Moral Ambition - Rutger Bregman

Partial Excerpts (antilibrary)

Prologue

The neurologists could scarcely believe their eyes. Never before had they seen a brain like this one. It was early morning on 22 May 2001

When the scientists shared their results, the press proclaimed they’d found the man with the most beautiful brain on earth. ‘His level of mind control is astonishing,’ wrote a British reporter, ‘and the upbeat impulses in his brain are off the scale

The man in the MRI scanner was a Buddhist monk named Matthieu Ricard.

Ricard would end up clocking more than 60,000 hours of meditation. Year in, year out, he fed his brain with thoughts of love and compassion, to staggering effect. By the time he ended up in that scanner, according to headlines around the globe, Ricard was ‘the happiest man in the world’.

But you can also look at Mr Ricard in a different light. Here’s a guy who spent 60,000 hours – that’s 7,500 workdays, or a solid thirty years of full-time work – inside his own head. Thirty years in which he did little for others, thirty years in which he didn’t lift a finger to make the world a better place.

Maybe your own happiness isn’t the prime objective, let alone your ultimate life goal

In that case, you’ll need a book that’s more than the latest guide to finding happiness. Not a book that makes life easier, but one that makes life a little harder.

This is that kind of book.

1

Of all things wasted in our throwaway times, the greatest is wasted talent

First there’s the obvious reason: they don’t get the chance. After all, half the world’s people have to make do with less than seven dollars a day

But I’m talking here about the people who’ve been given every opportunity

the talented folks with the world at their feet who nonetheless get stuck in mind-numbing, pointless, or just plain harmful jobs.

There’s an antidote to that kind of waste, and it’s called moral ambition. Moral ambition is the will to make the world a wildly better place. To devote your working life to the great (grand) challenges of our time, whether that’s climate change or corruption, gross inequality or the next pandemic.

Those looking to do some good in today’s world don’t have to look far.

Now you might be thinking: That’s all well and good, but I’ve got a full-time job, two kids, and a mortgage. I’m happy to recycle and eat some tofu now and then, but a ‘fundamental transformation’? No thanks. In that case, this book may not be for you

2

it seems to me you’ve got roughly four options

Category I jobs: not that ambitious, not that idealistic

Some jobs simply don’t add much value. These are people writing reports nobody reads

Recent research shows that about 8 per cent of all employees think their own job is pretty pointless. Another 17 per cent confess to having some doubts about whether their job contributes to society

David Graeber (1961–2020) had a highly technical term for such positions: bullshit jobs

we know which ones it’s not. In 2020, at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, lists of ‘essential workers’ popped up everywhere: from cleaning staff to streetsweepers, from teachers to firefighters, and from bus drivers to registered nurses. These are the people who keep the world running; they don’t need a lecture on moral ambition.

But it can be even worse. Some jobs are outright harmful and fall into what are sometimes called the ‘sin industries.’ Here we find accountants helping the rich avoid taxes, marketers promoting addictive meds, brokers peddling dubious financial products, and anyone working for the gambling industry or Big Tobacco

Unless cornered, many of these employees won’t cop to having a pointless or harmful job. It’s not exactly the kind of thing you chat about at parties

In fact, there’s a striking correlation between the level of pay in a given industry and how moral or immoral we think it is.8

For some people in this not-all-that-ambitious, not-all-that-idealistic category, there’s also an escape hatch: becoming financially independent

this kind of thinking always seems a little sad to me. It means you’re chasing a form of freedom where you won’t have to lift a finger. The dream is to make the transition from office serf to person of independent means, so you can delegate all the annoying work and no longer have to contribute to society

Category II jobs: ambitious, but not all that idealistic

these people want to reach the top, but use soulless indicators for success: a fancy title, fat salary, corner office, or other perks

A corporate lawyer, for instance, does some $30,000 of damage to society each year, a commercial banker more than $100,000.14 That’s a lot of money, but if you ask Lockwood, he stresses that the opportunity costs are much higher.

Take consultants

The work’s alright and isn’t hurting anyone

They don’t start new organisations, don’t come up with new innovations, and generally don’t concern themselves with the most pressing challenges facing us today

You can hear similar frustrations even among doctors, professionals we usually think of as essential

Things aren’t much different for entrepreneurs

more often than not, we’re offered solutions for problems we didn’t know we had.