The Good Wolf We Keep Starving: Why Our Cynicism About Human Nature Is Killing Us

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There's an old parable about two wolves fighting inside us—one evil, one good. The grandson asks which will win. The grandfather says, "The one you feed."

Cynicism is easy. It's lazy. You can sit back and say everyone sucks, nothing will change, why bother? Hope is heavy. Hope requires courage. It means trusting people who might hurt you. But the evidence—from the Blitz to the Norwegian prisons to those six Tongan boys—shows it's the only way we've ever survived.

We are, biologically and historically, Planet A creatures. We just keep choosing to believe we're on Planet B. And that belief is creating the broken world we think we're describing.

What if we stopped starving the good wolf? What if we built institutions that assumed people are decent—and watched that assumption become reality?

The science is clear. The question is whether we're brave enough to believe it.

Humankind: A Hopeful History

This is Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy

Independent, moderated, timely, deep, gentle, clinical, global, and community conversations about things that matter.  Breathe Easy, we go deep and lightly surface the big ideas.

Transcript

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Okay, let's unpack this. I want you to really picture the scene because it's absolutely crucial for understanding the story we're about to tell. So it is September 1940, London. Right. The Second World War is raging. The Luftwaffe is darkening the skies. And the British Army Command is essentially just holding its breath. They are staring down the barrel of what they believe is an existential threat. But here is the twist. it wasn't just the German bombs they were terrified of. No. They were terrified of their own people. It is such a fascinating and honestly a pretty revealing moment in history to kick this all off. Yeah. Because that fear wasn't just about, you know, structural damage or military defeat. It was psychological. Deeply psychological. The experts at the time, the intellectual elite, people like Winston Churchill and the leading military strategists, they'd all steeped themselves in the psychological literature of the era. And the consensus, well, they were convinced that under the pressure of the Blitz, Yeah. the civilization of London would simply... Snap. Right. They were expecting absolute, unmitigated chaos. And we aren't just talking about people being scared. We are talking about millions of people living in this dense, urban environment just descending into madness. The predictions were apocalyptic. I mean, one general actually went on record saying traffic will cease, the homeless will shriek for help, the city will be in pandemonium. They genuinely thought the army would be too busy controlling the hysterical British masses to actually fight the enemy. Yeah, that's incredible to think about. And Churchill himself, he predicted that three to four million Londoners would flee the city in a blind panic. And you have to ask, where did that certainty come from? I mean, that fear was rooted in a very specific, very cynical view of human nature. It largely stems from the work of Gustave Le Bon, a French scholar whose book, The Psychology of the Masses, was basically the operating manual for leaders like Hitler, Mussolini, and yes, even Churchill. Really? For Churchill, too? Oh, absolutely. Le Bon's theory was that civilization is just a thin veneer. It's a fragile crust. And the moment you apply a little pressure like, say, a massive bombing campaign, that crust cracks and underneath you find the true human animal. Selfish. Selfish, panicked and savage. Veneer theory. That is the term for it. And that right there is the core tension of what we are diving into today. This pervasive idea that we're all just one bad day, one blackout or one crisis away from becoming monsters. But here's where it gets really interesting. The blitz happens. The bombs fall for months. Thousands of people die. But what actually happened to the psychology of London? Did they shriek? Did they turn on each other? Not at all. It was the exact opposite. It's amazing. Observers and psychiatrists who rushed into the bombed out neighborhoods, you know, notebooks in hand, expecting to document mass hysteria. They were just baffling. What did they find? They found a strange serenity in the city. There are these incredible accounts of children playing on the sidewalks, like right next to fresh bomb craters. People were drinking tea while their windows were rattling from the explosions down the street. I love the specific details about the shop owners. You had these buildings that were half destroyed, rubble everywhere, and the owners would climb out and put up signs. The signs were the best part. Signs that said, more open than usual. Or that pub owner who wrote, our windows are gone, but our spirits are excellent. Come in and try them. Exactly. The panic never materialized. The psychiatric wards remained empty. In fact, alcoholism rates went down. Suicide rates dropped. Far from descending into barbarism, the population became more altruistic, more cooperative. It completely contradicted the veneer theory. And yet... Despite this massive historical evidence, that cynical view of human nature, that we are bad at our core, it persists. Oh, it's more than persists. It's the dominant narrative of our time. It really is. And that brings us to the mission of today's deep dive. We are looking at the book Humankind, a hopeful history by the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman. Now, this isn't just a history book. It's a direct challenge to that cynical narrative. Bregman is basically arguing that for centuries we've been telling ourselves a lie about who we are. And he's not doing it to be nice. He's doing it because the science, he says, shows we're wrong. And Bregman is such an interesting figure to lead this charge. He's a young historian. He's got this incredible curiosity, and he started noticing a pattern. He calls it mean world syndrome. Mean world syndrome. It's his idea that the news acts like a drug, we consume it daily, and because the news by its nature focuses on the exceptional, the murders, the terrorism, the corruption, we start to believe that this is the norm. We start to believe that most people are out to get us. He has this great metaphor in the book borrowed from a professor, Tom Postmas, about Planet A and Planet B. I think this perfectly frames the whole discussion. It does. So imagine a plane crash. The survivors are stuck on a remote island. On planet A, the survivors turn to their neighbors, they ask if they're okay, they share their water, and