Rutger Bregman wants to help you pursue a life of “Moral Ambition” | Audible.com
Rutger Bregman wants to help you pursue a life of “Moral Ambition”
The Dutch historian and journalist makes a plea for you to use your time and talents to make the world a better place—and he’s mapping out the best way to get there.
Note: Text has been lightly edited for clarity and does not match audio exactly.
Emily Cox: Hi, this is Emily Cox. I'm an editor here at Audible, and today I'm thrilled to be chatting with Dutch historian, journalist, and bestselling author Rutger Bregman about his newest release, . Welcome, Rutger.
Rutger Bregman: Thanks, Emily. Thanks for having me.
EC: I've been really looking forward to this conversation. For the past year or so, you've been on the podcast and interview circuit, discussing and pitching this idea of moral ambition, the idea that there are too many smart people doing too many so-called bullshit jobs when they should be working to radically improve the world. You've also founded an online entrepreneurial effort called The School for Moral Ambition. For listeners who aren't as familiar with your recent work, can you talk about the genesis of this idea and this effort and what came first, the book or the foundation?
RB: Sure. So, I'm a writer. I spent about a decade in what I like to describe as the awareness industry. You write articles, you write books, you have all kinds of ideas and opinions, and then you hope that some other people will do the actual work of implementing those ideas and opinions and making this world a much better place. And I gotta be honest, I was a little bit fed up with myself after doing that for a decade. I came to the conclusion that awareness is often quite overrated. People listen to a lot of audiobooks, they follow the news, they read newspapers. Very often, we know what's wrong with the world. The question is how do you bridge the gap from awareness to action?
I thought, "You know what? Perhaps I should write a book that will force me to change my own life, and then perhaps it could be helpful for others as well." And the book is called Moral Ambition. Moral ambition is the desire to stand on the right side of history before it is fashionable, and to use your precious time on this earth to make this world a wildly better place. And, as I said, to be quite ambitious about it. I think that often the idealistic people are not ambitious enough, and the ambitious people are not idealistic enough. We want ambitious idealists, and that's what we call moral ambition.
EC: Yeah, I certainly am relating to the idealist, not ambitious persona that you outlined in your book. I was like, "Oh, no." It has shifted my perspective quite a bit.
RB: [Laughs] Is that you?
EC: Yeah. So, you talk about, across history, the surprising ways in which change has come about. In politically or socially fraught times, you say there are two types of heroes. Well, I'm sure there are many types of heroes, but you hone in on how there are people who are super-spreaders who sort of infect everyone else with the excitement to make change. And then there are those who got involved simply because they met that most important condition: They were asked to help. So, what's your moral origin story? Which one of those types of people are you?
RB: I think I've definitely been infected by others. I caught the moral ambition bug. I'm not the kind of person who, from a very early age, turned vegan and gave away all my money to charities, et cetera. I was a pretty lazy and also probably quite selfish teenager, which I think is perfectly healthy. Then I started my career and had this dream of becoming a famous author, writing big books about big subjects for a lot of people, and I climbed that conventional ladder of success. But as I said, at some point it started to feel perhaps a little bit empty, or I was yearning to climb a different ladder. There's this beautiful saying from Allen Raine, who wrote more than a century ago that a lot of people are climbing that ladder of success only to realize at the very end of their life that the ladder was leaning against the wrong wall the whole time. That they were pursuing the wrong definition of success.
"Moral ambition is the desire to stand on the right side of history before it is fashionable, and to use your precious time on this earth to make this world a wildly better place."
In the corporate world, this would be something like getting the corner office, getting the fat paycheck, having a fancy title. Obviously, we all like a little bit of luxury in our lives. Obviously, money is important. But at some point, this form of success becomes a little bit shallow, I would say. The book is really an encouragement to build a legacy that actually matters, to do something that is worth remembering.
So, I spend a lot of time, indeed, writing about the British abolitionists. They were the most successful abolitionists. Or the American suffragettes, people like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The reason we remember them today is obviously not because they were wealthy or rich, and some of them actually were, some of these abolitionists. No, it's because they used what they had—their time, their talent, their skill set, their networks, and also their financial capital—to make a massive, massive difference. That's why we historians still write books about them today, and that's why they're still so inspiring for us today.
