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.
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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?
So what steps have you taken to get into the arena? I’m now an entrepreneur. I co-founded the School for Moral Ambition, which is an organization that helps as many people as possible to devote their career to some of the most pressing challenges we face. We like to see ourselves as the Robin Hood of talent. Robin Hood took away the money from the rich; we take away the talent. We were recently invited by a couple of students to start a Harvard chapter around the idea of moral ambition, and that’s quite fitting because you have the most prestigious university in the world, and 45 percent of graduates end up in consultancy or finance. [That number is from 2020; it has gone down since.] It’s an extraordinary waste of talent.
But materialism is real. A desire for status is real. People want to make money. So how do you incentivize someone who might be tempted to go into a line of work that you see as morally vacuous to instead pick a career that is morally ambitious? 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. 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. There’s a period where this happened in the U.S.: the move from the Gilded Age to the Progressive Era. You had figures such as Alva Vanderbilt — a fascinating character who was this very decadent woman, incredibly rich, but later in her life, after she divorced her Vanderbilt husband, became a radical suffragette and one of the main financers of the women’s rights movement. She reminded me of MacKenzie Scott, who divorced Jeff Bezos and now is one of the most morally ambitious philanthropists in the U.S. A decade ago, people like me were told to check our privilege. It’s important to be aware of how privileged you are, but it’s also important to use it.
The dismissal of people’s career choices as “boring” — that tone of light sarcasm or snideness shows up in the book also. Why communicate that way? It works quite well, David.
Does it? Yeah, I agree with you that financial incentives obviously play a big role, but it’s not the only thing. If you go back a couple of decades, students had a very different attitude. There’s this study called the American Freshman Survey, it’s been done since the late 1960s. At that time, when students were asked about their most important life goals, about 80 to 90 percent said that developing a meaningful philosophy of life was most important. Today that’s 50 percent. In the ’60s, 50 percent said making as much money as possible was a really important goal. Today, that’s 80 to 90 percent. The numbers have reversed. For me, that shows that this is not human nature. It is culture. It can change.
How does one determine what counts as sufficiently ambitious moral behavior? One of the main characters in the book is the British abolitionist Thomas Clarkson. He’s my personal hero. He participated in an essay contest at Cambridge University and had to answer this question: Is it OK to own other human beings? He had never really thought about the question. But he did his research, won first prize, and after he attended the prize ceremony, he was like: If this is true, then shouldn’t someone do something about it? Maybe I’ve got to be the one to do it. You can see this mix of idealism and vanity within him. He deeply cares about the suffering of enslaved people, but he also likes to see himself as this historical hero who devotes his life to abolishing slavery.
But this guy can’t be the benchmark! I’m getting there. [Laughs.] After seven years of doing that, he had a nervous breakdown, what we would call burnout. He took it too far, but let’s be honest: Today a lot of people get burned out while they do jobs they don’t like or that don’t contribute to the welfare of the world. So if we’re going to get burned out anyway, we might as well do something useful.
Your book has this implicit idea that there is a deficit of moral ambition in the United States. I want to press on that. One could say that the movement to overturn Roe v. Wade was morally motivated. Or one could argue that what happened on Jan. 6, 2021, was morally driven. So what would account for the possibility that moral ambition on the right seems to be more ascendant or more effectively utilized than moral ambition on the left? That’s a good question. Ralph Nader in the late ’60s and the ’70s built this incredible movement of young people who were like: We’re not going to go work for some boring corporate law firm. We’re going to Washington to lobby for a good cause. There’s one historian who estimates that they had their fingerprints on at least 25 pieces of federal legislation — the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act that saved hundreds of thousands of lives. It’s a beautiful example of what moral ambition can mean in practice. At some point a third of Harvard Law School applied to work for Ralph Nader because it was the coolest thing you could do. Right wingers looked at that model very carefully. They built this huge network of think tanks — the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society. I disagree with most of their goals, but I’m in awe of that perseverance. They built a network of 5,000 clerks and lawyers and did so many strategic lawsuits, and that all culminated in the Dobbs decision. That’s what it takes.
What does the left need to learn from the right when it comes to effecting moral change? There’s a real lack of ambition among progressives these days. Take the environmental movement. You’ve got so many people who are obsessed with their own footprint. There are all these commandments: Don’t eat meat, don’t fly, don’t have kids, don’t use plastic straws. In the best possible scenario, you will have reduced your footprint to zero, and you might as well not have existed — and then death is the highest ideal. Not very ambitious, in my view. The same is true for those who are called “woke.” They are often accused of going too far. I think they don’t go far enough. They’re mainly obsessed with policing language and using the right words to describe all the injustices in the world, and they’re very good at going viral. “Tax the rich” and “kill the patriarchy” get you a lot of likes on Instagram, but do you achieve anything?
Are there different ways that the left could be communicating its moral messages, particularly to younger men? There’s a lot to be said about that. Our daughter was born almost four years ago. So we bought all these lovely books about modern feminism and girls are smart, girls are powerful, girls can be anything. I loved all of that. Four months ago, our son was born, and I was like, I want all the books about what young men can become. You see a lack of that. We all know about toxic masculinity. We know about Andrew Tate. But what is the opposite? I would call it heroic masculinity: using what you have — your power, your privilege, whatever — to help those who need you.
Who would examples be? Think about the Frodos, the Luke Skywalkers.
It’s a bad sign if we have to point to Frodo and Luke Skywalker. OK, well, take Thomas Clarkson. These are young men who are motivated by a mix of vanity and idealism but then do the work. Those stories are powerful. We should get better at telling them to young men on TikTok because Andrew Tate is giving them a very different definition of success.
