Latest news with #MoralAmbition
Yahoo
14-06-2025
- General
- Yahoo
He once rebuked billionaires for not paying enough taxes. Now this historian says we need ‘moral ambition' to fight tyranny
It is one of the most inspiring photographs in modern history, one that reveals the worst and best of human nature with a click of a camera shutter. It is a black-and-white image of a crowd of workers at a shipbuilding factory in Nazi Germany. It shows hundreds of them tightly packed in virtual military formation, extending a Nazi salute to Adolf Hitler — all except for one man. He stands in the middle of the throng, coolly defiant, with his arms folded across his chest and a sour look on his face. Historians have debated the identity and fate of the man in the photo, which was taken in 1936. But the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman uses the image in his new book to ask two questions: What innate characteristic enabled that man to resist the fear the Nazi state instilled in so many of its citizens? And what can people today learn from him, and others who are fighting new forms of state-sponsored fear? Bregman says one antidote to that fear is 'moral ambition.' It's his term for people who blend the idealism of an activist with the ruthless pragmatism of an entrepreneur to make the world a better place. In his new book, 'Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference,' Bregman uses the example of that German shipyard worker and other ordinary people to critique what he sees as a common failing of people on the left: They fall for the 'illusion of awareness,' a belief that simply exposing people to injustice will inspire them to act. 'Awareness doesn't put food on the table. Awareness won't keep a roof over your head,' writes Bregman, a vegan who has spoken out against animal factory farming. 'With awareness, you don't cool down the planet, you're not finding shelter for those 100 million refugees, and you won't make a bit of difference for the 100 billion animals at factory farms worldwide. Awareness is at best a starting point, while for many activists, it seems to have become the end goal.' Bregman has built a global audience by making others face uncomfortable truths. He shot to prominence following his 2017 TED talk about overcoming poverty by offering a universal basic income. Two years later, he went viral at a 2019 Davos panel discussion for his scathing rebuke of billionaires for not paying their fair share of taxes. ('Taxes, taxes, taxes. All the rest is bullsh** in my opinion,' he said). In a conversation from his home in New York City, Bregman spoke to CNN about why the Black Lives Matter movement failed to generate transformational change, why he gets most of his criticism from the left, and how his parents — Peta, an activist and special needs teacher, and his father, Kees, a minister — inspire his work. His remarks were edited for brevity and clarity. As a young boy, I was already obsessed with the Second World War. The country in which I grew up, the Netherlands, was occupied by the Nazis. I always wondered, what would I have done? There's huge literature around the people who actually did something. I was interested in the psychology of these resistance heroes. I thought that they were more altruistic, or maybe more extroverted, or maybe they have had certain privileges in the sense that sometimes you need resources to do the right thing. But none of that turned out to be true. It turns out that resistance heroes were really a cross-section of the population: rich, poor, young, old, left-wing, right-wing. A group of researchers looked at the evidence and said, hey, wait a minute, there is actually one thing that seems to be going on here. In 96% of all cases, when people were asked to join the resistance, they said yes. And then I had a epiphany. This (the resistance) was actually an idea that was spreading, almost like a pandemic. People were inspiring each other. This also explains why the resistance was a very local phenomenon; it wasn't evenly distributed over the country. People gave each other courage. That's super simple, but I think it's a quite profound lesson for us today. We often imagine that people do good things because they are good people. But it's exactly the other way around. You do good things, and that makes you a good person. You just got to get started or be inspired by others, and that's how you get there. Resistance is incredibly important. My fellow historian, Timothy Snyder, always says that we should not obey in advance, right? We shouldn't, even before the order goes out, start behaving as if we live in an authoritarian system. I was very glad to see Harvard show some courage, especially after the very cowardly behavior of some of the big law firms. Acts of resistance can be highly contagious, just as cowardice can be contagious. As a historian, I'm reminded of other periods in our history. It's often said that we live in a second Gilded Age (a tumultuous period of shocking income inequality and concentration of corporate power in the US). And if I look at the first one in the late 19th century, I see very similar things. I see an incredible amount of immorality and amount of political corruption. I see elites that were utterly detached from the realities of ordinary people's lives. But what gives me hope is that after the Gilded Age came the Progressive Era, with people