Review: Humankind: A Hopeful History

Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars



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Humankind: A hopeful History

Summary:

This is a Book with a radical idea and it's proofs -> Deep inside, Humans are essentially nice. The author debunks psychology experiments (Stanford Prison, Milgrim, Katie Genovese incident etc.) and provides his interpretation that Humans are innately nice. After we started claiming things for ourselves like land, money, we started to distrust each other. But when the chips are down, we always help each other and bring each other up. 24X7 news, negative feedback loops and environment do turn people into monsters but ultimately these are local data points and not the default.

Now, many people will come out of this book saying, ah.. this is just too naive and all the data points can be refuted or multiple examples can be given to kill the main point of the book. But that is the point, isn't it. The idea that answer to all of our human worries is just interpretation (people are nice and always have been) will be so counter-critical to our existing confirmation bias of "mean" humanity that most people will just bash the book around.

I believe the way to see it is - this should be our default position and see. We are just so scared that if we start behaving in an all helping, hippy way - people will make fun of us or basically our credibility will be lost. My personal experience has taught me, this is not the case. People generally are good and tend to mirror what you believe them to be like. Reading this book was like having my existing beliefs strengthened. Maybe it is all my confirmation bias anyway but I do recommend this book to everyone. I think, this will atleast force you to question your stand in day to day life.