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Moral Ambition: Stop wasting your talent and start making a difference
Stuck in a rut at work? Feel like your talent is being wasted and you’d like to make the world a better place? A new book by the wunderkind Dutch historian might have some answers.
Rutger Bregman is that rare thing: a visionary ideas ninja who’s also a publishing PR’s dream: as equally comfortable joshing away on US chat shows as he is discussing Rousseau and Hobbes on podcasts. Bregman’s books on the universal basic income and how humanity is fundamentally good have chimed both with the public (his works have been translated into 46 languages worldwide), as well as political and academic circles. The Dutch historian isn’t immune to ruffling a few feathers either: in 2019 he gave the elites at Davos a dressing-down for taking their private jets to hear David Attenborough talk about the climate crisis.
With Moral Ambition, Bregman turns his gaze to how we can all make the world a better place. The book offers something of a roadmap to those of us who want to do something more meaningful than spending 80,000 hours of lives stuck in jobs which consist of pointless meetings and making endless updates to Google Calendar.
There’s certainly no shortage of powerful luminaries queuing up to lavish praise on Moral Ambition. Former Tory MP and superstar podcaster Rory Stewart has called it “clear, brave, important and provocative”. Intelligentsia such Timothy Snyder, Bill McKibben and Steven Pinker have raved about the book too. Even Russell Crowe has chipped in, saying, “there is something Socratic about Bregman” and that the new tome is “a book of weight, wit and incitement.”
Heavy words, indeed. But the aim of Moral Ambition is a bold one. Bregman writes about how history has been moulded by a small group of radical pioneers, who have devoted their lives to tackling some of the world’s biggest problems: the climate crisis, developing vaccines for eliminating polio or fighting Big Tobacco. By distilling the attributes that made these epoch-changing individuals so persuasive and influential, Bregman hopes that we can take on the purpose-driven mantle and do the same.
You may think Bregman is pumped with pie-in-the-sky idealism, you may think his views are unrealistic. But the big kahunas of politics and business really listen to him. His 2017 book Utopia for Realists outlined a vision for the universal basic income and how we could all work 15 hours and get away with it. Many considered it preposterous at the time. Yet, just three years later, governments were paying wages for millions of furloughed workers during Covid, while a guaranteed income is now seen as a credible solution to the impact of AI.
Whether Moral Ambition will inspire anybody to jack in their jobs with the hope of becoming the next Mandela or found the next BioNTech is anyone’s guess. But these game-changers are needed, now, more than ever…
Rutger Bregman’s new book, Moral Ambition: Stop wasting your talent and start making a difference is published by Bloomsbury. (Hardback £20; eBook and audio £14.)
Christian Koch is an award-winning journalist, editor, content strategist and brand consultant.
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