Is Your Life Morally Ambitious Enough?

24:01Coleman Hughes:Yeah, so, okay, one question about the slave trade. So, about abolitionism in particular. So, I agree that Britain was the driving force behind global abolition. And, in fact, much of what they did was resented and viewed as a part of their colonial legacy by the rest of the world. And viewed as a cynical cover for colonial ambition. and you could argue, you know, motives are always mixed. And so projecting power and abolishing the slave trade went hand in hand. I think that's a good thing. Ultimately, I think there was more good than bad, which came from that aspect. But when you talk about American abolitionism being a failure, I think this is, I think that claim needs some more context, which is, I think, Americans in the North who were against slavery.

25:01Coleman Hughes:You know, the Republican Party was founded as an anti-slavery party. And that, as you know, but just for my audience, was different than abolition. Abolitionists were viewed as extreme activists who believe that slavery in the South should end immediately, right? And slaves should be emancipated. Much of the rest of the North, especially over time, over the course of the first half of the 19th century, they became anti-slavery, which was the more moderate position that slavery was a sin. Slavery was immoral. However, to simply end it overnight would cause more practical problems than it was worth.

25:39Coleman Hughes:So the correct position was to contain it, to not let any new slave states into the union. And then the idea is ultimately it would hopefully would die out or whatever. And that was Abraham Lincoln, and that was the Republican Party, and so forth. And so it's easy for me to imagine, because those people actually did think slavery was immoral, they believed it was a sin, that their view was tempered by the politics and by the practicality. Meaning, they understood if the whole North just did what the abolitionists said, there could be a bloody civil war on a scale that was unimaginable. And that actually is what happened.

26:24Coleman Hughes:Ultimately, that war did happen. So is it that it was a failure or is it that abolition was the extreme version and gave energy to the overall anti-slavery movement, which in turn did hasten the end of slavery?

26:44Rutger Bregman:So you're absolutely right to say that the circumstances in the US and Britain were obviously very, very different. Like for British people, like slavery did exist. There were people, I think around 10 to 15 ,000 people in London in the 1780s who were enslaved. But obviously it was not a huge phenomenon. And for most people, it was something that happened far away on slave ships, in colonies, places where they'd never been. So it was easier to virtue signal, if you will, and to be against the slave trade because you would not suffer big consequences, perhaps in your own life. But what I found really striking when I compared these two movements, you know, American abolitionism and British abolitionism, is that British abolitionism was so much more pragmatic.

27:32Rutger Bregman:It was really laser focused on actually achieving results. I'll give you one example. In the US, you had the so-called pre-produced movement. very similar to the most pure vegans today who are like, oh, is there a tiny little bit of milk powder in this that I can't consume it? The free produce movement was also like, I will refuse to buy any products that has any slave labor involved. I refuse to do that. So you have these free produce shops that were really unpopular because the quality of the products was very low. it was expensive and in this way i think abolitionists american abolitionists didn't pay themselves a service they come they came across as these very morally pure people who were more focused on you know on their own moral purity than on actually achieving results now in britain you had a very successful boycott campaign because it was much smaller in scope so you had a huge boycott of sugar and tea.

28:37Rutger Bregman:Now, obviously, this was highly charismatic, right? Everyone knows the British people, they love their tea, they love the sugar in their tea. So for hundreds of thousands of people to suddenly not do that anymore, it didn't make a big economic impact. If you look at the statistics, the economic statistics, you can't even see anything. But it was a great way to galvanize the movement and to increase awareness. And that is something that struck me again and again and again. Another simple example is that the British abolitionists early on decided that they would first focus on taking down the slave trade and not on taking down slavery as such.

29:18Because they thought, you know what, in the end, we want to take down the

29:22Rutger Bregman:whole system. But that is going to be politically completely impossible, completely toxic. If we want to suggest that we even touch the property of people in the colonies, I don't know, that's indeed going to cause some kind of civil war. But for canceling and ending the slave trade, we have some pretty pragmatic arguments. And you know what struck me most is that they started saying, hey, it is actually our own white British boys who really suffer the most from the slave trade. Because it turned out, they did some really good investigative journalism, that the percentage of white sailors that died on these voyages was actually higher than the number of, or the percentage of enslaved people.

