David Marchese, The Interview: Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives, NYTimes, May 17, 2025.
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.
From the Interview
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?
Here's my take on woke. White guilt, for example, is simply the price some people are willing to pay to go about their lives doing what they will, but doing nothing that benefits the poor and oppressed. That's how woke works. The guilt that accompanies woke is simply a price one pays for doing nothing beyond confessing, professing, and pontificating.
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