Still, more powerful is the retelling of the real marooning of seven boys on an uninhabited island. His examination of Lord of the Flies, for example, points out William Golding’s deep psychological struggles and the probable impact on his writing. Only with permanent settlements and the rise of personal possessions did social hierarchies, militaries and permanent rulers start to appear - and with them, he says, violence and inequality.īregman’s attacks on the consensus around our nature are often delivered with aplomb and evidence. Instead, these communities were largely peaceable and self-regulating, using mockery to overturn those who would put on airs. The lives of our prehistoric ancestors and tribal societies, says Bergman, were not the nasty, brutish and short affairs so often imagined. The opposite is true, he says: the institutions we associate with progress, such as nation states and private property, have fundamentally allowed for corruption. Sociability is our superpower, says Bregman, who rejects the veneer theory of humanity: that beneath a thin layer of civilisation, we are little more evolved than our “savage” ancestors. The central theses of Humankind are that “most people, deep down, are pretty decent”.
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