“In America, if you say something like, ‘I’m trying to build a global movement of ambitious idealists’, then the response is, ‘Yeah, of course,’” says Rutger Bregman. The historian and writer of popular nonfiction is telling me about his move to New York to launch his new project, the School for Moral Ambition.
Bregman, 36, has made a name for himself by going against received wisdom. His first book to be translated into English from his native Dutch, Utopia for Realists, made the case for open borders and a universal basic income, and was a New York Times bestseller. His second, Humankind, argued that humans, despite supposedly insurmountable evidence of our wickedness, are essentially good.
Bregman is now determined to demonstrate the power of collaboration. His latest book, Moral Ambition, to be released in English in spring 2025, will act as a manifesto for his new project, which aims to rescue talented people from what the late anthropologist David Graeber called “bullshit jobs” and move them towards more positive careers.
Through the School for Moral Ambition, he hopes to address what he believes is “one of the great tragedies of our time; the enormous waste of talent”. High-achieving people are sucked into what his friend Simon van Teutem calls the “Bermuda Triangle” of corporate law, finance and the Big Four management consulting firms. Bregman and the school’s three other founders “like to see ourselves as the Robin Hoods of talent,” he says.
Bregman delivers this line with relish. He has long enjoyed speaking truth to money. After a 2019 debate at the annual super-rich gathering in Davos, a clip of him discussing the hypocrisy of the wealthy, and their wilful ignorance of the role of taxation in producing positive change, went viral. This gained him an interview with Tucker Carlson, in which the presenter called Bregman a “moron” and other choice terms for questioning his unwillingness to deviate from talking points shared by his billionaire backers. Fox News chose not to air the interview, with Carlson citing foul language as a justification. Bregman, who had been recording the conversation himself, leaked it.
Now, Bregman says he has come to understand the psychology of people who strive for “career capital blah blah”.
“A lot of leftists like to say to these people that they’re so greedy, that they’re super selfish and they only care about the money, and that always backfires because then those people would say, ‘Look, you just can’t keep up with us, you’re not as smart as we are.’
“If you really want to hurt those people, you have to say, ‘Oh you’re so boring, come on, there’s so much that you could have done with your one life on this planet—an average career lasts for 2,000 workweeks—this is what you choose to do with it? Making PowerPoints for people you don’t even like, writing reports no one’s ever going to read, you know, selling more toothbrushes, what are you doing?’”
Equipped with their new Moral Ambition, the school’s first 24 fully funded “fellows” will work against the food and tobacco industries. The latter, in particular, is a hot topic for Bregman, who “knew that they were evil, obviously, but [had] never done much research”. Once he did, he began to question his assumption that “we had already basically won the fight” after seeing evidence of growing numbers of young smokers and a “huge vaping epidemic”.
Bregman believes we should be more positive about human potential. “We’re at a point in our history where we have such amazing opportunities to make the world a wildly better place,” he says. “Our best days are in the future.”
Starting from this principle, he wants progressives to “learn how to say yes” to positive projects. “For too long being a progressive or being a left-winger was about saying no,” he says. “So I am excited about that mentality, at least among some progressives”, a mentality which favours “saying yes to awesome new development projects, saying yes to building more housing.”
He also wants progressives to more openly champion the benefits of immigration. “Sometimes I feel that that’s the new political correctness, that you can’t ever say anything positive about the power of immigrants,” he says with a wry smile.
He admires the enthusiasm behind Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign—although he’s “quite terrified” of how his new home country will vote. “It’s quite important that the democrats win this, both in the sense of with a small d and with a capital D.”
Then he laughs. “I don’t want to end this interview on a downer!” For Rutger Bregman, with his endless optimism, it’s hard to stay gloomy for long.