like Theodore Roosevelt, a Harvard graduate (and a powerful progressive reformer), someone who grew up in a privileged environment. And then so many things happened in such a short period of time that were unthinkable: the (introduction of) income tax, labor and environmental regulations, the shorter work week, the breakup of big monopolies and corporate power. It was quite incredible. I'm not predicting that this will happen or anything like that, but I do think it is time for a countercultural revolution. It should be led by people from the bottom up, but also very much by elites who have a certain sense of noblesse oblige (the belief that people with wealth and power should help the less fortunate). This is really what you see in the progressive period. Take Alva Vanderbilt. She used to be this pretty decadent woman who was married to Cornelius Vanderbilt. She wanted to get into the Four Hundred, the most wealthy and elite families in New York. But then her husband died, and she did the same thing as MacKenzie Scott (the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. She turned into an activist and became one of the main financiers of the women's rights movement. This (the Progressive era) was very much a revolt among elites who were just utterly fed up with the total decadence, immorality, and also frankly the unseriousness of the people who were in power. I see the exact same thing today. At some point, it's time to get fed up with it and provide an alternative. But that really starts with doing the work yourself. I'm too much of a historian to be a real optimist. I know that things can go downhill very quickly. If you study Germany in the 1930s or the 1920s, you see a society that is one of the most civilized and technologically advanced countries in the world. There was this idiot named Adolf Hitler, but most people didn't take him seriously. We are living through an extraordinary moment. The next five to 10 years are going to be incredibly important for the future of the whole human race. The Industrial Revolution in 1750 was the most important thing that happened in all of human history. We are living through a similar moment. It's easy to see the dystopian possibilities, and I really do not want to dismiss them. But at the same time, some of the utopian possibilities that I sketch out in my first book, 'Utopia for Realists,' which were often dismissed as quite naïve — they become more realistic by the day. Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, says that 50% of entry-level jobs could be gone five years from now (because of AI). We are going to have to rethink so many basic aspects of the social contract. This whole idea that you have to work for your money, that you're not a valuable human person if you don't have a job — we have to get rid of that idea quite soon, because it's going to be very cruel to hang on to that if we keep automating our jobs so quickly. All of this could lead to some wonderful utopian possibilities. We will finally be able to ditch the whole idea that you have to work for a living. Then we will finally be able to figure out what life is all about. Will we get it right? I don't know. Yes, I'm afraid so. I spend a lot of time studying the civil rights movement, and what really strikes me about that movement is just how effective it was in translating awareness into tangible results. They got these huge packages of legislation through Congress that made such a massive, tangible difference in the lives of real people. And then look at Black Lives Matter. It's incredibly impressive on one hand — it was the biggest protest movement in the history of the United States. But then look at the actual results. It's not nothing — some police forces changed a little bit. But compared to the amount of energy around that movement, it's been pretty disappointing. unknown content item - This is not true for BLM alone. It's true for many protest movements of the last two decades. And this is probably because in this online era, it's easy to start up the empathy and the anger. We see it in Los Angeles (where people are protesting the Trump administration's sweeping immigration crackdown) right now. You get people out in the streets very quickly. But is there an actual plan, an actual strategy? Changing the world is very difficult. It takes enormous perseverance, and coalition building, which is quite difficult. You have an online environment where people are calling each other out all the time over purity politics. I often find it funny but also depressing that I get the most criticism from my friends on the left. It can be all kinds of things. I'm currently building an organization called the School for Moral Ambition. We are building fellowships for ambitious, talented people to take on some of these very pressing global issues, whether that's animal factory farming or tax avoidance by billionaires. But that stuff needs to be financed. So we work with groups like Patriotic Millionaires, for example — wealthy people who say, hey, tax me more. But for some on the left, it's like, ewww, you're working with rich people. In my book, I talk about the noble loser, those people who like to say, 'I stood on the right side of history. We didn't vote for Kamala (Harris), because Kamala was pro-Israel.' Well, look what that got us. Whether we're talking about people who are currently suffering in