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The PoliticsGirl Podcast
How to Be a Good Person in a Bad World: A Conversation with Rutger Bregman
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- [00:00]
Rutger Bregman
I think that a lot of people agree that it's not enough anymore to look for the moral minimum. There have been a lot of do gooder movements, you know, in the past that are all about, you know, offsetting your carbon emissions, recycling your garbage, eating a little bit less meat. And I'm not against any of that. I think all that is good, but it's just not ambitious enough. Because take your environmental footprint. If you do any everything right, then the in the best possible scenario, you, you will have reduced your footprint to zero. You live in a tiny house with your own vegetable garden and you might as well not have existed. Right? This is not how we're going to prevent climate collapse and save democracy and prevent the next pandemic, et cetera. We got to be a bit more ambitious, almost like morally greedy. At the School for Moral Ambition, we're not interested in looking for a moral minimum. We're more looking for a moral maximum. We're thinking like, okay, how far can we take this?
- [01:02]
Lee McGowan
Hello and welcome to the Politics Girl podcast. I'm your host, Lee McGowan. Let's get into it. I'm so excited today because we're taking a break from the daily nightmare that is Trump's America to talk to one of my all time favorite thinkers, the brilliant Dutch historian and author, Rutger Bregman. Rutger is known for his thought provoking works on history, philosophy and economics. And if you haven't read any of Rutger's books like Utopia for Realists, Humankind, or his newest bestseller, Moral Ambition, you really should. If you don't know Rutger as an author, you may remember him from the time he went viral at the World Economic Forum in Davos when he called out the richest people in the world for their tax avoidance right to their faces on the main stage. From his TED Talk on poverty, which has been seen by millions of people, or from his current media tour on his School for Moral Ambition, the new initiative he has created to help people use their talents to to tackle the world's biggest problems. Rucker believes there's an antidote to this sense of emptiness that so many of us feel, and it's the will to make the world a better place, to devote your career to the greater challenges of our time rather than just to making money. And as someone who has really tried that in their own career, I am deeply inspired by the promise of his work and his vision for the world. So without further ado, please welcome my guest, historian, author, and the man called one of Europe's most prominent young thinkers. Rucker Bregman. Welcome back, Rucker.
- [02:24]
Rutger Bregman
Thank you so much. It's so good to see you again. Really looking forward to this.
- [02:28]
Lee McGowan
I am too. Thank you so much for coming back. Our conversation last year was one of my absolute favorite pods of the year. So I am so happy that you are back. And when we spoke last August, your book Moral Ambition was only available in Dutch, but since then it has been translated into English. And you have expanded your school by the same name into over, I think I understand it, a hundred countries, including opening offices in New York, which is where you're living right now. So tell us about this project.
- [02:55]
Rutger Bregman
Yeah, it's been a wild ride. So, as you know, I spend about a decade of my career in what I like to call the awareness business. Right. So you write articles, you write books, you express your opinions about everything that is wrong in this world, and then you hope that some other people will do the actual work of making this world a better place. And that is important work. I do believe in the power of ideas. I do believe in the importance of awareness. But I also had a little bit of a nagging feeling that perhaps awareness is overrated. A lot of people will know me for going to Davos in 2019 and saying some nasty things about the billionaires who gathered there.
- [03:32]
Lee McGowan
I think some real things about the billionaires record, let's be honest, it was not nasty. It was entirely something to be said. It was entirely true. They just aren't used to hearing it.
- [03:42]
Rutger Bregman
Absolutely. So I don't regret it at all. But I did start asking myself the question, have we actually made progress in the fight against tax avoidance and tax evasion? And I would say a little bit, but not nearly enough. So I thought that perhaps for the next decade of my career, I wanted to work more on translating that awareness into action. At the time, as you know, I was working on studying the abolitionist movement. We spoke about that, I think last time, you know, one of the greatest movement for human rights that this world has ever seen. And I was particularly interested in the British abolitionist movement because that was the most successful one in Europe. In the Netherlands, the abolitionists got almost nothing done, I'm afraid. I'm Dutch, so ashamed to say this, but in Britain it became a huge movement and I started to experience an emotion that I like to describe as moral envy, where you just become a little bit jealous of the people in the arena actually doing the work, making a massive difference. And here I was in Houten, which is a suburb of the Netherlands, living my comfortable life as a writer. And I was like, I should do more, I should try harder. I should do something more challenging. So anyway, that led me to change careers. Basically, I became the co founder of a new organization called the School for Moral Ambition. We're helping as many people as possible to devote their careers and lives to some of the most pressing issues that we face as a species. My life is much less comfortable right now, but hopefully more impactful.
