Humankind: A Hopeful History By Rutger Bregman

[Anonymous No.20009888]

Did this book did a good job on showing that Humans are decent?(and also that Hobbes and Machiavelli Got everything wrong?Mutual aid from Kropoktin did the same in the last century).Links to read.
https://elearning.southwesternuniversity.edu.ng/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Humankind-A-Hopeful-History-by-Rutger-Bregman-z-lib.org_.epub.pdf
https://www.complementarycurrency.org/ccLibrary/Mutual_Aid-A_Factor_of_Evolution-Peter_Kropotkin.pdf

[Anonymous No.20009897]

>>20009888
>Early life
>Dutch
That's even worse than what I expected.

[Anonymous No.20009927]

Refuted by Chinggis Khaan in his landmark survey of geopolitics and sociology, The Mongol Empire

[Anonymous No.20010871]

>>20009897
The dutch are scum.

[Anonymous No.20010902]

>>20009897
>>20010871
What's wrong with the dutch? They're pretty inoffensive, now at least

[Anonymous No.20010906]

Your second link has more in common with Hobbes than you know.

[Anonymous No.20010974]

>>20009888
It is the age of mendacity: moral goodness is being pro-
claimed.

humans are evil - they are the most
terrible predators, in terms of deception and cruelty.

that humans are still evil is a reason for
hope. For good humans are caricatures who arouse disgust: they
are always a harbinger of the end.

[Anonymous No.20011043]

>>20009888
>Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-hour Workweek

[Anonymous No.20011120]

>>20009888
Kropotkin couldn't fight his way out of a paper bag.

[Anonymous No.20011125]

>>20011043
yeah that's a huge red flag.

[Anonymous No.20011251]

>>20010906
I am just saying that there are flaws in Hobbes nad Machiavelli Thought imo.
By the way if you believe Machiavelli did not write The prince in a context to mock the Medici,he also supported republicanism i think.
>>20011120
Thomas paine was badass

[Anonymous No.20011273]

By the way folks,do you believe that LSA marshall story?so here´s the theory
>Humans are not inherently violent compared to chimps,because bonobos are our related ancestors and also because self domestication,homo puppy
>That´s why all casualties are famine and disease
>That´s why there is no such thing as PTSD from helping people
>George Orwell talked about the fact that the enemy need to be seen as other,"evil"fighting for a reason otherwise if you look close,he is just like you.
>Nazis could not stand shooting stabbing etc,that´s why they invented gas chamber to create distance between enemies and victims
I know it´s very utopian,but i just can´t help but think it´s right really,why the leaders in wwii did not fight along with their soldiers?Like Napoleon did?My gut feeling is that LSA marshall is right really.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.L.A._Marshall

[Anonymous No.20011302]

This book is a solid 8/10 imo,he talked alot of true things
>News only shows the exceptional,if it showed what really happened every single day,it would lost viewers,ever since men walked on planet,life is mundane,boring and predictable.
>Lord of the rings in real life was cooperation,just like when tragedies happen 9/11,blitz,(Junger talked about this in tribe),
>Psychology is a flawed and should be looked in skepticism,(Milgram,stanford,Robbers cave,Kitty all exaggerated.)
>If the world got more understanding,compassion and sympathy the world would be better,(if the allies from wwi treated the entente better for example.
>Without manipulation,nothing really happens.
(reality shows for example.)

[Anonymous No.20011349]

>>20009888
The only thing I've read about "human nature" that felt really convincing was The Elephant in the Brain. It actually presents a working model for why we cooperate in apparently unselfish ways and why we so often don't.
Bregman seems to largely operate on the level of anecdotes. That makes me wary. Thanks to selection bias you could write a whole book without a single (intentional) lie, arguing for a conclusion that's false. I don't think that sort of book is bad to write, per se, but it's inherently more convincing than it should be.

