This viral critic of the Davos elite is both admirable and annoying

Telegraph

24-04-2025

The Dutch historian Rutger Bregman is best known as a gadfly to the global elite. He went viral online in 2019 when, speaking on stage at Davos, he criticised attendees of the World Economic Forum for avoiding tax and taking private jets to Switzerland to listen to Sir David Attenborough talk about climate change. When Tucker Carlson then invited him on Fox News, Bregman pointed out that his host was 'a millionaire funded by billionaires'. Carlson insulted him and pulled the segment. Bregman's own recording of that exchange went viral too.
Bregman's first book was Utopia for Realists (2017), which argued in favour of universal basic income and a 15-hour workweek, and was buoyed by a popular TED talk on poverty. Humankind: A Hopeful History, a feelgood book out in 2020 – when readers were desperate to feel good – argued that human beings are, at heart, A-OK.
Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference, translated from Dutch by Erica Moore, offers something of a corrective to that optimism, or at least the brand of optimism that's laced with complacency. Bregman told Big Think magazine last year that he saw 'influencers reading Humankind [who] started posting: 'My faith in humanity is completely restored. I'm going to work less and just enjoy my life.'' It alarmed him: 'I felt I had created a monster.'
The cold water he douses on readers of Moral Ambition, as its subtitle implies, is an injunction: don't just stand there, do something. Bregman faults his fellow progressives for armchair activism, citing the ineffectiveness of contemporary protest movements such as Occupy compared to the coordinated efforts, say, of the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955. He also urges activists to set aside differences if they want to reach bigger goals. Coalition-building requires compromise; otherwise, he warns, 'you end up with a movement that's 100 per cent pure, but zero per cent effective.'
Bregman urges educated professionals to move away from what the anthropologist David Graeber dubbed 'bulls--t jobs', in fields such as consultancy, and instead to pursue socially meaningful work. 'Of all things wasted in our throwaway times,' Bregman writes, 'the greatest is wasted talent.' He highlights the paths of altruists such as the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson, the civil-rights activist Rosa Parks, and Rob Mather, founder of a malaria-fighting charity. Some of the case studies are instructive at the everyday scale: people, we learn, are more likely to help when they're directly asked.
Bregman's ambitions are admirable. If even a small percentage of those who pick up this book are spurred to action, whether that's a charity run or a complete change in career, it's hard to disagree that it will have been worth his effort. (The idea resonated personally: I left what he would consider a bulls--t job in investment banking to write a book about the future of seduction that I hoped readers would find helpful.)
The delivery of the message, however, is irksome. Bregman, the son of a pastor, is too susceptible to sermonising, and like most pop philosophy-history-psychology writers in the Malcolm Gladwell mould, he's prone to hyperbole and gross oversimplification. Twenty-five years after Gladwell's The Tipping Point, the Big Ideas genre continues to sell healthily – especially to a type the writer Gavin Jacobson has dubbed 'Waterstones Dad' – but its formula of anecdotes and simplistic diagrams isn't ageing well.
Bregman opens his book by making the curious choice to upbraid a Buddhist monk, Matthieu Ricard, whose brain activity in an MRI scan saw him branded 'the happiest man in the world'. Bregman's beef with Ricard, formerly a molecular geneticist who researched colonic bacteria, is that he had ditched the Institut Pasteur in Paris for a monastic life in Tibet, thereby depriving the world of his potential contribution to science. (He somewhat redeems himself in Bregman's eyes by later setting up a nonprofit.) Yet Ricard is also a bestselling author, having written books on altruism, happiness, meditation and animal rights, and translated numerous Buddhist texts. When you consider that Bregman is telling us all this in a book of his own, and the ripple effects of books are not quantifiable anyway, you wonder: who's to say whether Bregman or Ricard has the greater moral ambition?