- [05:08]
Lee McGowan
Yeah. Well, let me tell you, one of my son's favorite books is a book called Red Rising. And it's a book series. And in it, one of the characters says, I wish I had met you earlier. I would have raised you as one of my sons. You could have been a good man. And he's like, not a great man. And he said, no, because you are a great man. But great men don't live comfortable lives. Like your life could not be great and comfortable. That often those two things don't go together. You have to push yourself, you have to be uncomfortable. You have to put yourself in those situations that you don't really want. I feel the same way you do. I mean, I have dedicated the last 10 years of my life to the awareness business. I'm having people understand how American politics works and what's going wrong. And I used to say my whole job was to educate and inspire. And like you said, I kept hoping other people would be like, you're like, all right, I'm telling you what's going on. Like, stand up and do the work. Let's stand up and make change. And then you start thinking, oh, Lord, do I have to do the thing? Like, is my awareness not enough? Do I have to change paths in what I'm doing? And so I understand very clearly what you're talking about, because I think about it daily myself. The goal of the School of Moral Ambition to me seems to be to inspire people to use their talents to solve the world's biggest problems rather than just waste their talents in some job, often some job that makes a ton of money, that we can have moral ambition and not just financial ambition. And one of the things I read about what you guys were doing is that you called yourself the Robin Hoods of talent, that you're stealing talent from the corporations to give it to the most important causes of our time. And your website says right at the top, the world's biggest problems aren't going to solve themselves. And I feel that so viscerally.
- [07:02]
Rutger Bregman
Yeah. So let me give you a simple example. The Fight against tax evasion and tax avoidance. Right. We know that there's a, a massive industry of corporate lawyer, fiscal specialists helping the billionaires to evade billions, perhaps trillions in taxes. Right? It's one of the great challenges we face now. If you look at the polling, it's pretty clear the vast majority of people in basically all countries, America, Europe, Asia, wherever you ask people, they think we should fix this. We need a more reasonable system of taxation. Currently in the US billionaires have a lower effective tax rate than working class people. And that's for the first time in U.S. history that that is happening right now. But the same is true in Italy, in the Netherlands, in France. Every time we study this, we see that even undocumented immigrants pay more in taxes, relatively speaking, than billionaires. So basically everyone agrees here, people from the left to the right, Republicans, etc. Now how do we translate that awareness into action? What we thought is we need the radical nerds who understand everything about how these loopholes works. Because taxes get complicated very quickly. I think everyone who's ever done their taxes know that. Well, imagine, you know, how complicated the taxes of a billionaire are. Like they have these massive structures, right? They use all these tax paradises like the Cayman Islands and the Virgin Islands and you name it, and the Netherlands, which is by the way, also part of that tax paradise system. So you need the people who are the radical nerds who just deeply understand that and almost felt like joy in what most of us would find pretty boring, right? They just get excited when they see these big spreadsheets and complicated graphs. And very often these people are currently working on the wrong side. They're currently working for those of us who like Star Wars. They're working for the Empire, and we're trying to recruit them to work for the Rebel Alliance. And that's indeed why we call ourselves the Robin Hoods of talent. We started doing this in Europe last year. One of the industries we wanted to take on was Big Tobacco. This is one of the most evil legal industries out there, responsible for the death of 8 million people every year. They've created one of the most addictive artifacts in the history of humanity and the deadliest artifact in the history of humanity. And it's purposefully addicting kids. It's always targeting kids and has been doing so for more than a century now. We were recruiting corporate lawyers, lobbyists, people who really know how the, how the sausage gets made. Is that an expression in English?
- [09:31]
Lee McGowan
It's an expression, yes, it is an expression in English.
- [09:35]
Rutger Bregman
Otherwise, I thought Like I'm saying something very weird.
- [09:37]
Lee McGowan
What am I saying? Am I saying this really weird Dutch phrase that no one knows?
- [09:40]
Rutger Bregman
Yeah, exactly. Well, I'm happy. That's a. That's an expression anyway. You get what I mean, right? It's like, I think every movement consists of a coalition, right? You need people with very different skill sets. So you need the activists in the streets, right? You need extinction, rebellion, occupying squares and occupying highways. Like, mother was recently arrested once again, she's the only one in our family who keeps being arrested all the time as a climate act. She's 68 years old. And again, like mom, again, you're arrested again.
- [10:11]
Lee McGowan
She's like, this is my role. This is my role in the resistance.
- [10:13]
Rutger Bregman
And you need that. But you also need the entrepreneurs who understand everything about how to build an effective climate company. You need the lobbyists who know how to pass legislation, et cetera. And we saw that there was really a gap, right? We were good at the awareness game, but not really good at the legislation gang. So we've been recruiting talent ever since. And I came to the US to also build the movement here and to do the same thing here.
- [10:36]
Lee McGowan
Well, it's a really good idea, honestly. I mean, I think, like, when I think about what you're saying, it's a lot like when, you know, the government has someone hack into their system and then instead of arresting the hacker, they hire the hacker, because that's the person that knows how to do the thing that, like, they need to be doing, you know? And I saw you on the Daily show with Jon Stewart and you basically shocked him because you said, yeah, like, listen, we are paying people to quit their jobs, right? And you were explaining that you've already started two fellowships in Europe to fight what you're saying, Big tobacco and climate change. And next you want to move forward to recruit. What you were saying, is it like a SWAT team of tax specialists and legal experts and policy wonks, people that really understand tax justice to start a global billionaires tax. And that is so essential because we see what's happening all over the world. Like, I mean, we started this whole thing with people knowing who you were from Davos. That's where they go every single year. And you were like, why are we talking about, you know, how we can all do this philanthropy when we should really be talking about, like, we could afford more things than. We wouldn't need philanthropy if you guys were just taxed more. It all starts from the same place.
