RUTGER BREGMAN

GESPRÄCHSTEIL 1

IM: In the last days, whenever I told people that I’m going to have a conversation with you and that you had written a book about how good people are, I earned astonished faces, raised eyebrows. What?

And what? Why do you think we find it so difficult to believe that people could be basically good, as you describe in your book?

RB: Well, there’s a pretty simple reason humans have a trait that psychologists often call the negativity bias. So the the negative stuff makes a much bigger impression on us than the positive stuff.

And there’s probably some evolutionary reason. You know, imagine being a hunter gatherer. You want to survive, obviously. Well, then you really have to pay attention to the negative things, right? The snake that might come closer and closer. A tiger that might be about to kill you. So for a long time, the negativity bias helped us to survive. But today, we live in an information environment where we’re being inundated with negativity. And I know that lots of journalists want to help us to understand the world in a in a more profound way. But the reality is that they very much focus on the negative stuff. Right. You rarely see a headline that saysthat like extreme poverty is declining every day by 250,000 people. Right. Or that we are making massive progress in the fight against child mortality, for example, or extreme poverty. So that is something that we got to deal with. It’s hard for us to see the full picture. Now, I’m not denying the bad stuff. Humans are capable of horrible things, but I think it’s important to zoom out and to see the full picture.

IM: So we are brainwashed by the media who hammer us the cruelties in our in our minds and brains all the time. And but this is not.

RB: If I can say one thing. Brainwashing makes it sound as if it’s deliberate. But I think that, like the vast majority of journalists are doing their jobs in good faith. There’s just an inherent problem with the product of the news itself, like how we define news. What we find newsworthy. In and of itself is often very pessimistic, negative because the positive things are like happening on a daily basis. While the news is about what happens today.

What we really should focus on is what happens every day and which are often like these gradual silent improvements. Right. There’s a term that psychologists sometimes use. They talk about mean world syndrome. And it’s been shown that people who watch a lot of the news, especially television news they indeed become more pessimistic. So I think that a good antidote to that is, well, obviously listening to long radio programs gives you obviously a better, more zoomed out perspective.

IM: But in whose interests is it that makes us believe that people are mean, are cruel, are violent?

RB: Yeah, it’s in the interest of those in power. It’s in the interest of elites very often. So there’s an old theory that scientists call veneer theory, which says that our civilization is just a thin layer, right? Just a thin veneer. And that below that lies raw human nature, that supposedly humans are fundamentally selfish, corrupt, or maybe evil. Now, if that is really true, then we need hierarchy, then we need structure, then we need people in power, police, the army, politicians, you name it, to control us. Right. So this is basically one big justification of inequality. Now, if it is true that actually humans are fairly decent and that we are the product of some evolutionary anthropology, it’s called survival of the friendliest, that actually that is pretty revolutionary. That means we could structure our society and economy in a completely different way that maybe we can get rid of all those managers. Maybe we can move towards a much more equal world. Right. So that’s quite subversive. And actually, this has been understood for a long time in the history of political philosophy. What you assume about other people, what you assume about human nature, has massive, massive political ramifications.

IM: What did did you especially bring you to this work? To write a whole book, which was a lot of work, a book long essay about people being good. Was that a single incident or had you collected already material in the past years?

RB: Well, as a writer, I’ve always been fascinated by the power of ideas. I’ve always been fascinated by those ideas that were once crazy, radical utopian, but then gradually became reality. There are some obvious examples, I think, about the abolition of the slave trade or slavery. I mean, once slavery was an utterly normal common practice among basically all people, not just among Europeans, but on every continent in the world, it was seen as normal that you could own and sell other people.

The same is true for the subjection of women, right? It was once unthinkable that women would ever receive the right to vote. Today we see that as like totally normal, obviously.

So how does that happen? How do you go from unreasonable and unrealistic and irresponsible to common sense? I think that is like the main question in all of my books. Now, the reason I wrote humankind is that many of the ideas that I was very excited about eradicating poverty through a universal basic income, moving towards a completely different kind of democracy, a participatory democracy where not the politicians, but actually the citizens are in power. And many of those radical ideas. They assumed something about who we are as a species. They were grounded in a much more optimistic and much more hopeful view of who we are as a species. So I realized that if I wanted to keep advocating for those ideas, I needed to do some deeper work and write a more substantial book about what it really is. You know, who are we deep down?

