Are humans fundamentally good, or is niceness just the thin layer of rules and consequences keeping our selfish instincts in check?

Historian Rutger Bregman's bestselling book "Humankind" argues that most of what we think we know about human nature is wrong — that cooperation, not selfishness, has been our real survival strategy, and even points to a real-life story of six Tongan teenage boys shipwrecked on an island for over a year in 1965 who built a functioning cooperative society rather than descending into the violence of "Lord of the Flies" (which was fiction). Critics push back that this is cherry-picked optimism ignoring the wars, atrocities, and everyday selfishness that fill human history — that people behave well mainly because laws, social pressure, and consequences hold selfish instincts in check, and remove those and the mask comes off fast.

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