Author Rutger Bregman on his million-euro giveaway and how ordinary people can change the world

Publishers have given author Rutger Bregman more than a million euros for his new book. He won’t see a penny of it. Most authors, to be clear, do not get seven-figure advances. But, evidently, there’s belief that Moral Ambition will be a hit. Having packaged the blue-sky ideas of universal basic income, the four-day working week and humanity’s fundamental goodness for the TED Talk-watching, airport-book-reading crowd, Bregman has his next big idea: reframing what we think of as success. 

And there’s a twist. Bregman has signed a contract which means every single pound and euro he earns from Moral Ambition must, legally, go to a foundation he’s set up, striving to change the world in the same way he hopes his readers will.

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Talking to Rutger Bregman is a lot like listening to a podcast. That’s no surprise – both Utopia for Realists and Humankind became bestsellers and made Bregman the go-to guest for any host wanting to unpick whether humans are in fact fundamentally good. The 36-year-old talks in deliberate paragraphs, shorn of filler words, perfectly picked up by an otherwise-dodgy AI transcription service. 

Even Rupert Murdoch seems open to his ideas, having been snapped reading Utopia for Realists on a sun lounger in Barbados. “I initially thought it was fake. But it was funny to see. I cherish all my readers,” Bregman says. “I do know that he has a more progressive son, I think, and a more progressive daughter in-law, if I’m correct. So I’ve been guessing that they’ve been forcing him to read it.” 

You wonder what Murdoch will make of his new book, Moral Ambition. In it, Rutger Bregman argues there is a tremendous waste of talent in our society. Ambitious but un-idealistic people waste their talents. Idealistic but unambitious people stagnate as noble losers, prizing awareness over action. What’s lacking is the will to make the world a wildly better place. Unambitious idealists might obsess over their carbon footprint, and never eat meat or fly, but “they might as well have never existed, which is not very ambitious”, he says. 

Moral Ambition serves as a wake-up call and a self-help manual for those looking to do more. “Maybe you don’t want to get to your deathbed with a gnawing feeling you had much more in you,” he tells readers. It’s hard to imagine Samaritans approving of this as a retirement present at McKinsey. 

It has become impossible to move for self-help books. Dodge Atomic Habits, and the dullest person you know will recommend you Four Thousand Weeks. Propped up with titles like The Diary of a CEO and The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, the self-help book industry is expected to rise to $14 billion (£10.5bn) this year. 

“I have always been fascinated by the genre, indeed, the bestselling genre about how you become more mindful, more productive, get rich, work four hours a week and live the life of a king or something like that. And I guess it’s an escape for people. It’s really nice to believe that if you follow this set of procedures, then you know, everything will work out for you, pull yourself up by your own bootstraps,” says Bregman. “I call it the right-wing excuse. Faced with all these structural injustices, it’s a nice escape. It’s a nice thing to be able to believe that people can just, with enough willpower, will themselves out of it. Now we all know, or at least, I think, that that is mostly BS.” 

Sick of working in what he terms the “awareness industry” of journalists and historians, Bregman wanted to be the man in the arena. “At some point, I started experiencing an emotion that I like to describe as moral envy,” he says. 

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“Here I was standing on the sidelines, looking at the people in the arena, those people with the sweat on their forehead, you know, with their hands dirty, the people who fall down and then stand up again. And I was honestly just jealous. I was like, well, I’d love to do that as well, to build a legacy that actually matters and move beyond the awareness phase of my career.” For inspiration, he can look to his own mother, a 68-year-old member of Extinction Rebellion in the Netherlands whose most recent arrest was just a fortnight ago. 

“She’s the only person in our family who keeps getting arrested,” he says. “She’s really one of my heroes and role models. And I think that the work that she and other activists have been doing has been very valuable in raising the saliency of the issue of climate change.” 

A series of unlikely heroes  

Bregman’s heroes in Moral Ambition are the ordinary people who stepped up and made an impact. Not the legislators and movement leaders, but the inventors of kitchen appliances and bulk-buyers of mosquito nets. Take 18th-century abolitionist Thomas Clarkson, who had a spiritual revelation on the evils of the slave trade after winning an essay prize at the University of Cambridge, then devoted himself to the cause. 

