Rutger Bregman thinks happiness is overrated

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0:32The New Statesman

0:37Hey Rook, Ollie Dougmore from The New Statesman here. Really looking forward to our interview later. Particularly talking about the Quaker abolitionists. A small group of people wearing funny hats, but they got a lot done. They got a lot done. I think there's probably, there's a lesson for all of us in that. but also you know on this question of uh well what is the meaning of life really you know is it is it to be happy or is it to be purposeful is it to leave the patch of ground that you're on in a better place than when you arrived on it so you know a small question for us to sink our teeth into hopefully things go a little bit better than they did with tucker carlson and i don't end up telling you to fuck off and rage quitting.

1:31Here's hoping. Looking forward to seeing you later. Take it easy, bye. Hey, Ollie, just arrived in London and really looking forward to talk to you as well. In his 30s, Rutger Bregman, the Dutch historian, had what he describes as an early midlife crisis. Having spent much of the last decade as a pundit commenting on the global state of politics and economics. I mean, this is not rocket science. I mean, we can talk for a very long time about all these stupid philanthropy schemes. We can invite Bono once more, but come on, we've got to be talking about taxes. That's it. Taxes, taxes, taxes. All the rest is bullshit, in my opinion.

2:06As well as publishing optimistic titles such as Utopia for Realists and Humankind, A Hopeful History, Bregman felt that something had to change. It seems like there's a lot to chat about. The collapse of everything, for example. The insanity of the AI race, the global rise of fascism, I think that's what it's called. And if he wanted to see that change in the world, he needed to make a change in himself. It seems we live in a day and age when we really need some moral ambition. Some small groups of really committed people who are actually serious about their ideals and who are willing to practice what they preach.

2:46In January, he joined me in the New Statesman studio to talk about things like why he thinks happiness is overrated, how morality has changed the world for the better in the past and how it might continue to do so in the future. And I'm pretty sure we'll be able to finish the interview without you calling me, what is it, like some fucking moron or what did Tucker call me? I can't remember. Anyway, see you soon. Roger Bregman, hello. Thanks for having me, Ollie. Good to see you again. Likewise, great to see you. I'm very glad to have you here and I'm very glad to be talking to you about your paperback version of Moral Ambition.

3:23Yeah. I'm excited about it as well. Last time you forced me to bully bankers. Well, bully is a strong word. People can look that up on YouTube. Yeah, we were in the city of London and you were confronting consultants, lawyers, a few sort of citywide boys, shall we say, about whether or not they felt they were living moral lives. Yeah, we were doing Vox Pops. It was a new experience for me. It was a lot of fun. Did you enjoy it? Yeah, you had fun? Yeah, absolutely. Well, you recruited all the people, all my victims. Generally speaking, when you do that, the hard part is getting people to talk to you.

3:56So you sort of get perks of the job of being the presenter, I guess. Some people really enjoyed it, though. They were like the gifts that I kept on giving. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of people watch that. Let's start with the introduction to the book. I'm going to quote a little bit of it to you now. I cannot believe that the purpose of life is to be happy. I think the purpose of life is to be useful, to be responsible, to be honorable, to be compassionate. It is, above all, to matter. So like I said, those are the opening words. Tell me more. Shouldn't we be happy? Yeah, that's a Leo Rosten quote that I've always loved.

4:27And indeed, like this obsession with happiness is rather shallow, I think. You can go to an average airport and there will be piles of books in the self-help section that will promise you a happier life, a more productive life, a more mindful life, whatever. And I always thought, wouldn't it be fun to write a self-help book that will make your life more difficult? You know, a kind of book that you almost wish you didn't read. You turn the last page and you're like, shit, fuck. Now I got to do this stuff. It's like a mind virus that has entered my brain. That's the kind of book that I wanted to read.

5:03A couple of years ago, I was a bit fed up with myself. I'd spent a decade as a pundit, you know, expressing my opinions, shouting Texas, Texas, Texas on some stages here and there. and I enjoyed that quite a bit. But I was at a point in my career where I was wondering, is this actually making a difference? And perhaps awareness is a bit overrated. So I set out to write a book that I needed. I mean, that's what writers usually do. They just write the books that they want to read. And then, yeah, things escalated a bit from there. So that's become more ambition. Okay. So if I was to be slightly reductive and say that before you started thinking about moral ambition, you were perhaps unhappier.

5:54Now that you've developed this framework, has it made you happier? Has it made you more fulfilled? Have you been more useful? I think I've been more useful and I'm definitely more fulfilled. I'm also more stressed out than ever. Like in 2025, the year was really for me the year in which I discovered that I can actually get a burnout. Okay. Multiple burnouts even. Tell me about that. What happened? actually doing things building things that's hard man uh i'm building an organization now called the school for moral ambition we like to see ourselves as the robin hoots of talent so we take the talent from the big boring corporations people who are sucked into that bermuda triangle of talent which is consultancy finance and corporate law and we come and liberate them which is an amazing experience.