EC: That ladder imagery is very haunting to me [laughs], just putting it out there. The idea of reaching the end and being like, “Oh shit, you're really in the wrong place.” But coming back to what you're saying about historians writing about these changemakers, our site's recommendation engine says if you like Rutger Bregman you might also like David Graeber and Yuval Noah Harari, but I feel like you write with more of an opinion and more of a perspective, in some ways, about history. There's a future-looking imperative here. Do you think that that should be part of the role of the historian, to be a steward for the future?
RB: Absolutely. I mean, for me, the main lesson of history is that things can be different. There's nothing inevitable about the way we've structured our society right now. It can all radically change, and it is, in fact, radically changing.
There's one graph in the book where I ask, “What is the shape of human history? Or what is the most important thing that ever happened in our past?” And I talk about a couple of candidates, maybe it was the birth of the great prophets like the Buddha or Muhammad or Jesus. Or maybe it was the invention of the wheel or the printing press, or perhaps it was the rise and fall of the great empires like the Roman Empire or the Aztec Empire or the Vikings. But then I look at some simple metrics such as the growth of world population, growth of GDP, increasing carbon emissions, decline of extreme poverty. And what you see is basically the same graph again and again and again. It's a line that's pretty much flat for hundreds of years, for millennia. And then you get this explosion around the year 1750, which was the Industrial Revolution.
We are now in this rocket ship that is accelerating and accelerating. If the history of our species would be a movie, then we are nearing the climax. This is the moment when the music is swelling, and we finally get to find out how the story ends. Will we break out into the Milky Way and will we be able to build some beautiful utopia, where robots will be doing all the work and we will finally be able to figure out what life is all about? Or are we going to build some pretty dystopian society? Should we read George Orwell, , once again, or Aldous Huxley, ? Where the robots will be in control and we will have lost agency. It's an unknown thing, but I think we can learn a lot from history here.
I'm not an optimist. I'm not a pessimist. I always see myself as a hopeful person. Hope is about the possibility of change, and it's also about what we can do to make a difference. I've always believed, like Margaret Mead, the anthropologist, said that “small groups of thoughtful, committed citizens can make a massive difference. In fact, it's the only thing that ever has.”So, this book is an encouragement to join one of those small groups, to try and steer this rocket ship that is, as I said, increasingly accelerating, going faster and faster, because the history of our species is, I believe, going to be determined, and the future of our species is going to be determined, in the next couple of decades, probably.
EC: Wow. That's wild, that we are actually alive for that moment.
RB: It's absolutely wild. I mean, our son was born in November here in New York, our second. And it's just wild to have two young kids and to realize, if all goes well, they're going to make it to the year 2100. It's a form of time travel, isn't it? A lot of people think that, I don't know, history is boring or something like that. I've always believed it's the most exciting of all the social sciences. It just expands your mind. It shows you that there’s so much more possible than we think today. People often overestimate how much change can happen in the next couple of months or years, but they vastly underestimate how much can happen in a few decades.
EC: Right. Do you find that time speeds up as you get older? I have teenagers now, and I feel like they were babies five minutes ago. I'm experiencing history a little bit different now in my forties, maybe.
RB: From a very young age, I've been very much aware of the fact that we're all going to die. I think that's the most essential fact of life, that our time on this earth is limited. There's this great book by Oliver Burkeman called . An average life lasts for around 4,000 weeks. When you visualize that, it's pretty powerful to see it, 4,000 dots. And after that, it's over. A career is obviously even shorter. So, it's around 2,000 work weeks. I think what you do with that time is one of the most important questions, one of the most important moral questions that you have to answer. I was always quite aware of that, because once I started to, indeed, experience this passage of time, I was like, I'm pretty sure that when I'm 80, I will be feeling like, “Oh, boom. It was over.”
"The history... and the future of our species is going to be determined in the next couple of decades, probably."
