We Are Better Than We Have Been Told

“Homo Puppy” Instead of Homo sapiens

Bregman offers a playful but pointed renaming of our species. Instead of Homo sapiens, he proposes Homo puppy — the human as puppy, the human as eager social creature. His point is simple: our evolutionary advantage did not lie chiefly in superior intelligence or ruthless aggression, but in trust, empathy, and cooperation. Those were the traits that helped us survive. Accounts of Humankind repeatedly summarise his argument in just those terms: friendliness, not ferocity, became our superpower.

For centuries, from Hobbes through Freud to Steven Pinker, some version of what Bregman calls the veneer theory dominated the way we think about ourselves. According to that view, people are naturally violent and self-interested, and only laws, institutions, and religion keep them in check. Bregman argues that this theory rests on much shakier ground than we have been taught to believe.

The Real Lord of the Flies

His most striking example is a counter-story to William Golding’s famous novel. Golding, shaped by war and convinced of human cruelty, imagined boys stranded on an island descending into violence and barbarism. Lord of the Flies became one of the canonical stories used to support the darker view of human nature.

But, as Bregman points out, reality offered a very different script. In 1965, 6 boys from Tonga really were stranded on an uninhabited island. They lived there together for more than a year, built a working community, shared food, cared for one another, and survived. When they were finally rescued, all 6 were alive. They remain friends to this day.

Bregman also ties Golding’s bleak imagination to Golding’s own darkness. He quotes the writer’s stark confession:

I have always understood the Nazis because I am of that sort by nature.

Read in that light, Lord of the Flies begins to look less like a neutral account of human nature than a projection of one man’s despair.

The Experiments That Lied

Bregman does not stop at anecdotes. In Humankind, he systematically revisits the classic psychological experiments long used to prove human nastiness.

Take Milgram’s obedience studies from 1962, the ones in which participants appeared willing to administer electric shocks because a scientist told them to do so. Bregman argues that a closer reading reveals something more complicated: many participants protested, hesitated, and often believed they were contributing to an important scientific experiment rather than acting out sheer cruelty. The standard story, in his view, flattens the moral uncertainty that actually appeared in the room.

Then there is the Stanford prison experiment from 1971. Philip Zimbardo ended it after 6 days when guards began humiliating prisoners. But the experiment has since drawn major criticism for weak design, demand effects, and evidence that participants may have been nudged toward the very brutality the study later claimed to reveal. Bregman leans on those critiques to argue that the experiment told us more about performance and expectation than about immutable human evil.

Why Do We Believe in Human Evil?

If people are basically decent, why has the darker view of human nature proved so persuasive? Bregman points to two forces.

The first is the media. Bad news sells better than good news. Millions of ordinary acts of kindness remain invisible: someone gives up a seat on the bus, helps an elderly neighbour, stays late for a friend, shares food, waits, listens, notices.

The second is what Bregman calls nocebo stories — stories that make us worse. If people are constantly told that selfishness is natural, they may begin to live down to that expectation. In that sense, Golding’s novel did not simply describe a reality. It helped produce one.

Humans Are Good: From Belief to Action

After Humankind, a descriptive and argumentative book, came Moral Ambition in 2025, a much sharper call to action. Bregman’s point is blunt: if humans are good, then we should stop wasting talent in hollow prestige careers and start applying it to the world’s largest problems.

He sums up the idea in one clear line:

Moral ambition is the will to make the world a wildly better place.

This is not a call for symbolic gestures or vague benevolence. Bregman argues instead that the brightest graduates of elite institutions should turn their talents toward climate change, poverty, pandemics, and democratic decay, rather than drifting automatically into consulting firms, hedge funds, and status careers.. On his own account, ambition should no longer mean climbing as high as possible inside existing systems, but asking where one’s abilities matter most.

“Winning Is a Moral Duty”

Bregman is especially severe toward what he sees as the posture of the noble loser: someone with pure intentions and no measurable results. In his view, it is not enough to raise awareness, repeat that humans are good, or join symbolic protest.

He puts it starkly:

Winning is a moral duty.

That means building coalitions, winning legislative majorities, and changing laws. That is why he invokes figures such as Ralph Nader, who did not merely criticise the car industry, but forced it to adopt safer standards. For Bregman, moral seriousness means effectiveness, not just sincerity.

What Follows from This?

Taken together, Bregman’s 2 books form a coherent whole. In Humankind, he says: people are better than you think. In Moral Ambition, he adds: then stop wasting your life and act accordingly.

Is he right? His diagnosis of human nature is hopeful and energising, but not beyond criticism. Critics accuse him of selectivity, of speaking mainly to elite graduates, and of offering a technocratic, top-down vision of change rather than a genuinely grassroots one. Some also call him naive, arguing that belief in human goodness alone will not persuade people to abandon self-interest for the sake of a larger good.

Bregman himself has admitted a version of that danger, saying that after Humankind he felt he may have “created a monster”: some readers took the book to mean that, if people are good after all, then perhaps they should simply relax, work less, and enjoy life.

Even so, his books land like a cold shower. For anyone accustomed to thinking the world is rotten and nothing can be changed, Humankind feels like opening a window in a smoke-filled room. And Moral Ambition feels like the push to step outside and try.

Read this article in Polish: Egoizm czy współpraca? Ludzie są lepsi, niż myślimy