30:07Rutger Bregman:Now, don't get me wrong, I don't want to suggest any like moral equivalency here, because I'm talking about the perpetrators. But what I admire about the abolitionists is that they were smart enough to recognize the political power of this argument. They went to the politicians, they went to the prime minister, William Pitt, the younger, and said, hey, our boys are dying. We ought to do something about this. And suddenly, you know, a lot of politicians were very interested.

30:33Coleman Hughes:Why was it higher? I mean, I have to imagine, you know, they were, maybe they were all getting scurvy and conditions were horrible, but shouldn't it have been higher for slaves packed in the bottom of a ship and then the people sailing the

30:45Rutger Bregman:ship yeah there's some really horrid economics behind this but it does make sense if you think about it um enslaved people were property so you didn't want them to die because you wanted to sell them um these sailors they were not property they were employees if they would die then you wouldn't have to pay their wages at the end of the voyage so you would actually make more money if they would die obviously you didn't want like too many of them to die because otherwise you you wouldn't get home. But yeah, I think that that was the basic economic mechanism behind it.

31:18Coleman Hughes:At the same time, though, wasn't there a famous case in Britain where people had insurance policies for the slaves that they were taking on these ships? And so they could basically try to commit insurance fraud by killing the slaves, throwing the slaves overboard. And there was a famous case there, right?

31:34Rutger Bregman:Yeah, that's the famous case of the Zork, which was originally actually a Dutch ship that was hijacked by the British. Recently, a fantastic book has been published about it. I just read it. But indeed, this was a case of, what is it, about 150 enslaved people being thrown overboard. And that case went to court, not because of murder, not because of mass murder, but because of insurance fraud. The owners of the slave ship tried indeed to claim the insurance money. And then the insurance company said, we don't really believe your story of what happened there. Now, this became a really important case to galvanize the abolitionist movement because Alada Equiano, the abolitionist that I mentioned, brought this to the attention of Grenfell Sharp, another one of the founders of the British Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade.

32:30Rutger Bregman:And they started to make a lot of noise about it in the British press. it is really a beautiful example of where you know rigorous journalism raising awareness campaigning can make a big difference and you gotta you gotta imagine that this is really the first time that this happened in all of human history the book to read about this is adam hawkshield's book bury the chains uh where he just really describes how they these people had to invent everything you know design a logo uh create that abolitionist propaganda if you will do petitions on a scale that people had never seen before. It was really the first movement in all of human history where people advocated for the rights of others.

33:13Rutger Bregman:Obviously, there had always been movements where people were advocating for their own rights, but this had never happened before, at least not to my knowledge, where hundreds of thousands of people started advocating for other people's rights.

33:25Coleman Hughes:Okay, so as you know, we still have slavery in the world today.

33:29Rutger Bregman:Well, it's just coming back in Afghanistan legally.

33:31Coleman Hughes:In Afghanistan, certain countries in Africa. There's a very good book that came out last year by Justin Marozzi called Captives and Companions, which is a history of slavery in the Islamic world. But he has visited locations in Africa and talked recently, like in the past five to ten years, to actual slaves or very recently freed slaves. And there it's a problem of entrenched local custom. You're talking about tribes and localities where slavery has been the norm for hundreds of years, if not longer, that are so remote that they were untouched really by the British abolitionist activism and still persists to this day in areas where the government has very little state capacity.

34:28Coleman Hughes:If they have a functional police force, it's not one that penetrates the whole country and regularly polices black markets that reflect local customs and so forth. And this is a very tough problem to solve. The lesson of, I think, our mutual admiration for what the British did is that they really were not afraid to use force. They were not afraid to use their role as the global superpower and really just force people to stop slave trading fully against their will. Is there any lesson to be learned there for America? Because, you know, America as a superpower today, I think, you know, in principle, we could make stamping out the remaining traces of slavery around the world a high priority.

35:19Coleman Hughes:but that would require a level of comfort with exerting force that I think we don't have. And in general, I think the issue of global slavery is underrated now. So how, if at all, should we incorporate trying to reduce slavery around the world into our current foreign policy?

