Humankind

‘There’s a fight going on inside me. It’s a terrible fight between two wolves. One is evil – angry, greedy, jealous, arrogant, and cowardly. The other is good – peaceful, loving, modest, generous, honest, and trustworthy. These two wolves are also fighting within you, and inside every other person too.’
After a moment, the boy asks, ‘Which wolf will win?’
The old man smiles.
‘The one you feed.’

‘For those who knew Laurens,’ his colleagues there wrote, ‘it came as no surprise that it would take an anti-aircraft missile to stop his powerful body.’

At this point, I should point out that I’m not a fan of the self-help genre. If you ask me, we’re living in an age of too much introspection and too little outrospection. A better world doesn’t begin with me, but with all of us, and our main task is to build different institutions. Another hundred tips for climbing the career ladder or visualising your way to wealth won’t get us anywhere.

To this day, police departments across the country still swear by Bratton’s philosophy – which is why scientists continue to consider US police statistics unreliable.

‘There’s been a lot of things done in the name of Broken Windows that I regret,’ Kelling admitted in 2016. When he began hearing police chiefs all over the country invoke his theory, two words flashed across his mind: ‘Oh s––t.’

In her groundbreaking book Governing the Commons (1990), Ostrom formulated a set of ‘design principles’ for successful commons. A community must have a minimum level of autonomy, for instance, and an effective monitoring system. But she stressed that there’s no blueprint for success, because the characteristics of a commons are ultimately shaped by the local context.

Do you think capitalism’s ascent in the eighteenth century was a natural development? Hardly. It wasn’t the invisible hand of the market that gently shepherded peasants from their farms into factories, but the ruthless hand of the state, bayonet at the ready. Everywhere in the world, that ‘free market’ was planned and imposed from the top down.38 It wasn’t until the end of the nineteenth century that scores of unions and worker cooperatives began forming – spontaneously and from the bottom up – laying the basis for the twentieth century’s system of social safety nets.

What I didn’t realise back then was that communism – according to the official definition, at least – has been a successful system for hundreds of years, one that bears little resemblance to the Soviet Union. In fact, we practise it every day. Even after decades of privatisation, big slices of our economy still operate according to the communist model. This is so normal, so obvious, that we no longer see it.

Bullying is often regarded as a quirk of our nature; something that’s part and parcel of being a kid. Not so, say sociologists, who over the years have compiled extensive research on the places where bullying is endemic. They call these total institutions.

Even as a teenager it struck me as odd that the case for communism’s ‘failure’ seemed to rest solely on the evidence of bloodthirsty regimes in countries where ordinary citizens had no say – regimes supported by all-powerful police states and corrupt elites.