So, in a way, maybe this sounds strange, but in a way, I already feel old. From a young age, I had this deep desire not to waste time, not to spend time on things that are stupid, silly, insignificant, boring, you name it. And, again, this is also the call to action in the book. There are a lot of really talented people currently stuck in jobs that are also, frankly, quite boring. I spoke at Harvard a couple of days ago, and you talk to so many bright, young, idealistic students, and we know that, sadly, about 40, 45 percent are going to end up in the Bermuda Triangle of Talent, as my friend calls it. It's consultancy, corporate law, and finance. I'm not saying it's all useless. I mean, obviously we need bankers, a few of them, but I really doubt that this is the best allocation of talent. Many of these people could go on and achieve great things, build fantastic companies, take on some of the world's greatest challenges, but they get lost somewhere along the way when McKinsey knocks on their door, I guess.
For me, this is so important to be continuously aware of the simple fact that you're going to die. I think it's a very healthy thing to basically think about it every day. It might be over, so don't waste time.
EC: Yeah, talking about the ways in which we waste time, it's an interesting segue because I was really fascinated to learn about who you call your personal hero, Thomas Clarkson. Having not deeply studied the abolitionist period, he wasn't someone I'd personally learned about. But he was a young scholar at Cambridge in the 18th century, and he decided to take part in a Latin essay contest that led to his involvement in the abolitionist movement. And before I could get to admiring this guy, I was like “Latin essay contest.” That is like a crazy intellectual high bar. I think I was tripping over that because that takes a lot of rigor and attention and a different kind of focus. I wonder if we have undercut our ability to do that today in this world of social media. You talk about wasting time. I watched my husband watch TikTok for an hour last night, and I was like, “Oh, my God.” I just think we are doing this to ourselves a little bit. I wanted to see if you had any thoughts about attention and social media in the era of trying to do deep and meaningful work.
RB: Yeah, sure. Well, we aren't just doing it to ourselves. It's being done to us by very powerful, big technology companies that are making a shitload of money in the meantime. So, in that sense, it's a little bit like the tobacco industry, an industry that has a history of more than a century now of misleading people, making our kids addicted. Eighty percent of people start smoking when they're still kids. And the vast majority of people would rather stop, but they can't because they're so addicted. There was this one study about TikTok in which teenagers were being asked, "Would you like to live in a world without TikTok?" And most of them said yes, and they were even willing to pay for it. But we're in this collective action problem where, because everyone is on it, you can't get out. We've been imprisoned by these environments.
So, yeah, Thomas Clarkson lived in a very different time, absolutely, in the 18th century, which had its own challenges. Back then, child mortality was 40, 50 percent? Lots of kids were dying before their 18th birthday, so I really don't want to make the case that in the past everything was better. But as a young student, he really wanted to make a name for himself. He was quite ambitious. He studied at the University of Cambridge, and by pure chance he was asked to participate in this essay contest and write an essay about the question whether it's okay to own and sell other human beings. He had never really thought all that much about the question. You gotta imagine, which is difficult for us today, but back then, slavery and owning other people was just utterly normal. And not just in the Western world, but across the world. Pretty much all civilizations engaged in it. The Aztecs, the Mayas, the Romans, the Chinese. The idea of human freedom and that you own your own time, you own your own labor, is a very recent idea, actually, that had to be invented.
And so Thomas Clarkson had never really thought all that much about the question, but he thought, "You know what? Interesting intellectual challenge." He wrote the essay, won first prize, and then after the prize ceremony in Cambridge, he was on his horse back to London, and he kept thinking about this essay that he had just written. He was like, "Well, but if this is actually true, then shouldn't someone do something about this?" So that's the really powerful moment in his life, when he bridged the gap from awareness to action, and when, a few weeks later, he actually pledged to devote the rest of his life to fighting slavery. That's what he did, 60 years.
EC: When you say he pledged his life, was it in any kind of official capacity, or he's just noted that that was an internal pledge he made?