6:41I mean, it's amazing work to be able to do. But yeah, actually building that juggernaut is hard. I mean, you work with people and people have opinions and they have very good opinions often. And yeah, fundraising, building everything out, it's really hard. It's stressful. That was like the original conceit of that video we spoke about at the beginning when we were in the city was meeting people who did those jobs and then saying, you know, would you quit and what would it take for you to quit yeah and quite often the answer that we were told was well a certain standard of income yeah basically you know i have i don't know a mortgage kids what i have financial responsibilities and if i could cover those off i would love to do something that made me a more useful person yeah yeah is that when when this is happening in the real world and you're bringing these people out of those professions and into this framework is that the same thing they sort of view as a boundary a challenge to oh absolutely yeah money is a massive consideration so one of the fellowships we've launched is the tobacco free future fellowship we want to take down big tobacco it's the single largest preventable cause of disease eight million deaths it's basically forgotten a lot of you know new statesman readers fairly educated privileged people will probably not realize that this is still one of the biggest global health problems in the world.

8:04But this industry is ruthlessly targeting the most marginalized, poorest communities, and especially kids. So that's bad, very, very bad. Our first fellowship doubled the lobbying capacity in Brussels against this industry. And these were just 12 individuals. That's how few people were actually working on this. Now, the biggest struggle here is indeed to fight the funding. Because for some issues, like say climate, If you say like we're launching a climate fellowship, more clean electricity is way easier because that's sexy, right? Or at least it used to be. But this is not sexy. It's way harder.

8:44Another cause that I care deeply about, as you know, is the fight against factory farming, right? I think the way we treat animals is one of the greatest moral atrocities of our time, 80 billion animals being tortured and slaughtered every year. Well, the total philanthropic spending on animal welfare, this whole movement, it's about 300 million. I mean, that's just a fraction of the whole climate movement. But yeah, it's kind of unpopular. But those are exactly the causes that I think we ought to be interested in. This is, I guess, where critique of the idea or the framework starts to come in, I think, because when we're talking about, to my mind, relatively straightforward moral questions, you know, should we seek to eliminate malaria?

9:31Should we try to preserve a livable planet, which I would say is a relatively uncontestable idea, but some people do see it differently. I guess the challenge comes when we start to talk about, okay, well, what is moral? From what do we define our moral framework? Do we point to religious sources? Do we point to utilitarian calculations? And I guess I would put to you that while you're trying to, for example, reduce smoking deaths, it might perhaps be easier than when you start to engage with slightly thornier, more political, moral questions. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm an old fashioned European social democrat.

10:10Some would say like he's just like a standard good old liberal. I think we're now basically waking up to the fact that that is an actual ideology. those who you know went to say school in the 90s i mean i'm part of that generation we grew up in a world with let's say a rules-based international order with talk about human rights and very often these ideals were flaunted and ignored and there was a lot of hypocrisy there but it was still kind of the world we inhabited right now we see the collapse of everything we see that well the developments in the US are most clear right we see the rise of what I think just has to be described with the F word I mean historians of fascism have developed a very precise vocabulary and have thought really long and hard about you know what are all the distinctive characteristics of this ideology and the list is getting really long now and I think you know it is about time to say that yeah you know this is this is basically it in a 21st century version obviously, but this is basically it.

11:20And that basically has led to the realization that all these things that we took for granted, like, I don't know, the human rights, the Declaration of Universal Human Rights, boring old stuff like global rules, cooperation, NATO, the UN, la la la. I mean, all of that was part of an ideological project, right? And it was part of a really ambitious ideological project. Call it social democracy, call it liberalism, call it whatever you want. But I think that is one of the most demanding ideologies basically in the world and also one of the most misunderstood ideologies in the world. It obviously degenerated into something that we came to call neoliberalism, which was a very shallow form of like, just, I don't know, consume whatever you want and everything will be fine.

12:10But yeah, we're basically now waking up to that fact that, oh, this thing that, you know, We talked about, we used those words like human rights. That actually means something. That actually demands an enormous amount of us. I see this as a tradition that goes back all the way to the abolitionists, to the suffragettes, those who fought for women's rights, to the civil right campaigners. This is basically a whole family tradition. It's not a coincidence that many of the first suffragettes had parents who were abolitionists. It's not a coincidence that many civil rights campaigners had parents who were suffragettes, right?

12:46Once you start expanding the moral circle, the question becomes like, why stop at a certain point? This is like the great moral project, I think, that started two centuries ago. And today it is losing badly. It has become the new resistance. Today you have like the neo-fasciate vanguard, people like Curtis Jarvin in the US. J.D. Vance is a good example. Peter Thiel who actually want to shrink the moral circle who like no actually the right thing is to care about your own people and to say F you to the rest and Stephen Miller basically the current prime minister of the US has said this very very clearly and I actually kind of like that that it's now becoming so clear says like look morality whatever it's just about power that's what it's about And as Thessilides, the ancient Greek historian said or wrote, the powerful do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

13:46And that is the worldview that they believe in. This is the interesting question for me. I think the Stephen Miller quote you're referencing is, you know, we inhabit a world that's governed by strength, governed by force, governed by power. And I've been – specifically, I was thinking about this in the context of the abduction of Nicolas Maduro. the Americans have spoken about this Don Roe doctrine, right? And so I was trying to think about that and sort of, what is the point of difference between the Don Roe doctrine and the Monroe doctrine from which it takes its name? And I think about the history of the CIA, sometimes indeed just explicit military intervention by America in its Western hemisphere.