Palestine, animals who are suffering or people who are being oppressed — they don't care if you're right. They want you to win. I think so. I've always been very proud of my dad. I remember very well sitting in church, looking at my dad, and thinking he has the coolest job. I looked at my friends, and one's dad was an accountant and another was a marketer. And my dad is a minister, who talked about the biggest questions of life. I don't give the same answers (as him) to all those questions, even though I think we've become closer philosophically and spiritually as I got older. But I've always believed that those are the right questions to ask. We have only one life on this precious planet, and it's very short. No matter how rich we get, we can never buy ourselves more time. A lot of my secular and progressive friends love to dunk on religion, and sometimes for good reasons. But I've always appreciated those parts of religion that force us to reckon with the bigger questions of what life is actually about. My mother is an incredible woman. She is the only one who keeps getting arrested in our family. The other day she was arrested again as a 68-year-old climate activist. For her, it's always been very natural and logical to live in line with your own ideals. A lot of people think certain things, but they don't act on it. Many of my friends on the left care so much about poverty and inequality, and then I'll ask, 'How much do you donate to effective charities?' and very often, the answer is nothing. What I've learned from my mother is that you can just do what you say. She's also never been afraid to use the power of shame. A lot of people say that shaming is toxic, and I tend to disagree. I think there's a reason why we humans are pretty much the only species in the whole animal kingdom with the ability to blush. They thought it was hilarious. Those are the moments when I make my mother proud. John Blake is a CNN senior writer and author of the award-winning memoir, 'More Than I Imagined: What a Black Man Discovered About the White Mother He Never Knew.'
RNZ News
19-05-2025
- Science
- RNZ News
Feature interview: A new definition of success
science life and society 3:00 pm today It's been said the best minds a generation are thinking about how to make people click on ads. Brilliant minds are going underused while big problems go unsolved says historian Rutger Bregman. He argues it's possible to build a life that's both ambitious and idealistic. He calls for a new definition of success, measured by impact, not income in his new book, Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting your Talent and Start Making a Difference.
New Indian Express
17-05-2025
- Business
- New Indian Express
Radical or problematic? Rutger Bregman's book, Moral Ambition, Drive A Change, gives the handle to those with privilege
'Of all things wasted in our throwaway times, the greatest is wasted talent. There are millions of people around the world who could help make the world a better place, but they do not.' Dutch historian and author Rutger Bregman's latest book, Moral Ambition (Bloomsbury), starts with these lines, and throughout, it tries to answer many questions related to the betterment of this world. 'The book is an amalgamation of the idealism of an activist and the ambition of an entrepreneur. It offers a fresh perspective to people who are facing challenges like sticking to a meaningless job and are willing to quit it to find a purpose. It is also an antidote to talent-wasting,' says Bregman. Make a difference As the book addresses key issues like waste of human talent, unemployment, lack of meaningful jobs, a pertinent question: 'How to drive change?' Bregman believes the answer lies in finding the right people at the right time. 'It is important to be part of a small group with morally ambitious people. They can see the larger picture and drive a sea change in this world. I have co-founded a school called Moral Ambition, which tries to bring many of these groups together to work on issues like poverty reduction, educational inequalities, and many others,' adds Bregman. About being a part of meaningful associations, the book refers to the Pareto Principle, a theory by Italian economist and sociologist Vilfredo Pareto, which states that a small percentage (20 percent) of inputs refer to a large section of outputs (80 percent). 'It is important to be a part of that 20 percent. Although they are a minority in numbers, they can drive big change,' notes Bregman. Where's the money? Sticking to a useless job may be boring; however, it adds financial stability. Where will people find the strength to quit that and look for a change? In simpler terms, where is the money to drive change? When Bregman was asked this question, he pointed to the concept of privilege and posits a problematic theory. According to him, it is the privileged who are capable of driving change. 'This book is particularly meant for those who come with certain privileges. Those who have got good education, who have time to read a book, and who have some capital, need to drive the change,' he says. 'During the pandemic, we saw how farmers and several other unskilled workers went on strike. Their financial gains were at stake, however, that did not compel them to take courageous steps. Now, it is our moral responsibility to make the world a better place for them by taking risks,' he says.
