Support for NPR and the following message come from SAP Concur, a leading brand for integrated travel expense and invoice management solutions.

With SAP Concur solutions, you'll be ready to take on whatever the market throws at you next.

Learn more at concur.com.

An old man says to his grandson, there is a fight going on inside me.

It's a terrible fight between two wolves.

One is evil, angry, greedy, jealous, arrogant, and cowardly.

The other is good, peaceful, loving, modest, generous, honest and trustworthy. These two wolves are also fighting with anew and inside every other person too.

After a moment the boy asks which wolf will win?

The oatmeal smiles, the one you feed. What we assume in other people is what we get out of them.

What we assume in other people is what we get out of them.

Our view of human nature tends to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

If we assume that people are fundamentally selfish,

then that's how they will behave.

If we assume that people are fundamentally decent, then maybe we can create a very different

kind of society.

This is Rutgers Bragman. I'm a Dutch historian and I'm the

author of the book Human Kind A Hopeful History. But this story doesn't start off

hopeful. There's a very widespread assumption that human beings are basically

selfish, brutal, barbarian. And this is author Rebecca Solnit. Cowardly, just sort of despicable and that civilization is some sort of structural overlay

that keeps us from realizing our true brutal natures, preventing us from doing what we would really do if we could do anything we

wanted which would be rape, loot, pillage, maraud, steel. And that idea that if you take away civilization that people are essentially evil has been an easy cell.

Introduce a little anarchy.

...