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
So I really consider that the big betrayal, that kind of hypocrisy, where people claim the moral high ground, but don't actually live up to it.
So I think that there are two ways to travel. You can travel in time, obviously, or you can travel in space. And if you go to another country, then very often you realize, oh, wow. So there are different ways to doing things, right? And that's just like history. I think the main lesson of studying history is that things can be different. There's nothing inevitable.
about the way we've structured our society and economy right now. I've personally always been fascinated by this question of how radical ideas, seemingly crazy ideas, can over the years and decades become reality, both for better and for worse. Actually, I spent about a year studying the abolitionist movement, mainly the British abolitionist movement, because that was the most successful one.
And what you realize if you go back to, say, the year 1750, and you would have stood on a street corner in London or Pennsylvania or New York, and you would have said, abolish the slave trade, abolish slavery, most people would have said, you're utterly nuts. That could never happen, and we really need this. This is like…
fundamental to our economy and then obviously it took many many decades and it started with a small group of really committed black and white abolitionists but it does happen so i've always been fascinated by those processes how the how the crazy can become inevitable what did they do well like what was it that made their movement as successful as it was
You know, you could write a very long book about that. I mean, that's what you do. That's exactly what you do. So as I was studying, in particular, the British abolitionist movement, I was like, this is almost like a self-help book for modern day activists and revolutionaries. Because there are so many lessons we can learn from it. One of the first big lessons is that It takes a coalition.
So very often these days, people are, I think, too purist about their ideals, right? They only want to work together with people who are exactly on the same side. But then you study some of these great movements and you realize that they were actually coalitions of people who very often disagreed. vehemently about pretty fundamental things.
In this case, it all started with the Quakers, which was a very weird, radical Christian sect. They didn't get much done for a long time until they started working together with the evangelicals. This was in the day when evangelicals were not just on TV trying to make money. So that's one really important lesson.
Another one that is, I think, very relevant today is that in history, very often the right things happen for the wrong reasons. So I really had this epiphany as I was studying the life of Thomas Clarkson, who was one of the main British abolitionists. And He was trying to make the argument in Westminster, in the British Parliament, that the slave trade ought to be abolished.
And from a modern-day perspective, you would say, well, obviously, your most powerful argument is that this is the most immoral system that ever existed, right? The historians of the future will judge us very harshly for this. Well, actually, that didn't work at all. What Thomas Clarkson did discover is that once he started advocating for the suffering of white sailors on these ships...
who were dying in droves. Then all the politicians were suddenly paying attention, right? And that was a really powerful political argument.
Yeah, so my very first book was called Utopia for Realists, and it was about all these crazy ideas like, can't we just abolish poverty by giving everyone money, which is called a universal basic income? Can't we abolish all borders around the globe? Can't we move to a much more participatory form of democracy? And at some point, I started to think, what do all these crazy ideas have in common?
Well, it's a different way of looking at humans. It's a more hopeful and more optimistic view of human nature. There's this old theory which says that humans deep down are just fundamentally selfish. It's often called veneer theory, the idea that civilization is just a thin veneer and that below that lies raw human nature. And I think the problem with that theory is...
It's not just that I think it's wrong. The biggest problem is that it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because once you start assuming the worst in other people, that's how you're going to design your whole society. You're going to have a society with a lot of bureaucracies, with a lot of cameras, with a lot of police. And you're going to bring out the worst in people.
You're going to create the kind of people that your theory presupposed. So...
obviously you know humans are capable of the of the most terrible atrocities we do things that penguins would never think of doing right um concentration camps genocides apartheid you name it but then on the other hand we're also um capable of incredible altruism and i think that you know shifting that perspective a little bit and assume and assuming the best in people and also designing our our systems of government of companies you name it around that um
could be a great way of making this world a much better place.
Well, here's an interesting story, Trevor. So there are two species of primates who are like 99% genetically similar to us. On the one hand, you got the chimpanzees who indeed behave pretty much like you just described. So like a tribe of chimpanzees meets another tribe of chimpanzees that they never met before, you know, and it can get pretty violent.
We also have the bonobos, and they're pretty much the opposite. So if two groups of bonobos meet each other, what they'll have is an orgy. That's basically their way of saying hi. So this has been a question that's been asked by primatologists for a long time. Are we the chimpanzees or the bonobos? Maybe we're both.
Yeah, well, that's the problem if you write a book about human decency is that you have to go on for hundreds of pages about all the terrible things we do. Look, for me, it all starts with this question, how have we conquered the globe, right? Why have humans been so successful compared to other species? And for a long time, we like to believe that it is because we are so smart, right?
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