35:40Rutger Bregman:So a couple of things. Let me first say, you know, I'm really trained as a historian, And I have little patience for people who want to treat this issue or this story as, you know, a kind of Disney story where you have the good guys and the bad guys. History is weird. And very often the right thing happens for the wrong reasons. If you ask the question, why did the British start this massive campaign against the slave trade? Why did they spend up to 2 % of GDP for decades on this? It has been described as the most expensive international moral effort in all of human history. You know, like four or five, six times as much as the British spend on development aid these days.

36:22Rutger Bregman:Well, it was a mix of motivations. Initially, I think it was mostly indeed quite moral or at least Christian motivations that the nation felt it had this sin of perpetuating slavery and the slave trade. for so long and that now it really needed to get rid of it and do its best. At some point, also, you know, very imperialistic motivations became a big motive, you know, about the scramble for Africa in the late 19th century when they cut up the whole continent and often anti-slavery and imperialism, you know, were just two sides of the same coin. But the fact that, you know, they were fighting slavery in the slave trade, that was a really good thing.

37:04Rutger Bregman:um and if you read about like for example how did i think this was the mid 1850s when the british approached the king of lagos and said hey um we thought about it for a while and uh we don't think slavery is good can you please stop doing that and the king said you know we've been doing that since forever like what's the problem you know i think i'd rather not stop and then the british bumped the whole city and 5 000 people died and then a new king you know came to power and they were like, yeah, what do you think about slavery? And he was like, yeah, yeah, I think let's abolish it. So you're absolutely right.

37:40Rutger Bregman:Like power was crucial here. This is, by the way, maybe a little bit off topic, but this is my big frustration with Europe these days is that it's become a continent that speaks a lot about morality and international law, et cetera, but it doesn't have the power to actually back it up. The lesson of 19th century Britain is that if you have big humanitarian beliefs, you better also have the power to enforce those beliefs. Otherwise, no one's going to listen. Now, we have made tremendous moral progress. I think that is really important to say. Up until last month, every single country in the whole world had made slavery illegal.

38:19Rutger Bregman:As I said, the evil Taliban has recently made it legal again. But the fact that it's moved into illegality pretty much everywhere, that is huge moral progress. Still, there are tens of millions of enslaved people, but it is not normal the way it was in the 1850s. For us, freedom of labor, we're so used to it. And it's so easy to forget that that was actually not the case throughout most of history. Democracy is a very recent, precious, fragile thing. And that's, by the way, also something to keep in mind as we move into the AI era and we face some pretty massive concentration of power, like there's, history doesn't suggest to us that we will always keep making more progress.

39:12Rutger Bregman:So for me, this is really a battle of ideas in the end. As I said, I see myself as an old-fashioned European social Democrat. I see myself as someone who's part of that universalist tradition. I think you had people like Peter Singer on the show who said that moral progress has mainly been about expanding the moral circle. I think we're still in the middle of that fight. And I think now actually in quite a few places around the world, we seem to be losing that fight.

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41:03Coleman Hughes:It's a digital security guard that never sleeps. Ready to take back control? Go to surfshark.com slash ColemanDeal or use code ColemanDeal at checkout to get four extra months of Surfshark VPN. You'll get a risk-free 30-day money-back guarantee. And that link and code are also available in the show notes. Okay, let's talk more about moral ambition. Consider the case of Bill Gates. Has he been able to do so much good in his life because he had moral ambition as a young person? Or is he a case where he had normal ambition as a young person, was extremely successful, and then at some point had so much money and the cast of mind so as to pivot to becoming morally ambitious?

41:51Coleman Hughes:If so, is he a model of your thesis in action or is he an exception that proves your rule or is he in a way a model for people to follow and a reason to have normal ambition rather than moral ambition as a young person?

42:07Rutger Bregman:So Bill Gates is absolutely someone who is a model for people to follow. And I've said this for a long time. I also think it's important though to point out that he's the exception. I always find it funny when people talk to me about billionaires and philanthropy. It's always like Bill Gates, Bill Gates, Bill Gates. What about Bill Gates? What about Bill Gates? Oh, Bill Gates, great, yeah. We wouldn't have a malaria vaccine without him. We actually have two effective malaria vaccines without him. And probably he was the Thomas Clarkson for malaria vaccines, right? He spent so much money on it two decades ago when very few people were interested in it.

