Humanise in 5 points

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My new book ‘Humanise’ contains a rich set of insights about human beings, the challenges we face and how we can build a better world. Below is a very short summary of 5 key points to help open it up so you can see what’s inside:

  1. We need to understand human beings better in order to change the world. You can’t solve human problems effectively without understanding human beings accurately first.
  2. Most people – including our leaders and policy makers – have an inaccurate view of how human beings think and behave. We are not the rational, self-determined individuals most of us think we are. This inaccurate view of human beings leads us to set unrealistic expectations for ourselves, build societies that actually harm us, and struggle to solve the problems facing our species.
  3. Human beings are LASID creatures. Human thinking and behaviour can be summed up in a 5-point model, built from the latest psychological evidence – we are limited, adapted, simplifying, influenced and deceived. We evolved to think in particular ways that can lead to biases, inaccuracies and less socially useful traits, and are highly sensitive to our situation and cues from our social environment.
  4. We haven’t evolved to live in the modern world. Instead, our thinking and behaviour evolved to help us survive and flourish in the hunter-gatherer societies of small tribes that our ancestors lived in for most of human history, up to only 12,000 years ago. Yet the world we live in now has completely transformed in this relatively short time, so we are struggling in the modern world, which has become hostile to human flourishing, as LASID creatures.
  5. We need to humanise the world. To build a world in which human beings can flourish as the LASID creatures we are, within the parameters of the one planet we have, we need to give people the conditions they need to be the rational, healthy, cooperative creatures we want and need to be. This includes giving everyone access to basic resources they need for dignified, self-determined lives, protecting rather than exploiting their cognitive vulnerabilities, dialling down their tendencies towards tribalism and activating their capacity for cooperation. We therefore need to have a radical re-imagining of the structures, ideas and institutions that surround us in our daily lives – including banning manipulative advertising, making information useful for people and building better local facilities for everyone.

Buy the book here now!

Click on this link to hear me talk about the book on my podcast series ‘Humans & Hope’

 

Building a world fit for humans

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Our understanding how human beings think and behave is one of the most important tools we have available to make our world and our lives better. Yet, we are failing to use this knowledge.

A couple of decades ago, psychology was released into the real world in a discipline that has become known as ‘Behavioural Economics’, in which pychological knowledge is used to nudge, prod and cajole people into specifc actions. This is sometimes used to achieve behaviour change on important topics – for example the United Nations produced a report in 2021 showing how behavioural science can be used to help achieve its Sustainable Development Goals. In other cases, it is used for commercial purposes – for example, to help design the layout of supermarkets so that customers will buy more products.

There is a growing industry of consultants and agencies offering their services to help clients harness human behaviour to achieve their aims – whatever they are.

It’s no surprise that psychology is being used for commercial purposes as well as laudable humanitarian ones, as it’s a powerful tool. What is surprising to me however is that we only seem to be using it at a micro level – to gain detailed changes in individual human beings – and only very rarely to explore the bigger picture, of society, politics and our future.

It may simply be because behavioural economics is the most useful tool immediately from a commercial perspective, so this is where the money has gone. But there are significant ways we can rethink and improve the world if we applied our understanding of human beings to the systems, ideas and institutions that govern us.

Our knowledge of how human beings think and behave has dramatically increased in the last 80 years, as advances in knowledge and a desire to understand the horrors of the Second World War accellerated research into how and why we behave as we do.

Despite these advances in understanding, most people, including those who are writing our economic policies, building our instititions and setting our pollitical and social visions, still have an old-fashioned and innacurate view of human beings – one that can be traced back to the Enlightenment, over 200 years ago. It is the picture of human beings as ‘rational calculating machines’ – creatures that make balanced, informed decisions on the information available to them. The reality is far from this however, and a great deal more complex.

We are creatures with a range of mental and behavioural adaptations to help us simplify the world, pass our genes on, live in tribes and function in the environment that our hunter-gather ancestors lived in up to 12,000 years ago. As a result, we are not rational calculating machines – we are much more complex than this. Our particular thinking and behavioural traits have enabled us to build our population to 8 billion people on this planet that live relatively peacefully together.

As creatures evolved for a hunter-gatherer existence and environment however, we can find it difficult to adapt to the challenges and expectations we face in the twenty-first century world we have created – from the need for global co-operation on existential issues such as climate change, through to the need to deal with massive levels of information and lifestyle choices.

