A kind of hope

Are humans really intrinsically bad, or has the virus crisis shown we are really better than we think?

In the argument between Hobbes and Rousseau over the fundamental character of humankind, Bregman therefore sides with Rousseau, and the noble savage; it’s not that he denies the human capacity for evil, but that he sees human evil-doing as most often an anomaly caused by those in power, who find it in their interest to divert our natural sociability into perverted forms of violent tribalism. And even then, argues Bregman, most human beings will do all they can to avoid deliberate acts of violence and cruelty; in war, he points out, most soldiers never even fire their guns. Bregman’s style is sometimes irritatingly chatty and repetitive, as if he were talking to someone with a limited attention-span. The thoroughness of his demolitionjob is impressive, though, as he sweeps aside example after example – from the fictional Lord of the Flies, to Stanley Milgram’s famous electric shock experiment at Yale – of the way we uphold the myth of our own wickedness.

And we do this, Bregman suggests, because a climate of distrust and mutual fear tends to suit those in power. His book points out how this negative theory of human nature has been adopted by most authority-structures in recorded human history, from the religious to the political; and how it has been ruthlessly used to divide and rule us. Examples of this are of course too numerous to mention. And after a period of relative enlightenment and rapid improvement in human wellbeing in the decades after the Second World War, in the 1970s we of course ran hard into the current dominant power ideology, in the shape of extreme free market capitalism; bent on convincing us that we are all primarily