Human Kind

The Dutch title is De Meeste Mensen Deugen, which translates literally as ‘Most People Are Decent’. Very Dutch, very straightforward, and when my GP recommended it to me recently, told me exactly what the book was about. Human Kind is subtle and creative. You have to stop and think about it. Very English.

I only mention this by way of saying that the book itself is as straightforward and direct as the Dutch title. It’s no abstract, academic text on the decency of humans. Dutch author Rutger Bregman sets out to offer, in simple, extremely readable language, dozens of examples of people being… decent. Along the way he lays into the media for highlighting the sensational and the cruel; into sociological experiments designed to prove that we’re all at base heartless sadists*; and how Lord of the Flies – long accepted as the illustration of the savagery in us all – had a real-life counterpart in which exactly the opposite thesis was proved.

Yes, there’s bad in us. Bregman doesn’t deny it. But over and over again, in example after example, he reminds us of the good in us. In a lot of us.

And that fact should be remembered.

And cherished.

 

*The (notorious) Stanford Prison Experiment, in which volunteer students got to play guard and prisoner was not the wilful descent into sadism so frequently described. A lot of the ‘guards’ were more than happy to leave the ‘prisoners’ alone. It was organiser Zimbardo and his associates who encouraged, ordered, them to be brutes. Because that was the thesis Zimbardo wanted to prove. So he made sure it was.