We expect ourselves to overcome these challenges, and we tend to label people as stupid or evil if they fail to do so. Yet we are living within systems and institutions (political, economic, social and many others) that have been built based on the incorrect ‘rational calculating machine’ view of human beings. And some have been built on other aims than helping human beings to flourish in a finite world. This means, in some cases, we are using tools sucha as behavioural economics to actually exploit our mental vulnerabilities, rather than helping to protect them to enable human beings to flourish. Why would we set up supermarkets to ‘nudge’ people to buy more unhealthy food otherwise?

Our knowledge about human beings could help us redesign the world and our lives in a way that is suitable for the creatures we really are – and with the aim of helping human beings to flourish within the parameters of our planet. From systems that promote greater international co-operation through to mass communication methods that don’t incentivise hate and division. But our challenges are urgent, so we need to get on to this job now – and encourage those who are applying psychology to the ‘real world’ to think big, and use it to challenge the systems and ideas that govern us.

It’s time to unleash the full power of psychology to create a better future for human beings and the planet.

Reflections on human beings

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We are a number of episodes into ‘Humans & Hope’, my podcast series about human beings and the challenges and expectations we face. This feels like a good time to reflect upon some of the key themes that have been appearing regularly in the episodes so far.

A central issue issue is that human thinking and behaviour has evolved to live in small tribes (of up to 150 people) – the sort of hunter-gatherer societies that we had for most of our history as a species, until about 5,000 years ago when they transformed into agrarian societies, bringing ever-larger groups of people together, based in villages, towns and eventually, cities.

This transformation of human lives has accelerated at an even greater pace over the last 200 years, leaving us in a complex modern world where there are 8 billion people on the planet, linked together by global trade, travel and communications. The things we do in our own small lives affect a much wider range of people (and environment and world) than they did when we lived in tribes 5,000 years ago. Each of us is also part of many different tribes at the same time (for example, football supporter, Christian, member of a political party, citizen of a nation etc).

Some of the key problems we face (such as climate change) and the expectations we have of ourselves (such as achieving global peace and co-operation) require us to extend our ‘radius of concern’ (or ‘moral circle’) beyond our immediate surroundings and our tribe of 150 people, and to the whole world. We face some common problems that transcend all our other tribes to involve our one human tribe.

In short, our thinking and behaviour as human beings has evolved for a completely different world and life from the one that we are currently in, with all its pressures, challenges and expectations – and all taking place way beyond one single, small tribe. And this simple point presents us with enormous challenges as human beings.

This requires us to radically change how we think and behave. In the tribal societies that we evolved for, we were able to live pretty well based on our instinctive feelings – our ‘automatic settings’. But, to meet many of the challenges and expectations that we commonly set ourselves in the modern world (including reducing inequality, building better relationships and tackling climate change) we have to go beyond this automatic, instinctive thinking and behaviour and switch to our ‘manual’ mode of rational thinking and behaviour.

Switching to this ‘manual’ mode requires us to put in a lot more cognitive effort – something we are instinctively not always keen to do. It may sometimes also conflict with what our instincts and feelings are telling us – and this can be hard to overcome. For example, your instincts telling you to eat that doughnut (to get the calories needed for survival), whilst your ‘manual’ mode telling you not to eat it, as there is an abundance of food around you in the modern world and eating it would leave you with too many calories for your health.

In short, it’s not easy to make this switch to ‘manual mode’, and it’s not clear whether we can do it consistently and on an ongoing basis as a species – hence our questions in the podcast as to whether achieving our modern challenges and expectations as human beings (from solving climate change to tackling hate and prejudice) is possible.

The other (significant) complication is that, as we move towards more ‘manual mode’ thinking, the answers of what we should do and how we should behave are not as clear as they are in ‘automatic’ mode, where our feelings and instincts give us very strong guidance – often accompanied by physiological nudges, like pain, hunger and arousal. In ‘manual’ mode, the question of what to do is often arbitrary and people can disagree vehemently on the answers – from politics to religion to moral questions.