And the other reason was that what I saw happening in science is that many scientists from many different disciplines, anthropologist, sociologists, psychologists, historians in the past couple of decades have been moving on to a more hopeful view of human nature. But because they’re also specialized, they’re working in their, you know, specific field. They often don’t realize that it’s happening in other fields as well. So in humankind, I’m trying to connect all the dots and to show that they’re all part of a much bigger wave. And that actually today, scientists have indeed moved on to a more hopeful view of humanity.

IM: That’s interesting. Did something happen with you after have written this book and it got a bestseller in many countries of this world? And you say that thinking in this positive way is also contagious. And I think you have a huge audience listening to your fascinating ideas. Did that something do with you, actually?

RB: Oh, it did many things with me. Absolutely. I mean, when I was young, it was obviously my dream to one day be a writer and to actually be able to live from thoughts and ideas and to really turn that into a profession. So that’s obviously a magical thing when that happens to you, it’s a great privilege. And I also would say it’s a great responsibility.

I spent ten years of my career like the first ten years of my career and in what I like to call the awareness business. Right. So that indeed means writing articles, writing books, standing on stages in many countries, going on book tours, all that stuff. And you talk about the ideas and you hope that some other people will do the actual work of making the world a better place. And I kept kept on saying that, yeah, it’s always it always starts with ideas. It’s awareness that really matters. And out of that, you know, can grow some beautiful flowers.

And I think that in the past couple of years, I became more skeptical about that. I started looking in the mirror, I guess, and I started realizing that real substantial change takes much more. And I realized that perhaps I have become a little bit lazy. Very often there’s a huge gap between awareness and action. Right. The listeners of your of your radio program will know about many things because they learn so many things about you from you. Right. They may know about the extraordinary inequality in the world. They may know about the terrible ways in which animals are suffering currently in factory farms. But then do we do something about it? Well, again, psychologists have a term for this. They call it the awareness action gap. Right. And it’s a big gap. And so I guess that for the next part of my career, what I want to focus on is transitioning that gap and actually doing something. And indeed, that should start with myself because I’ve lived a very comfortable life spreading ideas. Now it’s time to put them in practice.

IM: I would like to deepen a little bit what we said before. We said, yeah, it is in the interest of those in power to keep us mean, cruel, brutal. But now if you look at the world, so many rulers are from this kind of of person who have power, who are authoritarian rulers. Do you have an explanation for that? Because why they are so attractive in this very moment?

RB: It’s really one of the most fundamental questions of our time. And there are no easy answers. I think that what the answer will have to be. It’s got to be an international answer. Very often when we ask this question. We look at like specific things that are happening in specific countries, and surely they’re important. But if it’s a global trend, then I think you have to look at global explanations as well. Right. Things that are happening in all those countries at the same time. Now, I think the most obvious causal factor here is technology. Because technology doesn’t respect borders, right? And take something like the rise of social media. I mean, that’s happened in all countries at the same time. Right. And if you look at what social media is, well, in a way, you could see it as the news on steroids. We already talked about the biased inherent bias in news. Well, social media only makes that worse because it feeds it’s the kind of stuff that our brain craves, writes junk food for our brains. And again, very often this is quite negative because this is this is our bias. This is what we pay attention to.

So I think that’s a very important part. The other thing that the Internet and social media has done is that it has broken downor it has basically defeated the gatekeepers. And so from a for a very long time, political scientists have known that a very substantial part of the population has very negative sentiments about immigrants. I talk about this extensively in my book “Humankind”. In a way we are all natural xenophobes, right, we are inherently suspicious of people who are different from us. Now, there are beautiful ways to overcome that. And the most important one is to actually be in touch with other people, to actually see them face to face. But this is this is an essential part of human nature. And so there’s always been this political reservoir, like there’s always been the potential for politicians to use that, to exploit that, to break through. But what we saw in the 70s and 80s in many Western countries is that there were gatekeepers who prevented these politicians from breaking through. And I would honestly say the most important gatekeepers were probably in the media. Right. There are fascinating examples. So I’m from the Netherlands. There was a right wing politician in the 70s called Hunt’s Young. And he basically said things that are like seen as pretty normal today. He said, like the Netherlands is full, for example. Or he said that multicultural society has failed. Well, he was put in jail for that and he was not taken seriously by by journalists. He was given very little airtime. And so the gatekeepers basically made sure that this reservoir of political potency of unrest could not be exploited. Now, I think one of the reasons why that doesn’t work anymore is because of the rise first of commercial media in the 90s that started to make a lot of money by exploiting this reservoir. And then after that, obviously social media. So it’s like the the levees have broken. Right. And it’s you can’t we can’t go back anymore.

