Survival of the Friendliest: Lady Carnarvon talks to Rutger Bregman about the "real" Lord of the Flies and the power of kindness

I welcome Dutch historian Rutger Bregman to the podcast after first messaging him on Instagram and we talk about what I took from his book Humankind and my own wish to bring people together to remember friendship and kindness. 

Rutger reflects on Dutch directness and equality shaped by living with water, from the 1953 flood to the Delta Works, and shares why he writes for a general audience about big questions of human nature. 

We discuss his challenge to the “veneer theory” and his belief in “survival of the friendlies,” alongside a real shipwreck story near Tonga where six boys survived 15 months through cooperation. Our conversation turns to bullying, family and attachment, the Second World War and Rutger’s research for Moral Ambition on how resistance spreads simply by asking others to help.

01:10 Dutch Culture and Directness

04:01 Water Engineering and Delta Works

05:41 Early Civilizations and Conflict

06:58 Why Bregman Writes Big History

08:12 Debunking Human Nature Myths

10:07 Cooperation at Highclere Today

12:49 Tempest and Amoral People

13:55 Real Lord of the Flies Story

19:00 Bullying Attachment and Family

21:41 Victorian Fathers Revisited

22:40 Reform Politics And Women

23:28 Why Study War

24:04 Resistance Myth Debunked

25:24 Heroes Are Asked

27:29 Unconventional Organizers

30:25 Kindness After Loss

32:19 Kindness Is Contagious

35:03 Lessons From Animals

36:18 Veneer Theory And Dickens

37:59 British Indirectness

You can hear more episodes of Lady Carnarvon's Official Podcasts at https://www.ladycarnarvon.com/podcast/

New episodes are published on the first day of every month. 

Transcript

Lady Carnarvon’s Podcast: In Conversation with Rutger Bregman

Lady Carnarvon: Welcome to my podcast! I'm delighted to say that I'm sitting with a wonderful Dutch historian and intellectual, Rutger Bregman, whom I actually contacted through the guise of Instagram, and he replied. So thank you, Rutger, and thank you so much for joining me here today.

Rutger Bregman: Thank you so much for having me. It's really an extraordinary pleasure to be here.

The Bonds of Friendship and Shared History

Lady Carnarvon: It all began for me when I was gathering people together for a weekend to remember. I had been introduced to your books by my number-five sister, whose husband is actually Dutch. She had very much enjoyed your book, and I thought I would as well. So, I picked up Humankind, and I was really interested in the concept of kindness and having something positive to look forward to.

What I was doing in September of last year was gathering people to remember the bonds of friendship and what we share, rather than what we fight about. Thus, I reached out to you at far too short notice, but I'm very glad we've struck up a friendship, I hope. And I hope you'll come back again another time.

Rutger Bregman: I would love to. Anytime.

Lady Carnarvon: So Rutger, I know you are from the Netherlands. I've just been on a cruise which started there. Curiously enough, just walking through the polders and the dikes, understanding the engineering, and seeing how you've created your land as a nation gave me such great insight into what I've read. It really highlighted the ethos behind living in the Netherlands, where there is very much a sense of communality.

Rutger Bregman: My wife and I just lived for a year in New York, and it's kind of funny how you understand your own country better after being abroad for a while. You suddenly start to see, "Oh yeah, we are peculiar, we're strange, we're different from others."

I think we're mostly known for our directness. Our honesty—some would say our rudeness—is something I have to get used to again and again when I talk to foreigners. In America, it happened all the time. For example, someone says, "Hey, we should really have lunch sometime." In my dictionary, that means we really should have lunch sometime, so I'm already about to grab my agenda! But in other cultures, the words do not always necessarily mean what they mean in a dictionary.

That directness of saying what you think might go back to a culture of equality. Some historians say that because the Dutch have always had to fight against the water—"God created the Earth, but we, the Dutch, created the Netherlands," as we like to say—when the dikes break, everyone is equal. We just have to work together or else we're all going to drown. I'm not saying we have the definitive theory here, but I'm very proud to be Dutch.

Lady Carnarvon: I'm not surprised. Walking through the polders made me understand that every Dutchman practically has to be an engineer. You have to problem-solve and understand the intricate relationship with the land to make it work. My brother-in-law is Dutch and he is an engineer, so I completely understand why!

I also loved the practicality of the windmills. The only thing you have to survive in Amsterdam is the bicycles! I found the cyclists were coming out of left, right, up, and down. It was quite confusing.