[Anonymous No.20011435]

>>20011349
Thanks for this, anon. It looks like this will fit perfectly into the themes I am reading at the moment.

[Anonymous No.20011436]

>>20011349
Very good book
>human nature
Human nature exists,we´re the same as hunter gatherer,99% of our existence was spent in that existence,i am not saying that nothing changed,i am just saying that human nature is real.

[Anonymous No.20011534]

>>20011273
The LSA Marshall study has been deboonked I believe

[Anonymous No.20011640]

>>20011534
From the book humankind
>Though Marshall enjoyed a distinguished reputation during his lifetime,
in the 1980s the doubts began to surface. ‘Pivotal S. L. A. Marshall Book
on Warfare Assailed as False,’ declared the front page of the New York
Times on 19 February 1989. The magazine American Heritage went so far
as to call it a hoax, alleging that Marshall had ‘made the whole thing up’
and never conducted any group interviews at all. ‘That guy perverted
history’ a former officer scoffed. ‘He didn’t understand human nature.’17
Marshall was unable to defend himself, having died twelve years earlier.
Other historians then dived into the fray – and into the archives – and found
indications that Marshall had indeed twisted the facts at times. But the
group interviews had been real enough, and he certainly asked soldiers if
they’d fired their M1s.18
After days of reading Marshall, his detractors and his defenders, I no
longer knew what to think. Was I just a little too eager for the colonel to be
right? Or was he really onto something? The deeper I delved into the
controversy, the more Marshall struck me as an intuitive thinker – not a
stellar statistician, granted, but definitely a perceptive observer.
The big question was: is there any further evidence to back him up?
Short answer? Yes.
Long answer? Over the last decades, proof that Colonel Marshall was
right has been piling up.
First of all, colleagues on the front observed the same thing as Marshall.
Lieutenant Colonel Lionel Wigram complained during the 1943 campaign
in Sicily that he could rely on no more than a quarter of his troops.19 Or
take General Bernard Montgomery, who in a letter home wrote, ‘The
trouble with our British boys is that they are not killers by nature.’20
When historians later began interviewing veterans of the Second World
War, they found that more than half had never killed anybody, and most
casualties were the work of a small minority of soldiers.21 In the US Air
Force, less than 1 per cent of fighter pilots were responsible for almost 40
per cent of the planes brought down.22 Most pilots, one historian noted,
‘never shot anyone down or even tried to’.

[Anonymous No.20011652]

Cont
>Prompted by these findings, scholars began revisiting assumptions about
other wars as well. Such as the 1863 Battle of Gettysburg at the height of
the American Civil War. Inspection of the 27,574 muskets recovered
afterwards from the battlefield revealed that a staggering 90 per cent were
still loaded.24 This made no sense at all. On average, a rifleman spent 95
per cent of the time loading his gun and 5 per cent firing it. Since priming a
musket for use required a whole series of steps (tear open the cartridge with
your teeth, pour gunpowder down the barrel, insert the ball, ram it in, put
the percussion cap in place, cock back the hammer and pull the trigger), it
was strange, to say the least, that so many guns were still fully loaded.
But it gets even stranger. Some twelve thousand muskets were double-
loaded, and half of those more than triple. One rifle even had twenty-three
balls in the barrel – which is absurd. These soldiers had been thoroughly
drilled by their officers. Muskets, they all knew, were designed to discharge
one ball at a time.
So what were they doing? Only much later did historians figure it out:
loading a gun is the perfect excuse not to shoot it. And if it happened to be
loaded already, well, you just loaded it again. And again.25
Similar findings were made in the French army. In a detailed survey
conducted among his officers in the 1860s, French colonel Ardant du Picq
discovered that soldiers are not all that into fighting. When they did fire
their weapons, they often aimed too high. That could go on for hours: two
armies emptying their rifles over each other’s heads, while everyone
scrambled for an excuse to do something else – anything else – in the
meantime (replenish ammo, load your weapon, seek cover, whatever).
‘The obvious conclusion,’ writes military expert Dave Grossman, ‘is that
most soldiers were not trying to kill the enemy.’26
Reading this, I suddenly recalled a passage about the very same
phenomenon by one of my favourite authors. ‘In this war everyone always
did miss everyone else, when it was humanly possible,’ wrote George
Orwell in his Spanish Civil War classic, Homage to Catalonia.27 This is not
to imply there were no casualties, of course; but according to Orwell, most
soldiers who wound up in the infirmary had injured themselves. By
accident.
In recent years, a steady stream of experts has rallied behind Colonel
Marshall’s conclusions. Among them is sociologist Randall Collins, who
analysed hundreds of photographs of soldiers in combat and, echoing
Marshall’s estimates, calculates that only about 13 to 18 per cent fired their
guns
There is the bibliography and sources that he got in the end of book,it´s represented by numbers at the top of the words ex>25,23 etc.