42:43Rutger Bregman:People from the left to the right, even like the leftiest social Democrats in Sweden and didn't give a damn about malaria. And then, yeah, the Microsoft billionaire comes along and says, I think this is really important. I've looked into it and I'm going to spend a shitload of money on it. Well, that's great. And that's legacy. Recently, though, there was an analysis of people who had signed the giving pledge, the initiative of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, of people who promised to give away at least half of their wealth before they die. well um you know on average the wealth of the people who had signed on to it has grown by about 280 percent in the last 15 years um eight couples have died without fulfilling the pledge only one living couple john arnold and his wife have actually fulfilled the pledge well great credit to them um but i do think that is something they all lie i mean i think that's basically what they did like if you promise something and you don't do it then that's lying, right?

43:46Rutger Bregman:As you point out in your book,

43:47Coleman Hughes:Quakers didn't do this because it would set them up to lie, right?

43:53Rutger Bregman:Yeah, well, the Quakers, the Quakers, if only we had more Quakers. Yeah, it's a really, I became obsessed with the Quakers at some point. It's so interesting that indeed the abolitionist movement was driven by such a small, radical religious group. Honestly, you know, I was very much influenced by the new atheists when I was, say, 17, 18 years old. I was reading my Sam Harris. I was reading my Christopher Hitchens. And I had kind of assumed that slavery ended because of the Enlightenment, you know, that there were just great philosophers like Voltaire, like David Hume, like John Locke, who came up with really powerful arguments about human rights, and that that was the main driving force that ended the most horrible things that humans have ever done, or one of the most horrible things that humans have ever done to one another.

44:48Rutger Bregman:Turns out, no, not really. I wouldn't say the Enlightenment was unimportant. It did definitely play a role. But yeah, study British abolitionism and you realize how religious this was. I mean, the establishment was also incredibly religious, like all the Christian arguments in favor of slavery were also there. But yeah, these Quakers like Benjamin Lay, who was the very first abolitionist in the US, Anthony Benazay, who was like the podcaster, if you will, the intellectual of the movement, was a Quaker. And then people like Clarkson and Wilberforce, also deeply, deeply religious. In fact, they felt that God had punished Great Britain because of slavery, and that's why they had lost America.

45:34Rutger Bregman:that's that was basically their read of world history and that's why they felt now we need to do better and give it everything we have and abolish slavery everywhere right okay uh does elon musk have high moral ambition oh yeah definitely very high um so don't get me wrong i'm not saying that moral ambition i mean it depends a lot on whose morality we're talking about, obviously. I said to you before that I'm talking about a particular type of morality, the universalism, the desire to expand the moral circle. Now, Elon Musk is a profoundly mixed bag. I think those people on the left who call him stupid or don't recognize that he's an absolute genius and one of the greatest entrepreneurs, probably even the greatest of our era, um yeah they're very annoying i mean just just a tesla just spacex just one of those companies is already enough you know to be in the history books forever but to do multiple of those companies and that's just this is absolutely incredible i think he also completely lost it in recent years um and i think he's now going into a very dark direction um but yeah that's definitely moral ambition.

46:53Rutger Bregman:Honestly, Coleman, what has inspired me a lot, or what I've always been fascinated by, was basically the success of right-wingers in the United States. So maybe you remember that the last chapter of Utopia for Realists was about the rise of neoliberalism, the rise of people like Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek, people who really understand what small groups of very dedicated people can do if they want to change the world. Peter Thiel always calls that a cult. A cult is the opposite of a consultancy firm. People at a consultancy firm don't believe in anything. They jump from project to project.

47:29Rutger Bregman:But people in a cult, they have that one big secret that they believe in, and they're willing to fight for it. They're willing to die for it, just like the abolitionists. And if I look at the right versus the left in America in the last 30 to 40 years, then I think right-wingers have been way better at building those institutions, building those cults, you know, from the Federalist Society to the Heritage Foundation. I kind of admire these people, you know, they understand what it takes. I mean, their morality is not my morality. But yeah, they teach us a great lesson in social physics, if you will, you know, of how it actually works.

