Latest news with #moralambition
CNN
14-06-2025
- General
- CNN
He once rebuked billionaires for not paying enough taxes. Now this historian says we need ‘moral ambition' to fight tyranny
It is one of the most inspiring photographs in modern history, one that reveals the worst and best of human nature with a click of a camera shutter. It is a black-and-white image of a crowd of workers at a shipbuilding factory in Nazi Germany. It shows hundreds of them tightly packed in virtual military formation, extending a Nazi salute to Adolf Hitler — all except for one man. He stands in the middle of the throng, coolly defiant, with his arms folded across his chest and a sour look on his face. Historians have debated the identity and fate of the man in the photo, which was taken in 1936. But the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman uses the image in his new book to ask two questions: What innate characteristic enabled that man to resist the fear the Nazi state instilled in so many of its citizens? And what can people today learn from him, and others who are fighting new forms of state-sponsored fear? Bregman says one antidote to that fear is 'moral ambition.' It's his term for people who blend the idealism of an activist with the ruthless pragmatism of an entrepreneur to make the world a better place. In his new book, 'Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference,' Bregman uses the example of that German shipyard worker and other ordinary people to critique what he sees as a common failing of people on the left: They fall for the 'illusion of awareness,' a belief that simply exposing people to injustice will inspire them to act. 'Awareness doesn't put food on the table. Awareness won't keep a roof over your head,' writes Bregman, a vegan who has spoken out against animal factory farming. 'With awareness, you don't cool down the planet, you're not finding shelter for those 100 million refugees, and you won't make a bit of difference for the 100 billion animals at factory farms worldwide. Awareness is at best a starting point, while for many activists, it seems to have become the end goal.' Bregman has built a global audience by making others face uncomfortable truths. He shot to prominence following his 2017 TED talk about overcoming poverty by offering a universal basic income. Two years later, he went viral at a 2019 Davos panel discussion for his scathing rebuke of billionaires for not paying their fair share of taxes. ('Taxes, taxes, taxes. All the rest is bullsh** in my opinion,' he said). In a conversation from his home in New York City, Bregman spoke to CNN about why the Black Lives Matter movement failed to generate transformational change, why he gets most of his criticism from the left, and how his parents — Peta, an activist and special needs teacher, and his father, Kees, a minister — inspire his work. His remarks were edited for brevity and clarity. As a young boy, I was already obsessed with the Second World War. The country in which I grew up, the Netherlands, was occupied by the Nazis. I always wondered, what would I have done? There's huge literature around the people who actually did something. I was interested in the psychology of these resistance heroes. I thought that they were more altruistic, or maybe more extroverted, or maybe they have had certain privileges in the sense that sometimes you need resources to do the right thing. But none of that turned out to be true. It turns out that resistance heroes were really a cross-section of the population: rich, poor, young, old, left-wing, right-wing. A group of researchers looked at the evidence and said, hey, wait a minute, there is actually one thing that seems to be going on here. In 96% of all cases, when people were asked to join the resistance, they said yes. And then I had a epiphany. This (the resistance) was actually an idea that was spreading, almost like a pandemic. People were inspiring each other. This also explains why the resistance was a very local phenomenon; it wasn't evenly distributed over the country. People gave each other courage. That's super simple, but I think it's a quite profound lesson for us today. We often imagine that people do good things because they are good people. But it's exactly the other way around. You do good things, and that makes you a good person. You just got to get started or be inspired by others, and that's how you get there. Resistance is incredibly important. My fellow historian, Timothy Snyder, always says that we should not obey in advance, right? We shouldn't, even before the order goes out, start behaving as if we live in an authoritarian system. I was very glad to see Harvard show some courage, especially after the very cowardly behavior of some of the big law firms. Acts of resistance can be highly contagious, just as cowardice can be contagious. As a historian, I'm reminded of other periods in our history. It's often said that we live in a second Gilded Age (a tumultuous period of shocking income inequality and concentration of corporate power in the US). And if I look at the first one in the late 19th century, I see very similar things. I see an incredible amount of immorality and amount of political corruption. I see elites that were utterly detached from the realities of ordinary people's lives. But what gives me hope is that after the Gilded Age came the Progressive Era, with people like Theodore Roosevelt, a Harvard graduate (and a powerful progressive reformer), someone who grew up in a privileged environment. And then so many things happened in such a short period of time that were unthinkable: the (introduction of) income tax, labor and environmental regulations, the shorter work week, the breakup of big monopolies and corporate power. It was quite incredible. I'm not predicting that this will happen or anything like that, but I do think it is time for a countercultural revolution. It should be led by people from the bottom up, but also very much by elites who have a certain sense of noblesse oblige (the belief that people with wealth and power should help the less fortunate). This is really what you see in the progressive period. Take Alva Vanderbilt. She used to be this pretty decadent woman who was married to Cornelius Vanderbilt. She wanted to get into the Four Hundred, the most wealthy and elite families in New York. But then her husband died, and she did the same thing as MacKenzie Scott (the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. She turned into an activist and became one of the main financiers of the women's rights movement. This (the Progressive era) was very much a revolt among elites who were just utterly fed up with the total decadence, immorality, and also frankly the unseriousness of the people who were in power. I see the exact same thing today. At some point, it's time to get fed up with it and provide an alternative. But that really starts with doing the work yourself. I'm too much of a historian to be a real optimist. I know that things can go downhill very quickly. If you study Germany in the 1930s or the 1920s, you see a society that is one of the most civilized and technologically advanced countries in the world. There was this idiot named Adolf Hitler, but most people didn't take him seriously. We are living through an extraordinary moment. The next five to 10 years are going to be incredibly important for the future of the whole human race. The Industrial Revolution in 1750 was the most important thing that happened in all of human history. We are living through a similar moment. It's easy to see the dystopian possibilities, and I really do not want to dismiss them. But at the same time, some of the utopian possibilities that I sketch out in my first book, 'Utopia for Realists,' which were often dismissed as quite naïve — they become more realistic by the day. Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, says that 50% of entry-level jobs could be gone five years from now (because of AI). We are going to have to rethink so many basic aspects of the social contract. This whole idea that you have to work for your money, that you're not a valuable human person if you don't have a job — we have to get rid of that idea quite soon, because it's going to be very cruel to hang on to that if we keep automating our jobs so quickly. All of this could lead to some wonderful utopian possibilities. We will finally be able to ditch the whole idea that you have to work for a living. Then we will finally be able to figure out what life is all about. Will we get it right? I don't know. Yes, I'm afraid so. I spend a lot of time studying the civil rights movement, and what really strikes me about that movement is just how effective it was in translating awareness into tangible results. They got these huge packages of legislation through Congress that made such a massive, tangible difference in the lives of real people. And then look at Black Lives Matter. It's incredibly impressive on one hand — it was the biggest protest movement in the history of the United States. But then look at the actual results. It's not nothing — some police forces changed a little bit. But compared to the amount of energy around that movement, it's been pretty disappointing. Prev Next This is not true for BLM alone. It's true for many protest movements of the last two decades. And this is probably because in this online era, it's easy to start up the empathy and the anger. We see it in Los Angeles (where people are protesting the Trump administration's sweeping immigration crackdown) right now. You get people out in the streets very quickly. But is there an actual plan, an actual strategy? Changing the world is very difficult. It takes enormous perseverance, and coalition building, which is quite difficult. You have an online environment where people are calling each other out all the time over purity politics. I often find it funny but also depressing that I get the most criticism from my friends on the left. It can be all kinds of things. I'm currently building an organization called the School for Moral Ambition. We are building fellowships for ambitious, talented people to take on some of these very pressing global issues, whether that's animal factory farming or tax avoidance by billionaires. But that stuff needs to be financed. So we work with groups like Patriotic Millionaires, for example — wealthy people who say, hey, tax me more. But for some on the left, it's like, ewww, you're working with rich people. In my book, I talk about the noble loser, those people who like to say, 'I stood on the right side of history. We didn't vote for Kamala (Harris), because Kamala was pro-Israel.' Well, look what that got us. Whether we're talking about people who are currently suffering in Palestine, animals who are suffering or people who are being oppressed — they don't care if you're right. They want you to win. I think so. I've always been very proud of my dad. I remember very well sitting in church, looking at my dad, and thinking he has the coolest job. I looked at my friends, and one's dad was an accountant and another was a marketer. And my dad is a minister, who talked about the biggest questions of life. I don't give the same answers (as him) to all those questions, even though I think we've become closer philosophically and spiritually as I got older. But I've always believed that those are the right questions to ask. We have only one life on this precious planet, and it's very short. No matter how rich we get, we can never buy ourselves more time. A lot of my secular and progressive friends love to dunk on religion, and sometimes for good reasons. But I've always appreciated those parts of religion that force us to reckon with the bigger questions of what life is actually about. My mother is an incredible woman. She is the only one who keeps getting arrested in our family. The other day she was arrested again as a 68-year-old climate activist. For her, it's always been very natural and logical to live in line with your own ideals. A lot of people think certain things, but they don't act on it. Many of my friends on the left care so much about poverty and inequality, and then I'll ask, 'How much do you donate to effective charities?' and very often, the answer is nothing. What I've learned from my mother is that you can just do what you say. She's also never been afraid to use the power of shame. A lot of people say that shaming is toxic, and I tend to disagree. I think there's a reason why we humans are pretty much the only species in the whole animal kingdom with the ability to blush. They thought it was hilarious. Those are the moments when I make my mother proud. John Blake is a CNN senior writer and author of the award-winning memoir, 'More Than I Imagined: What a Black Man Discovered About the White Mother He Never Knew.'
