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Is it time for us to redefine what we mean by career success? Rutger Bregman thinks so, and his new book, Moral Ambition, makes a brisk and persuasive case for ditching “mind-numbing, pointless, or just plain harmful jobs” and doing something more meaningful instead. He’s aiming this book squarely at the “idealistic and ambitious” person of any age who works in consulting, law, finance and other well-paid sectors. (Yes, he’s looking at us, FT readers.)
Bregman is no ambition slouch himself. The superstar Dutch historian has published several books and essays, including the global bestsellers Humankind: A Hopeful History (2020) and Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There (2017). He went viral on YouTube in 2019 after calling out billionaires at the World Economic Forum in Davos for their tax avoidance tactics: “It feels like I’m at a firefighters conference and no one’s allowed to speak about water.”
In this optimist’s manifesto, moral ambition is about devoting “your working life to the great challenges of our time, whether that’s climate change or corruption, gross inequality or the next pandemic”. Inevitably, David Graeber and his concept of the “bullshit job” make an early appearance, but Bregman isn’t dwelling on the negative. He wants us to bring about positive change, and we can start small. As is customary in the modern “change your life” manual, he inspires the reader through real-life examples.
There’s a playbook here, and founding or joining “an elite corps of driven idealists” is probably the best way to do it. Examples include Ralph Nader and the teams of young lawyers he inspired to work with him on reforming the law on complex issues such as food safety and water pollution in the 1960s US.
Bregman’s un-preachy and persuasive writing style makes profound change look easy. It helps that we are reading about campaigns that succeeded. The progress of the anti-slavery movement in Britain runs throughout the book (“the abolitionist movement got going as a sort of Quaker startup”) and Bregman shows how pragmatism drove these activists in a society that was uninterested in their aim.
Thomas Clarkson, an influential early abolitionist, instead focused on something the country did care about: the high death toll among British sailors on slave ships. About 20 per cent of the crew, vulnerable to tropical illnesses, were dying on any given voyage. “That’s right, one of the greatest abolitionists of all time shifted his focus to the suffering among the perpetrators. Psychologists call this tactic moral reframing.”
The aim is to find new arguments for your world-changing idea that will convince those who don’t share your beliefs. This demands compromise, and Bregman has no time for modern activists who fall out with each other and write off potential allies because of minor mishaps or lack of “intersectionality”: “You end up with a movement that’s 100 per cent pure, but 0 per cent effective.”
Early in Moral Ambition, it had struck me that Bregman’s vision of a few individuals creating maximum gain for people and planet might represent a nascent fightback of the forces for good against the increasingly dark influence and philosophy of the Silicon Valley elite. Then, as if by magic, on page 48 there’s an old photograph of the venture capitalist Peter Thiel’s original “PayPal mafia”, dressed as mobsters. “History is full of small action groups with enormous impact,” says the author, reminding us that: “Thiel writes that we can speak of cults.”
Bregman is not suggesting that these tech founders have moral ambition (“It’s debatable, of course, whether those guys have made the world a better place”). He’s merely pointing out that single-minded focus, tireless work and devotion to a cause is effective. “If you want to change the world, you’d do better to join a cult. Or start your own.”
Bregman’s mission, instead, is to show that the more under-the-radar the cause, the more important it is for smart people to focus their efforts there. The most memorable example is the story of Rob Mather, a British business executive who started organising sponsored swims to raise money for a girl called Terri who had been badly burned in a fire. Having gathered enough money to make her financially secure for life, he scaled up and founded the Against Malaria Foundation, which distributes mosquito nets treated with insecticide. “What started as a swim-a-thon for little Terri has grown into a campaign that by conservative estimates has saved 100,000 lives.” AMF is, Bregman tells us, one of the world’s best-performing non-profits, and it’s been built by a an individual with moral ambition.
None of this might have happened had Mather not watched a news report in June 2003 about Terri’s accident and posted on Mumsnet, the parenting website, asking for ideas: “Charity swim? Email help?” Sometimes it’s chance or serendipity that takes us in unexpected new directions. And Bregman makes that sound like the most exciting thing of all.
Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference by Rutger Bregman Bloomsbury £20/Little, Brown $30, 304 pages
Isabel Berwick is FT Working It editor and author of ‘The Future-Proof Career’
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