48:08Coleman Hughes:Thinking off the top of my head, might that be because people on the right understand and live out the reality that most of the important cultural institutions from any national museum they visit to Hollywood movies to elite colleges skews against their values and against their image of themselves and so forth and doesn't reflect them. So they're more likely to have a self-concept of needing to be Luke Skywalker and crew against what they would see as kind of the evil empire of the left that controls everything. And that lends itself to a psychology of cultish project management more so than would be the case on the left.

49:01Rutger Bregman:So, I'm inclined to disagree, just because I know of many historical examples of very successive progressive cults, you know, who were initially very small and not taken seriously, and their ideas were dismissed as utopian. But then over time, they were really successful in influencing policy.

49:19Coleman Hughes:I think that would go along with my point, though, in the sense that those progressive cults, they were cults at a time when their values were not reflected in the major institutions, right? Yeah.

49:30Rutger Bregman:Sure, that makes sense. Yeah. You could argue, though, that like, take the Great Awokening. I mean, like the first woke social justice warriors in 20, when was it? 14 or 15? They were probably the minority, right? And they were pretty successful in taking over. um so i guess my main problem though with the cults that we have seen on the left side of the political spectrum in let's say the last decade is that they were mainly focused on i don't know using the right words to describe all the injustices in the world instead of actually building institutions passing legislation in the book i compared the civil rights movement to black lives matter for example and even though black lives matter was huge as you know right it was one of the biggest like just if you look at the numbers one of the biggest protest movements in american history maybe even the biggest um but it passed no substantial legislation whatsoever and well don't have to tell you this uh its main slogan was one of the most impopular slogans in in history with defund the police um so um in in that sense i think we can really learn something from yeah from our in my case my adversaries um especially when they're actually effective in changing things and building power okay so a big goal of your book i think is to help

50:57Coleman Hughes:especially young people or spur them to pick bigger problems to solve, to not restrict themselves to the formula of getting a safe job, to really be ambitious and dedicate their life to some larger and important mission. As life improves around the world, does it get harder and harder to successfully have a moral ambition because the easier problems by definition get solved, which leaves the harder and harder problems to solve.

51:40Rutger Bregman:You could also argue the other way around that it becomes easier. Once people get richer, it becomes easier to just have that, say, middle-class lifestyle, and then you have more time and resources to spend on other things that perhaps are way more important than the job in that cubicle that you used to have. So I think the opportunities to be morally ambitious are enormous these days. It is true that the problems that we tend to focus on, I also founded an organization called the School for Moral Ambition, they're often problems that don't have a business model. I happen to believe in the power of capitalism.

52:22Rutger Bregman:I believe in the power of markets. There's no social democrat that you have to convince that markets can be really, really powerful. But they're powerful when there's a business model. When people are rich enough to buy iPhones and companies can make great iPhones, then sure, markets can do a good job. But when you have, say, pandemic prevention or malaria, tuberculosis or factory farming, all those kind of issues that don't really have a business model, then you need to come up with something else. You need to come up with a movement that convinces people to spend way more money on this, sometimes more philanthropic money, convinces governments to spend more money on it, and convinces really talented people to work on it, even though they would gain less conventional prestige with a job like that.

53:10Coleman Hughes:Is there a danger in more and more people becoming morally ambitious? And that danger looks something like this. not all of them are going to turn out like Bill Gates and pick really a great problem to solve, malaria in that case. Some of them are going to become more like, say, RFK Jr. And we don't have to necessarily discuss every aspect of RFK Jr.'s legacy to concede that it's mixed at best. And the things he has advocated for, Some of them have improved people's lives and some of them have not improved people's lives. Some of them have led people down roads of quack medicine and not getting vaccinated for things that they should get vaccinated for and so forth.

