Rutger Bregman
speaker
273 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard May 2025
Rutger Bregman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Hmm. So one of the main characters in the book is this guy called Thomas Clarkson. Yeah, a British abolitionist. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's become sort of my personal hero, even though he's now dead for two centuries. He participated in an essay contest at Cambridge University. And just by chance, he had to answer this question, is it okay to own other human beings?
He had never really thought about the question, did his research, won first prize. And then after he attended the prize ceremony in Cambridge, he went back on his horse to London where he lived. And he was still thinking about the essay and was like, if this is actually true, then shouldn't someone do something about it? And he steps off his horse and he's like,
Well, maybe I got to be the one to do it. And you can clearly see this mix of idealism and vanity within him. On the one hand, yes, he deeply cares about the suffering of enslaved people. But yeah, he's also, you know, a little bit of a vain man. You know, he likes to see himself as that historical hero who devotes his life to this great quest of abolishing slavery.
And in the first seven years, he traveled 35,000 miles across the United Kingdom on horse,
So after seven years of doing that, he had an utter and total nervous breakdown, what we would call a burnout today. So he was really gone, basically. And when I read that, I was like, okay, Thomas, you should have done your breathing exercises, right? So, yeah, he took it a little bit too far. But let's be honest. Today, a lot of people get a burnout while they do jobs they love.
don't really like all that much or that don't really contribute all that much to the welfare of the world. So if we're going to get a burnout anyway, we might as well do something useful.
Yeah, yeah. I come back to this quote from Margaret Mead again and again. You know, the very famous quote, never doubt the power of a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens to change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. And that quote is usually being used by starry-eyed idealists who say, look, we can do this. It's only a few of us now, but we can make a difference.
But I always felt that it's a really brutal quote. Why? Because she's basically saying that the vast majority of people don't change the world. the vast majority of people are just living their lives and not doing all that much. Look, I used to think about this quite differently. I used to have a more Marxist approach to history.
If you would have asked me something like, oh, why was slavery abolished in the end? I would have said, well, yeah, probably the Industrial Revolution, right? Probably it wasn't profitable anymore. Well, to the contrary, it was actually abolished at the height of its profitability and it was incredibly contingent.
And if a couple of people like Thomas Clarkson would have fallen off their horse in the year 1786 or a little bit earlier, then that would have been very bad news. The history could have looked very differently.
Yeah.
Oh, absolutely.
So I've got one chapter in the book about Nader's Raiders, you know, Ralph Nader in the late sixties and the seventies built this incredible movement of young people who were like, we're not going to go work for some boring corporate law firm. We're going to go to Washington to lobby for the good cause.
And there's one historian who estimates that they had their fingerprints on at least 25 pieces of federal legislation. The Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act that saved, you know, hundreds of thousands of lives. It's really a beautiful example of what moral ambition can mean in practice.
And at some point, a third of Harvard Law School applied to work for Ralph Nader to just go and work 100 hours a week for a pretty small salary because it was just the very coolest thing you could do. Now, right-wingers looked at that model very carefully.
And yeah, some historians would argue that that was like the beginning of the corporate takeover of America, where they built this huge network of think tanks, you know, the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society and the Super PACs and you name it.
And I think it's pretty clear that I disagree with most of their goals, but I'm somewhat in awe of that perseverance because that is really what it takes to Take the movement against Roe v. Wade. They built a whole network of 5,000 clerks and lawyers and did so many, you know, strategic lawsuits. And that all culminated in the moment of the Dobbs decision, of course. I mean, that's what it takes.
It's about building a whole ecosystem.
Yes. So I think there's a real lack of ambition among progressives and the left these days. Take the environmental movement, for example. You've got so many people who are obsessed with their own footprint. And so there are all these commandments. You don't eat meat. You don't fly. You don't even have kids. You don't use plastic straws. But then in the
best possible scenario, you will have reduced your footprint to zero and you might as well not have existed, right? And then death is the highest ideal, not very ambitious in my view. And the same is true for those who are called quote-unquote woke. Often accused of going too far, right? These people. Well, I think they don't go nearly far enough.
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