- [11:46]
Rutger Bregman
Absolutely.
- [11:46]
Lee McGowan
And as I said, when you were here last Year So many people in society, particularly in a country like America, where our version of predatory capitalism has made everything about money. So many people, I think, feel like they've failed when we measure ourself on financial success. When you live in a country where there is, say, less housing security, where you can't afford a house, less reliable income, extraordinary health care costs. And now we don't even know what the jobs of the future are going to be because we're told all the time AI is going to take all our jobs, right? So we feel scared, we feel nervous. And it's hard to feel, feel successful in a country like America or maybe Canada or the UK when you're not rich. Because we're told all the time that rich is it like that's the pinnacle of success, of ambition, that you should get to a place where you are keeping up with the Joneses. I don't know if that's an expression in where you're from, but it means, you know, like being able to keep up with your neighbors, right? And I just feel like this insecurity that people have about who they are and if they're successful, it breeds fear, right? And then that fear is able to be used against us by some of these terrible leaders to say, well, well, you don't have enough because these people, you don't have enough because of this. You don't have enough. You should feel bad because of that. And it not only makes us miserable, it makes us easier to control. And then if you look around like, our communities are limited. We have been deliberately divided racially, economically, socially. And then it becomes this me against the world mentality, this rugged individualism that you gotta look out for, number one kind of thing. And it makes us lonely, it makes us unfulfilled. And I feel like what you're trying to do with both your book Moral Ambition and then this school of moral ambition is suggesting that there is what you call an antidote to this sense of emptiness and fear that people feel. And it comes from working to make the world a better place, from devoting your life to something bigger than yourself, bigger than financial gain. Am I on the right track with that?
- [13:45]
Rutger Bregman
That's basically it. You gave a perfect summary. You know, I am really inspired by history. If you look at the history of the United States, it's often said that we're now living through a second Gilded Age, right?
- [13:58]
Lee McGowan
I think that's a fair assessment.
- [14:00]
Rutger Bregman
The first Gilded Age was also an era of incredible immorality, incredible corruption, incredible inequality, right? You had the robber barons, people like the Vanderbilts, J.P. morgan, the Carnegie's, who were making so much money off the backs of American workers who were really not getting a living wage. And the important thing is that at some point there was a countercultural movement against this. So after the Gilded Age came the Progressive Era. It's really fascinating, which was really a breakthrough era in US history. The income tax was implemented, the eight hour working week. Some of the biggest monopolies were broken up. It was not like a perfect era. It was not like some paradise had arrived. But there was real progress being made. And that was in many ways led by people like Theodore Roosevelt, for example, the Harvard graduate, the progressive president, who basically said, and I'm paraphrasing here, like, don't just check your privilege, but use your privilege to make this world a much better place. He said things like to just complain about a problem and not provide a solution. And again, I'm paraphrasing is called whining. And that was a whole cultural shift that happened back then. And I think we can do that again. It's also honestly what I discovered when I studied the British abolitionist movement a century earlier. I discovered that this was actually part of a broader societal movement which was all about redefining what it means to be successful. People like William Wilberforce, for example, one of the main abolitionists in Parliament, or Thomas Clarkson, who's my favorite abolitionist, they were like, you know what? We're not going to spend our lives, you know, building a conventional career in Westminster or the Church of England. We're going to take on one of these great challenges because we're just totally fed up with the status quo and with all these elites who are currently in power and are totally unserious, totally immoral. We need something else. And honestly, if we look at America today, I mean, the two words that come to mind for me are utter immorality. Like just blatant, utter immorality and corruption. And the other thing is just total and seriousness. It's also like, sometimes you don't know whether you have to laugh or whether you have to cry, right? If you look at the current administration, I was reading Edward Gibbons the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire recently, and that really reminds you of America today. At some point you had the Emperor Caligula who appointed his own horse in the Senate. And if you look at the Trump administration, I mean, it's basically like horses appointing donkeys, right? Idiots like Pete Hexit and Peter Navarro and the whole Doge farce of you know, like 20 year olds calling themselves big balls, destroying USAID. I mean, it's so farcical as it. And immoral as well. So I feel that the time is right for, like, a moral reawakening of a countercultural movement of people say, like, enough is enough. And this is not something that should just happen on the Republican side. It should also happen on the Democratic side. I mean, we've seen it recently in the elections in New York, right, that I had obviously the privilege to follow closely, now that I live in New York, sadly, don't have the right to vote. But it was just so pathetic to see Democratic elites, you know, circling the wagons, suddenly, you know, all behind Cuomo, you know, who's like a serial sexual abuser. And it was just utterly pathetic to witness that. But then to see Mandani win, it really felt like, ah, this is a new generation, right? Finally, serious, real, morally serious people are taking the reins. And I would love to see so much more of that.
