It does exist. I mean, there are some real saddest out there, but the Joker is not, I mean, that's really not human nature. Most people, when they commit violence or atrocities, they have to overcome very powerful instincts within themselves that actually go in the other direction. And they often do it in the name of the good cause or because they do it for their friends. That's not comforting. Actually, I think that's a very disturbing message.”
2020-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · Rutger Bregman on Human Kindness in a Frightened World with Helen Lewis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“of an incredibly complicated historical process in which evil was normalized and in which people started to believe that this savage behavior was somehow necessary or could be morally justified, right? But there are so many different parts of the explanation that you need. So yes, in the book I have one chapter about why the Wehrmacht soldiers kept on fighting in 1944 and 1945 when it was clear that they were going to lose the war. You would assume, and this is what allied psychologists assumed at the time, that they were brainwashed, right? That they were these fanatics who, yeah, were just fighting till the very end because they, I don't know, believed in the cause. Actually, what they later discovered, especially after interviewing lots of prisoners of war, is that many of these soldiers were fighting for their friends and for their comrades, that Kamaratschaft was the really most important ingredient.”
2020-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · Rutger Bregman on Human Kindness in a Frightened World with Helen Lewis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the interesting things is that if you want to explain human niceness or friendliness, no one expects some kind of big theory, right? Because, I mean, it sort of makes sense. How did we ever conquer the globe if we are not good at cooperating? If we were really like the kids in Lord of the Flies, then why are we still here? But then sometimes are in these interviews, especially for radio or television. And then after three minutes, like the question is, yeah, but what about a Holocaust? How do you explain that? Yeah, what about that? Now, obviously, sort of that is a huge question. And libraries full of books have been written about it. This is one of my main criticisms of these social psychology experiments is that they sort of trivialize this horrible, cruel behavior. Sort of like, oh, there's relatively simple explanation. That's why people behave in that way. Well, I guess for me as is historian, it's so important to point out that this was the result at the end.”
2020-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · Rutger Bregman on Human Kindness in a Frightened World with Helen Lewis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's like, what do you call it? Fake science? I mean, it's like we now know that, yeah, actually things happen in a very different way because only now 50 years later, the archives have opened up and researchers have gone in there and discovered the real story, which was often pretty much the opposite of what we've always been told.”
2020-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · Rutger Bregman on Human Kindness in a Frightened World with Helen Lewis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Zimbabwe, we're actually in the same class in high school. Very interesting. Now these experiments, I think sort of the point or the message of these experiments were if you take perfectly normal, healthy average human beings and you put them in an evil situation, then they very, very quickly turn into savages or monsters. Again, civilization is only a thin veneer and deep down or maybe not even that deep down. We're all monsters or Nazis. These experiences became incredibly famous, ended up in all the textbooks of psychology students, you know, dozens of documentaries were made about them and milgrim and Zimbarda were super famous. I mean, Zimbardo is the most famous living psychologist today, draws huge crowds. But yeah, then the problem is that, especially in the case, by the way, of the Stanford Prison experiment.”
2020-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · Rutger Bregman on Human Kindness in a Frightened World with Helen Lewis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, after the Second Walk, Thinking, how can we explain the Holocaust? How can we explain World War II? How can people behave in such horrible, monstrous ways? And what was very interesting about this moment is that there was this opportunity for very young researchers like Stanley Milgram, for example, who was, I think 28 years old at the time or 29, very young. And they did these fascinating experiments that really have high viral potential. You see a video of it and you're like, holy shit, do people really behave like that? And yeah, it went really completely viral in a 60s style. The other one was the Stanford Prison experiment was a couple of years later at the beginning of the 70s done by Phillips Imbardo. Really interesting is that Stanley Milgram, who, by the way, did the shock machine experiments. I think that almost everyone will have heard about this. If not Google Shock Machine Milgram and find the horrifying video on YouTube. And Milgram...”
2020-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · Rutger Bregman on Human Kindness in a Frightened World with Helen Lewis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just look a little bit nicer in general. It's also feminization is a very important part of self-domestication is where you just the men start looking more like the women. I don't think anyone should tell this to Jordan Peterson because he'll be quite shocked but that is I'm afraid the direction in which the science points right now. So I've come up with a term for this and this is Homo puppy. Yeah, you can be the judge if that's a good term”
2020-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · Rutger Bregman on Human Kindness in a Frightened World with Helen Lewis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fock years, very important. So that's the mastication syndrome. And now the really fascinating thing is that if you look at humans, if you look at us, we seem to be domesticated. But who did it, right? Who domesticated us? And the answer is we self-domesticated. So there's, I think accumulating evidence that over the millennia there was this process of survival of the friendliest, where actually the friendliest among us, the tamest among us, had the most kids and had the biggest chance of passing on their genes to the next generation. And this had a huge impact on our bodies. So if you compare Homo sapiens skeletons from 50,000 years ago to skeletons from thirty or twenty or ten thousand years ago, or to the way we look now, you see this puppification of humanity, right? You see that we've been domesticated, you see that we...”