Vox
13-05-2025
- Vox
How to find a meaningful job: try 'moral ambition,' says Rutger Bregman
is a senior reporter for Vox's Future Perfect and co-host of the Future Perfect podcast. She writes primarily about the future of consciousness, tracking advances in artificial intelligence and neuroscience and their staggering ethical implications. Before joining Vox, Sigal was the religion editor at the Atlantic. We're told from a young age to achieve. Get good grades. Get into a good school. Get a good job. Be ambitious about earning a high salary or a high-status position. But many of us eventually find ourselves asking: What's the point of all this ambition? The fat salary or the fancy title…are those really meaningful measures of success? There's another possibility: Instead of measuring our success in terms of fame or fortune, we could measure it in terms of how much good we do for others. And we could get super ambitious about using our lives to do a gargantuan amount of good. That's the message of Moral Ambition, a new book by historian and author Rutger Bregman. He wants us to stop wasting our talents on meaningless work and start devoting ourselves to solving the world's biggest problems, like malaria and pandemics and climate change. I recently got the chance to talk to Bregman on The Gray Area, Vox's philosophically-minded podcast. I invited him on the show because I find his message inspiring — and, to be honest, because I also had some questions about it. I want to dedicate myself to work that feels meaningful, but I'm not sure work that helps the greatest number of people is the only way to do that. Moral optimization — the effort to mathematically quantify moral goodness so that we can then maximize it — is, in my experience, agonizing and ultimately counterproductive. I also noticed that Bregman's 'moral ambition' has a lot in common with effective altruism (EA), the movement that's all about using reason and evidence to do the most good possible. After the downfall of Sam Bankman-Fried, the EA crypto billionaire who was convicted of fraud in 2023, EA suffered a major reputational blow. I wondered: Is Bregman just trying to rescue the EA baby from the bathwater? (Disclosure: In 2022, Future Perfect was awarded a one-time $200,000 grant from Building a Stronger Future, a family foundation run by Sam and Gabe Bankman-Fried. Future Perfect has returned the balance of the grant and is no longer pursuing this project.) So in our conversation, I talked to Bregman about all the different things that can make our lives feel meaningful, and asked: Are some objectively better than others? And how is moral ambition different from ideas that came before it, like effective altruism? This interview has been edited for length and clarity. There's much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. Why should people be morally ambitious? My whole career, I've been fascinated with the waste of talent that's going on in modern economies. There's this one study from two Dutch economists and they estimate that around 25 percent of all workers think that their own job is socially meaningless, or at least doubt the value of their job. That is just insane to me. I mean, this is five times the unemployment rate. And we're talking about people who often have excellent resumes, who went to very nice universities. Harvard is an interesting case in point: 45 percent of Harvard graduates end up in consultancy or finance. I'm not saying all of that is totally socially useless, but I do wonder whether that is the best allocation of talent. [Note: In 2020, 45 percent of Harvard graduating seniors entering the workforce went into consulting and finance. Among the class of 2024, the number was 34 percent.] We face some pretty big problems out there, whether it's the threat of the next pandemic that may be just around the corner, terrible diseases like malaria and tuberculosis killing millions of people, the problem with democracy breaking down. I mean, the list goes on and on. And so I've always been frustrated by this enormous waste of talent. If we're going to have a career anyway, we might as well do a lot of good with it. What role does personal passion play in this? You write in the book, 'Don't start out by asking, what's my passion? Ask instead, how can I contribute most? And then choose the role that suits you best. Don't forget, your talents are but a means to an end.' I think 'follow your passion' is probably the worst career advice out there. At the School for Moral Ambition, an organization I co-founded, we deeply believe in the Gandalf-Frodo model of changing the world. Frodo didn't follow his passion. Gandalf never asked him, 'What's your passion, Frodo?' He said, 'Look, this really needs to be done, you've got to throw the ring into the