Now, it is important to emphasize that humans have multiple identities. And there are many ways to get people to vote for your political party. And what has happened, though, is that the saliency of people different from us, of the topic of immigration has become so central across the Western world, is that in those kind of scenarios, it’s just much easier for right wing, populist, populist politicians to win. One of the reasons or one of the ways to get out of that is to focus on the things that unite us all and to have to focus also on different enemies. Actually, every good story has an enemy.

And I think, um, so my advice, you know, if you were like a more progressive politician today is very much try and focus on the economy and divide between the 99% of the 1% and the billionaires and the millionaires not paying their taxes. Um, that is, that is incredibly essential. And it’s also actually something that’s very popular. So across the the Western world, actually across the world broadly, the vast majority of people are in favor of higher taxes on the rich.

And this is true for people on the left and on the right. So anyway, it’s a long story, but I think that there’s always been this potential for the rise of right wing populism. I mean, we’ve seen it in many parts of human history, right? We saw it in the 1920s and the 1930. So it shouldn’t surprise us that it is possible again. And I think the reason it broke through is mainly because of technology, because new technologies have found ways of channeling information past the former gatekeepers.

IM: You mentioned progressive parties, and what would you tell them to do? But if you say if that is true, that more than 70% of all voters want more taxes? Why do they vote for parties and exclusively for pot? Is that want to reduce taxes like in the U.S., like in Argentina, like in Italy, like everywhere?

RB: Well, it’s pretty simple. People care about multiple things. So the vast majority of people are culturally conservative, but economically progressive. And then if the cultural issues are dominant in the media and the national conversation that’s what people focus on. Right. And this is what happened during the Trump era. People voted for Trump because they felt this cultural anxiety right there. We’re very vulnerable to all the hate mongering and the scapegoating and you name it. Again, it’s a dark part of human nature. I don’t want to deny it. We’re naturally xenophobes. It’s just the way it is. Again, there are always ways to overcome that. But it’s not easy. And if that is dominant, then people vote for the right wing populists who then will also indeed lower the taxes of the billionaires. So betray them in that sense.

How do you change that? Well, you fight it by making that topic more salient.

Elections are not just a matter of, okay, like what are my opinions? And let’s see what the best fit is with, you know, a particular politician that is closest to all my opinions. No, it’s very much a contest of what is the most salient topic. What is like the thing that is most on people’s minds? And again, with the rise of social media and commercial media, it’s been much easier to focus on the negative stuff. Those are the people who want to take away things from us. And honestly, we’re still very much struggling with how to defend against that. And there are no easy answers.

IM: I talked to Roberto Saviano this year, the Italian writer of anti-Mafia books, and he said that progressive parties have an authenticity problem. They are not taken in serious. People don’t believe them. But that is those strange because they believe in Trump, who tells lies all the time. How how does that.

RB: I think it’s actually quite logical. So the main trait of Donald Trump is this inhibition. Like, he does not feel any shame.

That’s very different from most politicians. With most politicians when they talk, you can see that there’s an internal computer at work, you know, always calculating, always thinking like, how does this play? How does that play?

And I guess one of the things that people like about Trump is that, yeah, he’s a liar, but at least he’s a liar. Right. He’s  in that way an honest liar. It’s always what you see is what you get, right? Um, so and this also connects to another reshuffling that has happened. So today’s progressives and leftists are very much part of the are run by the educated elite. Right. So most people who went to university or any form of higher education, they vote progressive these days or they vote left wing. Um, and that’s a real problem. Like social democratic parties, for example, used to be much broader, like used to be able to advocate for a much broader section of the population.

Now, one of the reasons this has happened is that the cultural axis has become totally dominant in politics, right? Because progressives and they’re mostly culturally progressive, right? That’s what they care about the most, about things like immense LGBT emancipation, for example. You know, what’s sometimes called the quote unquote woke topics. And I think that the tragic irony is that by very much focusing on those topics all the time, what you do is you make the cultural axis in politics much more dominant. And the reality is that right wingers are just going to win every single time if the cultural stuff is dominant, because the vast majority of people are just culturally conservative. That’s just the reality. And it’s not going to change. It’s deeply embedded in human nature, I would say. So I’m not saying that we should like throw the transpeople overboard, but I am saying that if you really want to help LGBT emancipation, then you got to think hard about how you actually win an election, right? Because if you lose all the time, what’s been happening right now? Well, you’re not going to achieve anything for anyone. So how do you actually win that election? Well, not with the approach of the last couple of years, where you make all these, quote unquote woke topics salient all the time. It’s not how you win. You win by focusing on the bread and butter stuff and the economic stuff and the stuff that appeals to everyone almost with a form of progressive left wing populism that I think could be much more popular.

