Rutger bergman has been working as a journalist, commentator and historian in the Swedish public service radio since 1983. He has written hundreds of documentary films and series, such as The secret state, Hitler's death camps and Crimes against humanity, which received international recognition. In 2010 he received The world history prize in Singapore. He has also written several books about Swedish political history and conducted courses and lectures at the universities in Stockholm and Uppsala, the European Institute of Florence, Waseda University in Tokyo and the German Historical Institute in Washington DC amongst others.
"Most people are deep down,polite and little better"
Historian and journalist Rutger Berbman has a wealth of arguments, research and data in his book"Human Kind, A hopeful History" to justify this idea .This book is about an idea that breaks the hearts of the rulers, an idea that is denied by idealogies and religions, that is the first priority of the media to ignore . An idea that has been erased from the pages of history and science.
The book begins with a reference to World War II. Hitler has read the famous book "The Psychology of Masses" word for word, how did his rivals Churchill, Mussolini, Roosevelt, Stalin stay behind, they also drank this book by dissolving it in water. Churchill is telling his forces and Hitler is telling his naysayers how people get stunned, frightened and chaos in a state of war, and how people go to great lengths to cut each other's throats in bad times or trouble. Are Churchill worries that Hitler and his ski war machine could ruin his cities and plunge his citizens into chaos.
But does that happen? What does history tell us? What was the response of the people at that time and what is the reaction and response of human beings in general to adversity? This book challenges the theories of Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, Jared Diamond. These are the three big names in the field of psychology, evolutionary biology and geography.
Thanks to the extensive interdisciplinary research by Rutger, it was shown that human nature is innately good and it was proposed that this self-fulfiling prophecy is due to how much the idea that humans are selfish has prevailed .I feel the right course of action is usually to mete out some punishment and rehabilitate them, but in some cases it it is a book on how to view the world differently in order to solve the problems we face today more effectively.
This assertion may be new and radically different from what people previously believed. We might assume that people are good, a cooperative force rather than a competitive one, and can be trusted instead of feared. We can be less than the best we can be politically and economically too.
Historian should be neutral and above all he must be sceptic in thinkig .
Rutgers is my favorite historian, Yuval has also given his review on this book, many people may think "too good to be true" but overall it is a well calculated book .
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