14:27I mean, literally take your pick. We'd be here for hours if we were to talk about Panama, Cuba, wherever, just take your pick, right? And I was trying to understand or formulate in my head, so what is the difference in this moment? Is the point of difference simply the kind of, like you said, the openness, the brazenness, the kind of the confidence to essentially say, no, no, the world is governed by strength and force. And whereas in the past, American political figures would have seeked to kind of civilize or sanitize what they were doing publicly, they would be more, they wouldn't admit to it as brazen as they have done now.

15:01It made me question whether actually perhaps we were kidding ourselves a little bit in that golden era, if you like, of the 90s through when there was a world, but, you know, rules-based international order. And where are there in actual fact, reality is just more visible now. It's just more obvious to us now. And has there been much of a material change? I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on that. Very conflicted thoughts about it. So on the one hand, it is indeed almost refreshing to kind of see, like, okay, so this is the world we inhabit. At least Miller is saying it out loud. He's not pretending anymore.

15:32On the other hand, hypocrisy has its uses as well. I mean, hypocrisy may be preferable to the alternative here because hypocrisy at least assumes that there is some standard, that there are some rules, that there are some ideals that you ought to abide by. I mean, George Bush lying to the UN, at least as he was lying, he was acknowledging that, you know, there are rules. And when you end up in a world where that is not even the case anymore, that may be even a worse world. I totally realize that that sounds very weird. No, I understand what you're saying. The example that I think of often is the example of how the Germans try to take all the Danish Jews to the gas chambers.

16:32And that's built spectacularly. So there was super effective Danish resistance. In the end, 99 % of Danish Jews survived the war. And there's one book written about this where the author also makes this point that the Germans somehow in Denmark had to use this kind of veneer of legitimacy of what they were doing. And that was really slowing them down in their efforts because the Danish were really effective at doubling down on democracy and doubling down and saying like, hey, everyone, these are all just Danish citizens. We don't make a distinction between Jews and non-Jews, et cetera. and yeah sometimes that veneer of legitimacy can actually stand in the way of something way more brutal so it's not a very hopeful message you made me think about um dows the is it was it um arnold downs i think yeah yeah i mean could you tell us like tell us his story of course so um i grew up in the netherlands and as a young boy i was always fascinated with the history of the second world war you know i always read books whatever i could get my hands on about what happened during those five years when my small country was occupied by the Nazis.

17:42And obviously, I kept asking myself that question, like, what would I have done? Would I have done the right thing? Would I have found the courage to help persecuted Jews or not? Like most of my fellow countrymen and women, like most people didn't do much. And I always assumed that there must have been some kind of psychology, a psychology of the resistance hero. Maybe these people were relatively young or old. Maybe they were, I don't know, very educated or not at all. Maybe they were poor or rich, or maybe they were somewhere on the spectrum or actually quite neurotypical. Is there like a profile of these superheroes, basically?

18:25And for this book, I really dived into that research. Turns out that after the Second World War, there were a couple of really big research projects into that question. Hundreds of resistance heroes were interviewed, and basically these researchers couldn't find anything. What they discovered is that these resistance heroes were really a cross-section of the population. So there's one historian, Eva Fogelman, who talks about attending these ceremonies in Israel of Yat Vashem, where the righteous among the nations were honored because they risked their own lives to help someone else who is really in danger.

19:05And she writes, it was like walking into a normal, an average subway. It's like really, again, a cross-section of the population. It's only years later that a new group of researchers looked at the evidence and found that there is actually one variable that predicts incredibly well whether people would join the resistance, yes or no. in 96 % of all cases, when this was the case, people did the right thing. And it turns out it was the mere matter of being asked. If people were asked to do the right thing, to join the resistance, almost always they said yes. And this kind of explains why resistance was not spread evenly over the country in the Netherlands.

19:50But it was more of a local phenomenon. It spread a little bit like a virus. And you had a few people who were really super spreaders because they asked so many people to join and to do the right thing. So I realized I had been asking the wrong question all the time. I had been asking a question about the psychology of resistance or moral ambition. But I should have been asking the question of the sociology of resistance, like how does this mind virus actually spread? and um it's a super simple insight but for me it's been really profound because that's when i realized okay so if we want to make the world a wildly better place we got to spread that virus yeah this was the this is the thing that's why i asked you about um dows i think that's how you pronounce his name forgive me forgive me if it's wrong but yeah so i read your book and then i went and bought his diaries which was actually quite a hard thing to do he was one of the great resistance heroes in the netherlands yeah for listeners he basically he's basically cycling along like canal towpaths and asking people to hide Jews in their houses and their farms, et cetera.

20:55It was interesting to hear you say, actually, whether or not, you know, were people on the spectrum, were they neurotypical? Because as you read the diaries, he basically sort of gets increasingly irate and is like shouting and berating people for refusing, if they refuse to hide Jews. And he's kind of like, he can't comprehend why or how people wouldn't do it. And he's also sort of manically, I think, was he burying? He made notes and would like bury them in the garden, which, you know, Most people would say it was an objectively really dangerous thing to do. Absolutely. If the Nazis discovered them, he would face them.