So yeah. And another thing is that I also think you need to have some story around immigration. And I would actually focus on a form of what you could sometimes call“nationalistic altruism”. So Canada is a great example of that. Canada has this points system where they say, sure, immigrants can come in if they have enough points, like if they get enough value, bring in a value to the economy.

And that’s actually quite popular. Um, so I would, I would much rather live in a world of saints. Don’t get me wrong. Right. If it were up to me like we would, I don’t know, pretty much abolish borders. And we’d say like have way more refugees. But I know as a realist that that is politically poisonous and that’s a pretty sure way to lose the elections. And I think it is our moral duty to win. Like we utopians and progressives, we’ve been losing quite a lot recently and we’re not helping anyone with that.

IM: But isn’t the problem with this point system that you talked about that is existing in Canada, if you have such a lot of refugees like in Europe coming from Syria, the Ukraine, what do you do? You do with the point system? I mean, you have to take them all.

RB: Sure. Absolutely. The European is in that respect, in a more difficult situation. Well, look, sometimes it also takes some symbolic politics. So like, for example, in Germany right now with the border controls, then left wingers and progressives love to say, oh, it doesn’t actually work. Right. Or we love to laugh at Donald Trump, who says, I’m going to build a wall and let Mexico pay for it. But what those kind of statements signal to voters is that you actually care about this stuff. Right. And a lot about of politics is not just about what you actually do and solve, but it’s also conveying that, like, I’ve seen I’ve hurt you. Um, and so if we have this like almost how do you say that paternalistic, arrogant approach where we say, Oh yeah, that doesn’t work. I’ve looked at the science. It’s not evidence based. Um, yeah. Well, actually, I think that sometimes, right wingers have a better understanding what politics is all about. It’s very much a matter also of saying like, I hurt you. I understand you. I feel you. So look, again, there are no easy solutions. And, you know, I’m personally a pretty radical, utopian progressive, like in one of my books, I argue for the complete abolishment of all borders. So. But. But I wouldn’t recommend any politicians in Europe right now to adopt that as a on the political platform. But that’s my job. But this is my job as a writer, obviously also to think about the ideas that may seem completely crazy today, but may become reality tomorrow.

IM: Let’s go back to your book, Humankind, because there are so many interesting stories that you tell.

What do you mean by finding the good aspect in humans and you earlier on mentioned the survival of the friendliest. What did you mean with that and which scientific basis talks about the survival of the friendliest?

RB: Yeah. This is really one of the most fascinating recent developments in anthropology and biology. We all know about Charles Darwin and his famous evolutionary theory. I also remember when I first read about it as a teenager and I remember feeling quite depressed. You know, gave me this feeling of nature being, you know, this this terrible competition. Back then, it was like nature red in tooth and claw.

And yeah, that’s sort of the feeling it left me with. Now, what’s actually interesting is is that already at the time, or a little bit later, there was a Russian biologist called Peter Kropotkin, who was an anarchist who studied a lot of animals, especially in Siberia, where it’s obviously incredibly cold. And what he saw there is that in those kind of environments, it’s actually indeed survival of the friendliest. It’s cooperation that really matters if you want to survive as an animal and as a species in general.

So that argument has been with us around for a long time that it’s not nature and evolutionary theory. It’s not just about competition. It’s also very much about cooperation in certain situation. Now there’s now a new theory called the self domestication theory, which is about how we humans evolved, because that’s obviously the big question, like what has been the most dominant mechanism in our evolution as a species? Has it been competition or has it been cooperation? Now, Charles Darwin already noted that there are certain traits that domesticated animals, you know, cows, pigs, dogs that they have in common. It’s a whole list, things like floppy ears or white spots. And therefore you also could look at their genetics and you see that there, that they have certain genes in common.

But most importantly, domesticated animals are more playful, more childish. It’s as if they never really grow up. Now, if you compare humans, modern humans are living today to our ancestor, say, the human, uh, that lived 50,000 years ago, or also some of the other human species because there were multiple human species at the time. What you actually see is that they seem to be much wilder in that respect and that over the past thousands of years, we also developed this so-called domestication syndrome.