they work together to survive. The cooperative model. Right. But on planet B, it's every person for themselves. Panic, fighting, hoarding, chaos. And when you ask people which planet we live on, the results are... well they're staggering something like 97% of people say we live on planet B 97% we assume the worst we assume that without the police or the government watching us we'd eat each other but Bregman's argument and is backed by a mountain of evidence from the blitz to actual plane crashes is that we firmly empirically live on planet A. We just refuse to believe it. So what does this all mean for us? Because if we're wrong about our own nature, I mean, that's not a small error. We are designing our whole society, our schools, our prisons, our democracies, based on a fundamental mistake. That is exactly the stake here. It's not just about feeling good or being sentimental. If we view human nature accurately, we can solve massive problems like climate change and political polarization. But if we stick to the veneer theory, we create systems that treat people like beasts, which ironically creates a feedback loop that can push them to act that way. Well, if we're talking about beasts and human nature, we have to talk about the ultimate cultural touchstone for this. You know where I'm going. Oh, we have to. It is inescapable. Lord of the Flies. William Golding's novel. Yeah. It's probably the most influential fictional story about human psychology ever written. Millions of kids read it in school. I read it. You read it. Everyone read it. The premise is just ingrained in us. Strip away the adults, put kids on an island, and they will devolve into savages. They'll paint their faces, worship a pig's head, and kill each other. It's a terrifying story. And Golding wrote it as a direct response to those optimistic adventure stories of his youth, basically saying, "No, this is what kids are really like." But Bregman asked a simple question that honestly I think we all just forgot to ask. Yeah. Has this ever actually happened? Did a group of kids ever get shipwrecked on a deserted island? And here's where it gets really cool. He went looking and he found them, the real Lord of the Flies. This is the story of the Tongan Castaways and honestly... It should be a Hollywood movie. It's unbelievable. It happened in 1965. You had six boys from a boarding school in Tonga, age 13 to 16. Teenagers. Teenagers. They were bored, they were fed up with school food, and they wanted an adventure. So they decided to borrow steel, really a fishing boat, and sail to Fiji. Classic teenage decision making. Right. Right there. But of course they fell asleep, a storm hit, their rudder broke, and they drifted for eight days. They're severely dehydrated when they finally crash onto this rocky, uninhabited island called Atta. So you have six teenage boys, stranded with no food, no water, no adults. In the fictional book, this is the moment where the war paint comes out and the killing starts. But what happened with the Tungan boys? It was the complete opposite of the fiction. They didn't fight. In fact, the very first thing they did was make a pact never to quarrel. A pact? A pact. They agreed that if things got heated, they would separate until they cooled off. They organized themselves into a commune. They worked in pairs to keep a signal fire going. And I want to emphasize this. They kept that fire lit for more than a year.- A year. That is incredible discipline. I can barely keep a house plant alive for a month.- Exactly. They built a gymnasium with weights made from wood and stones. They created a badminton court. They planted a garden with wild bananas and tarot. They even started their days with songs and prayers. Wow. And one of the most telling details is what happened when one of the boys, Stephen, fell off a cliff and broke his leg. Now, in Lord of the Flies, a kid with a broken leg, Peggy, he's a liability. He gets bullied, isolated, or worse. Precisely. But here, the other boys nursed him. They set his leg using sticks and leaves. They did his chores for him. They brought him his food. When they were finally rescued, a doctor examined the boy and was amazed. The leg had healed perfectly. It's a testament to the care they took of one another. And the rescue itself is just, it's a wild story. Enter Captain Peter Warner. Yes, the son of a wealthy Australian industrialist, a bit of an adventurer himself. He was sailing by Ada in 1966 when he noticed burned patches on the cliffs. That signaled human activity. Then, through his binoculars, he saw a naked boy with hair down to his shoulders swimming toward the boat. Yes. Unbelievable. The boy climbs up the side and yells, My name is Stephen. There are six of us and we reckon we've been here 15 months. And Peter Warner radios in, right? He calls the capital Nuku'alofa to check if there are any missing kids. He does. And the operator on the other end is weeping. He says, "You found them. These boys have been given up for dead. Funerals have been held. It was a miracle." But here's the kicker, and this says so much about our institutions versus our nature. When they got back to Tonga, the police arrested the boys for stealing the boat. Of course they did. Welcome back from the dead, by the way. You're under arrest. But Peter Warner stepped in. He did. He paid for the boat, bailed them out, and actually hired them to work on his fishing vessels. They remained friends for life. This story, it really serves as the emotional anchor of Bregman's new realism. It proves that when the veneer of civilization is removed, we don't descend into chaos. We gravitate toward cooperation. That seems to be our default setting. It is our default setting. It makes you wonder why Golding's fiction is so famous and the true story is almost unknown. It really speaks to that negativity bias we talked about. But let's dig deeper into the why. If we are naturally cooperative, why is that? Is it just culture or is it biology? Oh, Bregman argues it is absolutely biological. He introduces this amazing concept of homo puppy. Homo puppy. I love that. It sounds cute, but it's actually a serious evolutionary theory, right? It is. It's based on the idea of self-domestication. The question is... Why did Homo sapiens survive when other hominids, like the Neanderthals, died out? The Neanderthals had bigger brains. They were physically stronger. They were tougher. Yeah, by all standard metrics of survival of the fittest, they should have crushed us. But we had something they didn't. Friendliness. So in the long run, nice guys finish first. In evolution, yes. It turns out they do. Bregman points to the famous silver fox experiment in Siberia, started by Dmitry Believ in the 1950s. This is a crucial piece of the puzzle.