54:03Coleman Hughes:and if if the listener disagrees with what i just said about rfk jr then accept it in theory right accept it for the sake of argument that there are people that are going to be highly morally ambitious but are actually going to cause at best mixed consequences for the world uh and at worst bad consequences for the world and those consequences will be amplified to the extent that they are more morally ambitious. Is there a danger in essentially creating bad actors that have more influence by encouraging people to be more morally ambitious? And how do you steer people in the right direction? How do people steer themselves in the right direction?

54:48Rutger Bregman:So the first thing that's really important is to be very clear about what kind of morality you're actually talking about. As I said, I'm talking about a certain tradition that goes all the way back to the abolitionists, to the suffragettes, to the civil right campaigners, those who have throughout history expanded the moral circle. I do believe that there is such a thing as moral progress. I'm not trained as a moral philosopher. I know that moral philosophers, some of them would maybe say there isn't such a thing as objective morality, but I'm just inclined to look at this as a historian. And think like, hey, if you just look at the last two centuries, for me, there is a pretty clear direction.

55:27Rutger Bregman:It's not a coincidence to me that many of the suffragettes had parents that were active in the abolitionist movement. And that once you give women the right to vote, then other things become more logical as well, such as the civil rights movement. And then you can start building on all those kind of things. Obviously, you make mistakes along the way. Sometimes you take things too far. But in general, I think, yeah, we have made a lot of progress and we should try and build on that universal declaration of human rights of just after the second world war. Now, the ambition is just important is that once you have those ideals, you got to be serious about them, right?

56:06Rutger Bregman:And I think one of the reasons I wrote this book is that I felt that those people who believe in, let's say, my values, liberal values, democratic values, the problem these days is they're not they're not very ambitious so if i take something like the climate movement for example i was just getting more and more frustrated with people who yeah on the one hand uh saw climate change as a pretty existential threat like i basically agree with that i think it's not the biggest but it's a really important problem that we need to solve but there's so many people are being obsessed with their own environmental footprint you know saying like oh i don't eat meat and I don't fly and I don't have kids and I, you know, recycle my garbage.

56:49Rutger Bregman:Well, in the best possible scenario, you'll have limited your footprint to zero. You might as well die, you know, right? And then death becomes the highest ideal. That's not how we're going to win this battle. So it's really both what you need here. Maybe one thing to add is that you obviously need that epistemic humility as well. um like i i think that when we look back or when the historians of the future will look back on us they'll probably be horrified by some of the things we do today now obviously it's quite hard to say what it is because morality has changed so much like for the romans it was entirely normal to throw naked women before the lions and for the aztecs it was totally fine to sacrifice children to the gods.

57:31Rutger Bregman:And if you study that kind of history, you become at risk of becoming a little bit nihilistic and thinking like, oh, but then maybe anything goes. I don't think you should be tempted by that, but you do need that humility. Now, I am personally willing to at least make one big bet, which is about animal welfare. For me, that's the obvious one, where I think the historians of the future will be really horrified by what we're doing to animals today. But there's a logic behind that as well. For me, it's not a surprise that so many of the first abolitionists, like Wilberforce, like Benjamin Lay, also cared deeply about animal rights.

58:09Rutger Bregman:Like vegetarianism was a huge thing among suffragettes. And it just makes a lot of sense. Because once you get into that mindset of expanding the moral circle and realizing that basically we're just part of one big family, or at least the differences between us are not as big as we often think they are. yeah, then it only becomes logical to push the boundaries and include more people. And in this case, more centered creatures in our moral circle. Yeah.

58:37Coleman Hughes:On the other hand, you would expect there to be an outer limit of our empathy with respect to living creatures at some point, right? So just because we were able to expand the moral circle to all humans, regardless of race, let's say we were able to do it to pigs and chickens as well, I think you wouldn't expect us to be able to expand that to bugs. Right.

59:01Rutger Bregman:Well, that is a really good example. Like for me, that would feel very weird. I agree with you that like, if you asked me that right now, like I don't feel empathy for, I don't know, when I kill a mosquito, I'm not like, but again, history is weird, man. And the way we live right now, it would be completely bizarre to someone like, say, two centuries ago. And things are changing so fast right now. No, it's not incomprehensible or inconceivable to me that at some point, yeah, maybe if science says so, and there are quite a few scientists who actually are saying that insects do suffer. And if, you know, we advance so much as a species that we're able to do, you know, actually effective interventions to improve insect welfare.

