Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think

parts of Africa. I said that the best places to invest right now were probably
those African countries that had just seen decades of rapid improvements in
education and child survival. I mentioned Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Ghana. The
audience listened hard, eyes wide, and asked some good questions.
Afterward, as I was packing away my laptop, a gray-haired man in a lightly
checked three-piece suit walked slowly up to the stage, smiled sweetly, and
said, “Well, I saw your numbers and I heard what you said, but I’m afraid
there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that Africa will make it. I know
because I served in Nigeria. It’s their culture, you know. It will not allow them
to create a modern society. Ever. EV-ER.” I opened my mouth, but before I
had figured out a fact-based reply, he had already given my shoulder a little
pat and wandered off to find a cup of tea.
The Destiny Instinct
The destiny instinct is the idea that innate characteristics determine the
destinies of people, countries, religions, or cultures. It’s the idea that things
are as they are for ineluctable, inescapable reasons: they have always been
this way and will never change. This instinct makes us believe that our false
generalizations from chapter 6, or the tempting gaps from chapter 1, are not
only true, but fated: unchanging and unchangeable.
It is easy to see how this instinct would have served an evolutionary
purpose. Historically, humans lived in surroundings that didn’t change much.
Learning how things worked and then assuming they would continue to work
that way rather than constantly reevaluating was probably an excellent
survival strategy.
It’s also easy to understand how claiming a particular destiny for your
group can come in useful in uniting that group around a supposedly never-
changing purpose, and perhaps creating a sense of superiority over other
groups. Such ideas must have been important for powering tribes, chiefdoms,
nations, and empires. But today, this instinct to see things as unchanging, this
instinct not to update our knowledge, blinds us to the revolutionary
transformations in societies happening all around us.
Societies and cultures are not like rocks, unchanging and unchangeable.
They move. Western societies and cultures move, and non-Western societies
and cultures move—often much faster. It’s just that all but the fastest cultural
changes—the spread of the internet, smartphones, and social media, for

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example—tend to happen just a bit too slowly to be noticeable or
newsworthy.
A common expression of the destiny instinct is my Edinburgh gentleman’s
idea that Africa will always be a basket case and will never catch up with
Europe. Another is that the “Islamic world” is fundamentally different from
the “Christian world.” This or that religion or continent or culture or nation
will (or must) never change, because of its traditional and unchanging
“values”: again and again, it’s the same idea in different costumes. At first
sight there appears to be some analysis going on. On closer inspection, our
instincts have often fooled us. These lofty statements are often simply
feelings disguised as facts.