we have evidence that uh in many situations the first impulse that people have is actually a generous impulse so in in many situation you know Oscar wild I think wrote about that 150 years ago but uh he um he he wrote watch it beware your first impulse because it's the good one you know it's the generous one so so it's it is not obvious you know children it's a generosity is built in part in system one I mean so it's not only that we're not only selfish we're also naturally generous Amman was well in the
first place you know he enjoyed what he was doing I mean it is not uh that that's well established uh but it's also true that he was in a context where a lot of people were doing similar things uh and and you know what is very frightening is that you can create a situation in which uh people can be treated like animals and you know we and they are no longer humans and you don't feel what you would normally feel and and it's possible it is possible to make reasonable people act in that way I
mean that's the important lesson I think is that Amman is not all that different from the rest of us when we see success or we see failure we assume that it was somebody who succeeded or fail because of something they did or didn't do whereas you know it could be that they succeed or fail because of something that somebody else did or didn't do so it wasn't under their control and and that's what I mean by luck if you believe that luck is the only thing and if you believe that everything is willed and that
what we and that what we do doesn't matter and so on then uh then that's not a recipe for a very successful Society although I mean even even with that there are exceptions I'm just arguing in favor of some kind of balance not denying that if you try hard you know it's it's lucky you're likely to to do well and if you don't try hard you know you're likely to suffer for it I'm just saying that when we look at ourselves and when we look at other people we tend to put to assume much more
control than in fact we have