21:23It's really an exceptional document. I don't think there's any document like it where you basically have a real-time story about what resistance was like. Sometimes it gives you an hour play-by-play of what happened. It's really incredible. And indeed, he was super blunt. Like, I don't know, Dutch directness on steroids. It's like another level, isn't it? There's this one anecdote of when he was at a farmer in the east of the Netherlands and he had a Jewish couple with him. And the farmer didn't want to take in anyone. And it was like, come on, come on. You know, it's a great person. And then they were like, okay, we'll take one of them.

22:06Well, actually, it's a couple. And here you go. And bye. And I looked it up and this Jewish couple actually survived the war. um so um yeah it's it's it's an amazing story about human agency yes this was someone who did not see himself as a part of a machine as a cock in the wheel but he really saw himself as an individual as someone who could make a difference and as someone who comes from the political left that was for me very refreshing because i'm used to hear a lot of talk about systemic injustice, structural problems. We need politics, policy interventions, all of that. And whenever, you know, someone says, oh, well, maybe you ought to do something, or maybe there's an individual responsibility here, then we're all like, oh, you sound like Thatcher.

22:56Yeah, that sounds like neoliberalism. That's like bad. And I understand where that's coming from. it's true that I mean sometimes right wingers can wield you know that weapon of individual responsibility as a way to blame people for things that they should not be blamed for and that indeed are structural problems like poverty and inequality but there's probably also the opposite of that like I've come to call it the left wing excuse where whenever you know your responsibility comes up you know the fact that you are one of the richest say two to three percent in the world you have extraordinary privilege you had a great education but you're doing basically nothing apart from recording podcasts um making me nervous now yeah i i i had this i had this right because i read i was um i was talking to the your colleague from bloomsbury who's here with us and we're at dinner and we were talking about the idea in your book and i sort of end up in this sort of moral spiral thinking like oh my goodness is what i've actually done benefiting the world in any way, shape or form?

24:00Or do I just sort of make videos and do social media? And then, and like, is my life meaningful? Essentially, you can end up in this sort of position of paralysis where you're like, well, you know, take a Dallas for example. Okay. Well, I will never be able to defeat the Nazi war machine. And therefore what is, what is the purpose of resist? You know, it's just, I can't defeat fascism alone. There's no point in doing anything. That's one point of view. The other is, well, do you know what, actually, if I can save the lives of 10 Jews, I might not be able to defeat the Nazis, but I can make a tangible real world improvement to people's lives.

24:31I can save people's lives. And I think if you, you can still acknowledge that perhaps you have more power as a, as a collective, uh, if you're organized and if you, if you believe in, in sort of the primacy of that over a sovereign individual, but it's important also not to swing too far the other way and basically think, well, can I do alone? Because, and maybe we should talk about the abolitionists now, it turns out that actually with a relatively few number of people, you can genuinely change the world. Yes, yes. And this is the story that I've become absolutely obsessed by. So some people will know that my previous book was called Humankind.

25:04It was a very hopeful book about human nature, about who we are as a species. Still, I guess, quite fond of that book, but I really started to see the problems with it as well. At some point, I saw these images popping up on Instagram with people, you know, on a beautiful white beach reading the book saying, life is wonderful. Humans are great. Don't follow the news. I was like, I've created a monster, you know? It's nice in the Bahamas. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And I don't know, there were like certain celebrities getting really enthusiastic about my work. And I was like, this is not a great sign that people, like you now think I'm apparently some kind of great thinker.

25:48So I was like, let's write a very different kind of book. And for me, that all started with studying the moral pioneers of the past. I thought, you know what, let's just start with the abolitionists. That seemed obvious to me, probably the first great movement for human rights that the world ever saw. And I started studying it and learned so many fascinating lessons. Honestly, five, six years ago when I started, I knew very little about it. So everything was an epiphany. I first thought, you know what, let's focus on Dutch abolitionism. Surely there's an interesting perspective here. Surely, I mean, we were a huge slave trading empire, but surely there were, you know, awesome abolitionists in Holland as well.

26:32Well, that would have been a very short book. It barely existed in the Netherlands. Really? Yeah. And in the 1850s, you had a few petitions against slavery. those gathered about six seven hundred signatures maybe but that was about it 10 years later there was a petition against the catholics that got 200 000 signatures to give you an idea of the moral priorities of my fellow countrymen and women at the time um there was there's this one moment when a british abolitionist comes over to rotterdam and he's like really excited like let's get abolitionism started in the netherlands and everyone's like whatever what are you talking about it like bugger off and he comes back and he's really disappointed and he said he says this is a cold and dead place but anyway the the same is true for for basically all the other uh countries so france a bunch of writers and intellectuals that got pretty much nothing done spain hardly any abolitionism portugal the the biggest slave trading empire right it's like six million um enslaved people transported over the Atlantic Ocean by the Portuguese.

