Rutger Bregman
speaker
273 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard May 2025
Rutger Bregman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And it's a real example of survival of the friendliest, because if they were really like nasty and not working together, well, we wouldn't be here able to tell their story. Now, what's happening there? I think it's really a combination of things.
Obviously, it's Tongan culture, right, which is a very cooperative culture with very essential skills where kids learn to swim, you know, basically in their first year already. So that's obviously essential. I also think, though, that it is a part of human nature what we see expressed there. As I said, survival of the friendliest.
It's kids working together and exhibiting traits that are also very much part of who we are as a species. You know, to Trevor's point again, this is one of those things where you can hold two seemingly contradictory thoughts in your mind at the same time. Yes, we're incredibly selfish, cruel. We're also one of the most cooperative and altruistic species in the animal kingdom.
Yeah. And this is particularly the case when you look at natural disasters. So look at how disasters are portrayed in series and movies, and it's the same thing all the time. Civilization is a thin veneer, and people very quickly turn into animals, beasts, barbarians. They start raping, looting, plundering. And that's also how the press often behaves.
The most famous case here is Katrina, 2005, the terrible flooding. And the press was full of these horrible stories of people getting shot, of the looting and the plundering. Well, actually, we have got 60, 70 years of empirical evidence of anthropologists, sociologists going into these places and actually interviewing people, doing the rigorous empirical research.
And time and time again, they found that disasters actually bring out the best in people. So every single time, doesn't matter where it happens, whether it's Japan or the US or South Africa, you get an explosion of altruism. Because once things really get serious like that, people are like, okay, we've got to stick together. We've got to survive together.
Sure, there are always some examples that then will get magnified in the press. But like the big headline story should be, oh, people are working together once again.
50%?
Yeah, it's really extraordinary. Child mortality has been declining massively. On the other hand, though, I also understand why people are really scared. In many respects, I'm pretty terrified. Do you guys know this website called Our World in Data? It's my favorite website. Our World in Data. Yeah.
It's really a great website that has the best collection of data on what's going on in the world, basically. And the guy who founded that is a statistician called Max Roser. And he always says that there are three statements that are true at the same time. So the first statement is the world is bad. I mean, that is true.
There are millions of kids dying from easily preventable diseases every single day. There are billions of animals being tortured in factory farms right now. Autocracy is on the rise. So there are lots of bad things. The second statement is also true, that the world is much better. We have made extraordinary progress.
And you won't see that if you just follow the news, because the news is about what happens today instead about what happens every single day. It doesn't teach you all that much about the big structural trends. And the third statement is also true, which is we could do so much better.
If you take a look at the resources we have, how many talent we have, how much capital we have, we should already have abolished poverty around the globe. We should already have abolished most terrible diseases. Like the fact that malaria still exists, that tuberculosis still exists. I mean, that's just an outrage. So yeah, as you can see, I've got mixed feelings about this.
I think it's one of the most fascinating questions. You can basically ask about history. So... If you look at all these civilizations we've seen, whether it's the Romans or the Aztecs or people in the Middle Ages, people throughout history have believed that they are the most civilized, right? Yeah. That they are on the right side of history.
So the Romans, for example, thought that they were so civilized because they didn't sacrifice children for the gods. That's a good move. Yeah. Then they did have the Colosseum, you know, and they did throw naked women for the lions, etc. But that was just good entertainment during lunchtime.
Okay. So today we like to see ourselves as really civilized because we've, you know, officially abolished slavery and the slave trade. We've got, you know, universal suffrage. In many countries we now have gay marriage. So surely we got to be the most civilized, right? Yeah. Well, that would be very coincidental if we turn out to be that one civilization who got it all figured out.
I think it's quite likely that the historians of the future will look back at us. And I'm not just saying like, oh, the MAGA Republicans. No, I'm talking about me, about you. We're probably doing some things that are terrible, like moral catastrophes. And today, we have lots of progressives and liberals who care deeply about human rights and about all the injustices.
But keep eating factory farmed meat of animals that have been horribly abused. So that for me is one of those examples where the historians of the future could be like, they're going to look at us. What the hell were these people thinking? How could they unthinkingly keep participating in that crisis?
I was a quite fanatic carnivore. Yeah, well, then what changed? I guess reading. So I think the final notch came from Yuval Noah Harari. You had him on the show as well, right? So he wrote this book called Sapiens about, you know, the big picture, right? The history of humanity of the last hundreds of thousands of years. And in that book, he doesn't make any moral judgment whatsoever.
So he talks about the Nazis and he's like, I don't know, describing it as... You know, just another culture, right? Just another way of, you know, the way humans can behave. And then at the end of the book, he talks about the way we treat animals. And he has this offhand remark where he says, well, this is probably the biggest crime in all of human history.
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