One thing’s for sure – we’ll need to give ourselves all the help we can if we are to successfully make these ongoing changes in our thinking and behaviour. I’ll explore these in more detail in a later publication, but some ways we could do this include:

  • Educating everyone about what human beings are really like as creatures. By understanding ourselves better we can help ourselves to meet our challenges and expectations, both as individuals and a species. It could be said we need another Enlightenment, in which we all develop a more modern view of human beings.
  • Trying to activate what the psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls ‘hive mind’ behaviours – those that help each of us to transcend our individuality and feel part of something bigger with our fellow human beings.
  • Trying to ‘outsource’ some of our rational, manual choices to make them effectively automatic, when they’re not automatic within us – to take the cognitive burden away from us.
  • Using our new, more accurate picture of human beings to build ideas, institutions and societies that will help us to thrive, given the creatures we really are. This may mean a radical rethink of many areas of our lives – including those areas (such as advertising) that currently seek to exploit rather than protect our vulnerabilities. There are big questions to be asked here – about the society we should have, given the creatures we really are, and about whether we are prepared to build a society based on flourishing for all humans, rather than just some.

Next episodes

Naturally, these issues will come up in some of the future episodes of the podcast as they are central to many of the challenges and expectations we face as human beings. We will also directly tackle the overall question of where we’ve got to as creatures – indeed, one episode is simply called ‘can human beings cope with the modern world?’.

As always, our focus will not only be on understanding human beings and the challenges we face but also on considering how we can harness our thinking, behaviour and capacities as creatures to address them as effectively as possible.

I am particularly keen to explore the broader question of how we can build better societies, institutions and ideas that take into account the creatures we really are, and help us to flourish, within the parameters of the one planet we have.

100 places that changed the world

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Here’s a new idea rather than a new, fully formed initiative – putting it out there to see if people would find it interesting.

There are hundreds of places and sites around the world that have an amazing story to tell – from the Trinity site in the Nevada desert where the first atomic bomb was exploded in 1945 to the Chicxulub crater   underneath the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico that is believed to be the impact site of the asteroid that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs.

I think telling the stories of what happened at these places is a fascinating and different way of exploring events and ideas in history, and would make a great book, blog and/or podcast series. Before I go to the work of starting to put something together it would be great to hear if it was of interest to people – please drop me a line on the contact email address on this site to let me know!

Thanks and all the best, Richard

Seeing through the fog

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We’re living in a time when it’s increasingly difficult to tell fact from fiction, discern a real news story from a PR puff piece, understand what a politician is really trying to say, escape from the influence of advertising or work out how to manage our kids’ lives online.

We’re surrounded by hot air, interest groups, information and influence everywhere and it can feel overwhelming. Everyone’s talking at you, trying to influence you, and yet no-one is helping to lead us through this fog, so that we can deal with this stuff and live well-informed, flourishing lives.

One of the reasons I set up the not-for-profit Life Squared was to help people deal with these issues – as no-one else helping them to do so, including the present education system. The modern world has created a unique set of pressures on people that human beings haven’t faced before. Life Squared helps people to understand what these pressures are, deal with them better and then live the lives that they really want.

A couple of good starting points in their (free) resources to help people understand these pressures are:

The Life Trap – and how to escape it

The modern life survival guide

Do get in touch with me if you’d like to find out more about how Life Squared could help.

The Life Trap – coming soon

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I’ve just completed a booklet for Life Squared that has turned into a book!  It’s a piece of work that I’ve been putting off for years as I knew it would be large and complex, but I’m delighted to have finished it as I think it’s a critical issue, yet one that hasn’t been exposed in any significant way to date.

It’s called ‘The Life Trap – and how to escape it’. Or – ‘how to think for yourself’. Here’s a brief summary.

You may not know it, but you’re probably caught in the Life Trap.

You live in a complex world where you are bombarded daily with a wide range of powerful messages and influences, but at no point in your life have you been given the skills or tools you need to manage this assault on your mind.

As a result, you have ended up caught in a trap, like most of us in the modern world – with worldviews, values and lives that are stifled and restricted, only following the path that we’ve been led down by the dominant ideas of the people and society we’ve grown up in. As a consequence, you pursue career achievement and material success, worry about what other people think of you and lead a busy, distracted life. Your life feels meaningless and isolated yet you find it hard to stop, take control and change it.

This book explores what causes the Life Trap and why it matters so much – not just for our own lives but for society as a whole.

You will find out how to escape the Life Trap – as well as how we can change our education system, politics and other areas of society to give everyone the best chance of independent, fulfilled lives, and build a peaceful and civilised society.