- [17:45]
Lee McGowan
So would I, Rucker. Honestly, so would I. I mean, I was just saying that I was watching early in the summer, and I was just complaining to my husband that there was a right after Mondani won. There was a commentator on one of the networks, and he was basically doing, like, it felt like a performance piece, but he sincerely believed it. And he was like, what about the rich? What are the rich supposed to do? Like, he was losing. It's like, honey, it's gonna be 1 to 2% more tax. Like, he was acting like. I think one of them said, it's like they're trying to put Wall street on an ice float out into the east river so we all die. And I was like, my God, this is the most ridiculous, over the top, like, that Simpsons character that was like, won't anyone think of the children? But it was like, won't anyone think of the rich? And I thought, they're like, that's it. New York is over. It's done. We're ha. And you're like, because we're gonna have free buses for people that can get to work. We're gonna maybe try and have rent stabilization so people aren't starving to death. The man was his. His mind. And I just thought, yeah, I think these are we. We are at a point now where I hope it is a tipping point to people thinking more morally correct as opposed to about what we have prioritized for so long, which is financial success. And I just. I think when I look at moral ambition, when I look at your book, When I look at your school, you point out, which I thought was a really interesting idea, and I think people should think about it at home, that a career, your career consists of about 2,000 work weeks. And it's like, how are you going to spend that time? Right? This is like choosing what you're going to do with your life is one of the most important decisions, along with, I think, who you partner up with, because that person can make or break your life. Still, millions of people are stuck in these sort of mind numbing, pointless, often harmful, if you work for big Tobacco or you're, you know, a lobbyist for, you know, oil and gas companies, harmful jobs. You know, moral ambition is still ambition, right? You still want to be among the best people. It's just a different place of where success is based. So maybe your success is not based on your job title or your salary or which office you have, but it's finding a way to kind of measure your success not by what we accumulate, but what we contribute to society. And as someone that like, does that myself, I can say that, like, I genuinely like myself better now. I feel like my life is one of worth, that I'm trying to do good work in the world, that I'm not making my decisions based on who's gonna pay me more. And I understand to some people this might sound a little Dudley Do Right. You know, like we're just all like really good little children who are doing the right thing. But I, like, look at our world, right? It is failing, the bad guys are winning, the planet is dying. So few people are truly happy that it really does feel like now is the time to switch it up.
- [20:39]
Rutger Bregman
Yeah, absolutely. I had a conversation about this with Trevor Noah, and at some point I said the slogan of the school for More Ambition is make future historians proud. And he said, you should put that on a cab instead of a MAGA cab, like a Make Future Historians Proud cab. And that's basically what it's about. It's not about being super successful or popular according to conventional metrics in the here and now. Because if you study the abolitionists in the 18th century, I mean, it was super controversial. It's almost hard to wrap your head around how normalized this institution was.
- [21:13]
Lee McGowan
The institution of slavery.
- [21:14]
Rutger Bregman
Yes, yes. And people said, you know, this is just what people have always been doing. It's part of every civilization. It will wreck the economy if you even touch it. Regulate it a little bit. And it's just, by the way, fascinating to see that the arguments that are now being Used against progressive legislation such as taxing the rich very much remind you of the arguments that were being used back then. They always use the same trick, right? Oh, it will backfire, you know, or then, like, all the millionaires will, you know, move to another country. That's basically what the slaveholder said as well. Like, oh, then, you know, the slave trade will just move to Portugal or Spain or blah, blah, blah. It's always the. It's fascinating to see that the playbook has been the same for two centuries now. But my point is that indeed, we can step into the footsteps of the great moral pioneers who came before us. Often when we study them, we think, oh, they were almost like a different species, like different kinds of people. But if you actually study their memoirs of people like Susan B. Anthony or Elizabeth Cady Stanton or Frederick Douglass or Martin Luther King, you realize they were normal human beings, right? They had the same fears and doubts. When he was 25, 26 years old, King really didn't think he would become the leader of the civil rights movement. He later said this. If. If people would have asked me back then to do that, I would have run 100 miles. But you can become a different person by just starting to do the work. In my book, I've got a whole chapter about resistance heroes during the second World War. As a young boy, I was always fascinated with this question, like, what would I have done if I were alive back then? Would I have done the right thing? Would I have had the courage to hide? Persecuted Jews to help them to hide from the Nazis? It turns out there's been a lot of research into this question, and there isn't such a thing as the altruistic or heroic personality type. It was really a cross section of the population of people who had this courage. People from the left to the right, young, old, rich, poor. What they did discover is that it is pretty contagious. So most people joined the resistance when they were asked. So about 96% of people, when they were asked, can you do something? Said, yes. And then also another important thing is that it often starts pretty small, right? It starts with maybe distributing an illegal newspaper. But then once you start doing the work, you discover that you can actually become a different person. And one thing leads to another, right? And you become inspired by the new friends you've made. So this is, for me, such a simple and fundamental insight that you do not good things because you are a good person. Now, it's exactly the other way around. You do good things, and that makes you a good person writing it down.