We got some of those genes associated with the mastication. And we also seemingly became more playful, like humans are famously one of the most playful species on earth.

And so what scientists have started to suspect is that we are also domesticated, actually, just like the pigs and the cows and the dogs. But then the big question is obviously, how is that happened? Like with the domestication of animals. We know how it has happened. Right? So if we humans, we selected for certain traits, right? We wanted to work with the dogs who were friendlier. We wanted to work with the the pigs that were more gentle, obviously.

But with humans, how did it happen? Well, scientists have a term for it. As I said, they call it self domestication. So this means that we self-selected for friendliness for thousands of years. It was actually the friendliest among us who had the biggest chance of passing on their genes to the next generation and at the biggest chance of having kids, actually.

So that is pretty much the opposite of what I always believed. I have this view of like a caveman, you know, who’s like very robust and hunting down mammoths, etc., very violent, and that probably those guys would have prevailed. Well, actually, what scientists tell us today is pretty much the opposite. So for thousands of years, it was actually a matter of nice guys finish first. And in my book, I give a lot of different forms of evidence for that.

You could also, for example, look at nomadic hunter gatherer tribes that have been studied in the 18th and 19th century and a little bit in the 20th century as well. And you see the same mechanism of survival of the friendliest. So imagine a guy like Donald Trump living as a hunter gatherer. Well, he wouldn’t have survived for long because people would have really disliked him, cast him out of the group. And if you were cast or expelled out of the group, you wouldn’t survive for a long time. Now you really need your friends. So back then, it was incredibly important as a leader to be humble.

There are these fascinating practices described by anthropologists that, for example, you’re a big hunter. You come back with a lot of meat to the camp. What do you do? Well, you really downplay your achievement. It’s incredibly important not to brag about it because people are not going to like this. And then there’s this whole cultural practice called insulting the meat, right. Where people come along and say, Oh. Is that it? Is that now? Sometimes reminds me of certain social democratic countries. Right. So it’s called “tall poppy syndrome” in English or it’s called the Hayfield culture in the Netherlands where we chop off your head as soon as you stick out your head above the hayfield. In Denmark, it’s called junta’s law. Well, there are many different words for it in different languages, but it’s an important cultural practice that helps those in power to stay humble. Right. Because we know that power corrupts. Anyway, long story.

The point is there are lots of different strands of evidence right now that indeed show that we humans are not like the survival of the Narcissus. Now we’re a product of survival of the friendliest. And the reason we conquered the globe instead of the Neanderthals or the chimpanzees is not that we’re so smart, it’s not that we’re so strong. It’s not that we’re like really good at climbing trees or anything like that. No, it’s it’s because we’re able to cooperate on a scale that no other animal has been able to do and in the whole history of life on Earth. And that is very much the story of survival, of the friendliest.

IM: It is so interesting that as you as you write in your book that not only news tend to show you how mean, how violent, how cruel our people are without Olivia Town controlling them, but also science. And it is so interesting that now science evidently changed its perspective, at least in in different in different parts of it, because there were this famous his famous experiments in the 1960s who also wanted to show how mean and how terrible people are or can be when they are in extreme situations. But now you found out or scientists found out and you wrote about them that these experiments were manipulated.

RB: This all connects back to this ancient veneer theory. The notion that people are fundamentally selfish deep down, and it keeps coming back again and again and again. It comes back in our literature. In the book, I talk about Lord of the Flies, you know, a really famous book written by British author about kids that ship wreck on an island and turn into Beasts. Well, I looked at the one example and over at history where it really happened and it actually turned out that kids were able to work together really creatively and survive for a long time. But you’re right, you can also see it in science.

There was this period in the 1960s when we had these really infamous experiments that purportedly tried to show how evil we are deep down. One of the most famous among them is the Stanford Prison Experiment, probably the most famous experiment in all of social psychology. It was an experiment in which around 24 students were put in a basement of Stanford University. 12 of them got the role of being a guard, and 12 of them got the role of being a prisoner. And the story, as it’s been taught for a long time, was that very often these guards who were these nice, you know, hippies from the 60s turned into monsters because you just give people a little bit of power and then they, you know, do these terrible things to to one another. Well, actually, we now know that that experiment is a total hoax. It’s one of the worst cases of scientific fraud in the 20th century. So the researcher, Philip Zimbardo, who recently passed away, but, you know, was arguably the number one most famous American psychologist, he lied about it. So he’s been lying about it all life. He said he didn’t say that he specifically instructed the students to behave as nasty as possible. And he convinced them by saying, look, we need you to do this because then we can go to the press and convince journalists that prisons are horrible environments that need to be reformed.

