Moral Ambition

Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference. Rutger Bregman. Little Brown and Company. 304 pp.

Back Cover

 

Bloomberg Businessweek's 

Best Business Books of the Year 

Audible's Best Books of the Year Longlisted for the Non-Obvious Book Awards

From the author of the New York Times bestsellers Humankind and Utopia for Realists--"a more politically radical Malcolm Gladwell" (The New York Times)--comes a bold manifesto daring us to harness our talents and transform our idealism into action, all with the goal of making the world a wildly better place.

A career consists of 2,000 workweeks, and how you spend that time is one of the most important decisions of your life. Still, millions of people are stuck in in mind-numbing, pointless, or just plain harmful jobs.

There's an antidote to this waste of talent, and it's called moral ambition. Moral ambition is the will to be among the best, but with different measures of success. Not a fancy title, fat salary, or corner office, but a career dedicated to the best solutions to the world's biggest problems-- whether that means tackling climate change, making pandemics history or fighting Big Tobacco.

In Moral Ambition, internationally bestselling author Rutger Bregman reveals how our conventional definitions of success are harming us and the planet, and shows how we can shift the focus from personal gain to societal benefit. In the process, he explains, we will join a growing movement of pioneers who are already living out this ethos. They're the builders, the problem-solvers, the doers who have chosen a path less traveled. A guidebook to finding that path for ourselves, Moral Ambition reminds us that the real measure of success lies not in what we accumulate, but in what we contribute, and shows how we, too, can build a legacy that truly matters.

The Author

 

Rutger Bregman (1988) is a Dutch historian and best selling author. His books Humankind (2020) and Utopia for Realists (2017) were both Sunday Times and New York Times best sellers. His work has been translated into 46 languages and has sold over two million copies.

The Guardian described him as ‍”the Dutch wunderkind of new ideas”, while TED named him "one of Europe's most prominent young thinkers". His TED Talk, "Poverty Isn't a Lack of Character; It's a Lack of Cash", was selected by TED curator Chris Anderson as one of the top ten talks of 2017.

 

Summary + Notes

Prologue 

22 May 2001, at a laboratory at the University of Wisconsin, a Buddhist monk named Matthieu Ricard was labeled as the happiest man on Earth. He had spent 60,000 hours – that’s 7,500 workdays, or a solid thirty years of full-time work, meditating, inside his own head. Thirty years in which he didn't lift a finger to make the world a better place.

No, you’re not fine just the way you are

Moral ambition is the will to make the world a wildly better place. A longing to make a difference – and to build a legacy that truly matters. You’ve only got one life.

• Category I: not that ambitious, not that idealistic. There’s a striking correlation between the level of pay in a given industry and how moral or immoral we think it is. Those who dream of accumulating passive income, chasing a form of freedom where you won’t have to lift a finger.
• Category II: ambitious, but not all that idealistic. Take consultants, these talented people are at best helping others be a little more productive. They see to it that things run more smoothly; rarely do they get things rolling. They don't start new organisations, don't come up with new innovations.
• Category III: idealistic, but not all that ambitious. Tend to prize awareness more than action. Awareness alone won't make a bit of difference. Awareness is a starting point, but not the end goal.
• Category IV: idealistic and ambitious. Thomas Clarkson. In 1785, as a 24-year-old college student. What the apostle Paul was to Christianity, and Martin Luther to the Reformation, Thomas Clarkson was to abolitionism. A refusal to see their own deeds as mere drops in the ocean. They believe they can make a difference and are prepared to take risks to get there. They take action themselves. They have a certain degree of privilege.

‘A person of honour cares first of all not about being respected,’ writes the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, ‘but about being worthy of respect.’ Your honour is not the same as your reputation. It’s not about looking good; it’s about doing good. Because so many others waste their talents, people with moral ambition can make a world of difference.

Lower your threshold for taking action

August Landmesser. In 1931 joined the Nazi party in the hopes of landing a job. But only a few years later, he met nineteen-year-old Irma Eckler. She was Jewish, and as an Aryan, he wasn’t allowed to get involved with her. Yet the two fell in love. Against all the rules, they had two daughters together, Ingrid and Irene.