Rutger Bregman: Shortly after I finished Humankind, I spent some time learning more about my own country's history because more people were getting worried about global warming. I thought every nation needs its own story so that they can find a way to tackle this huge global challenge. For the Dutch, it obviously had to be a story about water.

I dug into the history of a terrible event that happened in 1953: a huge flood that actually also hit England. Lots of people drowned. After that, there was a huge wake-up call, and we built the Delta Works, which are still seen as one of the seven wonders of modern engineering. These huge structures protect the whole country against the sea. It's basically a country that, in many ways, should not be able to exist, but somehow we've made it work.

"The Veneer Theory" vs. Human Kindness

Lady Carnarvon: Here at Highclere, we are more landlocked. I read Humankind with interest because you can see the remains of the Bronze Age tumuli and the Iron Age forts here, marking the transition from early hunting inhabitants towards later farming settlements. When you see an Iron Age fort on the top of a hill, you know they only built it to protect themselves from those around them. So, we've clearly been fighting for much of humankind's existence.

Your book is provocative, and my favorite topic is the transition to Neolithic settlements and how ancient languages reflect the fields we cultivate. Have you spent a lot of time looking back at our earliest history?

Rutger Bregman: As a historian, I've never really been able to specialize; I am just interested in everything. When I was around 22, I initially planned to do a PhD and follow a traditional academic career. I thought maybe when I was 50 or 60, I'd finally write the books I wanted to write about the great questions of human history: Why are we here? Where do we come from? Why did Europeans conquer the globe? Why is Highclere not inhabited by bonobos?

It turns out I didn't want to wait. So at 23, I jumped into it and started writing books for a general audience. Humankind has been my biggest book so far. It challenges a really old theory in Western culture that comes back again and again in our plays and films: "Veneer Theory." It claims that human civilization is just a thin layer, and below the etiquette and fancy dresses lies raw human nature—that we are fundamentally selfish and driven by competition and aggression. In the UK, the most famous example is Lord of the Flies.

Lady Carnarvon: I didn't like watching that, I'm afraid. It's not my favorite story, and I don't necessarily accept it either.

Rutger Bregman: It's a pretty depressing story. What I try to do in Humankind is debunk it, and that takes me about 500 pages because it's such a pernicious theory and we've really been brainwashed to believe it. It comes back in Netflix series, whether it's zombies, Game of Thrones, or Succession. I think humans are the product of something evolutionary anthropologists call "survival of the friendliest." Our secret to success is our ability to cooperate on a scale that no other animal can.

Lady Carnarvon: I completely understood your theory of cooperation, and I think it is at the heart of what we do here. We recently had 30 different ambassadors here, hanging all the flags around the castle, to bring people together to remember what it is to be a friend and to say hello. So, I share your hope.

However, I find some of it challenging. I think there's more than a thin veneer of kindness, but that the theory of our selfishness has been misused and abused to control people. Whether blamed on religion or early leaders, it’s a way of putting in a pyramidal structure of control. That is why I enjoyed the Netherlands—you can't have pyramidal control when you have to cooperate just to keep the water out.

At Highclere, I’m always interested in teamwork and working together. I've created the "Friends of Highclere" because it is about being together and looking back at the things we’ve achieved collectively, rather than judging ourselves by the things we've acquired.

In one of my favorite plays, Shakespeare's The Tempest, everyone is shipwrecked and has to learn to be together. There are good and bad people, but at the end, they're returned to the world holding hands in a circle. However, Antonio, the usurper who cast his brother out, stands outside. He is amoral. I'm never quite sure how you deal with amoral people in your terms.

The Real Lord of the Flies

Rutger Bregman: Let me tell you another story of a shipwreck. I've always believed that we become the stories we tell ourselves. Lord of the Flies is a depressing story that tends to bring out the nastiness in people. Many reached out to me saying that boarding school felt like a traumatic Lord of the Flies experience, asking if bullying is just natural kids' behavior. It's not. We have so much evidence from sociology and psychology that bullying is actually quite an unnatural thing. It mostly happens in "total institutions" like prisons or highly regimented boarding schools where kids can't get out.

For Humankind, I wondered: has there ever been a real case of kids shipwrecked on an island? In 2015, I started Googling. I eventually stumbled upon an obscure blog stating that six kids had shipwrecked near Tonga in 1977. I searched old archives in Australia, the UK, and the US, but couldn't find anything. Then I made a little typo and checked newspapers around 1966 instead. Boom. Suddenly, I saw that it had happened on the island of 'Ata. Six kids had survived for 15 months!

