Book Review: "Humankind: A Hopeful History" by Rutger Bregman

 I really liked this book but I felt like it was a little bit all over the place. The general theme is that humans are innately good. What's kind of weird about this book is that he says that and then he talks a lot about really garbage things that people have done (like the Stanford prison experiment or that experiment where people shock someone that they can't see even if they are screaming, and the like). The book is more like a series of essays then a cohesive nonfiction book.

So, as usual - here's a list of things that I found interesting.

- Going all the way back in history, even with a lot of training, war combatants are incredibly reluctant to shoot another human. During WWII only 15-25 percent of soldiers fired their weapons. There's also a stat somewhere that I couldn't re-find that said in WWI that the amount of soldiers killed in hand to hand combat was in the single digits. It was almost always long distance killing (mortar shells shot from across no man's land, grenades, bombs dropped by plans, etc.) We truly don't want to hurt people even when our lives depend on it. And the reason that we do fight? Not for ideas or presidents or territory, it's to protect the person standing next to us. 

- When people talk about the terror of unchecked human nature they talk about Lord of the Flies. Which, I get. The thing is the guy that wrote that book was a teacher who HATED children. And was in general a pessimistic and heavily depressed person. Also a teacher. A teacher that hates kids? Greattttt....

-Did you know that humans are the only animals that blush?

-There was a lot of talk about neanderthals and such in this book but honestly I always think that stuff is super boring so I don't have much to expound on from that part

- 99% of Denmark's Jews survived WWII. A nazi who didn't agree with what was happening (Greg Ferdinand Duckwitz) warned the Dutch government that a raid was coming in two days to collect their jews. The country hid them, helped them flee, refused to give up their neighbors, escaped routes organized, Danish police refused to cooperate. It honestly feels like a miracle in a mass of terrible things. This was a unique event in WWII. (There were some countries that gave up their "undesirables" the second the nazis walked through their borders - looking at you a couple far eastern european countries)

-There's a section on Kitty Genovese. If you've ever heard about bystander effect and Kitty's murder I suggest listening to this FANTASTIC podcast episode. I always cry at the end. 

Wow, that got long.