We've to bring people together: Rutger Bregman on social media

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 new 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 is 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:What has been the reaction to ‘A Hopeful History’?I think many people are looking for sources of hope, and historians have long known that crises are shifting points for society and it can go in many directions. If you would have told anyone 10 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. There’s a very long way to go, but there’s hope as well.Can you look at social media and still feel hopeful?The first thing you have to recognise is that the news and social media are the biggest addictions of our times. 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. It’s quite hard to hate someone who is standing right in front of you, a human being you can look in the eye. It’s much easier to hate someone who’s behind an anonymous account, we have to try and find ways to bring people together for face-to-face contact.What makes us not accept an idea like universal basic income that is clearly so good for us?My previous book was about basic income. Much evidence points out that once you give people some venture capital to do something in their lives, they can use that money to find jobs, maybe start companies. But people don’t believe in it very often because they have a darker view of human nature.We are also the friendliest of species. We are able to co-operate at a skill that no other animal has – survival of the friendliest. But we also know that friendliness can turn into followership, or groupishness where you actually start doing nasty things in the name of loyalty, that is at the heart of so many atrocities in human history.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.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. 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. Climate changes is one example.If we talk about racism, there have been so many George Floyds before George Floyd, their deaths didn’t cause massive protest. But this was the biggest protest in American history. 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.An ironic thing 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, that it’s worse than what it used to be, but it is actually getting better, because we are angry about it. I have addressed this paradox in my book.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 the very rich who 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 real globalisation, not the system of global apartheid where we treat refugees like scum.Explain Don’t Punch the Nazi for our readers...There’s a certain kind of activism - this is something I learnt from my favourite author, Rebecca Solnit - she taught me 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.