mountain.' If Frodo would have followed his passion, he would have probably been a gardener having a life full of second breakfasts and being pretty comfortable in the Shire. And then the orcs would have turned up and murdered everyone he ever loved. So the point here is, find yourself some wise old wizard, a Gandalf. Figure out what some of the most pressing issues that we face as a species are. And ask yourself, how can I make a difference? And then you will find out that you can become very passionate about it. In your book, there's a Venn diagram with three circles. The first is labeled 'sizable.' The second is 'solvable.' And the third is 'sorely overlooked.' And in the middle, where they all overlap, it says 'moral ambition.' I wonder about the 'sizable' part of that. Does moral ambition always have to be about scale? I'm a journalist now, but before that I was a novelist. And I didn't care how many people my work impacted. My feeling was: If my novel deeply moves just one reader and helps them feel less alone or more understood, I will be happy. Are you telling me I shouldn't be happy with that? I think there is absolutely a place for, as the French say, art pour l'art — art for the sake of art itself. I don't want to let everything succumb to a utilitarian calculus. But I do think it's better to help a lot of people than just a few people. On the margins, I think in the world today, we need much more moral ambition than we currently have. When I was reading your book, I kept thinking of the philosopher Susan Wolf, who has this great essay called 'Moral Saints.' She argues that you shouldn't try to be a moral saint — someone who tries to make all their actions as morally good as possible. She writes, 'If the moral saint is devoting all his time to feeding the hungry or healing the sick or raising money for Oxfam, then necessarily he is not reading Victorian novels, playing the oboe or improving his backhand. A life in which none of these possible aspects of character are developed may seem to be a life strangely barren.' How do you square that with your urge to be morally ambitious? We are living in a world where a huge amount of people have a career that they consider socially meaningless and then they spend the rest of their time swiping TikTok. That's the reality, right? I really don't think that there's a big danger of people reading my book and moving all the way in the other direction. There's only one community I know of where this has become a problem. It's the effective altruism community. In a way, moral ambition could be seen as effective altruism for normies. Let's talk about that. I'm not an effective altruist, but I am a journalist who has reported a lot on EA, so I'm curious where you stand on this. You talk about EA in the book and you echo a lot of its core ideas. Your call to prioritize causes that are sizable, solvable, and sorely overlooked is a rephrase of EA's call to prioritize the 'important, tractable, and neglected.' And then there's this idea that you shouldn't just be trying to do good, you should try to do the most good possible. So is being morally ambitious different from being an effective altruist? So, I wouldn't say the most good. I would say, you should do a lot of good — which is different, right? That's not about being perfect, but just being ambitious. Effective altruism is a movement that I admire quite a bit. I think there's a lot we can learn from them. And there are also quite a few things that I don't really like about them. What I really like about them is their moral seriousness. I come from the political left, and if there's one thing that's often quite annoying about lefties it's that they preach a lot, but they do little. For example, I think it's pretty easy to make the case that donating to charity is one of the most effective things you can do. But very few of my progressive leftist friends donate anything. So I really like the moral seriousness of the EAs. Go to EA conferences and you will meet quite a few people who have donated kidneys to random strangers, which is pretty impressive. The main thing I dislike is where the motivation comes from. One of the founding fathers of effective altruism was the philosopher Peter Singer, who has a thought experiment of the child drowning in the shallow pond… That's the thought experiment where Singer says, if you see a kid drowning in a shallow pond, and you could save this kid without putting your own life in danger, but you will ruin your expensive clothes, should you do it? Yes, obviously. And by analogy, if we have money, we could easily save the lives of people in developing countries, so we should donate it instead of spending it on frivolous stuff. Yes. I never really liked the thought experiment because it always felt like a form of moral