So it’s an example of what I sometimes call survival of the shameless, that in our modern media ecosystem, the people who are a little bit more shame less, they get more attention. And Philip Zimbardo is a great example of that. I mean, he’s been a shameless liar basically his whole career. And it’s because of our negativity bias, right? You just look up the Stanford experiment on YouTube and, you know, it’s it’s almost like entertainment. It’s almost like watching a scary Netflix show is like, oh, how did people really behave like that? Oh, that’s so interesting.

Now, when the BBC once replicated that the Stanford prison experiment, they tried to do it again with two psychologists who only want. To do it under the condition that there would be no interference. We’re just going to watch. We’re going to put them in a prison and we’ll just see what happens. Well, that’s turned into the most boring reality television show in the history of television because nothing happened. Obviously. They just sat in the prison and they played cards. And at some point, the guards said, you know, we can all sit in the canteen, have a cup of tea together. And it’s horrible television. For my book I had to watch it all. I did that for my readers. I’ll never get those hours back. It was the most boring thing I’ve ever witnessed. So yeah, obviously that didn’t go viral.

IM: Yeah, but that’s interesting. Everybody knows this experiment, or at least really a lot of people know the experiment per se from the 1960s, but only a few know that it was fruit.

IM: That didn’t get so popular in the news. Like, look, but everybody remembers the experiment per se that’s so interesting to me.

RB: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s something I don’t know. There’s something exciting about it.

And obviously it’s also a simple, straightforward explanation for why evil exists. Because, look, I was in a problematic position because part of my book debunks all the popular simplistic theories of why people do terrible things to one another. But then you’ve got a pretty big problem because you still have to explain all the terrible stuff we do, right? And that’s why, you know, it’s a 500 page book because then you have to build up a very complicated, layered explanation of how it is possible that people who have it actually evolved to work together to cooperate, how it is possible that they are still in certain environments capable of terrible atrocities. But it’s a much more complicated, layered explanation. And that’s why I’m happy that this is a long radio interview. And I’m old on television right now because it’s very hard to explain on television.

IM: What I really liked in this book is also that you showed quite cool examples of what can be in different sectors of society, if you believe that people can act in a responsible way, can take their responsibility for doing what they do, like in school or in the care system. And that’s what I like most. And I would wish that we get more of this initiatives in our country.

RB: Yeah, once you change your view of human nature, a world of possibilities opens up. What you assume in other people is what you get out of them. So, for example, in the workplace, if you are the owner of a company or if you are the quote unquote manager, well, if you have a more positive view of human nature, you may wonder like, why am I even necessary? Maybe you can work in self-directed teams. Maybe you can rely on the intrinsic motivation of your employees. This is a management practice called holocracy, which can really work, but it only works if you internalize this view of human nature being much more about cooperation.

Take something like the criminal justice system. In the book, I’ve got a whole chapter about the criminal justice system and the prisons in Norway, which look insane from an outsider’s perspective. So you’ve got this these prisons busto, for example, which is a prison on an island where people who have done terrible things, you know, they’ve been convicted of rape, murder, you name it, and they are, you know, given the opportunity to do all kinds of things to, you know, go to the cinema to go to a nice library. They’ve got a ski slope on that island. They barbecue with the guards. Some of them have even have jobs on the mainland, you know, and they take the ferry every day, go to their job, come back to the prison.

You would say, like, this is insane. But if you then look at the recidivism rate, the chance that someone will commit another crime once he or she gets out of prison, well, that’s nowhere as low as in Norway. So according to criminologists, these are the most effective prisons in the world, but they hardly look like prisons. So, yeah, it’s it’s all about what you what you assume and people, right? That’s what you get out of it. And the implications of changing your view of what other people are are massive.

IM: I already hear in my in my head the voice of our right wing politicians talking about luxury. Stay in prison and.

RB: Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. And that’s I’m not saying it’s easy. It’s actually quite difficult to assume the best in others. I mean, it’s easy when it comes to your friends and those who are close to you. But as we talked about earlier, people are naturally xenophobes, right? We find it very hard to trust complete strangers who are, you know, very different from us. So that takes a big amount of courage. And I think it does help to

try and tell the story in a different way. And also, I mean, the evidence can sometimes also help.