You may think it can seem impossible to make your mark. The opposite is true. A small group of committed individuals can have enormous influence, in part because most people are busy living their lives. It’s actually an old law of statistics. The 80/20 rule: the Pareto principle.

Margaret Mead: ‘Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.’

Nassim Nicholas Taleb: ‘The intransigent minority. The world is shaped by stubborn, obstinate, headstrong, hell-bent, wilful, relentless advocates. The most intolerant wins.’

Nieuwlande, a tiny town in the Netherlands close to the German border and the story of Arnold Douwes, a man from the town of Boskoop. If you’d told Arnold Douwes that ‘most people, deep down, are pretty decent,’ he would’ve laughed out loud, because he thought most people were cowards. Dutch historians speak of the resistance myth. Most Dutch people remained passive under occupation. Arnold Douwes was different.

Can I live with myself if I do nothing? Dr Samuel Oliner and Dr Pearl Oliner, a husband-and-wife team. Together, they founded the Altruistic Personality Institute at what was then Humboldt State University in California. 

Eva Fogelman's findings:

1. Feelings are overrated. Very few rescuers reported being motivated by deep-felt sympathy. In fact, they put aside their emotions in order to function effectively.
2. Many rescuers had similar upbringings. Their parents instilled in them a strong sense of self-worth and taught them to think for themselves. A certain amount of self-confidence
3. Communists and the super-religious were both overrepresented among rescuers, at least in the Netherlands.
4. When a condition was met, nearly everyone took action –96 per cent to be precise. The condition was: Ask for it.

Time and again, people would only innovate after being inspired by other inventors –be it a coworker, teacher, or friend, a neighbour, family member, or acquaintance. It was as if they were ‘infected’ by a belief in progress. A way of looking at the world, an attitude has to be transmitted.

The resistance worked like a virus. Some individuals, like Arnold Douwes, were superspreaders. Everyone has their own threshold to act, a tipping point to taking action. There’s a minuscule minority that needs zero encouragement to stand up. Psychologist Cass Sunstein calls these pioneers the zeros. The ones need only one person (‘If you go, so will I’), the twos take action if they have two allies, and the millions will only act if half the country has taken to the streets. Lower your own threshold for taking action. So, expose yourself to the virus.

To get going, you need only the smallest of beginnings. It’s something that grows. Martin Luther King Jr said, ‘If anybody had asked me a year ago to head the movement, I tell you very honestly that I would have run a mile to get away from it. I had no intention of being involved in this way.’

Join a cult (or start your own)

Summer of 1969: Radical Nerds, Harvard Law School. Ralph Nader's message: you’re about to throw your life away. Best solicitors, consultants, programmers, accountants, and bankers seldom work on solutions to big problems. Car safety became Ralph Nader’s first mission: President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Traffic Safety Act and the Highway Safety Act into law.

Cults: Members are completely devoted. They have little time for a normal life, but work tirelessly in pursuit of their mission. What’s the opposite of a cult? Thiel’s answer: a consulting firm. To put it bluntly, the big firms are full of highly talented individuals who don’t know what to do with themselves. And so they shrug and become consultants. If you want to change the world, join a cult... or start your own.

The pioneers: 

• Benjamin Lay (1682–1759). Described by his biographer as a ‘class-conscious, gender-conscious, race-conscious, environmentally conscious, vegetarian ultraradical’.
• Anthony Benezet (1713–1784), who was like a writer-in-residence for the abolition movement.
• Ten of the twelve men who in 1787 founded the British Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade were entrepreneurs and nine of them were Quakers. Go through the archives of that group today, and you’ll mostly find to-do lists, action plans. While the abolitionist movement in France was led by writers and intellectuals (and didn’t get much done), the British movement was powered by merchants and businessmen.

The four points: 

1. Most reporters are lazy. Lobby their staff. 
2. Whistleblowers are found from middle management on down. 
3. The drier something seems, the more exciting it is.
4. The less praise you need, the stronger your position.

‘The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.’ Chain reaction: The publication of Vanishing Air was followed by the Clean Air Act of 1970. After Water Wastelands came the Clean Water Act of 1972.