blackmail to me. It's like, now I'm suddenly supposed to see drowning children everywhere. Like, this microphone is way too expensive, I could have donated that money to some charity in Malawi! It's a totally inhuman way of looking at life. It just doesn't resonate with me at all. But there are quite a few people who instantly thought, 'Yes, that is true.' They said, 'Let's build a movement together.' And I do really like that. I see EAs as very weird, but pretty impressive. Let's pick up on that weirdness. In your book, you straight up tell readers, 'Join a cult — or start your own. Regardless, you can't be afraid to come across as weird if you want to make a difference. Every milestone of civilization was first seen as the crazy idea of some subculture.' But how do you think about the downsides of being in a cult? A cult is a group of thoughtful, committed citizens who want to change the world, and they have some shared beliefs that make them very weird to the rest of society. Sometimes that's exactly what's necessary. To give you one simple example, in a world that doesn't really seem to care about animals all that much, it's easy to become disillusioned. But when you join a safe space of ambitious do-gooders, you can suddenly get this feeling of, 'Hey, I'm not the only one! There are other people who deeply care about animals as well. And I can do much more than I'm currently doing.' So it can have a radicalizing effect. Now, I totally acknowledge that there are signs of dangers here. You can become too dogmatic, and you can be quite hostile to people who don't share all your beliefs. I just want to recognize that if you look at some of these great movements of history — the abolitionists, the suffragettes — they had cultish aspects. They were, in a way, a little bit like a cult. Do you have any advice for people on how to avoid the downside — that you can become deaf to criticism from the outside? Yes. Don't let it suck up your whole life. When I hear about all these EAs living in group houses, you know, they're probably taking things too far. I think it helps if you're a normie in other respects of your life. It gives you a certain groundedness and stability. In general, it's super important to surround yourself with people who are critical of your work, who don't take you too seriously, who can laugh at you or see your foolishness and call it out — and still be a good friend.
Vox
13-05-2025
- Vox
Does your job feel meaningless? Try 'moral ambition.'
is a senior reporter for Vox's Future Perfect and co-host of the Future Perfect podcast. She writes primarily about the future of consciousness, tracking advances in artificial intelligence and neuroscience and their staggering ethical implications. Before joining Vox, Sigal was the religion editor at the Atlantic. We're told from a young age to achieve. Get good grades. Get into a good school. Get a good job. Be ambitious about earning a high salary or a high-status position. But many of us eventually find ourselves asking: What's the point of all this ambition? The fat salary or the fancy title…are those really meaningful measures of success? There's another possibility: Instead of measuring our success in terms of fame or fortune, we could measure it in terms of how much good we do for others. And we could get super ambitious about using our lives to do a gargantuan amount of good. That's the message of Moral Ambition, a new book by historian and author Rutger Bregman. He wants us to stop wasting our talents on meaningless work and start devoting ourselves to solving the world's biggest problems, like malaria and pandemics and climate change. I recently got the chance to talk to Bregman on The Gray Area, Vox's philosophically-minded podcast. I invited him on the show because I find his message inspiring — and, to be honest, because I also had some questions about it. I want to dedicate myself to work that feels meaningful, but I'm not sure work that helps the greatest number of people is the only way to do that. Moral optimization — the effort to mathematically quantify moral goodness so that we can then maximize it — is, in my experience, agonizing and ultimately counterproductive. I also noticed that Bregman's 'moral ambition' has a lot in common with effective altruism (EA), the movement that's all about using reason and evidence to do the most good possible. After the downfall of Sam Bankman-Fried, the EA crypto billionaire who was convicted of fraud in 2023, EA suffered a major reputational blow. I wondered: Is Bregman just trying to rescue the EA baby from the bathwater? (Disclosure: In 2022, Future Perfect was awarded a one-time $200,000 grant from Building a Stronger Future, a family foundation run by Sam and Gabe Bankman-Fried. Future Perfect has returned the balance of the grant