I mean, there have been some trips of experts in the U.S. criminal justice system or like prison wardens who go to Norway and are like, holy shit, I had no idea that this is possible. Like, this is a much more tranquil environment. There’s hardly any violence in the prisons. I mean, it’s a much nicer place to work, obviously, for the guards. And then the results are much better as well. And oh, it’s also cheaper for society because if you have less recidivism, you have fewer victims after people get out of prison, obviously. So it’s basically in the interest of everyone. Like, do you want a ticking time bomb? That’s like how most traditional prisons operate, right? Kropotkin, the anarchist philosopher I mentioned earlier, he always called prisons, universities for more crime right there, criminogenic in nature. People come in for a small drug offense maybe, and they come out as hard of criminals. It’s insane if you think about it. And it’s all funded by the taxpayer. Right. So it should be possible to tell a different story around this and to convince a bigger part of the population that indeed, it is the right thing. It is the civilized thing. And honestly, I look forward to the day and I know it’s going to take a long time, but I hope that at some point our civilization will have progressed enough where we will realize that actually all forms of punishment are immoral, that yes, sometimes it is necessary to lock people up for their own sake and to protect society. But like all retribution in and of itself, to be honest, I think that’s a medieval instinct.

I think civilization is about rising above those instincts and understanding that people who commit terrible crimes, well, if you peel back all the causes right, there are always reasons behind it.

And the way the perpetrators are the victims as well. Now, again, I. I don’t recommend any politician running on what I just said because you’re bound to lose the elections. But this is my job as a writer. Sometimes.

IM: Sometimes as a utopist

RB: Yeah.

IM: Yeah. You were already mentioning a central word. Now, again, moral. Your new project has a lot to do with moral and with ambitions, Both not so really popular values at the moment, I think. Why are they so important to you at the moment?

RB: As I said earlier, I spent ten years of my career in the awareness business, spreading those ideas, dreaming about possible utopian futures. But at some point I was like, Is this enough? How do you actually make progress? And I started studying the great moral pioneers of the past. With the question in the back of my head like, can we learn something from them? I had this funny idea in the back of my head of maybe I could write a self-help book. You know, we’ve got so many self-help books these days that promise you to be more mindful or productive or happy or whatever. But I was like, what if the abolitionists would have written the self-help book? What did the suffragettes would have written the self-help book? What are the civil rights campaigners of the 60s? What would their lessons have been?

And for me, it all started with studying the greatest of all social movements that we’ve ever witnessed, which was the abolitionist movement, the fight against slavery and the slave trade. And I specifically focused on the British movement because that was the most successful one.

So in the Netherlands, where I from, there was hardly any abolitionism. And the few that did do something or say something about the slave trade and slavery, well, they got nothing done right. So at some point they gathered about 700, 800 signatures. Well, ten years later, there was a petition against the Catholics and that one got 200.000 signatures.

Same is true for France, like a bunch of writers and intellectuals who talked a little bit about how evil slavery is, but they got nothing done. In Portugal, it hardly existed in Spain. Abolitionism partly existed, but embraced in Britain itbecame this huge movement. Now, I discovered a couple of facts about that movement.

The first fascinating fact was that the British Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was founded by 12 individuals. One was a writer. So there is a place for someone like me. One was a lawyer. So sometimes lawyers can be useful, but ten out of 12 were entrepreneurs. People who had built and scaled their own companies who had gone from 0 to 1, who thought in solutions sometimes were quite wealthy, actually. But then after they had climb that first ladder of success, the first mountain in their lives, in their careers, they were like, what’s my actual legacy going to be? And can’t I use my talents? Can’t I use my privilege and my capital in a much more impactful way? And the reason we remember them today is obviously not because they were wealthy. You know, some may have been in the Forbes 400 at the time. Now, the reason we remember them is because they changed the course of history.

Now, what they had in common is a trait that I’ve come to call moral ambition. So moral ambition is the combination of two things. It’s the idealism of an activist, of a utopian thinker, but it’s the ambition of an entrepreneur. So it’s very much about actually getting things done, about actually achieving results. And that’s really what you see when you study the British abolitionist movement. You see these pragmatic revolutionaries who are always focus on actually making things happen. And sometimes that indeed means that you’ve got to make difficult compromises.