Nader’s method: 

• Expose an injustice
• Come up with solutions
• Bring together a coalition to make solutions happen.

See winning as your moral duty

Overton (1960–2003) was an American political scientist who wondered how –over time– radical dreams could become reality. All kind of people play an essential part: The intellectual and the influencer. The networker and the agitator. The only kind of person we can’t use in this fight is the fool who thinks good intentions are enough. In the fight against injustice, winning is a moral duty.

• Rosa Parks, On 1 December 1955. Montgomery, Alabama, a long committed activist. 
• Pauli Murray. She published the seminal work States’ Laws on Race and Color in 1950, also called the ‘bible for civil rights attorneys’.
• Fred Gray.  He led the legal team who filed a lawsuit against the mayor of Montgomery, and won. On 13 November 1956 the US Supreme Court ruled that segregation in city buses violated the constitution, and with that decision, the 381-day boycott in Montgomery came to an end.

Five myths about how social change works:

1. The illusion of awareness. Politics as pastime. It has little to do with lobbying, protesting, organising, or mobilising –the building blocks of democratic power. it’s not what you think is right that counts, but what you’re prepared to do about it.
2. The illusion of good intentions. Misperception of the Noble Loser is that good intentions are enough.
3. The illusion of the right reasons. The right thing often happens for the wrong reasons. Moral reframing: Find new arguments for the same standpoint –arguments that resonate with people outside your cult and fall within the Overton window. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano.
4. The illusion of purity. Every successful coalition is a pact among people who disagree on any number of things. During British women’s struggle for the right to vote, all kinds of suffragettes came together, ‘from fishwives to aristocrats, mill girls to Indian princesses’. Intersectionality: People are often discriminated against on the basis of multiple, overlapping factors, like gender, ethnicity, class, education, age, sexual orientation, disability, and so on. The problem with purity is that you shut out loads of potential allies. Then you end up with a movement that’s 100 per cent pure, but 0 per cent effective.
5. The illusion of synergy. ‘Progressives are eternally convinced, that “all good things go together.” All has to be radically reformed once and for all. You have to hold on tight to your highest ideals. But sometimes you have to aim lower if you want to hit your target. 

‘Ultimately, a march in and of itself doesn’t accomplish anything. We have to focus on the continued work. The idealists are not usually realistic, and the realists are not usually idealistic.’ What we need is some realistic idealism.

Learn to weep over spreadsheets

GiveWell was founded in 2007 by Holden Karnofsky and Elie Hassenfeld. Started doing evidence-based assessments of all kinds of charities.

Rob Mather. In 2005, more than 250,000 people from 160 countries took part in the World Swim Against Malaria. Born of Against Malaria Foundation, or AMF. 

Mr Rob,
Malaria no longer exists in our village.
Mohammed

Bertrand Russell once said. ‘The mark of a civilised man is the capacity to read a column of numbers and weep.’

Enrol at a Hogwarts for do-gooders

What are the best solutions to the world's biggest problems? Which investments provide the greatest good in return? What organisations don't exist yet, but should? And how can you help as many people and animals as possible?

What do all these problems have in common? The three S's:

• Sizeable
• Super-solvable
• Sorely overlooked

Charity Entrepreneurship is a programme for entrepreneurs – entrepreneurs with moral ambition. To earn a spot, you must first of all be radically open-minded. Second, you have to bring buckets of ambition – moral ambition, to be precise. Third, you've got to be prepared to work incredibly hard.

Loads of people think they're not good enough, when in reality they can change the world. What can help is a mentor, to help lower the threshold for action. And nearly everyone takes action, as long as they're asked.

Take Joey Savoie – one of the oddest people I've ever met. Joey's plan: get his first degree at a low-priced college, earn his master's at a more prestigious institution, and then go for a PhD at Harvard. Along the way, three strategies: applying for grants (didn't work at all), schmoozing with rich people (they weren't that good at it), and crowdfunding (which really took off). Then came the idea: 'Let's do six months of research, make a prioritisation spreadsheet, and come up with the best possible thing.'