They took vital foxes and they bred them based on a single trait: 11:52

friendliness toward humans. Just that one thing. Just that. If a fox didn't bite the researcher's hand, it was selected for breeding. And within just a few generations, the fox has changed completely. Drastically. And not just in behavior. They started to look different. They developed floppy ears, curly tails, spotted fur. They started barking. They retained their juvenile traits into adulthood. This is called neoteny. And the argument is that humans went through this same process. Exactly. We selected ourselves for friendliness. The friendliest humans were better at communication and working together, so they survived and had more children. We domesticated ourselves. And there's physical evidence for this in our own bodies, right? Like in our eyes. The sclera. The whites of the eyes. This is fascinating. Humans are the only primates with visible whites around the iris. If you look at a chimpanzee or a gorilla, their eyes are dark. You can't easily tell where they are looking. It's a form of camouflage. But humans, we are open books. Our eyes reveal our focus and our intentions to everyone around us. Which is terrible for poker, but great for survival. Exactly. It allows for gaze following. If I look at something dangerous or interesting, you immediately look too. It fosters trust and cooperation. It makes lying harder. We are biologically wired for transparency. We are built to connect. And then there's blushing. I found this part so interesting. The only species that blushes And think about what blushing is. It's an involuntary signal of shame or social sensitivity. It shows that we care what others think of us. In a dog-eat-dog world, showing weakness like that should be a fatal disadvantage. But for homo puppy, it's a superpower because it builds trust. It says, I want to be part of the group, and I know I messed up. It keeps the social fabric together. So we are wired for connection. But this flies in the face of that old Hobbesian view. Thomas Hobbes, the philosopher who said life in nature was nasty, brutish, and short. Yeah, Hobbes was wrong. Modern anthropology shows that for most of human history, when we were hunter-gatherers, we were largely egalitarian. We lived in small groups where hoarding was taboo. If you were arrogant or selfish, the group would use shame, teasing, or eventually exile to keep you in check. Generosity wasn't just nice. It was a survival strategy. If you didn't share, you died. Okay, so if we are biologically wired to be homo puppy, to be friendly and cooperative, why do we have so much science telling us the exact opposite? opposite. I'm thinking of those famous psychology experiments we all learned about in college. Oh, yeah. The Stanford Prison Experiment. The Milgram Shock Experiment. These are the pillars of the humans are bad argument. And this is the section of the book where Bregman really puts on his detective hat. He calls these the zombie theories. because they've been debunked repeatedly, but they just refuse to die in the popular imagination. Okay, let's start with Stanford. The Stanford Prison Experiment by Philip Zimbardo in 1971. Right. The classic narrative. You take normal, healthy Stanford students, make some guards and some prisoners, put them in a basement, and the guards spontaneously turn sadistic. That's the story Zimbardo told. That's the movie version. But Bregman, he dug into the archives at Stanford. And it turns out it wasn't spontaneous at all. Zimbardo acted like a scientific police chief. He held orientation meetings. He coached the guards. He coached. He told them exactly how to be cruel. He told them you have to take away their individuality. You have to create fear. He gave them instructions. So they were basically actors following a script. Precisely. One of the guards, the guy who became known as John Wayne for his cruelty, later admitted he was just putting on a performance because he thought that's what the researchers wanted. He was trying to help the experiment succeed. That is wild. And interestingly, when a British team tried to replicate the experiment later, this time without the coaching, The guards didn't turn cruel. So what happened? The prisoners and guards actually sat down and formed a commune. Again with the communes, it seems like whenever you leave people alone, they just want to hang out and share food. It's almost boring how consistently nice people are when you remove the artificial pressure. It really does seem that way, doesn't it? Then you have the Milgram shock experiment. Yeah. This is the one where people supposedly electrocuted a stranger just because a man in a white coat told them to. Yeah. The takeaway has always been that humans are sheep who will blindly obey orders to do evil. I was just following orders. That's