[Anonymous No.20011661]

It´s far from debunked
>Some veterans and historians have cast doubt on Marshall's research methods, challenging the data collection methods used to support his ratio-of-fire theory.[18] These were initiated seven years after Marshall's death in 1977 by Harold Leinbaugh, a former WWII infantry veteran who viewed the concept as a slur on the fighting ability of American soldiers.[19] In fact, the suggestion many soldiers did not fire in combat was verified by separate studies conducted at the same time in the British and Soviet armies. It was so widespread Russian officers suggested inspecting rifles after combat, and court-martialling those found with clean barrels.[11]

Despite questions over methodology, percentages and the need to adjust for context, the basic principle is accepted and much of the continuing debate surrounds reasons for 'non-firing', attributed by Marshall to social conditioning. This was partially supported by historians like Omer Bartov, who suggests deliberate brutalisation as one reason for the Wehrmacht's higher combat performance compared to other armies. Social norms against killing were weakened by a combination of the long-standing German military doctrine of wide scale reprisals against civilians and Nazi propaganda describing opponents as "sub-human". However, Bartov identified other elements in overcoming this reluctance, the strongest being loyalty to the group; paradoxically, the enormous casualties suffered by the Wehrmacht led to an increased focus on sections of 4–6 'comrades', which were far better at maintaining morale and fighting ability.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.L.A._Marshall

[Anonymous No.20011838]

I saw a cute girl in the metro today and she was reading this

[Anonymous No.20011852]

>>20011251
Regarding Machiavelli, a person who prefers republicanism can still prefer a strong monarchy. His preference for republicanism was practical, he thought it built stronger institutions. It was not based on our modern conceptions of people having rights to take part in their government

[Anonymous No.20011854]

>>20009897
The Dutch are based. 3 of the best people I know are Dutch.
>>20009888
Sounds gay, >>20011043 also about what I expected.

[Anonymous No.20012010]

>>20011852
I was just being skeptical of Machiavelli being,you know "teacher of evil" by Strauss,life is not black and white no matter what people says.
There are lot of interpretations of The Prince,you can´t take by it face value,you need to know he was tortured,he also has other books for example on Livy,so it´s not that simple,still i believe somehow it´s a satire AND political philosophy,it´s my opinion.

[Anonymous No.20012091]

When did the word change from mankind to humankind. I've noticed it's everywhere. It sounds retarded. Just say humanity.

[Anonymous No.20012797]

>>20012091
I gotta assume he did it here because he says that humans are kind.

[Anonymous No.20012912]

I am loving the Dutch posting lately. Makes /lit/ feel a little bit more like home, like a little colony.

[Anonymous No.20013684]

>>20012091
Just say, Most People Aren't So Bad

[Anonymous No.20014133]

>>20009888
You are not "a human". You are a man. And the title is "Human kind", not "Humankind". "Humankind" is incorrect.

[Anonymous No.20014323]

>>20014133
It's a pun you autist