27:38But hardly anything there. The big book about Portuguese abolitionism is called The Sounds of Silence. I think that says enough. The U.S., abolitionism, also a total failure. I mean, we celebrate people like Frederick Douglass, and rightfully so, but they were not successful. Up until the Civil War, abolitionism was extremely unpopular. There's this anecdote of a guy who campaigned for Abraham Lincoln, went to the South and came back and said, oh my God, so many horrible things have happened to me. They called me an idiot. They called me a fool. They called me all kinds of things. But what's worse is they called me an abolitionist.

28:14That was like, it was worse than being a vegan today. So it was only in Britain that it became a really, really big movement. And so what I realized that actually, abolitionism was way more contingent. It was not some automatic thing. Like the Marxist read of history is just entirely wrong here. It wasn't structural forces that caused the end of slavery. Actually, it was abolished at the height of its profitability in 1807. The British were making more money than ever. It was an absolute pillar of the economy. It was so insanely profitable and still it was abolished. Now, why did it happen? because a small group of really entrepreneurial, morally motivated people built the biggest movement for the rights of others that had ever existed.

29:06It had never happened before in that way. So I was like, well, that is inspiring. How did they do it? You know, what was it? What was so unique? What was different about them doing it? And I guess maybe I would add the supplementary question to that, that if there are lessons that can be derived from their approach for us in today's world yes so slavery has existed since the beginning of time or at least the beginning of civilization it reached its most horrible most totalitarian form in the European colonies in places like Barbados and Jamaica and Hispaniola but it has always existed I mean there's one estimate that around the year 1800 around 75 % of the world population was in some form of bondage, indentured labor, or outright slavery.

29:59So freedom in that sense is really the exception. So when you were in, let's say, the year 1750 on a street corner in Amsterdam or London or Philadelphia shouting abolish slavery, I mean, nine out of 10 people would have said, you're nuts, you're crazy. And the 10th, maybe have said, like, yeah, you're right in theory. Like, I get where you're coming from, but that's never going to happen, right? That's like, there are striking similarities, I think, with some moral atrocities today. Like, it's very hard to imagine a world where eating meat or factory fart meat is absolutely banned, right? If you stand on the street corner shouting that, I mean, most people will look at you like you're an idiot.

30:45So there were only a few people, and mainly Quakers who'd really come to believe that indeed slavery is very, very bad. For them, this was a very religious thing. So as a secular agnostic, you know, son of a minister, I would have loved to find out that, you know, it was the Enlightenment and the Enlightenment philosophers who led the charge here. But sadly, that was not the case. I do think the Enlightenment was influential. sure. I mean, there was talk of human rights, but the abolitionist movement was very religious. It was a dissenting religious movement led by these Quakers who believed in the light of God in each and everyone.

31:25So for them, slavery was a desecration of the sacred. It was really a violation of the will of God. And so at first they banned the slave trade and slavery in their own circles, but for a long time they basically kept it to themselves because they were seen as weird. Almost like maybe Scientology is not the right, but... Outposts. Well, almost like that. They were really quite weird for most people. They had all kinds of weird rituals. Their church services would look very differently, etc. But what happened in the 1780s is that suddenly an alliance emerged. So you had the Quakers, who often, by the way, were great entrepreneurs who made a lot of money, so had that capital.

32:12They financed a lot of the abolitionist movement. But then you suddenly have people like Thomas Clarkson that I write a lot about in this book, who was a really ambitious young man. He studied at the University of Cambridge, and initially he saw a career for himself in the Church of England. He was just a young guy who wanted to make a name for himself. And how did you do that back in the day? There was no social media, no YouTube, TikTok, but you could compete in essay contests, Latin essay contests. And so that was what he did. He usually won first prize. And in that year, by accident, pure coincidence, that year, the question that the students had to answer was, is it OK to own and sell other human beings?

33:01Like, is slavery morally justified? Now, Clarkson had never thought about that question. Just like his peers, just like most people in 1785, it was not something on their radar. But interesting, interesting intellectual exercise. So he did some research. He read some of the Quaker tracts. He read people like Anthony Benazze, who was the great American Quaker abolitionist. He basically plagiarized them and then won first prize. And then there's this famous moment when he is at the prize ceremony in Cambridge. He goes back on his horse to London where he lived. And then he's near the village of Waitemail where he keeps thinking about what he had written.

33:52He had spent two months writing about the horrors of slavery and of the slave trade and the slave ships. and he thought, you know, if this is really true, if this is really true, then shouldn't someone do something about this? Like, maybe I should do it actually. And it's this really powerful moment when he suddenly could see himself as the world historical hero taking down the slave trade. When you read his memoirs, on the one hand, you're like, wow, I mean, this guy's a bit full of himself, right? But on the other hand, you read it and you realize, oh, but he actually did it. He did sense 61 years of his life fighting slavery.

34:32He traveled 35 ,000 miles across the United Kingdom to spread his abolitionist propaganda everywhere. There's a great historian called Christopher Leslie Brown who has written the big book about British abolitionism. It's called Moral Capital. Christopher Leslie Brown, a black historian, went into the archives to disprove once and for all that these individuals were that important. He was really fed up with these triumphalist British narratives of, oh, it was Wilberforce. It was Clarkson. It was, I don't know, the evangelicals or whoever. It was our great nation who took this down. He was like, I'll prove that it was really the structural causes, that there were other things going on, and that's what ended slavery.