Somebody could want to support the cause of Israelis. They could want to support the cause of Palestinians. They could be energized morally by Donald Trump. They could be energized morally by Bernie Sanders. But insofar as somebody might want to determine whether or not the side that they’re energized by is the right side, how might they figure that out? It is important to be intellectually honest. If you’re morally serious, then you don’t care about your own purity. You want to do good, so you’re going to be open to the reality that you’re working on the wrong things or your solutions don’t work. In the book, I’ve got one example of a charity that after a big randomized controlled trial had to conclude that it wasn’t working, so they abandoned the project. Which is courageous and happens not nearly enough. There should be an annual award gala for people who made the biggest mistakes but were honest enough to admit it.
But very often the moral side we’re inclined to take is the side of people like us. So how do we get around the problem of tribalism when it comes to changing moral behaviors? In the fight against injustice, winning is a moral duty, so you’ve got to recognize that building coalitions is essential. That is something that leftists today need to understand. I was posting on social media about the great speech that Cory Booker gave, and the comments are full of people saying, Well, actually, he’s pro-Israel. People, we can keep going on like this in our little bubbles, but that’s not how we win next time. If you look at the abolitionist movement, initially it was mainly driven by these Quakers — who are very weird. They didn’t get much done because they weren’t taken seriously. It was only when they started working with the evangelicals that they really became a juggernaut for change. These people had to bite their tongue quite often because they disagreed on so many things, but that’s what it means to be morally serious.
I want to go back to one of your earlier books. You wrote “Utopia for Realists” years ago. In it you have sentences along the lines of, “politics has been reduced to problem management” and “the differences between the right and left are really about tax rates.” None of that feels as if it describes 2025. How do you account for the fact that the world feels so different? It’s a totally different zeitgeist. I was a millennial writing my first book and being frustrated by the fact that politics had become so boring. It didn’t seem like we had big utopian visions anymore. Every milestone of civilization — the end of slavery, democracy, equal rights for men and women — all these things were utopian fantasies once, and I was like: Well, what’s the next thing? Give me a bigger vision! I guess I got what I wished for. [Laughs.] I think that very often idealists know what they’re against. They’re against Trump, they’re against autocracy, they’re against austerity. But what are we actually for?
What would you say you stand for? What do you mean?
Well, you said, it’s not just what we’re against. So what are the things that you stand for? I believe we can totally abolish poverty. We’re more than rich enough right now, especially with the rise of A.I. We should use the bounty of A.I. and distribute it equally. That will be a dividend for all of us. It’s a bit like what Alaska has been doing since the ’80s: They recognize that the oil in the ground is owned by everyone in Alaska, so they’ve been giving a basic income to everyone. I think we should revive the dream of moving toward a much shorter working week as well. Until the ’70s, we were using a lot of our increased productivity, our economic growth, to work less, and back then sociologists and psychologists were saying, the great challenge of the future’s going to be boredom. I would say that possibility is still there for us, especially with another wave of automation about to happen. At the same time, we should never underestimate capitalism’s extraordinary ability to come up with B.S. jobs. One poll found that around 25 percent of people in rich countries think their own job is socially useless. I guess my point in this long rant is that there’s not just a dystopian possibility. There’s also a beautiful utopian possibility of how we use our technological capabilities to make a better world.
I could imagine someone coming across this interview and thinking the school and your books sound noble and well intentioned, but isn’t there something more morally ambitious you could be doing? I think this is going to be the last book for quite some time. Books are a great excuse to go on a publicity tour, and if you’re starting something like the School for Moral Ambition, a book is useful to have. But the main reason we founded the school is that we wanted to find the Thomas Clarksons of our time to work on some of the most pressing issues that we face. And if you ask me, what is the moral equivalent of fighting slavery today? I would say fighting factory farming. A couple of years ago, that’s what I envisioned doing. So I spent quite some time in the Netherlands going on talk shows advocating for farm animals. At some point I was like, is this the most effective thing? Maybe I could build something much bigger because I’m just a one-man army. People like Thomas Clarkson got a lot done because they brought many more people into the movement. So I feel that I’m doing the most ambitious thing I could be doing. But if you have better ideas, David, please push me.
We’ve been talking about a shift in values, and I think there’s a real burn-it-all-down sense of anger alive in the culture now, which is a seductive feeling. I want to connect that feeling to a book that you recommended to me: the autobiography of the philosopher and pacifist Bertrand Russell. In that book, he writes, in the context of public support in Britain for World War I, “I had supposed that most people liked money better than almost anything else, but I discovered that they liked destruction even better.” Was he wrong? Bertrand Russell certainly had his cynical moments. It’s a dark truth about humanity, that we can go nuts pretty quickly. I don’t know where we’ll go from here. Where I find hope is that I know of historical eras in which things got really dark as well — the late 18th century in Britain, the late 19th century in the United States — eras that were incredibly immoral, unequal, and where we had elites that were irresponsible and selfish. Then there was a countermovement, a cultural revolution that was started by elites. We desperately need that today. Someone said this to me recently: If you are watching the news right now and you’re not terrified for yourself because you have some savings or a nice job, then you are the person who needs to stand up. We see an enormous amount of cowardice, sadly. I guess I found hope in the simple knowledge that it only takes a small group of people to start spreading a different mentality. I like to see signs that that may be happening, and I just want to put more oil on that fire.
This interview has been edited and condensed from two conversations. Listen to and follow “The Interview” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, iHeartRadio, Amazon Music or the New York Times Audio app.
Director of photography (video): Tre Cassetta
David Marchese is a writer and co-host of The Interview, a regular series featuring influential people across culture, politics, business, sports and beyond.
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