Irish Times
14-06-2025
- Business
- Irish Times
Moral Ambition by Rutger Bregman: An engaging attempt to get us to change the world
Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference Author : Rutger Bregman ISBN-13 : 978-1526680600 Publisher : Bloomsbury Guideline Price : £20 Rutger Bregman is one of the most refreshing thinkers to have appeared around the time of the global pandemic, when many of us were seeking new approaches to living after the seismic shock of seeing millions dying. Here was a new voice worth listening to; someone who looked at the rules of engagement honestly, whether he was slapping the barefaced cheeks of those at Davos by raising the subject of tax avoidance, or flummoxing Fox News's Tucker Carlson by calling him out during an interview as a millionaire funded by billionaires. [ A 'really subversive idea': Most people are pretty decent Opens in new window ] Bregman has never philosophised in fear, but rather in positivity, and now he wants us to stop wasting our time in life and use it instead to make lasting changes: to show 'moral ambition' so that we are not only on the right side of history, but make our own contribution, too. The Dutchman sets out that most people spend 80,000 hours of their lives working; time that, in the main, is meaningless if you exclude core services and essential jobs (he references David Graeber here, who conceptualised the idea of pointless, Sisyphean work in his essay Bullshit Jobs). READ MORE [ The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World by David Graeber: Intense flares of thought from a brilliant mind Opens in new window ] 'Moral ambition is the will to make the world a wildly better place,' writes Bregman, 'to devote your working life to the great challenges of our time, whether that's climate change or corruption, gross inequality or the next pandemic. It's a longing to make a difference – and to build a legacy that truly matters.' Bregman won't tell you how to do this. But he does show you ways in which it has been done, by rummaging through history and academia and gathering data and a cast of activists, innovators and entrepreneurs who – with the required moral ambition – achieved tectonic changes in issues such as slavery, racism and rights, medicine and science, and so on. (He admits many of those featured, but not all, shared degrees of privilege.) It's an engaging, valid argument in the main, even if the book's own ambition can at times make it feel unwieldy, and some of the material may be overly familiar to some readers (Ralph Nader, Peter Singer, etc), whereas the moral ambition of someone such as Rosa Parks is a self-evident if necessary inclusion. The author's ambitious optimism for a better tomorrow will see you through to the end though, and he's right about the next moral hurdle that humans must overcome: eating animals and feeling fine about it.