35:12Now, he did that for decades. He's one of the most knowledgeable people on the issue, and he basically changed his mind. You know, spending so much time in the archives is like, actually, some people, if they would have fallen off their horse in 1785, 1786, history could have looked very, very differently. And slavery might very well have gone on way longer deep into the 20th century and maybe might still be with us today as a legal. Of course, slavery still exists, but at least it's illegal everywhere. And that is just so, so interesting, right? Because I used to have a more structuralist view of history.

35:50I used to have less faith in the power of humans to be the masters of their fate and the captains of their ship. But really the case study of British abolitionism appended my worldview and made me realize that actually it is possible to change the course of history with a small group of very determined people. There's so much in your answer that I want to ask you about. And I'm just going to put a little pin in Marxist interpretations of history. I want to talk to you about Gramsci in a second. But before we do that, look, you mentioned your agnosticism. And you mentioned your father's job. And it's of interest to me, particularly because we're talking about moral frameworks, particularly because we're talking about what is the purpose, what is the meaning of a life well lived.

36:44And I think you probably have to say it's quite a Christian worldview to say, to make the world a better place, to leave it in a better way than you arrived. And so I would just sort of, I'm not quite sure what my question is, but I would just sort of invite you to talk about your view on religious morality and I guess your own state of faith and belief right now, and actually how this work possibly has informed your faith. Sure. Well, I mean, you could take a boy out of the church, but it's hard to take the church out of the boy. I deeply believe that.

37:16So I grew up in a family where the five big questions of religion were always important. Like, who are we? Where do we come from? Where do we go? How should we live? And finally, what is sacred? Those are the five questions that all religions revolve around. And I did not find the answers that I got satisfying. I really tried. I tried very hard. My parents know this. But I just did not find it convincing in the end. And I found that quite heartbreaking, to be honest. When I was 16, I wrote my very first essay about free will. And I walked around in a daze for weeks. I thought I had made some monumental philosophical discovery and that, you know, nothing made sense anymore.

38:04I was like, but free will cannot possibly exist, right? Because I didn't choose my genes. I didn't choose my parents. I didn't like there was always something that came before me. So this whole notion of me deciding this, it doesn't make sense at all. Like a choice is just a moment when different causes come together, coalesce. But that's not like me. That's just superstition. and then obviously reading about Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution. I mean, it's hard. I found it hard at least to go through that, and I remember quite vividly the moment when I really lost my faith. It wasn't a happy moment.

38:47It was really a sense of falling out of a story, and honestly I think that's true for a lot of people, even a lot of people who maybe don't want to recognize it, But I do think there is a God-shaped hole in the souls of many of us. And maybe especially right now when reality is just so disorienting with this incredible technological revolution that we're going through, the rise of AI, with the breakdown of the global order, the rise of neo-fascism. I mean, people are really looking for deeper, more fundamental answers. And they can't find that in the latest guide to, I don't know, how to become more muscular or whatever.

39:31Yeah, how to get a private check, yeah. So, yeah, I think this book is also very much about those questions, those five questions of religion. It's just that I do not fight my answers in theology. I fight my answers in history. and my form of immortality or at least the form of immortality that I believe in is about building monuments in time. So Thomas Clarkson is dead. He was a collection of atoms and molecules and I mean, that's gone. But the fact that he existed, the fact that I read his memoirs a couple of years ago and was absolutely floored by them. I mean, I was like, holy, I mean, this is a way to live your life.

40:14I mean, this is what we call moral ambition. and like if there's anyone who is probably in like the top three people uh who influenced me the most even though he's like two centuries gone that is immortality and um i think the invitation of this book is to recognize that and to step into the footsteps of those great moral pioneers who came before us the abolitionists the suffragettes the civil right campaigners often it may seem as if we're alone i sometimes tell this to my friends in the animal rights movement you know they feel so alone i'm saying you've got so many friends you've got so many allies i mean most of them are dead but they're there you know you are continuing the greatest tradition of of human moral progress uh and in a way we we're just getting started yeah take courage from that um i mean you don't have to answer this question because it's very it's very personal but and so say if you don't want to but presumably that must that sort of loss of faith must also have changed your relationship with your parents and particularly your dad i mean will you talk a little bit about that or yeah so my parents and i get along extremely well um they're the the most wonderful people i i did the wreath lectures last year and um you know they they read all the lectures you should picture them sitting at a kitchen table side by side with a dictionary you know translating the whole lectures and uh and always their verdict is the same they always say the same thing like it's Brilliant.

