Are humans wired for conflict? Charles Darwin vs. Lord of the Flies | Rutger Bregman

In 1965, 6 boys were stranded on an island. Fifteen months later, the survivors were rescued. How many were there?

The iconic novel "Lord of the Flies" paints a picture of human beings as naturally selfish and prone to conflict, but that is not the most accurate depiction of humanity, argues historian Rutger Bregman.

Bregman shares a true story from his research about a group of Tongan students who survived on an island together for 15 months in 1965, not through brutal alliances, but by working together and forming a functional community.

Darwin's observation of domestication syndrome is apparent in humans, argues Bregman; our evolution into friendlier animals can be seen in our biological features and responses. Evolutionarily speaking, being "soft" is actually very smart, and we evolved to cooperate with one another for mutual gain.

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[heristyono]

"Survival of the friendliest"

Yup, I'm gonna die

[shrihari]

Sure we've evolved to be more friendly as we started moving away from animal instinctual behaviour towards being domesticated through nature's own way, i.e. learning. And that's a beautiful hope for the whole human society above all the(f words) fascism and fundamentalism.

[ichabod]

I looked up the tory of those boys in Tonga. As I recall, , they were not a clutch of Public school English boys who've been socialized in the UK public school system that "Lord of the Flies" was written to expose and satirize.

These kids, the Tonga kids, were from a village on another island. They all knew each other, played together, and knew each other's families, as I recall, and probably had already had experience working as team-mates with other males on fishing craft etc. back home. The Tonga boys were civilized. Tthe British boys had been brutalized for years, removed from their families from age six, and deliberately pitted against each other to toughen them up so they'd be qualified to be hard-nosed bosses of what was left of the British empire.

I don't think the comparison is useful, once you dig down into the details of the real-life incident.

[orah]

Very interesting. I suspected it was my hippie days that allowed me to trust and try to be sincere.

[m.dgaius]

Great anecdote. Now tell the story of war, murder, and melancholia.