By Rutger Bregman
In England and Germany during WWII, civilian air raids were predicted to break country morale. Instead they strengthened it. People banded together and shared a more fundamental bomb than they had shared before.
Most people deep down are pretty decent
Veneer theory: the order in society is just a thin veneer ready to crack and unleash mayhem at the smallest sign of crisis
The opposite is actually true, people are made stronger by crises. It allows them to ascend the rungs of politics, religion, etc to band together at a more fundamental level.
During times of crisis leaders will often release a self defeating wage of mayhem in the name of protecting their people. They do so under the flawed assumption that people operate with the same level of self interest as they do. They see all of humanity in their own power hungry image.
Coca Cola incident of 1999: hundreds of children got sick amidst concerns that there was a toxic agent in Coca Cola. Toxicologists found no evidence in the drinks or bodies of the sick children. Coca Cola withdrew 30m bottles and it all cost the company $200m when all was said and done. Scientist ruled that the episode was an instance of a mass sociogenic illness (Aka a big ole placebo effect).
We are what we believe, we find what we go looking for.
We attract what we expect. If we view the world as a large network of untrustworthy people, we will attract those very people into our lives.
Pygmalion Effect: When we expect certain behaviors of others, we are likely to act in ways that make the expected behavior more likely to occur.
People do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character. // Ralph Waldo Emmerson
Imagine there is a new drug that comes on the market that causes a misperception of risk, anxiety, lower mood levels, contempt, hostility, desensitization, and resentment. This drug exists already. It’s the news.
People in 30 countries were asked if the world in general is getting better or worse. Almost every country had a majority respond worse.
Every day over the last 25 years the number of people living in poverty has gone down by 137k—the news would never report that.
Airplanes have gotten increasingly safer but media coverage of crashes has gone up. In turn people have gotten more fearful of flying.
Negativity bias: we are attuned to danger / bad things. We are better off being fearful 100x too often than not fearful 1x too many times.
We also have availability bias—tough 1-2 punch
News is to the mind as sugar is to the body