Humankind: A Hopeful History

Look at what comes on the evening news right after work: crimes, betrayals, and fights dominate the headlines. Anyone who rides a packed commuter train or stops by the neighborhood bar grows up believing that society hangs by a thread. We are taught that civilization is just a fragile layer of varnish over our true, selfish, and violent nature. Rutger Bregman calls this widespread belief the veneer theory.

This bleak view gained traction in the seventeenth century with the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who argued that the natural human state was a war of all against all. Later on, cynicism became a pose of intelligence in workplace conversations, and anyone who bets on the decency of others came to be seen as naive or unprepared for the real world.

Yet historical records tell the opposite story. In real disasters, historic floods, or prolonged blackouts, people do not devour one another: they share supplies, rescue neighbors, and set up community kitchens. The fear that the person next to us is a monster lying in wait is fed by the catastrophism of sensationalist media, not by our biological heritage.

William Golding's classic novel Lord of the Flies convinced the world that isolated boys turn into cruel monsters without adult rules. The book became a symbol of supposed childhood savagery in school curricula, yet it grew solely out of the tormented imagination of the British writer, with no empirical basis in the real world.

Bregman decided to find out what would happen if that fiction became reality. In 1965, six teenagers from a boarding school in Tonga took a fishing boat, ran into a brutal storm, and drifted at sea until they were wrecked on the rocky shores of the harsh, uninhabited island of 'Ata.

Far from attacking one another, the boys cooperated from the first day to the last. They kept a signal fire burning for more than a year to call for help, set up a communal garden, and cared devotedly for a classmate who broke his leg. When a ship rescued them fifteen months later, it found young men who were healthy, strong, and deeply united in brotherhood.

Why did Homo sapiens survive while other, stronger hominids, such as the Neanderthals, vanished from the map? Biology's traditional answer always bet on physical aggression and wars of conquest, but the author challenges this myth by bringing up the thesis of human self-domestication. Just as domesticated foxes select for docility across generations, our species favored peaceful and affectionate traits, producing what he nicknamed Homo puppy.

That selection shaped our very bodies. We developed juvenile features, smaller jaws, and the white sclera of our eyes, an extremely rare trait among mammals. Eyes with a white background transparently show where we are looking, making immediate trust and the coordination of group tasks much easier.

The same applies to the involuntary blush on our faces when we feel embarrassed, which signals to others that we care about the group. Our great evolutionary advantage was never the physical strength of solitary individuals, but the talent for learning as a pack and acting with mutual solidarity.