Humankind: A Hopeful History

Uber, in the words of one anonymous employee, is a ‘Hobbesian jungle’ where ‘you can never get ahead unless someone else dies’.37

Vaccines now save more lives each year than would have been spared if we’d had world peace for the entire twentieth century.

So what is this radical idea? That most people, deep down, are pretty decent.

Farmers, by contrast, had to toil in the fields and working the soil left little time for leisure. No pain, no grain.

I’m often reminded of what a Chinese politician said in the 1970s when asked about the effects of the French Revolution of 1789. ‘It’s a little too soon to say,’ he allegedly responded.62

In 2010, researchers at the University of Amsterdam found that the effects of oxytocin seem limited to one’s own group.2 The hormone not only enhances affection for friends, it can also intensify aversion to strangers. Turns out oxytocin doesn’t fuel universal fraternity. It powers feelings of ‘my people first’.

Le Bon’s book gives a play by play of how people respond to crisis. Almost instantaneously, he writes, ‘man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilization’.3 Panic and violence erupt, and we humans reveal our true nature.

‘One day, in 1977, six boys set out from Tonga on a fishing trip. […] Caught in a huge storm, the boys were shipwrecked on a deserted island. What do they do, this little tribe? They made a pact never to quarrel.’9

‘My own impression,’ writes Rebecca Solnit, whose book A Paradise Built in Hell (2009) gives a masterful account of Katrina’s aftermath, ‘is that elite panic comes from powerful people who see all humanity in their own image.’14 Dictators and despots, governors and generals – they all too often resort to brute force to prevent scenarios that exist