- [23:55]
Lee McGowan
You don't do good things because you're a good person. You're a good person because you do good things. It's such an interesting concept. It also, you know, it reminds me a little bit of what you were saying recently because you just mentioned MLK and Susan B. Anthony both who would not meet the purity standards of today. You know, like, Susan B. Anthony, there's a whole argument that she was, you know, she had quite a racist way of trying to do a hierarchy for, like, which women can. There's a whole thing about mlk, and he was definitely a serial philanderer. You know, like, there's people that wouldn't meet a purity test that today's, I would say, left probably makes us hit all the time. So then we often push off people that could end up as our greatest leaders because they didn't quite meet the standard. And what you're saying is, you know, like, let the people do the good things, let the movements evolve, let us do the work, and then let the good come out of it. I mean, I was listening to you talk recently, and you were talking about, you know, we have to stop posturing online as good people, because if we want to make real change, it won't happen if we're all policing each other. It'll only happen if we're working together to achieve results. Like you said earlier, it's about coalitions, right? If we see democracy falling apart, then we have to say that's the goal, to fix that. You know, if I agree with you on 80% of things, then I am your ally. Like, if you don't agree with me on 20% of things, like, okay, that's fine, but I'm still your ally. And I think about this Mamdani win in New York because he went through the campaign often saying an old Ed Koch quote, which was another mayor of New York back in the day. And Ed used to say, if you agree with me on 9 of 12 issues, vote for me. If you agree with me on 12 out of 12 issues, see a psychiatrist. Right? And I think that's the thing. It's like, we're not. It's not about being completely simpatico on every single part of our agendas and our mindsets and how we see the world. It's about what our actual goals are. You know, we need to see results. We look at the 2024 election, and it is possible that Harris lost because there was a bunch of people who didn't agree with her on one issue. And they decided not to vote for her because of that. And then they ended up with a president that they agreed with on zero issues as opposed to the 80% that they agreed with Harris on. And that's just not a to win that, that at the end of the day, I think you've written that winning isn't optional in a social justice movement. It's our moral duty to win. We need a coalition. We need other people. And history is filled with people that had to work with other people that they disagreed with to get things done, namely the abolition movement or the women's movement or the civil rights movement. 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- [31:44]
Rutger Bregman
Yeah, yeah. The people who currently suffer under oppression, under poverty, under inequality. They don't give a rat's ass about the fact that you may be right about this or that or that you won another debate in the comment section on an Instagram post. No, they want you to win. They want you to pass legislation. They want you to, you know, achieve results. And I think that the left really has a problem with purity politics. I think it's less worse than it was a couple of years ago. So I write about this in my book what happened during the pandemic 2021, 2022, what is sometimes called the Great Awokening. I would say that quote unquote woke has brought us a lot of good things. More awareness around issues of sexual harassment, more awareness around racism, obviously. But then if you look at the actual results and the lack of coalition building that happens, you know, in my book, I quote one tweet that was sent by Nerol. You know, Nero was one of, is one of the most important pro choice groups and just before Roe v. Wade was destroyed by the Supreme Court, you know, it was like a historic moment when basically these pro choice groups needed to do everything to prevent this from happening. They were mainly fighting each other. Many managers at these organizations said, look like my biggest enemies aren't, you know, the right wingers. They're my own employees who are continuously, you know, putting me through purity tests. And that one of the, one of these tweets was like, if your feminism doesn't include trans women and girls, it's not feminism. If your feminism doesn't understand how anti trans policies disproportionately impact bipack falls, particularly black trans women and girls, it is not feminism. And on the one hand, I understand where that's coming from. So I do see the power of intersectionality. On the other hand, this is just not a way to build a coalition, right? If you ask for people that they have to agree with you on every single thing, that's just not how it works. And also, if you study the historically successful movements like the abolitionist movement, for example, in Britain, it was a coalition of people who strongly disagreed with one another on many, many things, who in some ways couldn't stand one another. Like for us today, it's difficult to really comprehend how offensive Quakerism was for evangelicals, right? But for these very religious people, that was a big, big thing.
- [34:03]
Lee McGowan
Oh, no. Thomas Paine wrote an entire chapter at the end of Common Sense that was like, directly to Quakers and how out of control they were. I think we don't, I don't think we understand how much they hated each other.