That led to Charity Science Health – sending parents text messages to remind them to have their kid vaccinated. Next, Fortify Health, a foundation that works with local millers to enrich wheat flour with iron, folic acid, and vitamin B12, protecting millions from anaemia and congenital defects like spina bifida. Then the Lead Exposure Elimination Project, a foundation that combats lead poisoning. And Family Empowerment Media, an organisation that helps prevent unwanted pregnancies through sex education.

A useful concept here is 'Value Over Replacement Player.' It calls for constant reflection: Am I doing what I say? Producing what I promise? You have to be on the lookout for moral corruption.

In the end, these are the four main ingredients of moral ambition:

1. the idealism of an activist
2. the ambition of a startup founder
3. the analytical mind of a scientist
4. the humility of a monk

But you need a team to get stuff done. You need a community.

As a certain wizard put it: 'It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.'

Find out what the world needs and make it happen

Progress is a story we easily forget. In 1836, the richest man in the world, Nathan Mayer Rothschild, died of a simple infection that we can cure today with a course of antibiotics for a few pounds. Even the most powerful weren't spared: Charlemagne (747–814), for instance, had seven brothers and sisters, but only two lived to see their eighteenth birthday. King Edward II of England (1284–1327) had eleven sisters, but only five survived childhood. The Queen of Great Britain, Anne Stuart (1665–1714), was pregnant no less than eighteen times, and only one of her children survived early childhood: little Prince William.

And yet, despite this dramatic progress, pessimism rules. In Finland and Norway, for instance, only 8 per cent of people think things are getting better; in France and Australia, a mere 3 per cent.

Beating polio

Polio is a horrible illness that can lead to paralysis and suffocation. Up until the early 1950s, parents were terrified their children would catch the disease. But then Jonas Salk appeared on the scene. The virologist had studied medicine at New York University in the 1930s. Salk wanted to treat humanity. He ended up devoting seven years of his life to developing the polio vaccine. Then came 12 April 1955, the day Salk's breakthrough was made public: Dr Jonas Edward Salk had developed a safe and effective vaccine against polio.

The eradication of smallpox

Then there's the tale of Viktor Zhdanov, a Ukrainian virologist. His moment came in 1958, when he called on the World Health Organization (WHO) to start an inoculation campaign against smallpox. It was a bold proposal: humankind had never eradicated a disease before. Nevertheless, in 1966, with a margin of only two votes, the WHO gave Zhdanov the go-ahead. Over a period of ten years, $300 million would be put into a worldwide vaccination campaign.

The results were staggering. In October 1977, the world's last smallpox patient was diagnosed in Somalia. His name was Ali Maow Maalin. Two years later, the WHO's surveillance teams reported: 'Search complete. No cases discovered. Ali Maow Maalin is the world's last known smallpox case.'

The household revolution

Consider Josephine Cochrane of Illinois. 'If nobody else is going to invent a dishwashing machine,' Cochrane said, 'I'll do it myself.' Inventions like Cochrane's sparked a revolution in American households. In 1900, the average homemaker spent fifty-eight hours a week on cooking, cleaning, and the wash. By 1975, that was down to eighteen hours.

The pill

Then there's Katharine McCormick. In 1904, she was the second woman to graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the first with a degree in biology. McCormick would fight for women's rights her whole life, in particular for the right to contraception. In 1950, McCormick wrote a letter to an old friend, the feminist Margaret Sanger, asking whether she knew someone who could develop a safe, reliable, and inexpensive contraceptive for women.

The answer was Gregory Goodwin Pincus, a brilliant scientist, said to have an IQ of 210. He'd been let go from Harvard due to controversial research into sex and reproduction. The result of their collaboration? The pill.

The next frontiers

There's still work to do. Every year now, we slaughter some 80 billion chickens, cows, turkeys, goats, and sheep. One promising answer is cultivated meat.

Or think of the digital age. 'Think of all the technology we have today,' Jimmy Wales, who founded Wikipedia, once said, 'and what could be created with it that nobody has even really thought of yet.' When he launched his online encyclopaedia in 2001, the necessary technology had already been around for years. Web servers, browsers, and online databases were nothing new, so Wikipedia could have seen the light of day much earlier.

