From the Rescuer to the Aggressor – understanding the 10 types of human

Why do some people chase noble dreams while others torture to stay sane? Barrister Dexter Dias's new book draws on 'moral cognition' to explain FGM, the crimes of child soldiers - and why we happily pay to punish a cheat

Why do human beings hurt other human beings? That, says the barrister and sometime judge, Dexter Dias QC, is the most fundamental question in his book Ten Types of Human. In it, we meet sex traffickers, the sex-trafficked, a woman whose career was very nearly ended when she blew the whistle in Bosnia, a man whose life very nearly was, when he tried to stage a rescue. We go from the post-earthquake shanty towns of Haiti, where Hobbesian brutality meets human dignity, to the living room of a woman with locked-in-syndrome; we meet women whose features have been destroyed by acid attacks, whose lives have been changed by FGM, men whose minds have been rewired by violence, we meet people who don't survive to the end of the book. But this isn't a story about victimhood.

Dias tells the story of human behaviour through 10 tropes. The Kinsman will protect his or her own gene pool at the expense of any other. It's illustrated in the first instance by a thought experiment in which there is a gunman in your child's school (how many classmates are you prepared to sacrifice for the sake of your own? One of his colleagues got to, "all the other children in the world, except for one, for my child to play with) and moves into a detailed consideration of FGM as an iteration of parental love twisted by cultural norm.