59:46Rutger Bregman:I know this may come across as bizarre, but again, abolitionism was just as, or very bizarre in the early 18th century. Like when Mary Wollstonecraft wrote her famous book, A Vindication on the Rights of Women, there was a British philosopher who responded by saying like, what's next, right? A vindication on the rights of horses. Like that's how ridiculous they thought it was to give women rights or the right to vote or anything like that. So I don't know. Studying history makes you humble about your own morality. There's actually this guy that I talk about in my book who founded the Shrimp Welfare Project.

1:00:27Rutger Bregman:And initially I was like, really, shrimp? But then you look into it and it turns out there's actually really good evidence for shrimp sentience and that the way we treat them by, you know, taking out their eyes, there's really some horrible things that we do to shrimp and not a feel like hundreds of billions of shrimp are farmed every year. And so on the one hand, he's a pretty weird guy who, you know, in order to feel more empathy for shrimp, went to the supermarket to look at shrimp in the fridge and try and feel more empathy. But then at the same time, I'm reminded of someone like Benjamin Lay.

1:01:06Rutger Bregman:as I said, the first abolitionist in the US, who was a very radical Quaker who refused to ride on horses because he thought that was animal exploitation, who would run into churches, you know, Quaker meeting houses and started screaming at slaveholders. And he was really seen as one of those fanatics. So sometimes we have a tendency to dismiss the social justice warriors of today. But then we forget that, you know, some of, not all of them, but some of the social justice warriors of the past were actually 100 % right.

1:01:41Coleman Hughes:You mentioned some of the barbarous aspects of the old world and ancient Rome. And, you know, the one that I always remember always stands out to me is that they had a tradition of crucifying a dog, crucifying a dog once a year as this ritual related to a previous war when a dog didn't warn them that an enemy was coming. And so, yeah, now we've got to crucify one dog every year. And especially to an American audience, that one probably hits harder than almost any other. How do you square all these things with your general optimism about human character and human nature? Because that was a subject of your previous book.

1:02:27Coleman Hughes:I argue that actually human beings are more good than most people think.

1:02:34Rutger Bregman:Yeah, so that book, Humankind, the thesis is that in general, humans have evolved to be friendly and to work together. This is really what scientists now call survival of the friendliest. They make the case that over millennia, it was actually the friendliest among us who had most kids and the biggest chance of passing on their genes to the next generation. The technical term for this is self-domestication theory. So it's really interesting if you look at domesticated animals like sheep and pigs, they have something called the domestication syndrome. Charles Darwin already noted this. They have been selected for tameness, but then other things happen as well.

1:03:16Rutger Bregman:So they get floppy ears, for example, often white spots in their fur. And most importantly, they start displaying more childlike and playful behavior. Now, some people have noted, some scientists have noted that humans also seem to have this domestication syndrome. But then the question is like, who domesticated us, right? Because there's no other species that did it to us. And the answer that a lot of evolutionary anthropologists now believe in is that we did it to ourselves, that there was some evolutionary advantage, some evolutionary pressure towards cooperation, kindness, and friendliness.

1:03:55Rutger Bregman:Now, it's really important to say a couple of things about this. One, this was obviously in a completely different social environment, right? This was when we lived in small bands of nomadic hunter-gatherers most of the time. Sometimes, you know, there were larger societies, but it was a very, very different kind of world. And yeah, obviously, we're now in a very different world. And that's exactly the argument I make, that the rise of agriculture and the moment we settled down and started living in villages and cities, that's when everything changed. That's when the era of warfare started. I've got a couple of chapters in that book taking aim at people like Steven Pinker, who has a very different shape of history in his mind.

1:04:42Rutger Bregman:So in his famous book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, he kind of suggests this, well, he would always make all kinds of caveats, but the basic picture is one of progress, where we became less violent over time. I think that picture is wrong. I think that recent evidence suggests that actually as nomadic intergatherers, we were way more peaceful and that then we became way more violent in the age, well, basically the civilized age of agriculture and sedatism. And that's the age when we invented hierarchy and slavery. And it's only very recently that we got out of that in the last, say, 200 to 100 years.