and is no longer pursuing this project.) So in our conversation, I talked to Bregman about all the different things that can make our lives feel meaningful, and asked: Are some objectively better than others? And how is moral ambition different from ideas that came before it, like effective altruism? This interview has been edited for length and clarity. There's much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. Why should people be morally ambitious? My whole career, I've been fascinated with the waste of talent that's going on in modern economies. There's this one study from two Dutch economists and they estimate that around 25 percent of all workers think that their own job is socially meaningless, or at least doubt the value of their job. That is just insane to me. I mean, this is five times the unemployment rate. And we're talking about people who often have excellent resumes, who went to very nice universities. Harvard is an interesting case in point: 45 percent of Harvard graduates end up in consultancy or finance. I'm not saying all of that is totally socially useless, but I do wonder whether that is the best allocation of talent. [Note: In 2020, 45 percent of Harvard graduating seniors entering the workforce went into consulting and finance. Among the class of 2024, the number was 34 percent.] We face some pretty big problems out there, whether it's the threat of the next pandemic that may be just around the corner, terrible diseases like malaria and tuberculosis killing millions of people, the problem with democracy breaking down. I mean, the list goes on and on. And so I've always been frustrated by this enormous waste of talent. If we're going to have a career anyway, we might as well do a lot of good with it. What role does personal passion play in this? You write in the book, 'Don't start out by asking, what's my passion? Ask instead, how can I contribute most? And then choose the role that suits you best. Don't forget, your talents are but a means to an end.' I think 'follow your passion' is probably the worst career advice out there. At the School for Moral Ambition, an organization I co-founded, we deeply believe in the Gandalf-Frodo model of changing the world. Frodo didn't follow his passion. Gandalf never asked him, 'What's your passion, Frodo?' He said, 'Look, this really needs to be done, you've got to throw the ring into the mountain.' If Frodo would have followed his passion, he would have probably been a gardener having a life full of second breakfasts and being pretty comfortable in the Shire. And then the orcs would have turned up and murdered everyone he ever loved. So the point here is, find yourself some wise old wizard, a Gandalf. Figure out what some of the most pressing issues that we face as a species are. And ask yourself, how can I make a difference? And then you will find out that you can become very passionate about it. In your book, there's a Venn diagram with three circles. The first is labeled 'sizable.' The second is 'solvable.' And the third is 'sorely overlooked.' And in the middle, where they all overlap, it says 'moral ambition.' I wonder about the 'sizable' part of that. Does moral ambition always have to be about scale? I'm a journalist now, but before that I was a novelist. And I didn't care how many people my work impacted. My feeling was: If my novel deeply moves just one reader and helps them feel less alone or more understood, I will be happy. Are you telling me I shouldn't be happy with that? I think there is absolutely a place for, as the French say, art pour l'art — art for the sake of art itself. I don't want to let everything succumb to a utilitarian calculus. But I do think it's better to help a lot of people than just a few people. On the margins, I think in the world today, we need much more moral ambition than we currently have. When I was reading your book, I kept thinking of the philosopher Susan Wolf, who has this great essay called 'Moral Saints.' She argues that you shouldn't try to be a moral saint — someone who tries to make all their actions as morally good as possible. She writes, 'If the moral saint is devoting all his time to feeding the hungry or healing the sick or raising money for Oxfam, then necessarily he is not reading Victorian novels, playing the oboe or improving his backhand. A life in which none of these possible aspects of character are developed may seem to be a life strangely barren.' How do you square that with your urge to be morally ambitious? We are living in a world where a huge amount of people have a career that they consider socially meaningless and then they spend the rest of their time swiping TikTok. That's the reality, right? I really don't think that there's a big danger of people reading my book and moving all the way in the other