How to make the world a better place

 "You need to have a fundamental assumption that either the people are essentially good or they are evil," my colleague and a sociology lecturer counselled me. I was in my late thirties and struggling with a protracted depression. He was giving me a choice between Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. 

Hobbes believed that human nature was fundamentally wicked. Without the rigours of the law, we would all be self-centred savages. Rousseau, on the other hand, declared that in our heart of hearts we are all good. If civilisation was the redeeming force for Hobbes, the same civilisation ruined people in Rousseau's philosophy. Man is born free and good but the institutions of civilisation enslave him everywhere, Rousseau wrote. 

I chose Rousseau when my counsellor-friend demanded. The events that had led to my depression had made me feel that I was the only worthless creature in the whole cosmos. I had become the metaphorical drum in the marketplace. Everyone who passed by loved to beat it. I accepted the beating assuming that I deserved them all. I was so bad. Logically, the others were good. Rousseau was right. People were good. I was an aberration. 

That didn't work, however. It doesn't work that way, I learnt later. Our worldviews are shaped by our experiences rather than by our gods or philosophers or poets. My experiences made me a cynic. I remained a cynic for the rest of my life once I overcame that bout of depression. 

Now, a quarter of a century after I redeemed myself from the musicians of the marketplace, I am an aging man sobered and mellowed by life's variegated melodies. I don't always look around for a coffin when I smell roses. I accept the possibility of a garden nearby. 

I accepted Yamini MacLean's book suggestion without a second thought on a sober and mellow afternoon last month. Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman. The cynic in me lay low while I read it over the last month enjoying every bit of it. A lot of material from this book seeped into my writings last month. 

Bregman is a greater optimist than Rousseau. People are good at heart, he is sure. The environment with its systems and demands may make us do evil things. The Holocaust was real. Stalin's gulags were inhuman. Human skulls in thousands stare at us from the mass graves dug by Pol Pot's men. Yet Bregman is convinced that human nature is essentially good. 

The book is a treatise on that theme: people are essentially good. Bregman goes on to show us precisely that. His thesis begins with the premise that homo sapiens prevailed over the other hominins like the Neanderthals precisely because the sapiens were more cooperative. The success of the sapiens is the survival of the friendliest version of hominins. 

Friendliness and cooperation are more natural to the human species than aggression and selfishness. Bregman inspires us with examples from various places. He disproves many of the established theories and experiments in psychology which taught us wrong things about human nature. He questions a lot of our convictions and beliefs. For example, he shows us how empathy is not a good thing at all. We learn from him why power corrupts. And what the Enlightenment got wrong.

Finally Bregman leaves us with a grand vision and a grander dream. The vision of a world of benign people. A world without "hate, injustice and prejudice." All that we need to do is change certain systems. Like capitalism, for example. The punitive legal system, for another. And our vindictive gods too. 

I loved the book for what it is: a grand dream. Bregman's previous bestselling book was Utopia for Realists. I haven't read it. I'm not going to either. Utopia belongs to dreams. I am a realist. 

Bregman's realism is actually idealism dressed in wonderful polemics. His success is the book's ability to convince us of humankind's intrinsic decency, if not goodness. 

I highly recommend this book to everyone. It is far more persuasive and inspiring than all the holy books I have read (and I have read quite a few of them). It gives us dreams. It offers us a paradise. It sounds good. Too good.