CHENNAI: Historian and author Rutger Bregman made waves at the World Economic Forum in Davos last year, when he called out the global elite for not acknowledging the realities of wealth inequality. In his newest book, Humankind, A Hopeful History, he explores some of the world’s most significant studies and reframes them to offer a new perspective on the last 200,000 years of human history.
“Elites get nervous when people come together. Cynicism is a legitimisation of hierarchy; it’s the tool of the powerful where they can say, “you need us, you can’t trust each other.” But if you can trust each other and work together, they get really nervous,” Bregman tells journalist Kaveree Bamzai during the recent session of Express Expressions.
Excerpts from the interview.
What has been the response to A Hopeful History?
I’m an old-fashioned social democrat. I think a civilised society should have universal healthcare that is accessible for everyone, public education paid for by the state, and universal basic income. I think all these things are investments. We have extraordinary amounts of research, which show that once you get people out of poverty, and they can go to hospital when they really need it, you get a return on that investment, you have to spend less on healthcare and corruption, etc. I think many people are looking for sources of hope. If you had told anyone ten years ago that a 16-year-old Swedish girl would kickstart this huge global climate justice movement, or that we would see the biggest protest in the history of the United States, it would have been unimaginable.
Does social media make you feel hopeful?
News and social media are the biggest addictions of our times. News is about things that go wrong, about corruption, about crises, terrorism, violence and war. If you watch a lot of news, at the end of the day, you’ve only heard about the exceptions, exactly how the world does not work. I think it’s good to plug out a little. In social media, algorithms want our attention so they can sell us as many ads as possible. They do that with outrage; they want you to be outraged all the time. News and social media often increase the distance between people; psychologists have always known that distance is the root of all evil.
What makes us not accept an idea like universal basic income that is clearly so good for us?
In my previous book about basic income, I try to give all that scientific evidence that really works. There is so much evidence, which points out that once you give people some venture capital to do something in their lives they can use that money well, to find jobs, maybe start companies. But people don’t believe in it very often because they have a darker view of human nature. I realised that I needed to dig a little deeper and talk about who we are as a species. If you look at the latest evidence we have from archaeology, sociology or anthropology, you’ll find a mixed view of who we are. People find it very hard to give up their privilege. They start thinking the world is zero-sum, where for someone to get something, someone has to lose something. I think it’s important to think about win-win, which is the idea behind social democracy. If we work together and invest in each other, we’ll all be better off.
Is the pandemic a moment in our history, that will change us fundamentally?
Maybe. Crises are shifting points for societies; they have been used by those in power throughout ages. What we’ve seen in the past ten years is that ideas, which used to be dismissed as highly unrealistic, have actually moved into the mainstream, at least from the Western perspective. That makes me hopeful. Climate change is one of the examples. If we talk about racism, how many George Floyds have there been before George Floyd; their deaths didn’t cause massive protest. The one George Floyd was the biggest protest in American history, and it had a global effect.
It also had a really big effect in the Netherlands; our Prime Minister really seemed to recognise the issue for the first time.Things like these give me hope. One of the ironic things about progress is that once progress starts to happen, it feels like the opposite. Tax evasion, for example. Ten years ago, there was no discussion about this phenomenon where rich people have their armies of lawyers and accountants, who basically try to make sure that these people have to pay as little as possible in taxes. There was no controversy. Now, it’s very different and many people think because it’s so much in the news, it’s worse than what it used to be. Yet it is actually getting better because we are angry about it. This is the paradox I address in my book; that because we are friendly, progress often starts with unfriendly people who are willing to go against the status quo, who are willing to make other people uncomfortable.
In the upcoming US elections, do you think President Donald Trump could be re-elected?
You have to recognise that the United States isn’t a proper democracy anymore, the most positive term would be to call it an elected aristocracy so people are allowed to choose their own aristocrats from dynasties. From a European perspective that is already crazy, the whole notion that if the Prime Minister has a wife, or a husband, that person would sort of succeed him or her, is ridiculous. A proper democracy is very different. The other issue is that Clinton had three million more votes than Trump in 2016; that is the big difficulty. It’s better than a dictatorship, sure. But it’s simply not true that people are in charge. If you look at how the Greeks did it two thousand years ago, that is the model— not choosing your own aristocrat but becoming a politician yourself.
Explain Don’t Punch the Nazi for our readers...
I learnt from my favourite author, Rebecca Solnit, that there’s a certain kind of activism that cares more about being on the right side of history than actually winning. I think this is often what happens with activists, who like to punch Nazis and they don’t ask themselves if this is actually effective. I think it’s counter-productive; you don’t have to be naive, you have to be realistic about the corruptive effects of power differences in this world. But in the book, I give a couple of case studies where institutions lean into the ‘other cheek’ approach with incredible success.