Latest news with #SchoolForMoralAmbition
New York Times
17-05-2025
- Business
- New York Times
Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives
The world is full of highly intelligent, impressively accomplished and status-aware people whose greatest ambitions seem to start and stop with themselves. For Rutger Bregman, those people represent an irresistible opportunity. Bregman, 37, is a Dutch historian who has written best-selling books arguing that the world is better (mostly meaning wealthier, healthier and more humane) than we're typically led to believe, and also that further improving it is easily within our reach. Sounds a little off in these days of global strife and domineering plutocracy, doesn't it? Even Bregman, who is something of a professional optimist, is willing to admit that the arguments in his first two books — 'Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World' (2017) and 'Humankind: A Hopeful History' (2020) — land less persuasively now than when they were published. But his new book, 'Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference,' is his attempt to meet the current moment by redirecting self-interest into social good. He is trying to entice the people I mentioned earlier — society's brightest and most privileged — to turn away from what he sees as meaningless and hollow (albeit lucrative) white-collar jobs in favor of far more exciting and even self-aggrandizing work that aims to solve society's toughest problems. That's also the driving idea behind a nonprofit of which he is a founder, the School for Moral Ambition — a kind of incubator for positive social impact. A key question, though, is how exactly he plans on persuading people to rethink their own goals and values — which is to say, their own lives. Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Amazon | iHeart | NYT Audio App Your new book is an argument for why talented, high-achieving people should direct their energies toward more morally ambitious behavior. Do you see your writing as morally ambitious? Well, look, the reason I wrote this book was that I became frustrated with myself. I had a bit of an early midlife crisis. I was mainly spending time in this quote-unquote awareness business: You write books to convince people of certain opinions and then you hope that some other people do the actual work of making the world better. And I was working on a new book about the great moral pioneers of the past — the abolitionists, the suffragettes — but as I was studying their biographies, I experienced this emotion that I describe as moral envy: You're standing on the sidelines and wishing, gosh, wouldn't it be awesome to be in the arena? To actually have skin in the game? Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The Guardian
12-05-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
Why you should quit your job and change the world
'Moral ambition is the desire to stand on the right side of history before it is fashionable, to basically devote your career, your life, to some of the most pressing issues that we face as a species.' Rutger Bregman, historian and author of Moral Ambition, believes that too many of us are in what he calls 'bullshit jobs'. 'What I see is an enormous waste of talent,' he tells Hannah Moore. 'So many people who could go on and do great things, who are stuck in cubicles, writing reports no one's ever going to read, creating PowerPoints no one wants to look at. It's pretty sad, and that needs to change.' He has founded the School for Moral Ambition, which aims to match such individuals with a cause to tackle. 'We want to recruit a Swat team of very talented wealth managers, bankers and corporate lawyers who are currently working for the Empire – sorry, this is a Star Wars reference – and we want to convince them to work for the Rebel Alliance.' He believes they should be 'fighting tax avoidance, fighting tax evasion, because it's not enough for me to just shout, 'tax the rich'. You also need the radical nerds who understand everything about all the loopholes and make all the difference.' Support the Guardian today:
