Rutger Bregman: Moral Ambition; Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference

Moral ambition

I cannot believe that the purpose of life is to be ‘happy’. I think the purpose of life is to be useful, to be responsible, to be honorable, to be compassionate. It is, above all, to matter: to count, to stand for something, to have it make some difference that you lived at all. Leo Rosten, writer (1908–1997)

No, you’re not fine just the way you are

People may spend their whole lives climbing the ladder of success only to find, once they reach the top, that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall. Allen Raine, writer (1836–1908)

Moral ambition is the will to make the world a wildly better place. 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.

A full-time career consists of some 80,000 hours, or 10,000 workdays, or 2,000 workweeks. How you spend that time is one of the most important moral decisions of your life.

Category I jobs: not that ambitious, not that idealistic. The late anthropologist David Graeber (1961–2020) had a highly technical term for such positions: bullshit jobs. Some jobs are outright harmful and fall into what are sometimes called the ‘sin industries.’
Category II jobs: ambitious, but not all that idealistic. The second category of wasted talent consists of people who are ambitious but not so idealistic. Take graduates from the world’s most prestigious universities. Some 45 per cent of Harvard alumni go into finance or consulting. That’s economic jargon for: just think how much better shape our world would be in if these bright people had done something useful with their lives. Things aren’t much different for entrepreneurs. More often than not, we’re offered solutions for problems we didn’t know we had.
Category III jobs: idealistic, but not all that ambitious. And then there’s a third category, made up of people who’re idealistic, but not that ambitious. It’s a combination often seen in Gen Z – people born since 1996. Young people’s take on their careers: with no interest in joining the capitalist rat race, many want work they’re passionate about – and then preferably part-time.

Sometimes it seems ‘ambition’ has become a dirty word, incompatible with an idealistic lifestyle.

In some circles, you’d think the highest good is not to have any impact at all. A good life is then primarily defined by what you don’t do.

The trouble with idealists who lack ambition is they tend to prize awareness more than action.

Awareness is at best a starting point, while for many activists, it seems to have become the end goal.

Make no mistake, idealism often comes with a shot of vanity.

Real-world deeds are more important than intentions, and when it came down to it, the ambitious college student kept his word. For the rest of his life, for sixty-one more years, Clarkson continued to fight for his ideals.

What the apostle Paul was to Christianity, and Martin Luther to the Reformation, Thomas Clarkson was to abolitionism.

I’d like to introduce you to some of the Thomas Clarksons of our time. What they have in common is a refusal to see their own deeds as mere drops in the ocean. What many of these people also share, is a certain degree of privilege. Not everyone can devote their life to the world’s biggest problems.

True, people with moral ambition often pay a price for their ideals.

‘A person of honour cares first of all not about being respected,’ writes the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, ‘but about being worthy of respect.’

Your honour is not the same as your reputation. It’s not about looking good; it’s about doing good.

Lower your threshold for taking action

There’s a well-known photograph taken in 1936 of German shipyard workers doing the Nazi salute. If you look closely, you can see one man in the crowd who’s not joining in.

August Landmesser. His story was heartrending. In 1931, a young Landmesser joined the Nazi party, in the hopes of landing a job.

The fear of being different runs deep in human nature.

The longing to belong is like a magnet, interfering with our inner compass.

There’s a quote from the anthropologist Margaret Mead that I think of often. ‘Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.’

A small group of committed individuals can have enormous influence, in part because most people are busy living their lives.

The statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb speaks of an ‘intransigent minority.’ The world is shaped by stubborn, obstinate, headstrong, hell-bent, wilful, relentless advocates. ‘The most intolerant wins,’ Taleb dryly observes.

The tale of Nieuwlande, a tiny town in the Netherlands close to the German border. During the Second World War, nearly one hundred Jews secured a hiding place there. The concentration of people in hiding was higher than nearly everywhere else in Europe.

Arnold Douwes, a man from the town of Boskoop, on the other side of the country.

Arnold Douwes was different. He got his start in the resistance by delivering underground newspapers, then soon moved on to chores like cutting the cables powering German searchlights. Once the authorities were on to him, he trekked cross-country, his bicycle his sole possession. That’s how he ended up in Nieuwlande in the summer of 1942. There, he led what would become one of the country’s largest network for Jews in hiding. In no time, Nieuwlande was full of what Arnold called duikelaars – Jews gone underground, primarily from Amsterdam.

In the 1970s, the first in-depth studies were conducted into the psychology of resistance heroes. The pioneers of this new field were the professors Dr Samuel Oliner and Dr Pearl Oliner, a husband-and-wife team.

The biggest surprise? How little the study found. Turns out heroes and mere mortals were hard to tell apart, which raised the question: Did the altruistic personality even exist? A resistance hero could be shy or self-assured, silly or serious, young or old, pious or scandalous, rich or poor, left-wing or right, and so on and so on.

And yet both Fogelman and the Oliners reached a couple of tentative conclusions. First, feelings are overrated. Very few rescuers reported being motivated by deep-felt sympathy. Empathy isn’t the same as courage, after all.

Second, psychologists have concluded that many rescuers had similar upbringings. Their parents instilled in them a strong sense of self-worth and taught them to think for themselves.

The third and perhaps most striking conclusion of the psychological research into resistance heroes was that communists and the super-religious were both overrepresented, at least in the Netherlands.

Turns out there was one circumstance that determined almost everything. A new analysis of data gathered by the Oliners showed that when this condition was met, nearly everyone took action – 96 per cent to be precise.

And what was that condition? Simple: you had to be asked.

That may be it: the key to moral ambition. Everyone has their own threshold to act, a tipping point to taking action.

There’s a minuscule minority that needs zero encouragement to stand up. Psychologist Cass Sunstein calls these pioneers the zeros,

But most of us only dare to act once others have led the way. The ones need only one person (‘If you go, so will I’), the twos take action if they have two allies, and the millions will only act if half the country has taken to the streets.

If you want to change the world, then it’s not so much about whether you’re ‘cut out for it’, with your precise mix of personal traits. It’s not about who you are; it’s about who you can become. You don’t do good things because you’re a good person. You become a good person by doing good things.

Join a cult (or start your own)

Moral ambition can take many forms.

On a Friday evening in November 1968, a young lawyer addressed a full lecture hall at Harvard Law School. His name was Ralph Nader and his message was clear: you’re about to throw your life away.

Like Arnold Douwes, Ralph Nader was a zero – but a zero in a suit instead of an overall. Car safety became Ralph Nader’s first mission. General Motors soon saw Ralph Nader as Public Enemy No. 1.

President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Traffic Safety Act and the Highway Safety Act into law.

History is full of small action groups with enormous impact.

Venture capitalist Peter Thiel writes that we can speak of cults.

Question: What’s the opposite of a cult? Thiel’s answer: a consulting firm. A company like Deloitte or Accenture isn’t driven by one mission; employees hop from client to client.

If you want to change the world, you’d do better to join a cult. Or start your own. Regardless, you can’t be afraid to come across as weird if you want to make a difference. Every milestone of civilisation was first seen as the crazy idea of some subculture or another, from the Pythagorean theorem to the conviction that slavery is depraved.

If the Quakers had one mission, it was equality.

They didn’t want to pledge loyalty to anyone, and they certainly didn’t swear oaths, because Quakers insisted they always spoke the truth.

In the eighteenth century, the Quakers also came out against slavery.

The ultimate pioneer – a true zero – was the hermit Benjamin Lay (1682–1759).

And then there was the Quaker and schoolteacher Anthony Benezet (1713–1784), who was like a writer-in-residence for the abolition movement.

The writings of Lay and Benezet, in turn, greatly influenced British activists like Thomas Clarkson

Who would’ve suspected that this odd collection of individuals – the hermit, the schoolteacher, and the recent graduate – would unleash one of the greatest revolutions in human history? But that’s precisely what happened.

And so the UK officially banned the slave trade in 1807 – at a time of peak profits, no less.

Ralph Nader’s next career moves and the cult he founded in the 1960s.

After his victory over General Motors, Nader continued to work as a one-man crusader, a ‘self-appointed lobbyist for the public interest’.

Nader came up with his idea of recruiting a whole brigade of Davids, which he’d pay with the royalties from his bestselling book on General Motors.

Nader’s Raiders knew how to turn their words into deeds and their deeds into results.

All that time, Nader’s method remained the same: expose an injustice, come up with solutions, and then bring together a coalition of activists, lobbyists, politicians, and experts to make those solutions happen.

The tragic thing about Nader was that he morphed into the kind of cult leader who’s deaf to all criticism.

See winning as your moral duty

Joseph Overton’s name comes up. Overton (1960–2003) was an American political scientist who wondered how – over time – radical dreams could become reality.

Effective idealists, on the other hand, may be pie-in-the-sky when it comes to their goals, but they’re pragmatic in making them happen.

Change is not that one-dimensional. All these people can play an essential part. The intellectual and the influencer. The networker and the agitator. The bureaucrat and the entrepreneur.

One thing that stands out about the activists of the American civil rights movement is how strategically they went to work. They made use of all kinds of carefully chosen methods, from bus boycotts to sit-ins, and from lawsuits to marches on Washington.

To put it bluntly: awareness is overrated. The fact that people are aware of various injustices doesn’t mean they’ll act on that knowledge – on the contrary.

Psychologists speak of the belief-behaviour gap.

The second misperception of the Noble Loser is that good intentions are enough.

History is full of idealists with good intentions who achieved little, while the problems they could have fixed instead fester.

Focus too much on intentions, and you can lose sight of something else: the right thing often happens for the wrong reasons.

Clarkson knew he needed other arguments against the slave trade, so he turned his attention to the fate of British sailors on slave ships. That’s right, one of the greatest abolitionists of all time shifted his focus to the suffering among the perpetrators. Psychologists call this tactic moral reframing.

What Noble Losers tend to forget is that every successful coalition is a pact among people who disagree on any number of things.

Why does it seem so hard these days for activists to forge a coalition? I suspect it has something to do with a key doctrine of modern progressives: intersectionality. That’s the understanding that people are often discriminated against on the basis of multiple, overlapping factors, like gender, ethnicity, class, education, age, sexual orientation, disability, and so on.

That brings us to the final myth that keeps Noble Losers from hitting their goals. Years ago, the economist Albert Hirschman (1915–2012) concluded that idealists often get swept up in the synergy illusion. They think that all their ideals reinforce one another. ‘Progressives are eternally convinced,’ Hirschman wrote, ‘that “all good things go together.”

Many activists think you have to hold on tight to your highest ideals. But sometimes you have to aim lower if you want to hit your target.

We live in revolutionary times. A recent study shows the number of protest movements increased threefold between 2006 and 2020.45 In no other period in the history of humankind did so many take part in a demonstration.

As for those five illusions: of course awareness and good intentions are a great starting point, of course the right thing can happen for the right reasons, of course you won’t be happy working with everyone, and of course your ideals will find some synergy. But still. Much of modern protest seems too fleeting. Heavy on intuition, light on strategy. Heavy on intentions, light on results. ‘Being on the right side of history,’ writes Tufekci, ‘doesn’t insulate one from weak analyses.’

According to his son, the deeply religious Wegert thought it blasphemous to revere a fellow man as a saint, even when it was Adolf Hitler. Whenever someone said ‘Heil Hitler’ to Wegert, he’d respond with a breezy ‘Guten Tag.’ And that was it. That’s all there was to the famous photo. Nothing indicated Wegert was sympathetic to the fate of the Jews. He continued working for the German war industry until 1945, and differed little in that sense from most other Christians in Nazi Germany who did nothing to resist the regime.

Learn to weep over spreadsheets

Rob Mather. Malaria is a leading cause of death in pregnant women. One of the most common causes of death in children under five. Some 500 million cases a year, and 3,000 dead children every day.

World Swim Against Malaria was born. Now Rob just needed to convince a million people to take part,

In 2005, more than 250,000 people from 160 countries took part in the World Swim Against Malaria.

The AMF doesn’t have to spend its funds on bookkeeping, the website, or legal advice, because that’s all provided pro bono.

At the same time, Rob is also critical of the nonprofit world – the lack of transparency, the lack of accountability, and the lack of in-depth evaluations. That’s why he wants everyone who donates to be able to see exactly what’s done with their money. Every donation is logged on the foundation’s website, and you can follow each delivery. The mosquito nets are distributed by local partners, and an independent third party checks to make sure the nets reach their destination.

Holden Karnofsky cofounded the think tank GiveWell and started doing evidence-based assessments of all kinds of charities.

Thanks to extensive analysis on the part of GiveWell, we know that the Against Malaria Foundation is one of the world’s best-performing nonprofits. Few foundations have saved as many lives or done so as cost-effectively.

Every day in 2005, the equivalent of seven jumbo jets full of children died of malaria. Today, it’s less than three jumbo jets.

the philosopher Bertrand Russell once said. ‘The mark of a civilised man is the capacity to read a column of numbers and weep.’

Enrol at a Hogwarts for do-gooders

In order to be irreplaceable, one must always be different. Coco Chanel, fashion designer (1883–1971)

Charity Entrepreneurship is a programme for entrepreneurs – entrepreneurs with moral ambition. It’s a startup incubator like so many you’ll find in the world of tech and venture capital, but here it’s not about launching high-performing companies. This is where high-impact charities are hatched.

What do all these problems have in common? They’re sizeable, they’re often super-solvable, and they’re sorely overlooked – the three S’s, if you will. These large (and largely neglected) challenges are things we can tackle, as long as we land on the right approach.

Such triple-S challenges offer untold new prospects for doing good.

In baseball, scouts speak of VORP, which stands for ‘Value Over Replacement Player.’ Say you’re an excellent batter, but there are ten other fantastic batters on the bench: your added value to the team is limited because there are ten others just like you, doing the same thing. At Charity Entrepreneurship, you’re trained to score your highest possible VORP. To go where no one else is going.

The director of this extraordinary school is a certain Joey Savoie.

To earn a spot, you must first of all be radically open-minded. Second, you have to bring buckets of ambition – moral ambition to be precise, Third, you’ve got to be prepared to work incredibly hard.

The four main ingredients of moral ambition: the idealism of an activist, the ambition of a startup founder, the analytical mind of a scientist, the humility of a monk.

You can’t change the world by yourself, Joey continually emphasised during my visit. It always comes down to teamwork. The problem with a lot of idealists is they have towering expectations of themselves. They want to be a successful entrepreneur, skilled researcher, fundraiser, networker, and storyteller in one. ‘It’s really nice to think you’re super-important, that you’re the one who’s going to save everything,’ said Joey. ‘But you have to get down to earth and realise you need a team to get stuff done. You need a community.’

Find out what the world needs and make it happen

In 1836 the richest man in the world, Nathan Mayer Rothschild, died of a simple infection that we can cure today with a course of antibiotics for a few pounds.

One thing’s certain: scientific innovations have saved more lives than all the Malalas, Mandelas, and Mother Theresas combined.

Jonas Salk, a team led by Dr Jonas Edward Salk had developed a safe and effective vaccine against polio.

Viktor Zhdanov, a Ukrainian virologist. He didn’t develop a vaccine but had an enormous impact in 1958 when he called on the World Health Organization (WHO) to start an inoculation campaign against smallpox.

Smallpox was the deadliest virus of all time. In the twentieth century alone, over 300 million people died of the disease.

If the fight against smallpox, polio, and malaria shows us anything, it’s that we can’t make the world a wildly better place without science. Moral ambition needs technology, and new discoveries and inventions can make a world of difference in the struggle to tackle our biggest problems. So why don’t we talk more about the promise of such developments?

Josephine Cochrane of Illinois wondered why there wasn’t yet a machine to do the dishes.

‘If nobody else is going to invent a dishwashing machine,’ Cochrane said, ‘I’ll do it myself.’

In 1900, the average homemaker spent fifty-eight hours a week on cooking, cleaning, and the wash. By 1975, that was down to eighteen hours.

Katharine McCormick. McCormick would fight for women’s rights her whole life, in particular for the right to contraception.

McCormick wrote a letter to an old friend, the feminist Margaret Sanger, asking whether she knew someone who could develop a safe, reliable, and inexpensive contraceptive for women.

Sanger met a biologist who was already working on precisely that. Gregory Goodwin Pincus

McCormick came to see him. She immediately wrote him a cheque, and in the end put more than $ 2 million towards his research. A few years later, Pincus’ discovery ‘Enovid’ was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration.

‘We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing,’ wrote a certain Winston Churchill back in 1931, ‘by growing these parts separately.’

In 2020, Churchill’s prediction came true. That year, in Singapore, the first chicken nuggets were served that required no chicken to be slaughtered. 46 The meat was grown in a laboratory from the stem cells of a chicken.

Josh Balk, founder of the company that served those first chicken nuggets in Singapore,

Energy is the foundation of modern society.

‘The team that brings clean and abundant energy to the world,’ writes the psychologist Steven Pinker, ‘will benefit humanity more than all of history’s saints, heroes, prophets, martyrs, and laureates combined.’

Since the 1970s, the price of solar energy has dropped more than 99 per cent.

As early as 1839, a French physicist described the basic principle of a solar panel, the photovoltaic effect. But it would take another hundred years before the New York Times reported in 1954 on a revolutionary development: new battery taps sun’s vast power.

Despite this enthusiasm, little was invested in the technology. As Ralph Nader put it in the seventies, ‘The use of solar energy hasn’t been opened up because the oil industry doesn’t own the sun.’

The German city councillor Hans-Josef Fell. Fell proposed the world’s first ‘solar premium’. Local residents got a sizeable subsidy for their solar panels, financed with a fee added to everyone’s utility bill.

In 1998, Fell’s party Die Grünen (‘The Greens’) now made up part of the ruling coalition at the national level.

Shi Zhengrong, and he grew into the solar king of the world. Like Thomas Edison figured out a business model for the lightbulb, Shi developed a business model for the solar panel.

There’s no end in sight for the drop in solar energy prices. According to the International Energy Agency, it’s now the cheapest source of energy in human history, even without subsidies, and it can be much cheaper still if we continue to scale up production.

We live in pessimistic times. The right longs for a return to a glorious past that never existed, while the left seldom looks beyond injustice today.

Nothing says that tech progress will automatically benefit everyone. That depends on the choices we make as a society, and those choices have moral aspects we can’t sidestep.

Technology isn’t a force of nature; it’s the work of people.

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Don’t forget: your talents are but a means to an end, your ambition raw energy. What matters is what you do with them.

Peter Singer, in November 1971, he penned his masterpiece. It was an article no more than fifteen pages long, published the following year in an obscure journal. The title was ‘Famine, Affluence, and Morality’, and in it, Singer introduced a thought experiment that would become known the world over.

When would you say you’re a good person?

Singer felt that most people go too easy on themselves. Because when millions are suffering from hunger and disease, you can never really do enough.

The global distribution of income has the form of a hockey stick

Psychologists suspect that our blinkers are a form of self-preservation. Our empathy doesn’t grow as we see more victims; it doesn’t even plateau. Instead, empathy drops.

Toby Ord understood that he would make a still greater difference if he could persuade others to do the same. Someone recommended he meet an ambitious philosophy student by the name of William MacAskill.

The young men met at a cemetery – no joke – and ended up talking for hours and hours. They set up their first nonprofit soon after, based on a new idea they would dub effective altruism, or EA.

If you want to do as much good as possible, the young philosophers realised, you have to prioritise relentlessly.

In a world where 14,000 children die every day from preventable causes, you could say we’re in an ongoing emergency.

Let me be clear: most rich-guy philanthropy doesn’t amount to much. They generally donate a mere fraction of their net worth, and when they give, it’s mostly for vanity projects, like paying huge sums to stick their name on the wall of an already well-funded university or museum. They’d love to be remembered, but with such cookie-cutter forms of giving, they’re soon forgotten.

The truth is that money and moral ambition need each other. Philanthropy doesn’t have to get stuck in vanity and paternalism. It can lead to real systemic change, as long as you prioritise wisely and keep an eye out for damaging side effects. What’s more, private individuals are in a unique position to support unpopular causes – when government and business steer clear.

Expand your moral circle

Before 1800 in fact, some three-quarters of the world’s people were serfs or enslaved.

Forced labour and slavery were common practice in Africa, India, China, and the Arab world. It was widespread among the peoples of North America, from the Cherokee to the Chickasaw, and was the norm in czarist Russia. The ancient Greeks and Romans also considered it perfectly acceptable to hold slaves, as did the Maya, Aztecs, and Incas.

The big question is how we figure out what we’re still doing today that will seem clearly wrong down the road. No one has a time machine, and there’s no way we can look into the hearts of generations to come. But I do think there are at least six alarm bells to be aware of. Six warning signs to look out for as a morally ambitious trailblazer.

First, if a practice later turns out to be wrong, then we’ve heard the arguments against it before. So when we hear the rumblings of protest, it’s good to seriously look into the matter – despite how odd it sounds at first.
The second alarm bell goes off when people don’t defend their practices, but instead say things like, ‘That’s how it’s always been’, ‘That’s human nature for you’, or ‘We don’t have a choice’.
The third warning sign is when people avoid unpleasant facts.
That brings us to the fourth alarm bell: the angry response that moral pioneers face. An American journalist once wrote, ‘Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.’
A fifth alarm bell goes off when it’s hard to explain a particular practice to children, who can be remarkably adept at spotting our hypocrisy.
And finally, it’s worth asking yourself the question: What will future generations see as our gravest offence? What practice of ours will most appal them?

It’s good to remember that courage is always relative. It’s easy to speak out against slavery today, but in the eighteenth century, that could get you killed.

Moral pioneers aren’t saints. They’re simply leading the way.

Make future historians proud

What’s the most important thing that’s happened in all of human history?

For thousands of years, the global population hardly changed at all. Then suddenly: an explosion. Around 1750, humankind took off. And to this day, we’re in a rocket flying nearly straight up. The start of the industrial revolution.

Of the 117 billion people who’ve ever lived, we’re part of the 1 per cent who can make a difference this century.

Over the last 300 years, we’ve not only made incredible progress, we’ve also left behind a trail of destruction.

Our power has become so great, so all-encompassing, that it’s threatening our own existence – and that of all future generations.

The uncomfortable truth is that we’re facing a number of existential threats to humankind and life on earth.

The first threat’s a familiar one. As I write this, over 3,000 nuclear weapons stand ready to be fired within minutes.

There’s another technology being developed today whose power is feared by many experts: artificial intelligence, or AI.

And then there’s a third existential threat to humankind: pathogens that escape from a laboratory.

Nobody gets credit for the disaster that didn’t happen. 2 Government work is always teamwork.

Air pollution is linked to the premature death of some 10 million people every year, as well as to diseases like cancer, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and ALS. Polluted air claims more victims worldwide than fire, heat, traffic, homicide, war, drugs, alcohol, drownings, natural disasters, malaria, and tuberculosis combined.

That last Voyager photo became world famous. On the grainy image, the earth is but one-tenth of a pixel, a pale blue dot in a sea of darkness. ‘Look again at that dot,’ wrote astronomer Carl Sagan. ‘That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.’ 63 On that minuscule dot a wondrous thing took place. A miracle that, as far as we know, hasn’t happened anywhere else in the universe. Life. Our living planet is a flickering little light in a vast and lifeless cosmos. Look at us from this distance, and you see just how vulnerable we are. You sense how great our responsibility is to protect and keep this world – this spark of consciousness – this, our only earth.

Moral Ambition

But people are more than tools for getting things done. We’re worthwhile in our own right.

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals.

Gandhi, thought Orwell, hadn’t understood what life was about.

‘One of the most difficult things,’ Nelson Mandela said after stepping down as South Africa’s president, ‘is not to change society, but to change yourself.’

Humans are social creatures through and through, and that means your choices can in turn influence the choices of dozens, hundreds, or even millions of other people.