Ever since it was published, «Lord of the Flies», albeit fictional, served as a cautionary tale of what humans will do to each other once the guardrails of civilization are gone. In his new book «Humankind», Dutch historian Rutger Bregman tells the real story of six boys who stranded on a small Pacific island – and behaved very differently from their fictional counterparts. It is one of several examples in the book in which Bregman clinically picks apart common assumptions about human behaviour, from history books to social experiments, to reveal that humans are often kinder than we assume. It’s a great book, at that excerpt in The Guardian is a good gateway into it.

From Weekly Filet #302, in May 2020.