What If We Are Wrong About Human Nature?

I’ve been watching a new show on Apple TV, Pluribus, and it has been doing that irritating thing good fiction does, following me around long after the episode ends. The premise is simple and unsettling: imagine a world where self-interest has been removed from human behaviour. Not discouraged or regulated, but eliminated altogether. What remains looks, at least on the surface, calm and cooperative. And yet the story’s energy comes from a growing sense of loss. The protagonist pushes back not because her life has become brutal, but because it feels thinner, flattened. Watching it, I found myself oddly sympathetic to that resistance.

That reaction surprised me. Why should a world without self-interest feel vaguely threatening rather than relieving? Why do so many stories, when they imagine deep cooperation, slip so easily into the language of conformity or control? As I sat with that discomfort, I realised I’ve encountered it many times before, not in television shows but in arguments about how societies work, how economies function, and how institutions must be designed if they are to hold together.

I was reminded, in particular, of Bernard Mandeville and his eighteenth-century provocation, The Fable of the Bees. Mandeville argued that what we call vice is not an unfortunate by-product of human life but its driving force. Pride, vanity, and self-interest are not moral failures to be corrected; they are the engine of progress. Remove them, he warned, and the hive falls silent.

Much later, drawing on history rather than moral theory, Rutger Bregman would challenge this inheritance, suggesting that we have built much of the modern world on an unnecessarily bleak picture of ourselves. Moving between Pluribus, Mandeville, and Bregman, a question began to take shape for me: what if we are wrong about human nature?

This question becomes easier to see when we look at institutions. Scratch the surface of many institutional designs and you find the same underlying assumption: left to themselves, people will not do the right thing. They need incentives, pressure, monitoring, and the constant presence of consequences.

One of the reasons Rutger Bregman’s book Humankind: A Hopeful History got me hooked is the way it opens, not with theory, but with a story most of us think we already know – William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. It’s a novel about a group of schoolboys stranded on an island who descend into violence and tyranny in the absence of adult authority. This story has become a cultural shorthand for what happens when civilising structures fall away. Golding’s novel was never based on a real incident. It was a thought experiment, shaped by war and by a particular view of human nature. And it has been extraordinarily influential.

What Bregman points out is that, years after the book was published, something remarkably similar did happen in real life. A group of Tongan schoolboys were shipwrecked on a deserted island and survived together for over a year. There were no murders, no descent into savagery. Instead, there was cooperation, shared responsibility, care for the injured, and agreed ways of resolving conflict. When they were eventually rescued, they were healthy and organised.

What unsettled me was not that Golding had imagined a darker outcome. It was how completely his imagined story had come to stand in for reality in our collective mind. When fiction and fact diverged, we believed the fiction. The story that fit our expectations won.

At that point, the question stopped feeling abstract. If our most famous parable about children left to themselves is wrong, what else might be built on inherited suspicion rather than evidence?

This is where education enters the picture.

Schools are among the first large institutions most of us encounter. They are also places where assumptions about motivation are made concrete, daily, and at scale. Despite frequent talk of curiosity and growth, most schooling systems are built around a deep mistrust of learners. Students are graded, ranked, compared, streamed, and evaluated constantly. Learning is treated as scarce and positional. Someone must be on top. Someone else must fall behind. Effort is elicited through rewards and penalties, not unlike any other bureaucratic system designed to manage risk.

And yet anyone who has spent time with children knows how incomplete this picture is. Curiosity does not need to be installed. It needs space. Young children do not ask whether their questions will be assessed. They ask because the world presses on them and demands understanding. Somewhere along the way, many learn a different lesson: that interest is risky, that effort should be strategic, that learning is something you do for marks rather than meaning.

None of this requires pretending that humans are always generous or that conflict disappears in cooperative settings. It requires something more modest and more difficult: treating self-interest as one motive among many, rather than the organising principle of everything. It requires recognising that trust, like mistrust, is not a personality trait but a response to context.

Watching Pluribus, I found myself less troubled by the idea of a world without self-interest than by our inability to imagine other ways of organising ourselves. That inability has consequences. When suspicion about human nature hardens into a system, it stops describing people and starts training them to fit that suspicion.

Perhaps the more interesting question, then, is not whether Mandeville or Bregman is ultimately right. It is whether we have been too quick to settle on a single, dark story about who we are, and then organise our schools, workplaces, and institutions around it. If we are wrong about human nature, even slightly, the consequences are everywhere.

And education, of all places, seems the strangest site on which to bet against human potential.