the chilling phrase. But Bregman says that's not what the tapes show. If you listen to the audio of the experiments, when the authority figure gave a direct response, order like you have no other choice, you must go on. The participants didn't obey. They didn't. No, they rebelled. They said, I do have a choice. And they stopped the experiment. Wait, so when they were ordered to be cruel, they refused? Then why did they continue pushing the button in the first place? They only continued when the prompt appealed to a greater good. When the researcher said the experiment requires that you continue, or implied that this was for important scientific knowledge, people didn't obey out of malice or blind obedience. They obeyed because they wanted to be helpful. They thought they were contributing to science. The tragedy is that their desire to be good was manipulated to do something bad. That is a massive distinction. It's not that we are evil. It's that our desire to help can be weaponized. That changes how we view history. And what about Kitty Genovese? This is the story that gave us the bystander effect. The idea that 38 people watched a woman get murdered in New York City and did nothing. Another complete myth. A fabrication by the New York Times at the time. Bregman looked at the police logs. It didn't happen on a brightly lit street. It was in a dark stairwell where few people could see. So they couldn't even see what was happening. Not clearly. And people did call the police, but the police codes were messy and calls were dropped. And most importantly, Kitty didn't die alone. A friend, Sophia Farrar, rushed out into the night, not knowing if the killer was still there, and held Kitty in her arms while she died. Wow. So the symbol of human apathy was actually a story of incredible bravery that just got erased by the media because it didn't fit the narrative. Exactly. These studies and stories were shaped by the researchers and journalists' own bias, the veneer theory bias. They went looking for the beast and the human, and when they couldn't find it, they manufactured it. So if we strip away the bad science, we are left with homo puppy. But, and this is the big question, the one I think every listener is asking right now. If we are so nice, why is the world so messed up? Yeah. Why do we have war, genocide, inequality? If we're wired for friendship, how do we explain the darker parts of history? This is the paradox of civilization. Bregman argues that the very things that make us good, our friendliness, our loyalty to our group, are also what make us capable of organized violence. We fight for our friends against the other. Okay, so how does that work structurally? It's the mismatch. We evolved for small groups. We have a social limit, you know, known as Dunbar's number of about 150 people. Structurally. Dunbar's number. Right. Hunter, Gator, a tribe, you know everyone. Shame works. Empathy works. But then we invented agriculture, cities and states. We created anonymous systems. And that anonymity, it breaks the feedback loops. Right. And it allows power to accrue. Bregman spends a lot of time on the psychology of power. He suns these studies by Datcher Keltner, known as the Cookie Monster Studies. Please explain the Cookie Monster Study. I need to hear this. It's hilarious, but also deeply disturbing. They put groups of three students in a room to work on some boring cask. They randomly assign one student to be the leader. Then they brought in a plate of four cookies. Okay. Okay. Four cookies, three people. So everyone ate one. That left one extra cookie. Who gets the fourth cookie? Almost invariably, the leader took it. And not only did they take it, they ate it sloppily. They chewed with their mouths open, dropped crumbs. Keltner found that power acts like brain damage. It shuts down our ability to mirror others. We lose empathy. We stop blushing. You stop blushing. Power makes you shameless. So power makes you shameless. Exactly. And in prehistory, shamelessness would get you exiled. But in modern hierarchies, shamelessness helps you climb. It's the survival of the shameless. We have built systems that select for the worst traits in our nature, and this connects to the nocebo effect. Right, so we know the placebo effect, positive expectations make you feel better. Nocebo is the opposite. Yes. Negative expectations produce negative results. If we design our institutions, our schools, our workplaces, our prisons, based on the idea that people are lazy, selfish, and untrustworthy, we actually create those behaviors. We need them that way. We make them that way. Yeah. If you treat employees like they're trying to slack off, they will slack off. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is the Gollum effect or negative Pygmalion effect. We are literally manufacturing the bad behavior we fear. So what's the alternative? What is the new realism look like in practice? Because it sounds nice to say trust people, but does it actually work in the real world? Bregman provides some compelling case studies where people have flipped the script. Take health care. He looks at Burtzorg, a Dutch home care organization founded by Jules de Bloch. And their philosophy is basically fire the managers. It relies on intrinsic motivation. People want to care for others. The bureaucracy was just getting in the way. He applies this to education, too, with the Agora School. Homo Ludens, playing man. This is a school with no classes, no homework, no rigid curriculum. It focuses entirely on curiosity and play. And the argument is what? That kids are natural learners. Exactly. Children are natural learning machines. We kill that drive with rigid structures. When you let them follow their curiosity, they learn deeper and faster. It's trusting the child's instinct to grow. And then the most controversial one for many people, prisons. We look at the Norwegian system, specifically prisons like Bastoy and Haldens. This is such a stark contrast to the broken windows theory of policing, which assumes you have to crack down on every minor infraction to prevent chaos. Yeah. In Norway, the prisons look like university campuses. There are no bars on the windows. The guards socialize with the inmates. They play sports with them. They eat with them. And to an outsider, especially an American, that looks like being soft on crime. It just, it feels wrong. It feels counterintuitive. But look at the data. Norway has the lowest recidivism rates in the world. When you treat inmates like humans, they behave like humans. When you treat them like animals, they behave like animals. It's the nocebo-placebo effect in action. By assuming the best, they create the best. This brings us to a concept Bregman talks about called non-complementary behavior. This sounds hard to do, but it seems to be the key to breaking cycles of violence. It is the hardest thing to do. Usually our behavior is complementary. If you're life to me, I'm nice to you. If you're mean to me, I mean back. Right. We mirror each other. Right. Non-complementary behavior is when you break that pattern. You meet hate with love. You meet aggression with calm. And the example of Nelson Mandela is so powerful here. No, absolutely. You had General Constan Viljone, the head of the South African military, preparing for war. He was ready to crush the anti-apartheid movement. His twin brother, Abraham, convinced him to talk to Mandela. And Mandela didn't meet him with anger. He didn't lecture him on his crimes. He met him with tea. He was warm. He asked about the general's family. He spoke Afrikenans. He disarmed him with kindness. He did. He trusted his enemy. And that trust prevented a civil war. He didn't lecture him on his crimes. It's based on the contact hypothesis, the idea that prejudice melts away when we actually meet the other face-to-face and work together. It's hard. It requires immense courage. But it works. So bringing this all together, we started with the Blitz where people didn't panic. We went to a desert island where kids didn't kill each other. We looked at our own biology that wires us for friendship. And we saw that our cynicism is basically a bad habit that's hurting us. It reminds me of the parable Bregman mentions at the end of the book. It's a story you might have heard, the story of the two wolves. An old man tells his grandson, there is a fight going on inside me. It is a terrible fight between two wolves. One is evil, angry, greedy, jealous. The other is good, peaceful, loving, generous. The grandson asks, which wolf will win? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. That's it. That's the takeaway. That is the essence of the new realism. Believing that people are decent isn't naive. It's actually the most realistic empirical view we have based on modern science. But it's also a choice. We have to choose to structure our world around the good wolf. Bregman talks about optrospection. Instead of looking inward, look outward Assume the best in others Treat people as if they are good and just Watch it become a self-fulfilling prophecy Cynicism is lazy It's easy to sit back and say Everyone sucks, nothing will change Hope, hope is heavy Hope requires the courage to trust people who might hurt you But the evidence shows it's the only way we've ever survived as a species Well, that is certainly something to chew on It challenges pretty much everything we'll see on the news tonight A huge thank you to Rutger Bregman for writing Humankind and to you for helping us navigate it. To our listener, try feeding the good wolf today. See what happens. It might just surprise you. Thanks for listening to this deep dive. Catch you next time.