Yes, says historian Rutger Bregman: civilisation isn't a thin veneer laid over a selfish human nature, it's the other way round. He proves it through true stories, from the boys of Tonga shipwrecked in 1965 to tales we thought we knew by heart, giving us back, without naivety, a reason to hope.
What if man isn’t a wolf to man, after all?
Here, mutual aid was the compass for fifteen months — and that’s the true story Bregman went digging for.
There's an old philosophers' quarrel that concerns all of us, and not just in theory. On one side, Thomas Hobbes: man is a wolf to man, and it's on this idea that our modern economy built its foundations, betting on self-interest. On the other, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, convinced that goodness comes before cruelty. You'll have seen it coming: it's this very divide that historian Rutger Bregman reopens, with the warmth of someone who genuinely wants to give us a reason to hope.
To back up his stance, Bregman draws on the work of anthropologist Joseph Henrich. His thesis, grounded in research, gently overturns the received idea of a fundamentally selfish humanity. What if, in the end, the veneer wasn't goodness, but the distrust we've been taught to see in its place?
What really happened on the island with the six Tongan boys?
Rutger Bregman uncovered the true story of six schoolboys from Nuku’alofa, Tonga, shipwrecked on an island in 1965. For fifteen months, far from any help, these boys stuck together. They organised themselves, supported one another, and never slipped into the violence we assume is inevitable among castaways left to their own devices.
Nothing like the closed-off world imagined by Golding in his novel, where isolation drives children towards cruelty. Here, mutual aid was the compass for fifteen months, and that's the true story Bregman went digging for.
Did New Orleans really descend into chaos after Katrina?
In the aftermath of Katrina, the press described New Orleans as a city left to its own devices, reverted to a savage state. Rutger Bregman revisits this narrative and sets it against the analysis of historian Timothy Garton Ash, who wrote in the Guardian of a thin crust of civilisation. One disaster, two opposing readings of what it truly reveals about people.
Bregman draws a parallel with a reality TV show that left ordinary participants to their own devices, hoping to spark chaos on camera. Nothing happened, to the producers’ great disappointment. Same disappointed expectation, same script that refuses to play out: New Orleans, like that television set, doesn’t bear out the fragile veneer people assumed it had.
Were Milgram and Zimbardo right about ordinary cruelty?
What if Milgram and Zimbardo got the story wrong? Bregman doesn’t dismiss them out of hand: he draws on the meticulous work of Gina Perry, who reopened the actual archives of the obedience experiments. This return to the sources is enough to shake some deeply held certainties, so much so that some psychologists now refuse to teach these experiments as indisputable truths.
To broaden the picture, Bregman looks even further back into our shared history. He cites anthropologists according to whom hunter-gatherers worked barely twenty to thirty hours a week, chose their leaders for a limited time, and made decisions together. Far from the law of the strongest, this way of organising sketches out another memory of humanity, gentler and more shared than the one we’ve long been told.
New Orleans, like that reality show, ends up telling the opposite of what was expected of it: not collapse, but ordinary people standing together when everything is shaking. What Bregman invites us to take away is another possible way of seeing things: the one Rousseau opened up against Hobbes’s certainties. Nothing says one is definitively right over the other: it’s up to us to choose, every day, which one to feed. At home, at work, in your neighbourhood, it comes down to a gesture as simple as it is demanding: giving your trust first, as those six boys did on their island, as an entire city did without knowing it, one we’d been too quick to condemn.
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