1:05:23Rutger Bregman:So to get back to your question, I'm absolutely not suggesting that humans are angels or anything like that. I am taking aim at this veneer theory of history, though. It's often suggested that civilization is only a thin veneer and that below that lies raw human nature, that people are fundamentally selfish or evil or whatever. And I think that's absolutely not true. And I look at a lot of the evidence. For example, what happens after natural disasters? If people really are so selfish, then you would suspect that when the lights go out, there's an earthquake or tsunami that people start behaving in very horrible ways.

1:06:01Rutger Bregman:And that's often the picture you get if you follow the press, right? You hear stories of looting. You probably remember Katrina. You know, this was one of those cases where the press was full of those stories. But we actually have 60, 70 years of sociological evidence that the opposite happens in moments like that. You get an explosion of altruism. There's a great book by Rebecca Solnit called A Paradise Built in Hell, where she goes over all the sociological and anthropological evidence. And I don't know, that suggests to me something about at least our capacity for goodness and kindness as well.

1:06:37Rutger Bregman:As always with humans, it's highly dependent on the circumstances and the stories that we tell ourselves. But I felt that, yeah, over the years, people had become too negative about human nature. We're not angels, but there's something to work with there.

1:06:53Coleman Hughes:I wish I could be that optimistic. Okay, final question. What is your highest moral ambition?

1:07:05Rutger Bregman:So, honestly, Coleman, after doing this for more than a decade, I was a bit frustrated with myself. I had spent years as a pundit, you know, writing about stuff like basic income, advocating for a more hopeful view of human nature. And especially after that book, you know, I saw people on Instagram sharing photos, you know, of being on a holiday, reading that book and saying, oh, life is wonderful after all, you know, just stop following the news and read this book by Rutger Breckman and it will restore your faith in humanity. And I was like, oh, no, I've created a monster, right? I'm only making people more complacent.

1:07:45Rutger Bregman:So with this book, Moral Ambition, I kind of wanted to read a book. I needed a book myself that would make my own life more difficult. Like I felt like I needed a big kick in the butt. And I had experienced something years earlier when, you know, I had become convinced by Yuval Noah Harari and his arguments against factory farming. And I was like, I need to write this down as soon as possible, because if it's out there in the open and public, then I can't go back anymore. It's a little bit like Odysseus tying himself to the mast, right? You basically force yourself to be the kind of person you want to be.

1:08:21Rutger Bregman:And so that's what I wanted to do with this book as well. I wanted to write a book about devoting your life to some of the most important causes of our time, realizing that it would force me to do that as well. So I've co-founded an organization called The School for Moral Ambition. And we have a very simple belief. We think that the most talented, most ambitious people ought to be working on the most important press in global problems. Too many of them are currently withering away at McKinsey or JP Morgan or some hedge fund. And I'm not saying that's bad. I'm not saying that's immoral. I would just say it's kind of boring, right?

1:08:57Rutger Bregman:You have one life on this planet. And we need people like that to take on some of these dragons. So that's what we are building. And that's what we're recruiting people for. We actually just started our first fellowship at Harvard. Almost 10 % of Harvard juniors applied. It was pretty exciting. The message that did best in our focus group was something like, you didn't fight your way into Harvard to end up in a bullshit job. And so instead of spending the summer after junior year at, well, some consultancy firm, we placed them at some of the most high impact organizations in the country. Organizations like GiveDirectly that we talked about earlier in this conversation.

1:09:40Rutger Bregman:We really want to convince people that it is possible to work with the best people to scratch that intellectual itch, to work 70, 80, 90 hours a week and not optimize some ads or improve some PowerPoint slides for a partner that you don't give a damn about. You can actually live a decent life and work on the most exciting, most important global problems. You can do all those things at the same time.

1:10:11Coleman Hughes:Awesome. Well, I hope that's a call to action for any listeners to this podcast that are young, hungry for meaning,

1:10:20Coleman Hughes:and thinking about what to do for the rest of their lives. So thank you very much, Rucker Bregman. Thanks for coming on my show. Thanks for having me, Matt.