RB: No, it was at a small dinner with a few abolitionists in the village of Teston, which was sort of the capital in the UK at the time for the abolitionist movement. And at some point he stood up and he said to his friends there, "I pledge that I will devote the rest of my life, and give it everything I have." On the one hand, you can read and then think, “Oh, he is a bit of a humblebragger, a little bit of a vain man,” which he probably was. But the point is he did it. Sixty-one years. He gave it everything he had. At some point, he traveled 35,000 miles across the United Kingdom to spread this abolitionist propaganda everywhere. And he had a total burnout when he was 33, a nervous breakdown. He couldn't walk the stairs anymore. He couldn't even speak. He started sweating profusely whenever he tried to do that.
Now, the point is obviously that Thomas Clarkson probably should have remembered his breathing exercises. He maybe should have read a few books about mindfulness. But today, a lot of people are getting burnouts while they do jobs they don't even like, the jobs that don't really make the world a better place. So, that is the lesson we can learn from Thomas Clarkson, if you're going to get a burnout anyway, then make sure you're fighting a cause or fighting a fight that is worth fighting.
EC: You write about how, a lot of moments in history where something has radically changed, they started off as unpopular ideas. Like slavery, it's hard to imagine, but it used to be so common. What do you say to people who really are struggling to speak out against the status quo? I think my “mesearch” is that making friends and family uncomfortable with your beliefs is a big blocker for folks. I just wonder if you have any kind of guidance or thoughts on how to get people over that hump?
RB: I think the most important thing is to find yourself a good bubble of like-minded, ambitious idealists. Things become much easier when you don't feel alone anymore. This is actually why I co-founded an organization called The School for Moral Ambition that's all about implementing the ideas in the book. The first thing we're trying to do is to bring people together. One of the causes that I care deeply about is animal suffering. I think the way we treat animals is one of the greatest moral atrocities of our time. I think anyone who walks into a modern factory farm is going to be horrified by what you see. And still, the vast majority of us consume huge quantities of meat and dairy, even though if we would see a video of how that is produced, we would lose our appetite quite quickly.
"A lot of people are getting burnouts while they do jobs they don't even like, the jobs that don't really make the world a better place."
There are some self-help authors that really like to dunk on shame and guilt, and they say, "Oh, it's toxic, it's bad." I'm like, “No, evolution has given us these emotions for a reason.” They sometimes can be useful, to drive us in a better direction. I think it's perfectly fine to sometimes shame your friends and family members a little bit, especially if they're on their high horse, saying, "Oh, I care so much about this problem or that problem," but then they don't actually practice what they preach.
I come from, personally, the political left, and I am often quite annoyed with my friends on the left who like to preach a lot about what's wrong in the world, but then don't donate anything to effective charities or still eat meat from factory farms or live pretty average lives. I'm like, “Come on. If you're really serious about this, then do something.” On the other hand, I think it's also important to double down on the enthusiasm. So, for me, the right mix is 20 percent guilt/shame, and 80 percent enthusiasm. You can also be really excited about making the world a better place and showing that there's a different way of living your life. I think we've now seen that 50 years of shouting “go vegan” has not been super effective. That's what the animal rights movement did for a long time. So we now know that we need to build a different kind of movement that's a lot more pragmatic.
EC: Coalition, right?
RB: Yeah, a coalition. And we've got to find ways to create new tasty alternatives, sustainable proteins that are really healthy and also very tasty. I think it's really cool to see all the developments in this space. One of the things that made me excited about moving to the United States last year, when we moved with my family from the Netherlands to New York, was that I could finally eat the Impossible Burger, which is for some bizarre reason illegal in Europe, because we've banned all GMO products. But here, it's legal.
EC: Oh, interesting.
RB: The Impossible Burger is just the best plant-based burger out there, and it's super tasty. And that didn't exist a decade ago. I just get really excited to think about how much progress is ahead in the future, and I want to be part of the movement that accelerates this.
I think that, very often, moral revolutions can be accelerated by new technologies. We've seen this in the women's rights movement. The second feminist wave of the ’60 and the ’70s was unthinkable without the birth control pill. The birth control pill, the invention of that, was financed by this one radical philanthropist, Katharine McCormick, who was a very wealthy woman, who said, "I want a pill to exist that will give women the control over their own fertility." She deliberately looked for the scientists who could make it happen, which was an incredibly radical thing to do at the time. Even Planned Parenthood didn't want to be a part of it because they felt it was too dangerous, too controversial. And I think a lot of women today can be very grateful that she and others paved the way here.