Forbes
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Moral Ambition By Rutger Bregman — Review
Greed and selfishness are failing humanity: can 'moral ambition' save the day – and us? Helping hand. getty Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?Tell me, what is it you plan to dowith your one wild and precious life? – The Summer Day by Mary Oliver I have eagerly followed Dutch historian Rutger Bregman's career online ever since I saw a video clip on twitter of him speaking truth to power at the Davos CEO Greedfest Conference. In this video, Mr Bregman admits to the audience that he was bewildered by the economic scolds at Davos who talked about participation, justice, equality and transparency, but 'nobody raises the issue of tax avoidance and the rich not paying their share. It is like going to a firefighters' conference and not talking about water.' After I had been won over by that charming introduction to his moral philosophy, I simply had to know more. I'm most pleased to tell you that, a few years later, I finally managed to get a review copy of his hot-off-the-presses book, Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference (Little, Brown and Company, 2025). This impassioned book is incredibly readable – I read it in one go. It uses crisp, energetic prose and interesting examples to argue that it is possible for all of us to live meaningful lives. Additionally, reading the opening credits in this book that quote numerous book reviews already published, I felt like I was in an online book club with some of my favorite famous people, from Trevor Noah and Timothy Snyder to Stephen Fry, and I was determined to read this book that they all were talking about, so I could be part of the conversation, and an active participant in this social movement, too. Mr Bregman opens Moral Ambition by discussing how most people waste their talents on bullshit jobs, when they could instead focus their talents, energy and time on how to live a meaningful life that is useful to society. We learn how our conventional definitions of success harm us, animals and the planet, and Mr Bregman uses numerous examples to demonstrate how we can shift our focus from personal gain to societal benefit. This, in a nutshell, is moral ambition; the willingness to devote one's life to solving the world's biggest problems – globally pressing threats like climate change, pandemics, or the energy crisis. In his book, Mr Bregman describes the four categories of people as he sees them. First are people who are neither ambitious nor idealistic. This category includes those who work at meaningless 'bullshit jobs' and those people who only seek to retire. Second are people who are ambitious, but not idealistic. This group includes consultants, bankers, many tech employees (and I'd suppose, most politicians.) Third are people who are idealistic, but not ambitious. Most protesters and activists fall into this group. Fourth are those incredibly rare people who are both ambitious and idealistic. Mr Bregman moves on to discuss his concept of 'zeroes', 'ones', and 'twos'. Zeroes are those rare people who start things, the trailblazers – or troublemakers, if you prefer. Ones are the people who help the zeros in their crusades. Twos are those who join in and follow after things have gotten started. According to Mr Bregman, regardless of whether you are a zero, a one or a two, the ultimate goal is doing something that's useful for humanity. As an example, he points to how the young law student, Ralph Nader, got his start back in the day, by successfully suing General Motors for making unsafe cars. Nader's actions led to LBJ signing the Highway Safety Act and Traffic Safety Act. Following on that success, Nader then started the 'Radical Nerds', a group of talented and idealistic law students who were recruited by Nader specifically to focus on solving societal problems. Mr Bregman discusses the idea of the 'Noble Loser' – someone with ethical intentions but unable to make a difference. This is often because Noble Losers don't know how to make a difference. According to Mr Bregman, one way to overcome this deficit is to join a group centered around moral ambition, that relies on a cult-like mentality to identify and accomplish their goals. (I disagree with the author here because a cult can so easily go wrong, as we've seen far too often.) Some of Mr Bregman's examples include the Against Malaria Foundation, the Abolition of Slavery movement and even 'ordinary people' hiding Jewish people in their homes during WW2. Using these examples and more, Mr Bregman discusses what is necessary to make a substantially positive social impact. He concludes that it really doesn't take much. For instance, many of those who hid Jews did so simply because they were asked to. And anyone who knows this can have similarly powerful social impacts. In the book's final chapter, Mr Bregman introduces three global challenges (in addition to climate change) that could serve as worthy, solvable threats for those with moral ambition who are seeking to improve society: nuclear war; artificial intelligence and biological warfare. Despite some of my reservations, I think Mr Bregman's argument to think carefully about the impact that your actions and life have on others is critically important. Taking deliberate actions to live a meaningful life, a life that is useful, and impactful, is the most fulfilling way to live your best life. An inspirational guide to finding that path for ourselves, Moral Ambition reminds us that the real measure of success lies not in what we accumulate, but in what we contribute, and it shows how we can build a lasting legacy that truly matters. Highly recommended for absolutely everyone from the ages of 15 to 115, I think this powerful, well-argued book would be an especially thoughtful and transformative graduation gift for your high school or university students. © Copyright by GrrlScientist | hosted by Forbes | Socials: Bluesky | CounterSocial | Gab | LinkedIn | Mastodon Science | Spoutible | SubStack | Threads | Tribel | Tumblr | Twitter
Irish Times
23-05-2025
- Business
- Irish Times
Leo Varadkar has more to offer than reality TV shows or doling out PR advice to mega-rich clients
