“People are basically good …”


translated by Google:
People are basically good. That doesn't sound very credible at the moment, but the Dutch sociologist @rcbregman explains very convincingly in his book why this is - and we should all be able to do much more. Read recommendation! 1/4

In his well-told book, Bregman researches numerous famous experiments and phenomena and comes to the conclusion that the assumption that we are sinners by nature and that we would mutually flaw each other without rules is fundamentally wrong. 2/4

He deals with the well-known Stanford Prison experiment, the Milgram experiment (keyword electric shocks) and with Eichmann and the Holocaust. I am not a sociologist, but I find many of his arguments very conclusive - and have been more positive since reading it. 3/4

I also found Bregman's first book, Utopia for Realists, to be very clever (and very pleasant because it was positive). Both books are also available in German. And if you want a sample, there is an introductory story at the Guardian*


*a link – see a note on notes and links
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Thucydides: Lessons from the Plague of Athens


part 1, on Thucydides as the first journalist, is available on the CBC website*

the blurb on part 2:
The plague of Athens struck in 430 BC, violently killing up to half of the Greek city's population. Thucydides was on hand to document the grim symptoms, as well as the social and psychological fallout. His vivid account holds enduring lessons for us during pandemic times today.


*a link – see a note on notes and links

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the real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months

image: still from the movie Lord of the Flies

Rutger Bregman:
This story never happened. An English schoolmaster, William Golding, made up this story in 1951 – his novel Lord of the Flies would sell tens of millions of copies, be translated into more than 30 languages and hailed as one of the classics of the 20th century. In hindsight, the secret to the book’s success is clear. Golding had a masterful ability to portray the darkest depths of mankind. Of course, he had the zeitgeist of the 1960s on his side, when a new generation was questioning its parents about the atrocities of the second world war. Had Auschwitz been an anomaly, they wanted to know, or is there a Nazi hiding in each of us?

I first read Lord of the Flies as a teenager. I remember feeling disillusioned afterwards, but not for a second did I think to doubt Golding’s view of human nature. That didn’t happen until years later when I began delving into the author’s life. I learned what an unhappy individual he had been: an alcoholic, prone to depression; a man who beat his kids. “I have always understood the Nazis,” Golding confessed, “because I am of that sort by nature.” And it was “partly out of that sad self-knowledge” that he wrote Lord of the Flies.

I began to wonder: had anyone ever studied what real children would do if they found themselves alone on a deserted island? I wrote an article on the subject, in which I compared Lord of the Flies to modern scientific insights and concluded that, in all probability, kids would act very differently. Readers responded sceptically. All my examples concerned kids at home, at school, or at summer camp. Thus began my quest for a real-life Lord of the Flies.

source: archived*

Rutger Bregman (!?) :: William Golding (!?)


*a link – see a note on notes and links

2021-04-28 …Telegraph Obituaries, 23 April 2021:
Peter Warner, who has died in a boating accident aged 90, was an Australian sailor who made headlines around the world after rescuing six Tongan schoolboys who had been marooned on a remote Pacific island for more than a year.

The story, widely compared to that of Lord of the Flies, William Golding’s dystopian 1954 novel about a group of British boys stranded on an uninhabited island, began in 1965 when the boys …*


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The Spectator: Engels sang German folk-songs or drunkenly recited ‘The Vicar of Bray’

Engels left Manchester in 1870 and moved to Primrose Hill, London, where he held parties on most Sundays
In 1890 Friedrich Engels, co-author of The Communist Manifesto, celebrated his 70th birthday. ‘We kept it up till half past three in the morning,’ he boasted to Laura Lafargue, daughter of his old friend Karl Marx, ‘and drank, besides claret, sixteen bottles of champagne — that morning we had had 12 dozen oysters.’

This was not an isolated act of indulgence. During the 1870s his Primrose Hill home had become a popular venue for socialist excess. ‘On Sundays, Engels would throw open his house,’ recalled the communist August Bebel. ‘On those puritanical days when no merry men can bear life in London, Engels’s house was open to all, and no one left before 2 or 3 in the morning.’ Pilsner, claret, and vast bowls of Maitrank — a May wine flavoured with woodruff — were consumed while Engels sang German folk-songs or drunkenly recited ‘The Vicar of Bray’.

source: archived

note: Smithsonian* and Britannica* articles on Engels are less entertaining but more thorough

Friedrich Engels and the Cheshire Hunt (!?)


*a link – see a note on notes and links
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