The book will be free to download from the Life Squared website in the next few weeks. More news as soon as it’s published!

 

 

 

The future of the left

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In the current political climate, I’ve not been surprised to see a particular question raised more than once – namely, does a proper left wing movement/party stand a chance in Britain? I’ve seen articles saying it doesn’t, and arguing that no really left wing party has held power since the early 70s.

So, is Britain just a bit right wing/centrist, and destined to remain on that track?

It’s certainly a more difficult battle to fight now, given the erosion of tribal politics where people were ‘Labour’ voters for generations, the massive bias of the establishment, media and powerful towards the right (and, at the same time – although not tautologically – aggressively against the left) and the continuing growth in influence of wealthy and powerful interest groups since being unshackled following the rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s.

So, it’s true to say that the progressive left is fighting a trickier battle than ever, but it should never stop trying to get people behind the vision of the future and values it believes in – a) because, in my view, they’re the most humane vision of how society should be and also b) because if history has taught us anything, it’s that no political situation is permanent. Commentators such as Peter Hitchens are therefore spouting nonsense when they espouse (out of hope rather than evidence) that there’s no chance of left wing electoral success and, essentially, that left wing progressive parties should abandon their cause.

I therefore have no time for politicians who seem to share these progressive values yet cosy up to neoliberalism not because they believe in it but out of so-called ‘pragmatism’ – because they think it’s the only way to get power. This philosophy of neoliberalism is fundamentally broken and inhumane – so we have to oppose it and put forward something different – even if it’s not the most popular view at the moment, given the political environment we’re in. So we should be faithful to the vision we care about and stay committed to moving towards it.

If it is to improve its position, the left also needs to get a whole lot better at articulating its vision of the future and its values in a way that resonates with people, not using the abstract and politically-loaded language it’s so accustomed to using but that means so little to people. Forget ‘social justice’ – talk about ‘jobs for everyone’.

A new progressive movement needs to meet the public on the issues that matter to them rather than judging them negatively for the things they care about, and talk to people in a way that resonates with them. It needs to show that its solution is the best one for their problems – but not change its principles entirely in order to gain power. The language it uses and the focus it takes (i.e. it needs to take the focus of the vote) is vital to its ability to succeed – and it’s been dreadful at this up to now.

I’m currently working with some progressive political entities to help them put together a more powerful and engaging vision of a progressive future, and I’ll aim to share some of this here soon, as well as some of the thinking behind why we’ve chosen to present the vision in this way.

A quick postscript – I long for a future in which we ditch the nomenclature of ‘left’ and ‘right, as these labels are laden with history, meaning and past tragedies and successes that can be employed in an almost infinite range of ways to inflict damage on the ideas coming from them in the present, and therefore obscure all useful debate and passing on of new ideas. Instead, let’s discuss how parties and policies are – in other words, judge them by the values and vision of society they espouse.

Brexit and the need for respect

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As the summer holidays come to an end, I’m sure many people will have had a similar experience to me of travelling abroad and realising how much Europe as an overall idea means to them.

Travelling to Germany and Italy, I’ve been aware of how connected I feel to these countries and people, as well as how sad it feels to be in the process of disconnecting from our nation’s official links with them. We can be sure though that this won’t weaken the sense of togetherness and belonging that many of us feel towards Europe as a whole.

Another post-Brexit observation I made in Italy was the great (and natural) level of respect for people doing manual jobs. Whether someone was painting a house, being a waiter or gardening, they seemed to be treated with an equal level of status and respect as accountants, doctors or any other profession.

This sense of equal status and respect is clearly not the case in the UK, and many commentators (including the Labour MP Clive Lewis) have suggested that it (alongside the searing economic inequality in the UK) is a key reason for the vote for Brexit that was made in June.

If we are to build a better future for Britain, we not only need greater economic equality, but also equality of respect and self-respect across all classes, trades and geographical areas of the nation.

Brexit – hope out of despair

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One of the key dangers of Brexit (aside from not insignificant others like the damage to our economy, the impact on the lives of Europeans and the barrier this has driven between people in British society), is that it will trigger an even more pronnounced lurch to the right in this country’s politics.

So, what can we do about this?

