Rutger Bregman — Im Grunde gut (Humankind: A Hopeful History)

Work in Progress!

Why it made the list

I keep circling one question that turns out to be surprisingly hard: what image of humanity do we need in order to imagine better futures?

If you want to take "futures worth wanting" seriously, you have to believe that people are willing and able to help carry them — that they are not, underneath it all, mostly selfish, fearful or cruel. Otherwise the whole thing collapses into wishful thinking before you even start.

I picked up Bregman hoping he would give me a solid foundation for that belief. Not a pep talk, but a careful correction of a very dominant story about human nature.

Thoughts I keep coming back to

Optimism with a disclaimer

What stood out to me immediately is how much energy Bregman spends proving that he is not naive.

I recognise that move, because I make it myself. I noticed the reflex recently when someone challenged my optimism and I found myself scrambling to explain why it was not just wishful thinking.

Optimism today seems to arrive with a disclaimer attached. You feel the need to signal that you are not stupid, not blind, not ignoring the problems. Pessimism carries no such burden — it gets to pass as realism for free.

Unfortunately I don't think optimism can win that argument by being right. Being right is simply not enough.

Optimism has to become the better offer: the more generous, more attractive, frankly more enjoyable place to stand. Not because everything is fine, but because wanting something again already matters.

Reading further into the experiment chapters, this gets sharper and a little stranger. Going through the famous twentieth-century experiments — Stanford, Milgram and the rest — what struck me was not the results themselves but the wanting behind them: how badly the people running them seemed to need the dark story to be true. The pessimism about human nature isn't just a mood that happens to hang in the air. It gets actively produced, almost willed into being. Apparently the bleak account offers a kind of safety.

That quietly reframes the task. The better offer is not competing against neutral facts. It is competing against a negative story people actively want — because it reassures them. The opponent is not ignorance, it is a need. And you certainly don't talk someone out of a need by being right. You can only meet it with something that serves the same hunger for safety, but from the brighter side.

Progress is the next iteration, not a return

There is one place I part ways with Bregman, and the disagreement turns out to be the productive kind. His grand historical arc — roughly: as long as we were nomads things were good, settling down was the fall from grace, everything since until about a century ago was misery, and the real cure would be to become nomads again — is too one-dimensional for me. History doesn't work like that. It is always layered. Nomadic life had its own problems, ones that settling down solved quite concretely — and settling created new ones, which were addressed in turn. Every solution breeds the next problem, and that is how we iterate our way forward. The Middle Ages weren't only "dark" either; far more was going on there than the label admits.

So here is the picture I'd set against his arc: progress is not a return to a lost paradise. It is the next iteration. A good future doesn't mean "back", it means "onward" — the next problem solved, in full knowledge that it will bring new ones with it. That is both more optimistic and more honest than a story of decline and redemption, and it is exactly the stance from which you can credibly invite someone in.

And this isn't really a rebuttal of Bregman; it's a conviction I bring with me, from twenty years of software and leading teams. We only ever move iteratively: we carry the past along and work from whatever understanding we currently have toward whatever comes next — and that understanding can never be perfect. I don't believe in the grand single stroke. Premature optimisation is the root of all evil. That isn't a fallback; it's the most honest way I know to move forward.

Obama put the same thing in two words: better is good. There will never be the grand single stroke. Each iteration is good precisely because it is better than the one before — not perfect, just better, and that is enough to keep moving.

The facade theory

Bregman attacks what he calls the facade theory: the idea that civilisation is a thin veneer over a brutal, selfish, violent core, and that the veneer cracks the moment things get hard.

I am still reading, and I won't pretend I have stress-tested every argument behind this. But as a working assumption it matters enormously.

If the facade theory is wrong, then assuming good intentions is suddenly not so naive after all — it is simply accurate. People may be far more willing to cooperate, help and care than our cultural stories give them credit for.

And the assumptions we start from build the world. Assume selfishness, and you design for control and suspicion. Assume the possibility of trust and care, and entirely different systems become thinkable. After twenty years of building things with other people, I have a fairly strong sense of which of those two assumptions actually gets good work out of a room (and believe me, micromanagement doesn't scale).

The experiment chapters only strengthen this. If a good part of the evidence for "people are fundamentally bad" was massaged into shape — by researchers who wanted that result — then the facade theory stands on even shakier ground than I'd assumed. Which makes the benefit of the doubt look less like generosity and more like plain good judgement.

Trust as a cultural default

The phrase I keep writing in the margin is trust as a cultural default. Not a finished theory — a direction.

What if trust is not some rare substance we have to manufacture from scratch, but something that is mostly already there, buried under fear, bad incentives, defensive habits and the quiet assumption that everyone else is less willing than we are?

This is where Bregman stops being abstract for me, because it describes my actual work. A lot of what I do comes down to creating spaces where people feel that exposing themselves a little is not dangerous. What holds them back is almost never a lack of willingness. It is much more the fear of being the first one to care, the first to step forward, the first to look slightly stupid.

So the interesting question is not only how to convince people. It is how to make trust visible — how to let people experience that the willingness was there all along.

Who, then, are "the others"?

One friction Bregman leaves open, and it keeps nagging at me. If we are all fundamentally good — he even calls us Homo puppy — then who are the others? His second main claim is that people will do terrible things when those things are dressed up as good. But who does the dressing? Who holds the bad intention to disguise harm as good?

Here Bregman slips, almost without noticing, into a shepherd-and-flock model: the well-meaning herd, and a few who steer it. That doesn't sit cleanly with "everyone is fundamentally good." I don't have a resolution, and I don't want to paper over it. For now I'm holding the tension open and watching whether the later chapters catch it.

A warm, full waterhole

Reading this, my mind keeps drifting to a practical question: how would you actually invite someone in?

The direction feels clear, and it is mostly a list of what not to do. Not missionary. No "gather behind me and everything will be wonderful", no door-to-door conviction. If anything works, I suspect it is low-threshold and inviting rather than preachy — less argument, more atmosphere. Somewhere it simply feels good, the drinks are cold, and people are laughing — with each other, not at each other. That way the willingness I keep talking about isn't proven to anyone; it's made experienceable. You see it because you're standing in the middle of it. And that is exactly what would defuse the fear: nobody has to be the first into the cold water if the water is already warm and full.

The experiment chapters leave a warning hanging off this, though. The psychologists did the wrong thing for the supposedly right result — Zimbardo wanted to make a point about prisons and the corrupting pull of power, and bent the experiment to get it. A little cheating, for a good cause. That is the one thing you must never do. Make willingness experienceable, by all means — but don't prove it, and certainly don't manufacture or fake it. The good cause does not justify a rigged result. That's the shadow side of "not missionary": also not manipulative, not even for the right reasons. The warm, full waterhole has to be really warm and really full.