Noble or narsty?

Are you kind to kittens [L]? Do you bring cookies? Lend books? Rutger Bregman reckons that you, Jan Modal, behave like that, because he does and most everyone he knows does too. We've met Bregman before on The Blob, speaking the tax-truth to power in Davos, and de-demonizing the poor. I'm reading his latest book Humankind: A Hopeful History (2021) - originally De Meeste Mensen Deugen: Een Nieuwe Geschiedenis van de Mens (2019) which flips the statement [Most People Lie: A New History of Man]. Whatevs, the book is a philosophical look at what it means to be human and how we could / should live. Longish sample on Googlebooks.

DO you believe, with Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), that human life is 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short' and we need government to survive the assaults of nature and the rest of humanity.
OR, with Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), that once we were 'noble savages' and the ills of the world started when the first man claimed exclusive ownership of a defensible part of the Commons of Eden.
The side of this dichotomy you lean towards will probably determine your views on . . .  prisons, the queen, redemption, sin, taxation, UBI, volunteerism, welfare and youth mental health.

lean towards because it's surely not a black&white  answer. Although Bregman defo leans towards Rousseau not least because a Hobbesian world is so bleak and uncaring. The EuroEnglish language version of the book [R] allows a neat pun on the etymologically related [O.E gecynd] meanings of kind 1. friendly, deliberately doing good to others originally esp. relatives 2. those rellies = kin. But not kine (cattle) that's another root altogether.

Bregman develops the idea that The Enlightenment, including Adam "The Wealth of Nations" Smith embraced Hobbes in the belief that people were [bad] idle skivers who needed to be incentivized to do any work. Out the window went the idea that lord and tenants were in a mutually dependent relationship - see Levin in Anna Karenina haymaking scything with his peasants - where everyone would take pride in their work because it required deliberate practice and attention to detail. Assembly lines and the parsing of work to a series of mind-numbing repetitive strain injury tasks were more efficient for Capital and some portion [the least possible] of the enterprize was paid as wages.

Bregman cites a number of cases [including the Haifa day-care fiasco] of perverse incentives [bloboprev] where paying (or fining) people leads to a series of unfortunate consequences. Anyone in the working world will know case of gaming the system. If/when The Man[agement] insists on auditing one aspect of work, then that aspect will become paramount on the shop-floor, the ward, the office, the lab, the classroom. Everything else gets sidelined. In my teaching at The Institute, new courses had to present a list of LOs [learning outcomes] for approval by the Teaching and Learning Committee. The LOs determined the curriculum and the contents of the exams. When something really exciting came along like the horsemeat hamburger scandal of 2013, there was no space on the curriculum to dig into that topical topic.

Charles Darwin married Emma "the Potter's Daughter" Wedgwood in 1839, and neither of them needed to work for a living. 1839 was getting close to peak industrial capitalism. Isn't in peculiar <not> that Darwin's whole world-view of individuals competing for scarce resources so exactly mapped his own lived experience . . . capitalism red in tooth and claw? I can't goog it up but Voltaire said something like "if donkeys were religious their gods would have long ears!". Mid-20thC evolutionary biologists had to tie themselves in "inclusive fitness" knots to explain the many examples of altruism in the natural world: where animals are kind to each other seemingly at some cost to themselves. 

Enough of me, back to Human.kind. Bregman is setting out his stall that if you trust people people and give them autonomy, then they are likely to achieve joy in work, being creative and contributing to the enterprise beyond their reluctant, extrinsically motivated, labour. These iconoclasts, it's easy to dismiss them because they are rocking the ship-of-state which may have been sailing majestically along under a totally skewed set of assumptions based on sketchy data and wishful thinking. Rutger Bregman puts it much more elegantly that I can, albeit at 400 pages of text. Get it out the library! I'm finished with it.