- [34:16]
Rutger Bregman
Well, there you go. And the same is true for the women's rights movement. Helen Lewis wrote a beautiful book about the women's right movement also in Britain. How it became this extraordinary coalition that lasted for just long enough to pass the legislation. But it was really a coalition of, of like wealthy princesses and working class women who were able just long enough to set aside their differences and make it happen. And I know that's not easy. And I know, I mean, I've made mistakes like that in the past as well. But especially Right now in U.S. history, we have the moral imperative to win the next election. Because like civilization itself, democracy itself is at stake. The whole world is watching. And indeed, we cannot afford this purity. And this is indeed one of the great lessons of Mandani's victory in New York. Like, the two essential ingredients, in my view were one, economic populism, like a relentless, relentless focus on bread and butter issues that unite people across the political spectrum. So indeed tax the rich and then help working class people and middle class people to actually pay their bills, to earn a decent salary, give them the dignity that they deserve. And the other thing is, indeed build coalitions, like work with people that you don't always agree with. I thought it was very powerful that he went on podcasts with people who are, I don't know, more centrist or liberals or whatever. I thought that was very refreshing for a democratic socialist because I've seen many democratic socialists who are like, I hate the whole Democratic party, let's burn it all down. I don't want to work with any of these fascists or neoliberals or whatever. And like, well, okay, well, then you feel really good in your own bubble and then everything's going to shit and hell at the same time.
- [35:58]
Lee McGowan
Yeah, no, I mean, we would never have had the women's movement if a bunch of really disparate groups hadn't come together for, like you said, just long enough to end up getting women the vote, because they really, truly did not agree. And I think you have to kind of keep your eye on the prize and then keep going back to, like, if we agree on the majority of issues, we're just gonna have to put those other ones to the side. That doesn't mean we have to put human rights to the side. Like, I always keep saying. Like, I don't know why we keep going back to trans rights. We should just say, hey, if you're a trans person, you totally exist. If you say you're a trans woman, you are a woman. Like, we don't need to have that discussion over and over again. We don't need to throw anyone's human rights under the bus to respect this. I don't know why we keep doing that. I think that's one of the greatest lessons, again, about the Mamdani win. He didn't. He could talk about economic populism. He could talk about taxing the rich without throwing any communities under the bus, which the Democrats often try to do. They'll say, well, we're not going to talk about women's rights anymore. We're not going to talk about abortion rights, or we're not going to talk about trans rights because they didn't win us the election. You're like, no, it's because they got spun on you by a team that was better at spinning. But you don't need to throw people under the bus to win elections based on values.
- [37:03]
Rutger Bregman
Can I. Can I put it a bit more provocatively? So I would say that as has happened in some places, if you make it like the centerpiece of your campaign, if you make trans rights like, or you give that impression, then you are actually throwing trans people under the bus. Because you should have known in advance that that was a pretty effective way to lose the elections. And look what's happening right now. You know, now that the Republicans are in charge.
- [37:29]
Lee McGowan
Yes. Can I ask you, though, do you not think that I don't believe the Democrats put trans people as their centerpiece? I believe the Republicans put trans people as the Democrat centerpiece. And the Democrats were unable to counter it. They were unable to move past how they were being describ think I always say we didn't lose the election because we were woke. We lost the election because we. We kept apologizing for woke. You know, we should have been like, yeah, we believe in human rights. We don't want to tell you who to be or who to marry or what to read or what to do. That's not the government's job. What we care about is that you can pay your bills, that you can do this, that we don't have wars, that we don't have this complete psycho as our president. Why are we talking about it? We kept talking about it and I said one of the biggest problems is that we play defense constantly instead of playing offense. We let them describe us as who we are and then we try and explain why we're not that as opposed to being like, that's not me moving on. Right. That we are not very good at that. And I feel like if you look at a win like the New York mayoral Democratic primary, he didn't allow himself to be described. They tried so hard to paint him as anti Semitic. So hard, I mean, like millions of dollars to paint him as an anti Semite. And he just wasn't taking the bait. And I think that's what we need to learn from that. Now listen, are people sign on for moral ambition? Are you finding people are signing up to join the school to read the book, to like change their mind about how they might want to set up their life?
- [38:54]
Rutger Bregman
Absolutely. It's getting totally out of hand. We have 17,000 members now from more than 100 countries, and I think by the time this podcast gets published might be a few more. It's been really, really exciting and exhilarating to see how this message resonates. I think that a lot of people agree that it's not enough anymore to look for the moral minimum. There have been a lot of do gooder movements in the past that are all about offsetting your carbon emissions, recycling your garbage, eating a little bit less meat. And I'm not against any of that. I think all that is good, but it's just not ambitious enough. Because take your environmental footprint. If you do everything right, then in the best possible scenario, you will have reduced your footprint to zero. You live in a tiny house with your own vegetable garden and you might as well not have existed. Right. This is not how we're going to prevent climate collapse and save democracy and prevent the next pandemic, et cetera. We got to be a bit more ambitious, almost like morally greedy. At the School for Moral Ambition. We're not interested in looking for a moral minimum. We're more looking for a moral maximum. We're thinking like, okay, how far can we take this? One of the epiphanies I had when I studied the most successful abolitionist movement was that it was founded by 12 individuals. One was a writer. So I guess there is a place for someone like me. One was a lawyer. They can be useful sometimes. But 10 out of 12 were entrepreneurs, people who had built and scaled their own companies, people who knew what it took to actually build an organization. And honestly, as someone who stood on the sidelines for a decade expressing my opinion and who's now building an organization, I have come to appreciate entrepreneurs much more. And people who actually do have that skin in the game. You know, the feeling that you're continuously risking it, all right, and that you might fail and that you might come across as a total idiot. I do see more clearly now, I guess, how important that is. And I also value maybe the opinions higher of those people who are actually trying things, right? And maybe often failing. But. But Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt said this as well, that it's not the critic who counts, but it's the men and the women in the arena, the people who try again and again and then fall and then stand up again. Right? That is what moral ambition, in my view, is all about. And I think that's exactly what we need right now.