I think we need something similar in the animal rights movement, where we need, as I said, a technological revolution. And then some people may say, "Ooh, I wouldn't want to eat that." I'm like, "Well, you currently eat the most disgusting crap." Again, go into a factory farm and you will be horrified. So, clean meat without pesticides, without antibiotics, without all the nastiness that is in our current food, it's actually a beautiful vision of what the future of food could be.
EC: Well, to talk about the people who have the privilege and the access they need to be moral pioneers, you note that there are lots of people who don't have that. There are so many people in the world who don't have the opportunity or resources. But then there's also people who work jobs that aren't large-scale charitable endeavors but they're absolutely essential, like teachers and doctors. These are critical social players in our world. Is your book not for them? Is it fair to say that? Are you really trying to target people who are wasting their time, specifically, or is there a lesson to be taken from those kind of people?
RB: This book is really for everyone. I think that everyone can be morally ambitious. Rosa Parks was a seamstress. Nelson Mandela worked as a security guard in a mine. And these people became the great moral leaders of the 20th century.So, I really do not want to say that you need some Harvard diploma in order to be someone who makes a massive difference. That's absolutely not true. But I am calling out the people who have more privilege than others, because I think they have a bigger responsibility to use that privilege. Not just check your privilege, but you use your privilege to help others. And you're absolutely right, about half of the population works in an essential job, and these people don't need to be lectured by me on moral ambition. The teachers, the nurses, the care workers, the plumbers, if they would go on strike, that would be a disaster for society.
"You don't do good things because you are a good person. No, it's the other way around. You become a good person when you start doing good things."
In a previous book of mine, , I once compared two strikes that happened in the ’60s and the ’70s. One strike was of garbage collectors in 1968. The strike lasted for six days, and after six days a state of emergency had to be declared in the city because it turns out we really cannot do without garbage collectors. They're very, very important. And then two years later, there was a strike of bankers in Ireland. It was the only strike of bankers that I could find in all of world history. Well, that strike didn't last for six days but for six months. And after six months, the bankers came back and said, "All right, all right, all right, we'll get back to work," because actually nothing much had happened. The economy just kept growing. And that really forces you to ask this question, who are the real wealth creators in our society?
I'm not saying that all finance is socially useless. I mean, finance has an important role to play in enabling business to come up with new companies and innovations, et cetera. But I do think it's gotten much too big, and that a lot of talent is going to waste there. It used to be very different. In the United States in the ’60s and ’70s, so many Ivy League graduates would go on and work for the government or in research, building great innovations, or for the military. Today, so much talent is being sucked up by both Silicon Valley and by Wall Street. I think a lot of that work is not very socially beneficial. There's this famous quote from someone who worked at Facebook for a long time. He said that “the best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click on ads.” And that's pretty sad.
EC: True and sad. Have you picked up that book ?
RB: Not yet. I'm looking forward to reading it.
EC: Yeah. I haven't either, but there's a lot of chatter around the office.
RB: Yeah, I can imagine.
EC: So, because I'm here at Audible, I want to make sure I touch on the performance of your book. You chose not to narrate the bulk of it. You covered the prologue and the epilogue. But you found someone who was a native Dutch voice actor to narrate the rest of the book. How'd you go about selecting them? Was it important to find someone whose voice resembled your own?
RB: Well, I like it that Boris [Hiestand], he's a fantastic English speaker, but you can hear a little bit of that Dutchness in it. So, I did like that. I'm not a native speaker myself, and I think it's really important that people listen to someone who really has mastered the language. It took quite a few takes, I can tell you, to record the prologue, even though it’s just two pages. But I'm super excited to be working with him, and I think it's an absolute joy listening to him.
EC: He did a fantastic job. I also really enjoyed your sections of the book, too. You could have done the whole thing.
