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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Appearances
They're mainly obsessed with policing language and using the right words to describe all the injustices in the world. And they're very good at going viral, you know, tax the rich and kill the patriarchy. Gets you a lot of likes on Instagram, I guess. But do you actually achieve anything?
Okay, so there's a lot to be said about that. So our daughter was born almost four years ago now. So obviously we bought all these lovely books about, you know, modern feminism and girls are smart, girls are powerful, girls are great, girls can be anything. And I loved all of that. Now, four months ago, our son was born, our second.
And I was like, okay, now I want all the books about what young men can become, right? And yeah, you really see that there's a lack of that. We all know about toxic masculinity, which is very real. I mean, we know about people like Andrew Tate, but then what is the opposite of that? I think there is something like that.
I would call it heroic masculinity, you know, using what you have, your power, your privilege, whatever, to help others, you know, to help those who need you. Who would examples be? Well, I would say that, you know, we've got a lot of older stories about this. Joseph Campbell, who wrote The Hero's Journey, that inspired Star Wars. You know, think about the Frodo's, the Luke Skywalker's.
Okay. Well, or take Thomas Clarkson, you know, young men who are motivated by a mix of vanity and idealism, but then do the work. And I think, yeah, those stories are very powerful and we should get much better at telling them on TikTok to young men because Andrew Tate is giving them a very different definition of success.
Yeah, well, here it is so important to be intellectually honest. And if you're really morally serious, then you don't care about your own purity or your own opinions. No, you actually want to do good. So you always got to be open to the reality that you're working on the wrong things or your solutions don't work.
I've got one example of a charity that after a big RCT, a randomized controlled trial, had to conclude that it just wasn't working. And so they abandoned the project, which is like very courageous and happens not nearly enough. I think there should be an annual award gala for people, you know, who made the biggest mistakes, but we're honest enough to admit it.
At the same time, we also shouldn't lose ourselves in moral relativism. I think that there are some things that are pretty obvious. So the way we treat animals, to me, it's quite striking. If you ask people from the left to the right today about, well, don't you think the way we treat animals might be one of the great moral catastrophes of our time?
I'm always surprised how little pushback you get, even from people who eat meat. and eat a lot of meat. But then they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's probably true. And then they lean back in their chair.
So that is like, for me, one of those clear examples where we've got so much knowledge now about how much suffering is going on in factory farms, how huge this industry is, 70 billion animals slaughtered every year. At some point, you got to make a choice and be like, okay, well, this is pretty clear.
In the fight against injustice, winning is a moral duty. So you've got to recognize that building coalitions is absolutely essential to getting things done. And that is something, again, that leftists and progressives today really need to understand. I mean, I was posting on social media about, you know, the great speech that Cory Booker gave.
And then the comments are full of people, well, actually, he's like pro-Israel. And like, well, look, people, we can keep going on like this, you know, in our little bubbles. But that's really not the way... how we win next time. So if you look at the abolitionist movement, initially it was mainly driven by these Quakers who were very weird.
You know, they had this deep belief in the equality of people. They believe that there's something of God in each and every one of us. So they were also the first who allowed women actually to speak in their meeting houses, their churches. And they didn't get much done, to be honest, because they weren't taken seriously. It was only when they started working together with the evangelicals
that it really became a juggernaut for change. Now these people, you know, they had to bite their tongue quite often, actually, because they disagreed on so many things. But that's what it means to be morally serious.
Yeah, it's really a totally different zeitgeist. I mean, I was a millennial writing, indeed, my first book and being mainly frustrated by the fact that politics, and maybe particularly so in the country where I was growing up, in the Netherlands, had become so boring. It didn't seem like we had big utopian visions anymore.
Every milestone of civilization, the end of slavery, democracy, equal rights for men and women. I mean, all these things were utopian fantasies once. And I was like, well, what's the next thing, right? Can we abolish poverty maybe with the universal basic income? Can we move towards a much shorter working week? Like, come on, give me a bigger vision. And yeah, I guess I got what I wished for.
But it's been moving a little bit in the other direction. I think that still the arguments holds that very often idealists mainly know what they're against. You know, they're against Trump. They're against autocracy. They're against austerity. They're against the establishment. But what are we actually for?
Yes, sure.
Oh, that's a good question. Like, what are the big utopian visions? A couple of things. So, obviously, I believe we can totally abolish poverty. Like, we're more than rich enough right now, especially with the rise of AI. And I think we should use the bounty of AI and distribute it equally. That will be a dividend for all of us. It's a little bit like what Alaska has been doing since the 80s.
Oh, the sovereign wealth fund? Yes, exactly. So they recognize that the oil in the ground is owned by everyone in Alaska, right? And so they've been giving a basic income to everyone ever since. And I think we should do that in many other respects as well. And yeah, I think we should revive the dream of moving towards a much shorter working week as well.
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