Rutger Bregman: Transforming our future by relearning a hopeful history of humankind
Rutger Bregman (@rcbregman) is a historian and the author of the New York Times Bestseller Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There and Humankind: A Hopeful History.
In this podcast episode, Rutger sheds light on how our human evolution has actually been about the survival of the friendliest rather than the fittest; how power literally changes people's brains and makes them less able to empathize and see the humanity in others; why we need a perspective shift on our human nature in order to transform our future; and more.
To start, get a glimpse below into the conversation between Rutger and Green Dreamer Podcast's host, Kamea Chayne.
Musical feature: Trust The Sun by Alive in the Wilderness by Endless Field
“For the vast majority of our existence, when we were still nomadic hunter-gatherers, which we were for 95% of our history, we lived lives that were relatively relaxed, egalitarian, and peaceful. It’s only quite recently, with the rise of ‘civilization’, that we see the beginning of archaeological and anthropological evidence of wars.”
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This is a conversation on Green Dreamer with Kamea Chayne, a podcast and multimedia journal illuminating our paths towards ecological regeneration, intersectional sustainability, and true abundance and wellness for all. This preview has been edited for clarity. Subscribe to Green Dreamer Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app, and support Green Dreamer on Patreon so we can keep the show going and accessible to a wider audience!
On bullying not being a natural part of human nature:
"Bullying is really a product of quite specific institutional circumstances. Bullying happens in certain kinds of environments—sociologists call them ‘total institutions’.
A total institution is a place that has a strict hierarchy, with strict rules and procedures, where you're part of a certain group, and it's very hard to get out of that group, so you have very little freedom as an individual.
A perfect example of a total institution is a prison. And indeed, we know that a lot of bullying happens in prisons.
There are other examples as well, such as nursing homes, which is sad but true. A lot of bullying happens there because they're a little bit like prisons: You can't get away, you have all of these rules, and you're part of a strict hierarchy.
The last example I want to give of a total institution is schools. The traditional school—think about the classic British boarding school—is also set up a little like a prison. You have a competitive environment where people are divided into groups and they can't get away. We know that a lot of bullying happens there.
We can turn that around. Let's look at different kinds of schools where there's a lot more freedom. You mix all of the ages, you mix all of the academic levels of the kids, [you mix kids with different] interests and curiosities, and you give them the freedom to basically ‘go around’—what I like to call 'breathing institutions'.
What you see there is that there's almost no bullying at all. That, to me, was such a fascinating and striking finding. And also a little bit shocking, actually.
That means that bullying is almost like a political choice that we allow still to happen. We know by now how you should design a school so that bullying doesn't happen or so it almost never happens.
Why don't we do that? Why don't we immediately start changing the way our schools are designed?”
Final words of wisdom:
"Dreaming is actually all about realism. It's what I try to do in my book: to redefine what it means to be a realist.
So often, we equate realism with cynicism and pessimism. Then we say to the dreamers to ‘be a bit more realistic,’ meaning to be a bit more cynical.
I think we have to turn that around. It's actually the cynics who aren't, and it's the dreamers who are more realistic, because utopias have a tendency of coming true—if we fight for them."