2020-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · Rutger Bregman on Human Kindness in a Frightened World with Helen Lewis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I hope it goes into the annals of science. Now, one of the most fascinating new theories from biology and evolutionary anthropology is the idea that human beings have evolved to be friendly. So the scientific term for this is self-domestication. I think we all know what domestication is, right? We've got cows and we've got goats and sheep. And these are animals that have been selected for tameness over the centuries and maybe even millennia by farmers and people who have animals. And the interesting thing is that domestication does very specific things to an animal. So there's a list of traits that you get with this so-called domestication syndrome. And biologists have known about this for a very long time. I mean, Darwin already observed this in the 19th century. So what do you get? Well, you get animals with thinner bones, smaller brains, and most importantly,”
2020-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · Rutger Bregman on Human Kindness in a Frightened World with Helen Lewis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's quite a controversial phrase in my book. Some people are like, are you serious about that? But no, it's the concept that I hope will make me think of a very...”
2020-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · Rutger Bregman on Human Kindness in a Frightened World with Helen Lewis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and a nocebo where what we believe comes to pass as a as a way to look at human nature as well because i think that our theories of human nature are often like that that what you assume in other people is what you get out of them if you assume that most people are selfish and nasty and that our civilization is only a thin veneer then you'll create a society where you'll have institutions that just will bring out the worst in each and every one of us and i think we can turn it around and have a society that doesn't work with a no seebo but with a placebo view of human nature and tries to bring out the best in each and every one of us”
2020-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · Rutger Bregman on Human Kindness in a Frightened World with Helen Lewis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sham surgery is the term. And this is really, there's been really been research into this where they do procedures on people for really nasty conditions like chronic back pain, for example. And they just pretend to do surgery on someone and then they don't do anything at all while people are in sleep. And they wake up and they say, well, it was a resounding success and people feel much better. Now, that doesn't mean that it's fake or anything. It just means that the human brain is way more interesting than we often think and that the whole medical process is way more interesting than we often think it is. Now the opposite thing of a placebo is the nocebo says to you, well, you might experience side effects and there you go. You already start feeling it, right? You might feel a little bit itchy here and there. So that can be a self-fulfilling prophecy as well. So in the book, I use this metaphor of a”
2020-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · Rutger Bregman on Human Kindness in a Frightened World with Helen Lewis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so I think that everyone knows what a placebo is, right? You think that something is going to help you or cure you and it actually can. You can really see this in research into antidepressants, for example, which are, I mean, there's quite some evidence that they have some, how do you say that, real medical effect here? The question is obviously what is real. But a big part of the effect is a placebo. Now, that doesn't mean that antidepressants are not valuable. They're actually really valuable, but because they really help people. But it also means that placebos are very powerful. And the interesting thing is that the more spectacular a placebo is, the more effective it is. So if I give you a pill and say, this is going to help you, that may be effective. But if I give you an injection, that's probably going to be more effective because it's easier to believe that an injection is, I mean, that's really something that's happening. Now, one of the most powerful things you can do is to do surgery or fake.”
2020-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · Rutger Bregman on Human Kindness in a Frightened World with Helen Lewis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I sometimes think that the great tragedy of religion is that the most wonderful generation of believers is also the last generation because sort of they're not that dogmatic anymore. They sort of keep the good things and they've lost the very nasty things. But then they're not evangelical anymore. They don't have”
2020-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · Rutger Bregman on Human Kindness in a Frightened World with Helen Lewis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that doesn't mean that I've suddenly turned into a Christian, but I think people are right when they point out that in many ways this is a quite Christian book or a religious book that I'm interested in, typically religious questions.”
2020-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · Rutger Bregman on Human Kindness in a Frightened World with Helen Lewis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Omnipresent being blah blah all those kind of questions. As I became older, however, I guess I became less interested in sort of those boring questions like, is this or that true? And I became more interested in the questions, what would happen if we believe this? What would happen if we believe that? Because I also started to realize that actually the conversation I've been having with my father over all those years didn't really make sense because he was looking at me and I guess he was thinking all that time that I didn't really understand religion. Because for him, religion was never really about that, about, you know, what is truth? It was about something else.”
2020-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · Rutger Bregman on Human Kindness in a Frightened World with Helen Lewis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I get my personal background, that's a great question. So many journalists are often quick to point out that my father is a Protestant minister. So I have a religious background in that way. I'm not religious myself anymore. But, you know, when I was 18 or 19 years old, as many people at that age, I was obsessed with the question, does God exist? Did Jesus die for my sins? I wanted to know the answers. And especially, I think I sort of wanted to become a Christian. I just needed to find the right evidence first, the right argument so that I could sort of convince everyone in my context who was not had the same beliefs. But then I, you know, went down that road and became an atheist. And that period of my life, I was very obsessed with the question, what is true, right? What about this dogma? What about that dogma? Does God exist? What does that mean? Like, did he create the, what, 6,000 years ago, or is he like sort of an”
2020-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · Rutger Bregman on Human Kindness in a Frightened World with Helen Lewis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or something like that. So, in this book, I just wanted to connect the dots and to show that something bigger is going on.”
2020-08-28 · Intelligence Squared · Rutger Bregman on Human Kindness in a Frightened World with Helen Lewis · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source