41:39Rutger, it's once again, brilliant. So we didn't have like a big battle of faith. My dad has a PhD in poetry and he sees religion as a kind of poetry, I think. I remember these moments when I would, you know, come up to him and say, OK, dad, you have to say yes or no. Did Jesus die on the cross for our sins? Yes or no? And he would be like, bugger off. Don't ask me such vulgar questions. so yeah no it's my mom who's much more direct some people will know me for dunking on some billionaires a couple of years ago in Davos and when people hear that I'm the son of a minister they say oh well that explains it and they're like well you haven't met my mom yet that's me basically channeling my mom's energy that's where it comes from okay let's talk a bit about those lectures and let's talk about Gramsci like I said you know there's There's been a lot of talk recently about Gramsci's interregnum.

42:38And, you know, 1926, Italian Marxist imprisoned by fascists. And he writes in prison notebooks, quote, the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. So, Reef Lectures, one's titled A Time of Monsters. It nods to that. I mean, do you think we're in an interregnum? Talk to me about why you use that title. Like, what does it mean to you? You remember February 2020. My Twitter timeline was on the one hand full of people I really respected, bloggers I really liked, super forecasters, some people in the effective altruism community.

43:18And they said, stockpile masks now. This is real. It is happening. Absolutely no doubt about it. It's coming. It's just a couple of weeks, maybe days, but it is coming. And then on the other hand, you go to newyorktimes.com, you go to the BBC, And you're like, no, no, no, it's all fine. It's a Chinese virus and whatever. And the health authorities are the same. I very much feel that, you know, early 2025 is so similar, but in two respects, actually. So if I now look at, let's say, my timeline of people I really respect, I've got two groups. Once again, I've got the super forecasters, the people who really specialize in getting it right.

44:00and I'm also a follower of you know my colleagues my fellow historians and particularly historians of fascism and like the super forecasters for them it's all about the technology right they're like AI people have no idea what's coming like the next three to five years are going to be absolutely wild even if AI progress would stop right now what I mean the technology we have right now would already be absolutely revolutionary in my view I mean probably as a revolutionary electricity but the models are improving every month week day um and i think we're going to make a few more quantum leaps um it's it's very hard to convince my progressive leftist friends of this there are very hard to as they say in silicon valley it's very hard to agi pill them because they have such um uh little respect for let's say silicon valley they're like these people can only come up with crap and BS, like crypto NFTs.

44:58And so they find it very hard to see what is before their eyes. I mean, if Sam Altman would walk over water like Jesus wanted, they would still be like, yeah, that's not impressive. Like walk over water. Like what's the use of that? Like it's no practical purpose. So that's one thing. I think this is a technological revolution that is as big or maybe even bigger than the industrial revolution that we're living through right now at breakneck speed. But the second one is the rise of neo-fascism, as we talked about. I think that's the real thing. And it's also happening much quicker than we're used to.

45:30It's happening way faster than Putin took over in Russia, way faster than Orban took over in Hungary. It's just one big spectacle after another. And it's also very hard to even know which news story we ought to be talking about right now because this will air like a bit later. and then we will have forgotten about all the stories that, you know, in the news right now. So I think it's those two things where, let's say, the normal, educated, middle-class centrist or progressive people, they are horrified, surprised, shocked again and again and again. And my message to them is like maybe I'll to stop being shocked all the time because maybe this is just the new thing, right?

46:18Maybe this is the new normal. Maybe this artificial intelligence thing, maybe that is a real technological revolution. And maybe this, you know, Trump phenomenon, maybe that is really fascism. Yeah, I know. Like this is the problem, right? Because like you said, this is going to come out in probably a month or so's time. And right now there is this in British national politics, you know, everyone's in fact, the British government has announced legislation. that's apparently going to come into force this week that we're talking now to prevent non-consensual intimate images being produced. And part of me is going, all right, well, we're talking about the AI super race and there's actually, this is a good touchstone for about AI development.

46:59To what extent should there be guardrails? To what extent should we try to regulate? Can we even try to control? Should we try to control? There are all these questions to ask. Yeah. And power concentration is a very, very big one. 100%. And then the other side is like, yeah, but by the time anyone listens to this in about a month's time, well, first of all, the technology could have developed to such an extent that what we're talking about is rendered meaningless. The news agenda will have moved directly on. The pace of change is really quite confronting, frightening. Yeah. Let me give you an example.

47:31So a couple of years ago, I wrote an essay about sea level rise. I thought, you know what? Let me write the national story of climate change in the Netherlands. I wanted to, you know, awaken my fellow countrymen and say like, hey, this is a real thing also for us because sea level rise. I mean, that can threaten the very future of our country. So I spoke to a bunch of experts and I said, like, how many meters of sea level rise can we handle? And they basically agreed that we can handle about three meters. But that after that, you know, the continued existence of the Netherlands becomes shaky. And especially after, let's say, four or five.

48:07Yeah, it's probably better to move to Germany because it just becomes too expensive at some point. to prevent the water from coming in. And so I asked, so when does this happen? And they said, yeah, you know, three meters in the worst scenario around 2100. And in that essay, I made the point like, hey, this is not as far away as people think. Like I just became a dad. So this is a world that, you know, my daughter may live in where this may be a real question. Do we have to say goodbye to our country? And that's why I, how I try to say like, hey, we should do more to fight global warming. When I read that thing right now, it feels just surreal.

48:47It's like, what a luxury to worry about the year 2100.