RB: Yeah, a lot of people tell me that, but I often wonder whether they're stroking my ego. I think people deserve to listen to a native speaker who really has mastered the language, and it's a job, right? People spend hours listening to a book.
EC: Narrators often make or break a book as well. I mean, it really can be the difference between “I'm going to buy this or not.”
RB: Absolutely. Well, look, I did the Dutch one. So, if people want to learn their Dutch, then they're welcome to listen to the Dutch audiobook.
EC: So, that's an interesting question. Do you write in Dutch and then translate it, or do you write starting in English?
RB: Yes. The Netherlands has always been my little laboratory where I test out ideas, see what works, see what doesn't. I work for this journalism platform called The Correspondent, where I've written my essays for the last decade. And then after a while, you turn them into a book. First a Dutch book, and then again you get a lot of feedback from readers, and then you adapt it again. So, when English readers or listeners get to read or listen to the book, it's been through a whole evolutionary process.There are so many people who’ve already looked at it, multiple editors, multiple copy editors, thousands of readers.
I quite like that process, to be honest. I've got an utterly brilliant translator, Erica Moore, who is a total perfectionist. And she's a bit of an editor as well. She doesn't stick to her task, she doesn't just translate. She's quite opinionated, which is absolutely great about her. I think she's made the book much, much better. We've collaborated on all my books, Utopia for Realists, Humankind, and Moral Ambition as well.
EC: Yeah, the National Book Awards always awards a prize for work in translation, and it's always so touching to see. Often the translators and the writers get up on stage together. It is such a collaborative effort.
RB: Yeah, it's a pretty intense relationship. For many months we lived together in Google Docs having extended discussions on like, “What's the right way to translate this? Does this joke work in English? How do we adapt this?” Translating is such a craft. Obviously, in the age of AI, a lot of translators are losing their job, and I've also honestly been amazed by how good AI has been getting. But for this, translating a book for a big audience that really needs to be A-plus-plus-plus in terms of readability, AI can't compete with the best translators. But you have to be really, really good now as a translator to keep up.
EC: I think all writers are feeling that a little bit. There's certainly a tremor of anxiety around AI doing creative work versus a real person.
RB: Yep. Absolutely.
EC: Well, where I wanted to finish out was, you're very data-driven and I heard on a podcast you mentioned, what's your favorite website about the world in data?
RB: Yeah. Ourworldindata.org, a fantastic website about the state of the world in numbers.
EC: What I really thought was interesting in this book was that section about obsessing over spreadsheets, and you really sort of emphasize the need to tackle problems that are measurable. So, I wanted to ask, do you have a target with this book? Like, out of 100 people who listen to it, how many lives are going to change?
RB: So, in the book, I've got one case study of Rob Mather, a former consultant and manager who radically changed his life and founded the best charity in existence today. It's called the Against Malaria Foundation, and they've already raised, what is it, $700 million to fight malaria and save over 200,000 lives. It's an extraordinary story of one individual making an enormous world-historical difference. I was recently emailing with Rob and he congratulated me on the publication of the book. And he also asked me this question, “What will success look like for you?” I said to him, "Look, if this book creates one additional Rob Mather, then I don't have to work for the rest of my life."
So, that's the goal. It's small groups of thoughtful, committed citizens that can change the world. And sometimes it's really individuals, people like a Thomas Clarkson, like a Susan B. Anthony, like a Rob Mather, who can make that massive difference. I deeply believe that moral ambition is contagious. It's not necessarily something you have to be born with. You don't do good things because you are a good person. No, it's the other way around. You become a good person when you start doing good things. And so I hope that listening to this book will be a little bit like getting converted, that you catch the bug. That you're infected by this idea, almost this virus, of moral ambition. And if that happens, then people are very welcome to join our movement, moralambition.org. We've got a lot of programs, fellowships, circles. You can be part of the community. We've got 8,000 members from 80 countries. And I can't wait to meet you all.
EC: That's awesome. Well, I think we're going to leave it on that super optimistic note. I love that. Rutger, it's been such a pleasure talking to you. And listeners, you can get Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference on Audible now.