It was an extraordinary tale of friendship. They survived by staying friends. I tracked down the Australian captain who found them, Peter Warner, who was in his nineties. I traveled to Brisbane and sat with this old captain as he told me this extraordinary story. If it were a Hollywood movie, people would say it was too naive—that real kids wouldn't behave that way. But it really happened.

The Contagion of Kindness and Moral Ambition

Lady Carnarvon: It does completely give one hope! I think sometimes people who are bullies are simply unhappy with their own personal family situations and take it out on others.

I sometimes think that the structure of family and friends cannot be underestimated. Sharing food, breaking bread, and attachment from an early age are incredibly important. The 4th Earl of Carnarvon actually gave up his job in politics in the Victorian era to look after his children when his wife died in childbirth. He tried many different ways to help them through their bereavement. He was quite unusual and a kind man, even advocating for the enfranchisement of women ahead of his time.

But looking at the 19th century and the two World Wars, it is fascinating how unkind we were to each other.

Rutger Bregman: Ever since I was a young boy, I was fascinated with the Second World War. The Netherlands was occupied by the Nazis, and I kept coming back to the question: What would I have done? After the war, there was a "resistance myth" that a small, brave country stood up against the evil Nazis. It's not true. Most people didn't resist; the Dutch police and train systems often collaborated. For my latest book, Moral Ambition, I researched what makes resistance heroes different. Researchers interviewed hundreds of people who did the right thing during the war and tried to find a defining variable. Were they rich or poor? Introverts or extroverts?

They couldn't find a single psychological trait. But they did find one sociological factor: being asked. If someone asked you to help hide persecuted people or distribute underground newspapers, in 96% of cases, people said yes. The resistance was a local phenomenon that spread like a virus. It’s a profound insight: we obsess over human psychology when we should look at human sociology. If you are doing the right thing, don't forget to ask others to join in.

I wrote about a man named Arnold Douwes, who was one of the most influential organizers of the resistance in the east of the Netherlands. He settled in the tiny village of Nieuwlande, which became one of only two villages honored by Yad Vashem for hiding Jews. Douwes was a "superspreader" of the resistance virus. He almost bullied some people into doing the right thing, but because of him, so many survived.

Lady Carnarvon: It’s often the unconventional people who aren't afraid to ask. For my part, I had a privileged upbringing, but when both my parents died relatively young, the center of my world fell apart. The most important thing to me and my sisters then was someone else's kindness. From that comes the courage to do other things. I will always try to reach out and welcome people, and it's amazing how many incredible people, like yourself, reply.

Rutger Bregman: That’s the contagiousness of our behavior. Social psychologist Nicholas Christakis highlights this in his research on contagion. When people play economic games in a lab, if an undercover participant is unusually kind in the first round, that kindness spreads. In subsequent rounds, you see other people being generous, even to new players. You can really see it ripple through the whole ecosystem.

Whenever we perform a small act of kindness, we throw a pebble in the pond. As we get older, we start to realize that selfish behavior is not adaptive. Those who are nasty often find themselves alone.

Lady Carnarvon: Inclusion is really important. I find it fascinating working with my horses in the field. When we sadly lose one, we leave it in the field with its friends. They stand by it when it's ill, and they stand by it when it has died, until they know it is no longer there. You have to figure out how their society works to get them to work with you; you can't just impose your rules on them. Those are jolly useful lessons when trying to persuade people in the office to be kinder!

Rutger Bregman: That reminds me of the late Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal, who actually coined the term "veneer theory." He spent his life proving it wrong by showing how smart and empathetic animals really are. We’ve been so silly for such a long time underestimating them.

A Historical Dinner Party

Lady Carnarvon: To jump to a very direct question, as you noted we British often hide behind unspoken language: If you were to come to a summer ball here at Highclere, and you could bring anyone from history, who would you bring?

Rutger Bregman: I am immediately reminded of the great British philosopher Bertrand Russell. When I was 18, a professor told me everyone needs an intellectual hero. Russell had an amazing life. He won the Nobel Prize, survived a plane crash, and was responsible for some of the biggest breakthroughs in philosophy and logic. He was a staunch advocate for nuclear disarmament and was even imprisoned during the First World War because of his pacifism. He had tremendous intellectual courage. I would love to meet Bertie Russell, smoke a pipe, and have a drink.

Lady Carnarvon: I can give you a smoking area outside! And who would I bring? I'm guilty of loving the Bard of Avon, William Shakespeare. I also quite like Boethius and Marcus Aurelius. Since this is my party, I'll bring them all!

Thank you so much for joining me here today, Rutger. It's been lovely to meet you, and thank you for replying to my mad message on Instagram.

Rutger Bregman: Thank you so much for having me.