- [41:18]
Lee McGowan
Yeah, I think that is exactly what we need. I was reading some writings on your book, and one of the things that was said, it was by the CEO of a person who created ocean cleaning, someone who went out and actually did something to clean the ocean. And what they said was the key to solving our biggest problems isn't just awareness or political will or money. It's ambitious individuals willing to dedicate their time and skill to improving the world, right? And I was like, yeah, that's it. It's not just political will or just money that I throw at a cause that I think is important. It's the people that are going to run it, the people that are going to do the actual work on the ground. And then I was reading a thing from a Nobel Prize winner in economic and an MIT professor who also had read your book. And what they said was, we have come to accept so many things as normal, right? And that's everything from, you know, inequality, this skyrocketing inequality, now these giant firms that rule our lives, the virtue signaling on social media where we think we're a good person, but we're not really doing that much the way we show up in a democratic way in our societies. We've come to kind of accept that this is the normal, this is what it's supposed to be. And what they said was we have to dream of an alternative vision for our society. This vision where we are doing it differently, where we're controlling things differently, where we can still speak our truth, we can still use our democratic process, we can still use a free media that we're going to have to fight for. But that moral ambition itself is the first step to a different way of living our lives. Because clearly this way is not. It's not helping the world, it's not helping us, it's not helping our relationships, it's not helping our mental health. We're not doing what. So what comes next?
- [43:00]
Rutger Bregman
Yep, yep. And one of the first things we got to do is to reimagine the role of the government in our lives. I think too often we have accepted that government is often too ineffective and doesn't actually achieve what we want government to do. I mean, take the subway, for example, in New York, in my view, pretty crap compared to the subway in Paris or London or Amsterdam. It's like so dirty, not well maintained. Why should we accept that? Why is it normal that so many talented people take. In my book, I talk about Harvard, for example. Obvious example. Like, half of Harvard graduates end up in what a friend of mine calls the Bermuda Triangle of talent, which is like consultancy, corporate law and finance. Now, if you add big tech to that, it's more than 60% of some really privileged, very bright young people who write applications essays, you know, to get into the university, about all the global problems they aspire to solve. But then as the years go by, you know, they end up in pretty meaningless careers and they get a job at McKinley. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And is that normal? Should we accept that? No. History teaches us that it doesn't have to be this way. Actually, it was very different. So in the 60s and the early 70s, it was much more prestigious and normal to go and work for government. Back then you had the American Freshman survey, you know, a big survey of American students asking them about their most important goals in life. And in the late 60s, 90% of students said that developing a meaningful philosophy of life was one of their most important life goals. Goals. Only 50% said that making a lot of money was one of their most important life goals. Today, as you might expect, those numbers have reversed. So it's now 90% saying money is the most important goal that's not because these kids are bad or selfish or whatever, but it's because the culture is just messed up. But that also gives me reason for hope. It shows that we can change it. What we can learn on the left, I think, is that historically we've been really good at saying what we're against, right? We've been really good at saying no, which was quite necessary in many respects, like blocking the development of terrible, polluting factories or highways that would be plowed through historic neighborhoods, et cetera. That's pretty important to check corporate abuse. But it's also important to know what you're actually for, to actually show that government can build, that it can be a real, really attractive place to work for some of the most talented, the best and brightest people. That's also, by the way, what I liked about Mandani's campaign and about the whole new discourse around what's called abundance. It's like, why do we settle for this, right? We should want much more. We want abundant, affordable housing. We want abundant healthy food. You know, we want abundant, affordable childcare. It's just this scarcity mindset where we're only thinking about, hey, how we can redistribute what we already have. Not enough. It's an important part, right? I'm a big believer, as you know, in taxing the rich. And I think that can actually help us to also reallocate a lot of talent and to expect much more of government that we say, like, hey, this is the subway as it is right now. We want, like, they have it in London or in Paris, like, clean the whole thing up, make sure it runs properly and make it free for everyone. Why not?
- [46:14]
Lee McGowan
Why not? Where's our bullet train? Where's our way to get from place to place? You know, we still don't have that in America. And you go, well, why not?
