KOCHI: Historian and author Rutger Bregman made global 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 2,00,000 years of human history. “Elites get nervous when people come together. Cynicism is a legitimisation of hierarchy,” Bregman tells journalist Kaveree Bamzai during the recent session of Expressions. Here are some excerpts from the interview:
What has been the reaction to ‘A Hopeful History’?
I’m an old fashioned social democrat, I think a civilised society should have universal healthcare, accessible for everyone, public education paid for by the state, universal basic income. I think all these things are investments. We have extraordinary amounts of research that show that once you get people out of poverty, you get a return on that investment, you have to spend less on healthcare and corruption.
Can you look at social media today and still feel hopeful?
The first thing you have to recognise is that news and social media are the biggest addictions of our times. The news is about things that go wrong, about corruption, about crises, terrorism, violence and war. 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. The news and social media often increases 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?
I try to give all that scientific evidence that really works. So much evidence that points out that once you give people something in their lives they can use that money well, to find jobs, maybe start companies. But people don’t believe in it.
Do you think the pandemic is a moment in our history which will change us fundamentally?
Maybe… Like I said, crises are shifting points for societies, they have been used by those in power throughout ages. It’s easy to imagine something like that happening again, there are also more hopeful signs. 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 changes 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 protests; it was the biggest protest in American history, 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.
Globalisation hasn’t been all that good for us. Do you think we’ll become more protective in the coming days?
The problem is that when we talk of globalisation we talk about globalisation for elites, very rich people can travel around the globe in their private jets. But most people are stuck in their own country, and there we say ‘Oh, it’s a migrant crisis. They are coming to steal our jobs.’ I think there is a powerful argument to be made here that we should have proper globalisation, not the system of global apartheid where we treat refugees like scum.