There’s Rob Mather, who was working a generic corporate job until he watched a TV programme about a two-year-old girl who suffered 90% burns in a house fire. Moved to try and change something, Mather wondered how much he could get done in 20 minutes. So began the journey to begin the Against Malaria Foundation. To date, it has raised over £565 million and protected 614 million people from malaria. 

Or Leah Garcés, an activist who exposed the evils of industrial farming by befriending a farmer – putting the focus on how big corporations create incentives forcing farmers to become modern-day serfs. This feeds into how Rutger Bregman sees the way ordinary people can change the world. He is sceptical of the idea of tipping points, used by groups like Extinction Rebellion – the idea that once a certain number of people buy into an idea, change will happen. 

“Just having the public on your side isn’t enough. You need to find other ways of affecting real change. You need those dedicated, small groups of people who don’t just believe something, but believe it very deeply,” he says. “Having a certain opinion, in and of itself, doesn’t say all that much. The question is, how deeply do you believe it, and what are you willing to do for it? What are you willing to sacrifice for it?” 

Every year, when Big Issue celebrates 100 Changemakers from all over the UK, one theme is clear: the desire to help is born out of necessity. Bregman is preaching to a slightly different crowd. “Obviously, I’m punching up a little bit in the book towards all those people who are really talented, quite privileged, but who are, for some reason, stuck in what is, I believe, called in academic terms a bullshit job,” he says. 

‘If you’re so smart, then why do you work here?’

But the writing is only half the story behind the Dutchman’s own moral ambition. Rutger Bregman is recruiting SWAT teams, as he calls them: small cohorts of dedicated, experienced professionals who will take on “great global problems”. He will take talent away from the rich, Robin Hood-like, and redistribute it to the service of urgent challenges. That’s the idea at the heart of his School for Moral Ambition. 

Bregman plans to find these people in unusual ways. One wheeze is to start a campaign on Wall Street with billboards saying: “If you’re so smart, then why do you work here? We will pay you to quit your job.” He hopes to recruit about 10 dedicated bankers, wealth managers, tax experts and beyond, to fight for tax justice and take on tax evasion. He needs people who understand the system, love spreadsheets and arcane details, and can work to close loopholes. Where does one get the idea to do something like this? 

Ralph Nader, for most people, is less a person than a political fable, after he ran as a third-party candidate for the presidency in 2000 and split the vote enough to accidentally propel George W Bush into the White House. Nader is a direct inspiration to Bregman. As a young lawyer in the 60s and 70s, Nader formed small teams of ambitious, idealistic people called Nader’s Raiders. These ‘radical nerds’ took aim at problems, inspired by Nader’s work on road safety, and tirelessly set about campaigning for the solutions. The Raiders helped usher in the Freedom of Information Act, Whistleblower Protection Act and Clean Water Act amid an estimated 25 pieces of federal legislation. 

Nader made changing the world cool. At one point, a third of Harvard Law School applied to work with him. 

The evidence is there that Gen Z are already voting with their conscience, with one study showing 40% have actively avoided applying to companies they find unethical. Some 42% of young workers have considered quitting because their job doesn’t have strong enough values or a social purpose. 

Bregman’s big promise to potential readers is this: everything he earns from Moral Ambition will be used to fund the School for Moral Ambition.

“I have signed a contract with the Dutch non-profit foundation The School for Moral Ambition that legally binds me to donate everything I earn from Moral Ambition – including related talks – to the foundation,” Bregman tells me. “To avoid any conflict of interest, I have stepped down from the board of the foundation and no longer have direct control over spending decisions.”

Each year, the foundation publishes a report detailing all donations, including Bregman’s, and how the money is spent. This includes more than €1 million (£850,000) Bregman has already made from his advances on Moral Ambition, which has helped launch the organisation and fund its first programmes. He lives off the royalties of his previous books.

If it’s tempting to see Rutger Bregman as a radical, remember: that’s exactly how Ralph Nader funded his raiders.

Moral Ambition by Rutger Bregman is out now (Bloomsbury, £20). You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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