As for the solar revolution, remember Martin Green, Shi Zhengrong, and Hans-Josef Fell – because nothing about it was inevitable.

The lesson

Progress doesn't happen by itself. We need inventors like Josephine Cochrane, politicians like Hans-Josef Fell, entrepreneurs like Shi Zhengrong, philanthropists like Katharine McCormick, and lobbyists like Viktor Zhdanov.

Save a life. Now only $4,999!

The story starts in 1969, when one Peter Singer went to study philosophy at the University of Oxford. There he would develop the ideas he later laid out in his famous essay 'Famine, Affluence, and Morality': if you can prevent something bad without sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, isn't it your duty to keep on giving until you can't give any more?

Decades later, in 2009, the young philosopher Toby Ord also decided to take action. Around that time, he met an ambitious philosophy student by the name of William MacAskill. They set up their first nonprofit soon after, based on a new idea they would dub effective altruism, or EA.

The reasoning behind it is simple but radical: some ways of doing good are vastly better than others. In fact, the best charities are fifty times (!) more effective than the median charity and a whopping 10,000 times more effective than the worst ones. Research suggests that with an office job and a median salary, you can save as many lives as Arnold Douwes saved during the Second World War.

Effective altruism also asks an uncomfortable question: what unpopular causes should we be fighting for today?

This way of thinking flips the usual career advice on its head. So don't start out by asking, 'What's my passion?' Ask instead, 'How can I contribute most?' And then choose the role that suits you best. After all, your talents are but a means to an end, your ambition raw energy. What matters is what you do with them.

Expand your moral circle

People seen as enlightened or progressive often upheld practices we now consider absolutely abhorrent. Makes you wonder: What practices of ours will future generations think barbaric? The past is full of practices we now think vile.

Six ways to find a moral challenge:

1. We’ve already heard about what is wrong, despite how odd it sounds at first, and the arguments against it.
2. People don’t defend their practices, but instead retionalize, ‘That’s how it’s always been’, ‘That’s human nature for you’, or ‘We don’t have a choice’. Those things are deemed as normal, natural, and necessary.
3. People avoid unpleasant facts. Two forms of not-knowing: genuinely having no idea and also showing wilful ignorance.
4. Angry response to moral pioneers. Time and again, they’re hated, harangued, harassed.
5. It’s hard to explain a particular practice to children, who can be remarkably adept at spotting our hypocrisy. 
6. What will future generations see as our gravest offence? What practice of ours will most appal them? What future generations will judge us for. If you think you already know the answer, you are wrong.

Make future historians proud 

Morally ambitious people eager to be ‘good ancestors.’ Chronocentrism, the naive idea that the times you happen to live in also happen to be especially important. 

‘We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organise and measure the best of our energies and skills’

‘We set sail on this new sea, because there is new knowledge to be gained and new rights to be won. Whether it will become a force for good or ill, depends on man.’

—John F. Kennedy 

Epilogue

When have you done enough for a better world? When are you allowed to climb down off your horse and rest at the side of the road? The fact of the matter is that it’s never enough. There’s always a new hill to climb, a new mission to complete, a new mountain to move.

Morality plays a big role in a rich and full life, but it’s not everything. Stop wasting your talent and start making a difference. See the good in others; demand more of yourself. Moral ambition isn’t a trait; it’s a mindset. Nothing left to do but get started.

‘In journeying on, I became more calm and composed. My spirits began to return.’

The Seven Founding Principles for Moral Ambition

1. Action. Awareness is overrated. Useless to point fingers. Do as much good in this world as you can.
2. Impact. Make a big difference. Truly transformative impact. Prioritise.
3. Radical compassion. Work to expand the moral circle. Push the frontiers of humanity’s moral. Care about future generations and seek to be a good ancestor.
4. Open-mindedness. Cultivate a curious and inquisitive mindset. Be epistemically humble. Own your mistakes and admit failure.
5. Kindness. Believe there are good in people.
6. Zest for life. Live a full, rich, well-rounded life to sustain your ambition as an end in itself. 
7. Perseverance. Don't give up. Tough times lie ahead.