In World War II, German planes dropped 80,000 bombs on London alone. Forty thousand people in the UK killed -- a million buildings damaged or destroyed. Germany’s war planners were sure this would break the British will to resist – that there would be general social collapse. The British famously kept calm and carried on.
As the tide of war turned, the Allies, refusing to learn from the British experience planned a similar civilian bombing campaign against Germany. Terrible idea. Crisis brings out not the worst in people but the best. Analyses after the war indicated that Allied bombing
“strengthened the German wartime economy, thereby prolonging the war. Between 1940 and 1944, they found that German tank production had multiplied by a factor of nine, and of fighter jets by a factor of fourteen." (Bregman, p. xvii)The bombs boosted solidarity and thereby efficiency.
Humans are made to pull together and help each other out. The movie, Titanic, shows people blinded by panic – except for the string quartet. “In fact, the evacuation was quite orderly” (Bregman).
“Or take the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. As the Twin Towers burned, thousands of people descended the stairs calmly, even though they knew their lives were in danger. They stepped aside for firefighters and the injured.” (Bregman)Most people, most of the time, are basically decent. Maybe the worst thing about us is what a hard time we have believing that.
One factor is this: The way we got to be such a cooperative species was by carefully monitoring noncooperation when it pops up. Cooperative, pro-social behavior doesn’t grab our attention much. Our brains are wired to focus on anti-social behavior – so that we can bring social forces to bear to bring the offender back in line.
It’s like our attraction to sugar, which was functional when sugar was scarce and we needed a preference for the riper fruit. Now that we can mass produce sugar, our sweet toothes are killing us. Focus on anti-social behavior was a brilliant adaptation when it was a rare thing to see it. But now that we have mass media inundating us with stories of people doing bad things – which the media does because people doing normal, ordinary, everyday good things isn’t very interesting. It doesn't sell newspapers or attract eyeballs or grab the attention of brains wired to attend to misbehavior.
Functional, normally cooperative people are boring to watch – which is rule number one of any producer of a reality TV show. Hence my prayer and blessing for you all is: may your life be one that would make for the worst reality TV show ever.
We got to be highly cooperative, hyper-social animals by paying attention to rare uncooperative actions. But then we developed media that overloads us with stories that we’re wired to pay attention to. Thus, we end up with the misimpression that people are usually only out for their own narrow self-interests – that people are no darn good.
As Rutger Bregman says:
“Even after the researchers presented their subjects with hard data about strangers returning lost wallets, or the fact that the vast majority of the population doesn’t cheat or steal, most subjects did not view humanity in a more positive light.” (11)In particular, Bregman notes,
“Catastrophes bring out the best in people. I know of no other sociological finding that’s backed by so much solid evidence that’s so blithely ignored. The picture we’re fed by the media is consistently the opposite of what happens when disaster strikes.”That’s one factor in why William Golding’s novel seemed to so many to be realistic.
A second factor is this. Power tends to corrupt. Lord Acton was right about that one. It starts in little ways, mild yet telling.
In one study, subjects were put in teams of three and given a task to do together. The researchers would randomly pick one of the three and say, “you be the leader.” As the team of three went about their task, the researchers brought them a snack – a plate of 5 cookies. Five cookies for 3 people. One of the cookies would be left on the plate, as etiquette prohibits taking the last one. That leaves 4 cookies for 3 people. They all get one – and then one of them takes a second. What the study found is that it was almost always the person randomly selected the designated leader who took that second cookie.
In another study, subjects were assigned a car and told to drive it around the block. Some subjects were randomly assigned a beat-up Mitsubishi or Ford Pinto – while others were assigned to drive a high-end late-model BMW or Mercedes. As they approached a crosswalk, a pedestrian would step off the curb. All the drivers of the clunker cars stopped and let the pedestrian go by. The drivers of the fancy cars, however, 45 percent of the time failed to stop for the pedestrian.
Psychologist Dacher Keltner calls it Acquired Sociopathy. Even a tiny bit of power, and we feel like taking that extra cookie. Why are we like that? At heart, we’re such team players that we adapt to the role we find ourselves in – even adopting some traits unconsciously. If you’re assigned the role of an Important Person, you’ll act like an Important Person -- and Important People don’t have time to wait for pedestrians. We are not such a bad species – but we are funny.
People often rise to power by being very friendly, attentive, warm, caring, and helpful. Then they get into power, and it’s like brain damage.
"It transpires that people in power display the same tendencies. They literally act like someone with brain damage. Not only are they more impulsive, self-centered, reckless, arrogant and rude, they are more likely to cheat on their spouses, are less attentive to other people and less interested in others’ perspectives. They’re also more shameless, often failing to manifest that one facial phenomenon that makes human beings unique among primates. They don’t blush.” (Bregman, p. 227)Neurological brain scans find that
“a sense of power disrupts what is known as mirroring, a mental process which plays a key role in empathy. Ordinarily, we mirror all the time. Someone else laughs, you laugh, too; someone yawns, so do you. But powerful individuals mirror much less. It is almost as if they no longer feel connected to their fellow human beings. As if they’ve come unplugged.” (Bregman, p. 227)If we are conscious of this tendency, we can counteract it. Many of us have had experience with that boss who was the exception to this tendency – who remained thoughtful and considerate of others even after ascending to power. So it can be counteracted.
When it isn’t counteracted, those suffering from acquired sociopathy assume that others are as self-centered and uncooperative as they have become. Having come unplugged, they forget how cooperative and decent most people are.
“The dynamic during disasters is almost always the same: adversity strikes and there’s a wave of spontaneous cooperation in response – then the authorities panic and unleash a second disaster.” (Bregman, p. 6)Emergency responders don’t respond, believing there’s too much chaos to go in – or armed authorities open fire on peaceful people. Rebecca Solnit wrote about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. She wrote: “My own impression is that elite panic comes from powerful people who see all humanity in their own image" (A Paradise Built in Hell, 2009, p. 131.) Bregman adds:
“Dictators and despots, governors and generals – they all too often resort to brute force to prevent scenarios that exist only in their own heads, on the assumption that the average Joe is ruled by self-interest, just like them.” (p. 7)People in power tend to purvey the idea that The Lord of the Flies is realistic. Between our sweet tooth for bad news and the projected acquired sociopathy of the powerful, we’re apt to be convinced we’re a terrible species. As filmmaker Richard Curtis observed:
“If you make a film about a man kidnapping a woman and chaining her to a radiator for five years – something that has happened probably once in history – it’s called searingly realistic analysis of society. If I make a film like Love Actually, which is about people falling in love, and there are about a million people falling in love in Britain today, it’s called a sentimental presentation of an unrealistic world.”So I will leave you, then, with Hugh Grant’s voiceover words at the opening of Curtis’ film, Love Actually:
“Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion's starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don't see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often it's not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it's always there – fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends. When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge – they were all messages of love. If you look for it, I've got a sneaky feeling you'll find that love actually is all around.”Not such a bad species.
Amen.
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