- [46:20]
Rutger Bregman
Yeah, yeah, why not? And there we need to have of this long, hard look in the mirror. I really appreciate that about a book like Abundance by Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein, even though not. I wouldn't agree with everything, but it is 80%. I would say about 80% indeed. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it is. I mean, it is embarrassing, right, that if you look at blue cities, blue states, California, San Francisco, a lot of progressive people there. I mean, the housing shortage is bigger there. And meanwhile, while states like Texas are kicking California's ass in the rollout of clean energy, I mean, why is that happening? That's not supposed to happen, right? So if progressives and left wingers really, you know, Believe they have many better ideas. Then roll up your sleeves and show that you can do much better.
- [47:10]
Lee McGowan
Yeah, well, last time you were here, you said that MLK didn't inspire us with his I have a nightmare speech, right? Like, like it's all about having a dream, right? That humanity, no matter what we've been taught or what we've been propagandized to believe, is actually quite benevolent, quite cooperative. That's how we got so far as a species. It's what you write about in some of your other books, that it's really important that we don't get too overwhelmed with what's happening from day to day. That we lose our imagination. That we lose our ability to see. That historically we have made great changes when things seemed terrible. We were able to have a progressive era after the first Gilded Age. We could have that again now if we use our imagination. Imagination and we work in cooperation. I mean, you have always said that the impossible becomes inevitable when enough people working on the right side of history work together to make it so. And I think that's where we have to be right now. And I'm so, so pleased that you're out here with your School of Moral Ambition and your book Moral Ambition, which everyone must buy. So before you go, tell us how we can help you. How can we move this world forward? How do we help the School of Moral Ambition? How do we join the School of Moral Ambition? How do we buy your book? Tell us how to do our job.
- [48:20]
Rutger Bregman
There's a beautiful quote from Market Mead who once said that we should never doubt that small groups of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. In fact, it's the only thing that ever has. So that's what we are trying to do. Continuously bringing together small groups of thoughtful, committed citizens, providing them with like a safe space for ambitious do gooders. Like, this is a place where you don't need to be embarrassed that you are so idealistic that you genuinely believe you can make a massive difference. Difference. And we've, we've got a program, our so called Moral Ambition Circle program. These are groups of six to eight people who come together around these questions like, okay, what are some of the greatest challenges we face? What are my superpowers? What's the match between those two? What's holding me back right now? How can I take that first step and how can we hold each other accountable? So I think that's absolutely essential. And whether you do it through us, you know, moralambition.org it's all for free. You can just use our material or another group. I think the most important thing is that you, you find like minded people. Right. It's almost like finding your own little cult of ambitious do gooders. That is what I see again and again in history. Like the abolitionist movement, it was so tiny in the 1780s, maybe 50 people in total. And they all knew each other, but they made a pledge, they promised one another that they would keep going. And it took them their whole lives actually. Of the 12 founders of the British Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, only one was still alive when slavery was finally abolished. Of the 68 women who came together at Seneca Falls in 1848, you know, for the first women's rights convention in the United States, only one was still alive when women finally got the right to vote across the United States and she was sick on the day of elections. Now I am just deeply in awe of those kind of people and they still exist today. And you can find them. You can become part of those groups. You don't have to be a saint, you don't have to be a hero. You only need to allow yourself to be infected by this idea, almost like this mind virus of what I call moral ambition and then just, you know, start the journey.
- [50:21]
Lee McGowan
Yeah, and like you said, it's contagious. When you do, someone does the good thing and someone joins them, you often find other people that will join you too. We have to be morally greedy, seek moral maximalism. I love that. Thank you so much for joining us today, Rutger. I could have you on all the time. I just love talking to you and thank you for all the amazing work work that you are doing.
- [50:42]
Rutger Bregman
Likewise. I really loved it and I'm already looking forward to next time we speak.
- [50:47]
Lee McGowan
So that was Rucker Bregman reminding us that it is time for a moral reawakening, that you don't have to be a good person to do good things. It's the doing the good things that makes you a good person. Rutger reminds us if we want to make real change, we need coalitions. We need to be working with others. Maybe we won't agree on every single issue, but if we, if we can agree on enough, let's not get caught up in purity testing each other to the detriment of winning and implementing real change. We can check our privilege, but we can also use our privilege. I want to thank Rutger for joining us today and you for caring enough about a better world to join us now. Go into the world and be morally greedy. Know what you stand for and stand by it. Until next week. Peachy Out. Before we go, I just want to thank the people who support this work by being members of Politics Girl Premium. If you would like to get this podcast like they do, ad free delivered directly to your inbox along with my kitchen rants, then please consider becoming a member of Politics Girl Premium by going to politicsgirl.com and signing up. We know we aren't getting what we need from mainstream media. It is mostly just billionaire backed propaganda at this point. So if you want facts and real knowledge it is essential that you support those of us out here still bringing that to you. There is a link to sign up in the bio of this episode but also@politicsgirl.com and as always please like and share this podcast so we can grow our audience because the more people who have access to this kind of information the better. As always, thank you so much for your time and support. The Politics Girl Podcast is written and performed by me, Leigh McGowan and produced and edited by Happy Warrior Entertainment. All rights reserved.