Today, I review, link to, and excerpt from The New York Times Interview Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives. David Marchese
All that follows is from the above resource. I have just excerpted the very beginning of the article. It is worth reading in its entirety.
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.
