Humankind: A Hopeful History

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

An old man says to his grandson: ‘There’s a fight going on inside me. It’s a terrible fight between two wolves. One is evil – angry, greedy, jealous, arrogant, and cowardly. The other is good – peaceful, loving, modest, generous, honest, and trustworthy. These two wolves are also fighting within you, and inside every other person too.’ After a mome

People are social animals, but we have a fatal flaw: we feel more affinity for those who are most like us.

a Swiss novelist once quipped, that ‘News is to the mind what sugar is to the body.’30

When the conquistadors marched into the city in 1519 and entered its largest temple they were stunned to see huge racks and towers piled high with thousands of human skulls.

‘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

The news, according to dozens of studies, is a mental health hazard.23

When a seventeenth-century missionary warned a member of the Innu tribe (in what is now Canada) about the dangers of infidelity, he replied, ‘Thou hast no sense. You French people love only your own children; but we all love all the children of our tribe.’15

Human beings, it turns out, are ultrasocial learning machines. We’re born to learn, to bond and to play. Maybe it’s not so strange, then, that blushing is the only human expression that’s uniquely human. Blushing, after all, is quintessentially social – it’s people showing they care what others think, which fosters trust and enables cooperation.