Understanding Society
The Psychology of Power
EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION
For millennia, ridicule, shaming, and peer pressure helped communities restrain overreaching leaders. Rutger Bregman’s Humankind: A Hopeful History marks the turning point about ten thousand years ago, when settled rulers acquired armies and became harder to remove. Doug then introduces historian Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind and its darker proposition: complex societies may depend on imagined hierarchies and unjust discrimination.
A Note on the Original Text
Doug’s writings are presented as originally written. Spelling, punctuation, and grammatical irregularities have been retained to preserve his words and the integrity of the original record.
ORIGINAL WRITING
The content in this post is based on the book Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman.
“For millennia, we picked to put the nice guys in charge. We were well aware, even in our prehistoric days that power corrupts, so we also leveraged of shaming and peer pressure to keep group members in check.
But 10,000 years ago it became more difficult to unseat the powerful. As we settled down in seats and states and our rulers gained command over whole armies, a little gossip or a well-aimed spear were no longer enough. Kings simply didn’t allow themselves to be dethroned. Presidents were not brought down by taunts and jeers.
Some historians suspect that we’re now actually dependent on inequality. Yuval Noah Harari, for example, writes that ‘complex human societies seem to require imagined hierarchies and unjust discrimination.’
But what fascinates me is that people around the world have continued to find ways to tame their leaders, even after the advent of chieftains and kings. One obvious method is revolution. Every revolution, whether the French (1789), the Russian (1917), or the Arab Spring (2011) is fueled by the same dynamic. The masses try to overthrow a tyrant.