A Dutch historian has established an incubator for idealistic leadership that he calls the School for Moral Ambition. Rutger Bregman, who confesses to being an indomitable optimist, is the author of a book entitled Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference. His non-profit school's mission is to put that message into practice by redirecting the careers of 'high achievers' motivated by money and status towards making the world a better place. The cynical guffaws in corporate boardrooms are already audible. Yet Bregman (37) is starting with an ace in his hand – most people are well-intentioned. 'If people desperately want to work for McKinsey and their main goal in life is to go skiing and have that cottage on the beach, fine. People have the right to be boring,' he told the New York Times, somewhat sneerily . 'But I think there are quite a few people who work at Goldman Sachs or Boston Consulting Group who are looking for a way out.' Bregman's initiative coincides with the foundation of a US fellowship for 'empathetic leadership' by the Centre for American Progress Action Fund jointly with former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern . Her premiership was distinguished by exceptional acts of compassion. Most memorably, after 51 people died in mass killings at two Christchurch mosques, she embraced Muslim mourners while wearing a headscarf and pronounced: 'They are us.' In her final speech to parliament, she said she hoped she had demonstrated that a leader 'can be anxious, sensitive, kind and wear your heart on your sleeve'. When, aged 42, she announced she was quitting politics because she realised that, after five years, she could no longer give it her best, the dominant narrative was that she had 'burned out'. The tone of the commentary was one of incredulity that a politician would walk off the rose-strewn stage just because she felt she could no longer give it her optimum. READ MORE [ Jennifer O'Connell: Response to Jacinda Ardern's resignation was depressing and predictable Opens in new window ] For all his Fine Gael conservatism, Leo Varadkar displayed some of Ardern's spirit during his time as a political leader. He and his partner Matt Barrett welcomed a Ukrainian war refugee into their home and, as a registered medical doctor, the then tánaiste volunteered to administer vaccines on his time off from government work during the Covid-19 pandemic. The vitriol heaped on him by keyboard warriors accusing him of exploiting the crises for self-promotion exposed the depth of cynicism in elements of the public rather than in him. A tight-lipped Varadkar was asked about his post-politics career plans while climbing a mountain in South Africa for RTÉ's adventure show, Uncharted with Ray Goggins, broadcast last week. His future includes an advisory position with the international PR agency Penta , whose clients include Microsoft, Google and JP Morgan. [ Uncharted with Ray Goggins review: Leo Varadkar has to get halfway up a mountain with Lyra before he lets his guard down Opens in new window ] As he struggled up that mountain in hazardous weather, I could not but think this man has more to offer than the jangling of his nerves on the slippery slope of an entertainment show and doling out advice on their public image to mega-rich clients. He is the prototype of accomplished, status-aware people being targeted by Bregman's mission to lure elites away from their 'wasted lives'. The Dutchman's premise is simple – capitalism has a boundless ability to create highly-paid and socially aggrandising jobs that make little contribution to the betterment of our world. He points to the financial sector as an example, saying 45 per cent of Harvard graduates end up in consultancy or finance. Some of the world's most lavishly enumerated chief executives are running wealth management and private equity companies. But are they happy? You pay peanuts, you get monkeys, goes the justification for obscenely bloated salaries. We've heard that mantra from bankers whose cupidity helped collapse the Irish economy in 2008. Top talent requires top dollar, they wailed. Top talent's vision, it turned out, is machines doing the jobs once done by people. We heard the mantra again in 2021 when a new secretary general was appointed to the Department of Health on a €292,000 salary, exceeding his predecessor's by more than €90,000. That's the department ultimately responsible for the €2 billion-plus children's hospital that has been under construction for a decade. Most recently, we heard it in the case of Brendan McDonagh , the Nama chief executive who withdrew as the putative 'housing tsar' amid controversy about his anticipated €430,000 salary. The political system cultivates the ideology that money is the measure of the man. Donald Trump represents the worst excesses and – let us hope – the dying sting of that mindset. The world's history of self-interest features a cast from Caligula and the Borgias to Vladimir Putin and Charlie Haughey. Hubris, megalomania and plain greed underlie the greatest existential threats to humankind currently posed by climate destruction and wars. It requires smart influencers willing to prioritise humankind's needs over their own to turn the tide. Bregman's theory is that talented people would be more fulfilled and more admired by concentrating their brilliant minds on the objective of making life better for others instead of accumulating zeros in their emoluments. 'She/he was loaded,' hardly compares as a headstone epitaph to 'she/he improved life on Earth'. Checking your privilege is no substitute for using it to benefit others. Former president Mary Robinson has used her international capital to try to save the planet. Jimmy Carter could have chosen to dine out on his reputation for the 41 years after he left the White House, yet he became most respected for the humanitarian work he did for the remainder of his life. The Robinsons and Carters of our age will remain the exceptions unless the cultural reverence for self-interested wealth-creators is turned on its head. That transformation needs a critical mass of converts to the idea that working to make the world a better place for everyone is more rewarding than working to enhance your own place in the world. Ardern's fellowship aims to inculcate 'pragmatic idealism' by drawing on the human strengths of kindness and empathy. Such values could provide the signposts to exit our zeitgeist of megalomania lorded over by the twin grabbers Putin and Trump and their sycophantic acolytes.
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.
