What can be created, changed, and accomplished in two thousand weeks of a working life? How many satisfied employees look back with a bit of pride and contentment on what they achieved in and for the economy over their lifetime? Most retirees, one assumes, look back contentedly. But alongside them stand very many for whom the job became a waste of time. There are, however, a great many people with jobs who call their work pointless, unproductive, or even harmful. A historian in the Netherlands has gotten to the bottom of this phenomenon: Rutger Bregman.
A Dutchman sees red!
Rutger Bregman had been invited to Davos in 2019 for a panel on inequality. The night before his talk, he rewrote his speech completely. His line about inequality in the tax system went around the world: “It feels like I’m at a firefighters conference and no one’s allowed to speak about water.” He called on the billionaires in the room to pay their fair share of taxes. Bregman then wrote his next book, titled “Moral Ambition.” He gave away every last cent of the proceeds to the School for Moral Ambition.
A school for morals, or for ambition? It makes sense that historians often get annoyed watching history — the historical record — repeat itself, especially its darker sides. In some areas, the history of humanity thus becomes a handbook. What annoys Rutger Bregman is not greed, but a lack of imagination. In other words, the boredom of people who spend an entire lifetime in a job doing things that make no sense. This was likely the driving force behind founding a School for Moral Ambition in Amsterdam. So the book became a house. The school and its students spent a thousand hours of research defining thirty major problems and, in the end, named two winners: the tobacco industry and the protein shift — that is, a rethink of what we eat.
In his own ambitions, Rutger Bregman carries a lineage in his head that runs from abolitionists to suffragettes to civil rights activists. In other words, people who fought for something they themselves would never live to see. People who wage a battle whose outcome they will never witness. This calls to mind his earlier book about the fundamental goodness in people.
Which cuts deeper here — the ambition, or the morals?
The movement around the School of Moral Ambition wants to apply leverage. With people who want to see their daily work as meaningful and useful to society. The university program on Moral Ambition launched right off at elite schools like Harvard and Princeton. What were Bregman and his team thinking, one wonders? Is that where the pipelines to McKinsey lie, the ones you simply turn onto? Or is it simply circular reasoning: the best people you’re looking for are already sitting exactly where you already were.
Speaking of which: I used to be in Switzerland, and now I’m at home in Canada. And that raises the question: are the so-called Circles of Bregman’s school already active here, as they are there? The Global Tax Fairness Fellowship places its participants with organizations in the US, Canada, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Kenya. There they work on global tax policy and on the question of how wealth concentrates — side by side with experts like the economist Gabriel Zucman.
Now, moral ambition as such was invented neither by Bregman nor in Amsterdam. People all over the world are ambitious about driving change in politics and society. Volunteers without any fellowship do exactly this in clubs, libraries, and local politics.
The good keener is not the Dutchman. The good keener is one of millions of volunteers.
Only, that one hasn’t written a book about it yet.