direction. There's only one community I know of where this has become a problem. It's the effective altruism community. In a way, moral ambition could be seen as effective altruism for normies. Let's talk about that. I'm not an effective altruist, but I am a journalist who has reported a lot on EA, so I'm curious where you stand on this. You talk about EA in the book and you echo a lot of its core ideas. Your call to prioritize causes that are sizable, solvable, and sorely overlooked is a rephrase of EA's call to prioritize the 'important, tractable, and neglected.' And then there's this idea that you shouldn't just be trying to do good, you should try to do the most good possible. So is being morally ambitious different from being an effective altruist? So, I wouldn't say the most good. I would say, you should do a lot of good — which is different, right? That's not about being perfect, but just being ambitious. Effective altruism is a movement that I admire quite a bit. I think there's a lot we can learn from them. And there are also quite a few things that I don't really like about them. What I really like about them is their moral seriousness. I come from the political left, and if there's one thing that's often quite annoying about lefties it's that they preach a lot, but they do little. For example, I think it's pretty easy to make the case that donating to charity is one of the most effective things you can do. But very few of my progressive leftist friends donate anything. So I really like the moral seriousness of the EAs. Go to EA conferences and you will meet quite a few people who have donated kidneys to random strangers, which is pretty impressive. The main thing I dislike is where the motivation comes from. One of the founding fathers of effective altruism was the philosopher Peter Singer, who has a thought experiment of the child drowning in the shallow pond… That's the thought experiment where Singer says, if you see a kid drowning in a shallow pond, and you could save this kid without putting your own life in danger, but you will ruin your expensive clothes, should you do it? Yes, obviously. And by analogy, if we have money, we could easily save the lives of people in developing countries, so we should donate it instead of spending it on frivolous stuff. Yes. I never really liked the thought experiment because it always felt like a form of moral blackmail to me. It's like, now I'm suddenly supposed to see drowning children everywhere. Like, this microphone is way too expensive, I could have donated that money to some charity in Malawi! It's a totally inhuman way of looking at life. It just doesn't resonate with me at all. But there are quite a few people who instantly thought, 'Yes, that is true.' They said, 'Let's build a movement together.' And I do really like that. I see EAs as very weird, but pretty impressive. Let's pick up on that weirdness. In your book, you straight up tell readers, 'Join a cult — or start your own. Regardless, you can't be afraid to come across as weird if you want to make a difference. Every milestone of civilization was first seen as the crazy idea of some subculture.' But how do you think about the downsides of being in a cult? A cult is a group of thoughtful, committed citizens who want to change the world, and they have some shared beliefs that make them very weird to the rest of society. Sometimes that's exactly what's necessary. To give you one simple example, in a world that doesn't really seem to care about animals all that much, it's easy to become disillusioned. But when you join a safe space of ambitious do-gooders, you can suddenly get this feeling of, 'Hey, I'm not the only one! There are other people who deeply care about animals as well. And I can do much more than I'm currently doing.' So it can have a radicalizing effect. Now, I totally acknowledge that there are signs of dangers here. You can become too dogmatic, and you can be quite hostile to people who don't share all your beliefs. I just want to recognize that if you look at some of these great movements of history — the abolitionists, the suffragettes — they had cultish aspects. They were, in a way, a little bit like a cult. Do you have any advice for people on how to avoid the downside — that you can become deaf to criticism from the outside? Yes. Don't let it suck up your whole life. When I hear about all these EAs living in group houses, you know, they're probably taking things too far. I think it helps if you're a normie in other respects of your life. It gives you a certain groundedness and stability. In general, it's super important to surround yourself with people who are critical of your work, who don't take you too seriously, who can laugh at you or see your foolishness and call it out — and still be a good friend.
