When Things Fall Apart

This message comes from Progressive Insurance and the name your price tool. It helps you find car insurance options in your budget. Try it today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states. An old man says to his grandson, there's a fight going on inside me. It's a terrible fight between two wolves. One is evil, angry, greedy, jealous, arrogant, and cowardly. The other is good, peaceful, loving, modest, generous, honest, and trustworthy. These two wolves are also fighting within you and inside every other person too. After a moment, the boy asks, which wolf will win? The old man smiles. The one you feed. What we assume in other people is what we get out of them. Our view of human nature tends to be a self fulfilling prophecy. If we assume that people are fundamentally selfish, then that's how they will behave. If we assume that people are fundamentally decent, then maybe we can create a very different kind of society. This is Rutger Bregman. I'm a Dutch historian, and I'm the author of the book Humankind, A Hopeful History. But this story doesn't start off hopeful. There's a very widespread assumption that human beings are basically selfish, brutal, barbarian. And this is author Rebecca Solnit. Cowardly, just sort of despicable, and that civilization is some sort of structural overlay that keeps us from realizing our true brutal natures, preventing us from doing what we would really do if we could do anything we wanted, which would be rape, loot, pillage, maraud, steal. And that idea that if you take away civilization that people are essentially evil has been an easy sell. Introduce a little anarchy. Upset the established order and everything becomes chaos. So many of these Hollywood movies like Batman gives us a very simplistic view of how evil really works. The story of Batman has always been about the battle of good versus evil spirit breaks completely. In the film The Dark Knight, the Joker tries to convince Batman that everyone, from the mayor to the people of Gotham, are all just out for themselves. I'll show you. When the chips are down, these, these civilized people, they'll eat each other. See, I'm not a monster. I'm just ahead of the curve. Yeah. The Joker is really interesting. He's he's the quintessential stereotypical depiction of of evil in our culture, I would say. So the Joker believes that everybody is dark, selfish, maybe even a little evil, like how we really are. And Batman is good. These two sides are a trope as old as storytelling, an idea that plays into something called the thin veneer theory. Veneer theory is a very old idea that's deeply entrenched in Western culture. It goes like this: Supposedly our civilization is just a thin layer, just a thin veneer, and below that lies raw human nature. The theory basically says that humans deep down …