The inherited goodness in humankind.

adrianabariego

18 sept 20237 Min. de lectura

I have been thinking about this topic: “the human kindness” for a long time now. Somehow, we are inclined to think the worst of us, as human beings. For me everything started when I found out about the existence of a travel journalist called Eva Zubeck [1], she is one of my biggest inspirations up to this day. In her travels to what she calls “raw” destinations, places such as Pakistan, Afghanistan, Irak, Yemen, Mongolia, Chad and many other places with cultures that are very different from her polish-european origin; she shows the kindness of the people she encounters in every situation. In one of her trips she travels through the south of Saudi Arabia and she arrives to a remote oasis where she runs into some local people who invite her for a cup of coffee from out of the blue. During her panamerican highway trip she receives the offer of an unknown family for her to stay at their house in her last stop before entering USA from Mexico. After COVID she accepts a stranger’s invitation to stay at a rural Romanian house to learn about their culture. This are just some examples of kindness that she has experienced during her three years of full time travelling.

There is this persistent myth that by their very nature humans are selfish, aggressive and quick to panic.

The truth is that, as humans, we are complex creatures, we have a good side and a not-so-good side. The question is “which of both sides will you look at?”, this is the same when we ask “what is true?”. The answer is that things have the potential to become true if we believe in them. You may be familiar with the placebo effect, but did you hear about the nocebo effect? Placebo effect has been extensively studied from very distinct perspectives, but the thing about testing the nocebo effect is the ethical dilemma it creates. Evidence, however, suggests it to be a very powerful tool, see for example the “Coca-Cola incident” [2] during the summer of 1999. Hundreds of children across Belgium got sick after learning about nine children from a small town that got very sick from drinking a Cola-Cola. The lesson to learn?

Ideas are never merely ideas.

Our dreadful view of humanity is a nocebo. If we believe that people cannot be trusted, that is exactly how we will treat each other. You will get what you expect to get.

There is this belief that civilisation is nothing more than a thin veneer that will crack at the thinnest provocation, this is known as veneer theory, coined by the primatologist Frans de Waals. However, this is not something that happens, in real life it is when crisis hits that we humans become our best. In August of 2005, Hurricane Katrina tore New Orleans, the city was completely devastated. A week after the incident the newspapers were filled with news about rapes, shootings, murders, infants throats being slit all over New Orleans… The chief of police confirmed that the city was slipping into anarchy. What everyone thought?

“Disasters like this take out the worst of the people”.

Months later, when the city recovered its serenity and started the fixing process after the floods, the truth was uncovered about the New Orleans disaster. There had been no rapes, no murders and the only deaths that happened (4) were due to natural causes (2), overdose (1) or suicide (1). During the disaster people had grouped together as a team to survive. Some other people had come from far away distances in boats, hundred of civilians had formed rescue squads to save people from the rising waters. In short, the city was inundated with courage and charity.

Why do we take such a negative view on humanity? Our instinct is to trust in our closer communities, but why do we change the attitude when we apply it to people as a whole? Well, we have been trained to see selfishness everywhere, when we see someone doing a good action we immediately transform it into an act of self-interest. The “bad vs good nature of humans” is a topic that has been debated for very long time, it perhaps started with Thomas Hobbes defending the wicked human nature he saw in himself and Jean-Jacques Rosseau declaring that in our hearts we are all good. Nonetheless, we surround ourselves with communication media that hold on to situations that cause us impression. Books, the news… all are just tools to cause an impact.

The news… the biggest addition of our society. We are raised to believe that in order to be good citizens we must engage actively in being updated with every single thing that the news have to tell us. This so-called-good-citizen-responsibility has negative effects on us, we can feel anxious, develop hostility towards others, feel helpless and it also lowers our mood levels.

In reality, the intention of the news is to report on recent incidental and sensational events. There are two main reasons that make news so pessimistic. First, our very own nature calls for us to accept “bad things happening” in our surroundings, all this as a survival instinct. In other times, fearing too much would not kill us, but fearing too little could. Second, if we can easily recall examples of a given thing we assume that it is very common. We frequently see terrible reports about people being assaulted, kidnapped, willingly hurt or even killed; this completely alters our view of the world. Nowadays, in the internet era, our data are exposed to the world and the news that reach us through social platforms, the television and so on, are shaped to cause us sensation.

The same thing can happen with books, some bestsellers are based on catastrophes or the adversity in nature. Some biologists, such as Richard Dawkins, believe that when animals do something kind they do it in their very own selfish way. This leads to the publication of books such as “The selfish gene”.

There is also the context that hides behind the stories that impress us the most. Do you want an example? The book of the “Lord of the Flies” written by William Golding; in which the author abandons a group of children in an island and creates conflicts among them, letting them become savage. At that time and even nowadays few doubt the grim view that Golding gave about human nature. Of course, our opinion on the book changes when learn about the unhappy and alcoholic life of the author, prone to depression. No one, though, talks about the real-life “Lord of the Flies” that happened in Polynesia in 1965 [3] and shared no similarity what-so-ever with the book. What does really happen if you leave a group of six kids stranded in a deserted island? According to the words of Captain Warner, who was responsible for finding the kids 15 months after the strand: “By the time we arrived, the kids had set up a small commune with a food garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to store rainwater, a gymnasium with curious weights, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire, all from handiwork, an old knife blade and much determination.” Stories can be nocebos.

Different psychological studies have been performed in the last decades with the only intention of showing that our very own nature is wicked. Studies in which children were confronted, which were considered non-biased subjects of study, to show that there is an innate selfishness in our veins [4]. Studies in which people were supposed to behave as prisoners and wardens, to then simulate a prison, but then wardens were asked to treat prisoners in the worst way possible [5]. Studies in which the human subjects had to “electrocute” an innocent person following orders to contribute to a “good scientific cause” [6]. All of these studies proved the opposite of what they were intended for, they showed generous kids, gentle wardens and concerned citizens. But the scientists were biased and could/would not understand the results. Some of the experiments were so biased from the beginning that the result could only not be true to our nature.

Nowadays, we find Darwin’s Evolution Theory to be a part of the cultural knowledge of the 20th-21st century. One of the main statements of this theory is that a slight modification of the genetics of an individual of a species can become a trait that helps them survive through a certain situation with less difficulties. This was used in the Silver Fox experiment, a project pursued by team of Russian geneticists in 1959 [7]. The Silver Fox experiment had the objective of selecting silver foxes, ferocious animals that had never been domesticated, for a specific quality: friendliness.

Within a few generations, the foxes were tail-wagging and begging for attention. The more amiable foxes produced fewer stress hormones and more serotonine and oxytocin, happy and love hormones. The idea behind the discoveries is that the same could be applied to humans. There is this general belief that humans were selected for their intelligence, that being smart was the quality that had helped us survive in an easier

What if I told you that Neanderthals had a greater brain capacity and still did not survive?

In the end it is us, the Homo Sapiens sapiens, who are here. We survived. Why?

Human beings have turned out to be ultra-social learning machines. Homo neanderthalensis may have been smarter, but Homo Sapiens were quick to learn and had great social abilities that contributed to the effective collaboration in groups. There is more, Homo Sapiens had a unique distinctive that differentiated them from other species: they were an open book. Things such as the eyebrows that show emotions, the white of the eyes that shows the direction of the object of our attention, our ability to blush.. all this revealed more about our inner thoughts and emotions. In the Silver Fox experiment, Dmitri Belyaev wanted to prove that for tens of thousands of years, the nicest humans, and not the smartest, had the most kids.