The Data is in: Assholes are actually statistically rare.

The World Really is Filled with Mostly Decent People

One of the most popular film franchises of the last decade has been The Purge series. The premise is simple: for twelve hours all laws are suspended and anything goes, always leading to horrendous and violent depravity. These films are popular in large part because they feed that pessimistic part of our brains that thinks: of course the world will go to hell, people are violent and without someone to stop them, most people will naturally resort to theft and violence. This is a natural impulse for most of us, at least we think so because, in reality, this is a totally unnatural impulse. You have to be taught to think the world is a shithole and that other people are dangerous. Our instincts as children are to love the world and everyone and everything in it. Our parents, our culture, our religions, and our media have lied to us because most people are in fact decent human beings.

And now we can prove it.

The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was right: the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice (a phrase with a more curious and length provenance than I was aware of). More than any other narrative, human history is a long story of progressively better behaved and better-treated people trying to figure out ways to live in harmony with each other. War is the aberration, not the norm. Peace is not exceptional, it is the default. In addition, the world and…