48:56You got a lot, right? It feels absolutely impossible to even write a piece. And this is just a couple of years ago. I mean, just AI, I mean, that is like the next five to 10 years when we will know how this story is going to end. Or at least we'll learn a lot more. And same is true for the absolute breakdown of the global order, the rise of authoritarians around the globe. I feel that this age, let's say 2015, when the do-goody people were impact investing and doing some philanthropy to offset their carbon emissions, what a happy day that was did um how did the essay did it catch on i'm the parish climate agreement yeah i remember that one heady days yeah and then america keeps pulling out of yeah i guess how did um how did it land i mean it feels it feels i'm trying to reach for the the parallel of perhaps the um the the abolitionists that were heading over to the netherlands a couple hundred years ago were but did people do people did the essay resonate with people or back then yeah were Were they too busy signing petitions about Catholics?

50:05I don't know. Some people definitely did. And I mean, the climate movement made a lot of progress. I think that's undeniable. Yes. I mean, we have China to thank for a lot of that. But also some other things like take the spectacular success of solar energy. In my book, I profile one guy, a German called Hans-Josef Fell, who in the 90s was called this solar nerd who was obsessed with solar panels. back in the days when they were super inefficient, super expensive. But he was just like, these things are awesome. You can get energy from the sun. And he had a simple theory. If we just buy more of them, they will become more efficient.

50:45And that's how we're going to solve global warming. He was basically right. And he convinced the Germans, not on his own, but with a small group of committed friends, to spend 200 billion euros on solar subsidies. At some point, the Germans had the highest electricity bills in the world, but German basically paid the learning money for the whole world. And that's why we have the cheapest energy source in all of history right now, which is solar. It's so interesting that you still have some dummies on the right wing side of the political spectrum. We're like, oh, it's all subsidies. It doesn't work.

51:21Well, look at what business is doing. Look at what big corporations are doing. They're scaling up solar massively, and solar is really kicking oils and coal's ass.

51:33And it's so interesting to see that the development of that technology was also highly, highly contingent. It could have happened way earlier, or it could have happened not at all. Initially, I mean, it was invented in the 60s at Bell Labs in the US, and it almost broke through. But then Reagan, neoliberalism came along and basically the funding was pulled. But yeah, it's one of those, for me, really inspiring stories where we have made a lot of progress thanks to some really crazy determined people. Yeah, look, I mean, the book is full of stories like that. And I'll admit I was moved to tears, actually, by one of the stories.

52:16I won't give too much away, but the genesis of some really amazing philanthropic work. There's a horrendous house fire and a young girl basically survives this horrific fire and it inspires someone to go on and really actually change the world for the better. Right. And I just become a dad at the time. And that really landed on me in quite a profound way. We're coming to the end of our time together, Rutger. So I'd probably just sort of ask, what's the school turning its attention to next? How are you thinking about the future? What issues do you see yourself being concerned with? Talk to me about that before we end our conversation.

52:52So I think we need a social democratic project 2050. How are we going to save civilization, basically? And what we need for that is a global alliance of ambitious idealists who are really willing to practice what they preach. We're not looking for the moral minimum, but for the moral maximum, how much they can give. Thomas Clarkson, the abolitionist we spoke about, I mean, he spent seven years traveling up and down the country, spreading the propaganda everywhere, and then he had a total burnout. Now, people shouldn't get a burnout, obviously, but currently they're getting burnouts while they do jobs they hate.

53:31So if we're going to get one anyway, we might as well do something useful. and what we're looking to do is to build that magnet for very driven, very ambitious people who want to take on some of these great challenges, whether that's AI safety, the preservation of our democracy, the fight against big tobacco, the fight against some of these terrible diseases, factory farming, you name it. And so what we continuously do is we launch fellowships. We have fellowships who have already started their career. We take them out of their jobs and we help them to work on what's really important. And we also work with students, actually.

54:08We just started our first fellowship at Harvard. I'm here in the UK this week, not just to promote the paperback, but also to find partners to start fellowships at universities here in the UK. Because so much talent is currently going to waste. If you read these application essays of students at Harvard, at Princeton, at Oxford, at Cambridge, They're beautiful essays about all the global problems they aspire to solve, from poverty to the next pandemic to tax evasion by billionaires. But then a couple of years later, they have been funneled into this BS industry. And it doesn't have to be this way.

54:48We can make doing good more prestigious. We can hack a nation's honor code. And that's really what I learned from the abolitionists. Thomas Clarkson was once a University of Cambridge graduate who was about to go into a fairly boring career in the Church of England. But then, you know, he met a couple of people, he read a couple of things and then decided to go in a very different direction. And I think we can scale that up. Raga Bregman, it's been an absolute pleasure to speak to you again. Thank you for taking the time. Best of luck. Thanks for having me.

55:32Your favorite friend group is back. FX's Adults follows five roommates living in New York, leaning on each other to navigate love, work, friendship, and family, while tackling pressing questions of your 20s like, what if the person who inherited your fake ID is cooler than you ever were? Why does being around your family make you regress into your worst self? And how do you tell your roommates that you have other friends? FX as Adults All episodes now streaming on Hulu