As progressives, we have to unite to overcome this – and not just fight against it in a defensive action, constructing badly thought-through counter policies on the hoof, but finally have the courage to construct a positive, compassionate, sustainable and human-centred view of the future that we genuinely believe in and that people will want to unite behind and support in its own right instead of neoliberalism so that it becomes a driving political and cultural force in society.

The left has singularly failed to construct such a vision for the last 20 years – as George Monbiot’s great talk to the Hay Festival this year (listen to it here) showed.  This has been for many reasons, including its seduction by neoliberal arguments and a fear of losing electoral backing for more radical policies.

But the time has come for a genuine, radical vision.  If not now, then when?  This vision has to include the following things (and this obviously a very rough, initial inexhaustive list):

  • A focus on sustainability and the need to live within the limits of the planet
  • A focus on human welfare, rights and well-being
  • An economic and political system that prioritises the two factors above all else – and sees the economic system as a means towards these ends rather than being the end in itself. It would therefore reject the doctrine of neoliberalism and what it entails – from the sanctity of the market and the primacy of economic growth through to the dominance of targets and measurement in every area of public life (e.g. education). This would give us an exciting opportunity to re-shape politics, economics and society to actually give us better lives – from re-thinking the working week through to  moving away from our damaging obsession with consumerism.
  • Listen to, and deal with, some of the underlying reasons why people voted for Brexit – including:
    • Deal with the wealth inequality in this country that is not only morally indefensible but also destroys people’s lives and drives them to feel resentment towards those competing with them for income
    • Address the issue of immigration head-on – choose a fair, compassionate policy and be clear about it
    • A change in the political system with proportional representation to ensure people get their voices heard
  • Greater investment and improvement in public services and the social safety nets that are so important for a good society, with innovation around the ideas of how we can best support each other – such as the citizen’s income.
  • An education system that is fit for the twenty-first century – that is human-centred and innovative, rather than simply aiming to maximise people’s potential as economic actors.  One that promotes personal development, well-being and life skills such as empathy, media awareness and critical thinking.

Of course, we are so immersed in the dogma of neoliberalism that it may well be extremely difficult to get people to shift their ideology and ‘operating systems’ as some of its assumptions are so deep rooted – for example, the idea that economic growth is essential.  Yet this shift is exactly what we must undertake, and the aftershock of the Brexit debate could be the ideal moment for people to realise what is at stake in society, and be open to a vision of a better, more progressive world to counter the potential lurch to the right in UK politics that Brexit could threaten.

In short – people are crying out for a hopeful, progressive vision of the future. So, perhaps we have an opportunity as progressives. But we need to take it – right now.

Email me if you’d like to help us get something moving!

Why we need to be more civilised

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The world feels like a depressing place at the moment.  Shootings in Orlando, the rise of Trump, refugee crises, dubious rhetoric in the Brexit debate – the list goes on.

We’re about to launch a new Life Squared booklet soon called ‘How to be civilised’ which examines some of the lessons that we can draw from the Holocaust for our own lives in the modern world.

Some of the lessons are stark, but are becoming more relevant by the day to our lives and the turbulent modern world we live in.

For example, one lesson from the booklet is that the smooth, co-operative surface of civilisation that we all skate upon is very thin, and can be shattered with relative ease.  We shouldn’t take our civilised, relatively peaceful society for granted, but cherish it and work tirelessly to protect it.

Another conclusion is that it takes effort – both as individuals and as a society – to be civilised and compassionate, and the booklet argues that we need to work much harder to build more civilised, compassionate thinking and behaviour into our own lives, and into the fabric of our society – from the ideas that overarch it (such as the political and economic models we choose to govern us) through to the institutions that help it work (such as what we teach our kids).

Many of the terrible events that are taking place and worrying ideas that are becoming more more popular at the moment have something in common – a lack of civility.  By this I mean a failure to see ourselves not just as individuals but as part of a wider (global) community of people and a failure to put in the effort needed to coexist with people in a harmonious, civilised way. When we fail to put the effort into preserving this civilised society, bad things can happen – as we can see now.

Conclusions like this may seem fatuous in our current age of aggressive individualism, but I’m increasingly coming round to the idea that it is the rebuilding of our lives and societies around simple but important values such as compassion and civility (that we will explore fully in the forthcoming Life Squared booklet) that will help create the better society most of us are looking for.

Keep an eye on @Life_Squared in the coming weeks to see when the booklet is published – it will be free, as ever, to download.