So another epiphany I had, was when I discovered one of their most powerful arguments that they used in Parliament at the time. You know, if you would have said, Oh, the slave trade is terrible because Africans are suffering immensely on these ships, well, you wouldn’t have gotten far with that because like most people didn’t give a share. Most people had never seen the slave ships or the colonies and they had never seen black people. So, yeah, it wouldn’t have been popular to do that. Well, some of the abolitionists discovered actually, that it wasn’t just black people suffering on the slave ships, it was also white sailors. In a way, the perpetrators of this evil system. But they were also suffering. Actually, 20% of them died during the voyage due to all kinds of diseases or terrible treatment by the captains. And once they discovered that, they were like, hey, we can use this, we can use this in Westminster and say, our boys are dying on these terrible ships. We got to abolish the slave trade. And this was actually one of the most effective arguments that convinced quite a few British politicians to turn against the slave trade as an institution.

Now, for us today, this is a hard to fathom. It’s hard to understand, like, why didn’t they understand that it was like clearly so evil? Well, again, zoom out a little bit. And, you know, we are also doing some things today that are like clearly evil. But yeah, that we just turn a blind eye to. I think the clearest example is the way we treat animals, right. Most people listening to this radio program eat meat from factory farmed institutions. Well, I’m pretty sure that the historians of the future will be horrified by those monsters listening to this radio program right now. Who eat meat!! Even animals that have been terribly tortured. And that’s just. Wow, That’s honestly just a scientific fact. So in that sense, we got to have some empathy for those in the past because zoom out, far enough and you can see that we still are implicated in some moral atrocities today.

IM: And on which arguments, on which fields are you focusing at the moment? Because you can’t save the whole world. And also the abolitionists, they focus on one project, which are the projects you were focusing on?

RB: Yeah, So I’ve co-founded an organization called The School for More Ambition. And we want to help as many people as possible to focus on the most pressing issues of our time. It sounds, uh, or I should say it starts with a simple recognition, which is that the greatest waste of our time is the waste of talent. There are so many people currently stuck in jobs that don’t add much value.

And I’m particularly talking about people with nice resumes, beautiful LinkedIn profiles who went to nice universities. You know, I just moved to New York to kickstart the US chapter of our movement. And while here you’ve got universities like Harvard, while Harvard, 45% of Harvard graduates go into consultancy or finance, which surely can’t be the best allocation of talent.

For us, moral ambition is that you use your talent to focus on the most pressing issues of our time, and we’ve got a pretty simple framework to determine what some of those most pressing issues are. We call it the triple AC framework. So you start with looking at things that are like very sizeable, like the biggest problems of the world.

Then you look at the stuff that is really solvable. You’ve got to have some plan on how you make progress. And the third one is also quite important. It’s got to be sorely neglected, overlooked. Um, because that’s where you make the biggest impact. Like entrepreneurs know this. They always are looking for the gap in the market, right? They always try to do what their competitors are not doing because then, you know, that’s how you make big bucks, obviously. And we should use the same approach in the world of doing good.

I’ll give you one example. What was the best time to be a climate activist? Well, not today. Obviously, the best time to be a climate activist was in the 70s because that’s when the movement was much smaller and when you could have a much more, much bigger impact. So our challenge is for people to think about what could be the climate change of today or what was climate change in the 1970s. Like what are some of the problems that are similar today that are so neglected but potentially very, very big?

And I think there are some obvious examples. Think about the threat of another pandemic. Think about the threat of our artificial intelligence. Think about like a really neglected health problem such as malaria or the tobacco industry. I mean, smoking is still the single largest preventable cause of disease worldwide. It’s 8 million deaths.

So that’s  a more entrepreneurial way of of how you can make a really big difference. If we talk about climate change, what I very much would recommend is for people to focus on the stuff that is currently not being done, like one of our fellowships in Europe, which is about actually we drag people out of their jobs. We pay them to quit their jobs, to focus on some of those most pressing issues. And in the climate space, well, food is most neglected. 20% of emissions come from our food system. Most of that is meat and dairy. There we go again.

And we really need sustainable alternatives to those proteins. But this is extremely neglected. Like clean energy is going through the roof right now. Electric cars are getting cheaper and better, but very few people are working on the protein transition, on the food transition. So anyway, that’s the way we like to look at it in a much more entrepreneurial way.

IM: That’s good. But I still don’t have a real image in my head. What you are really doing and how the response is. You say you want to get people out of their jobs they are doing now and you offer them a salary or you offer them money to think in new ways. But how does that really happen?

RB: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So it’s pretty simple. In the Netherlands, we started our pilot last year and that started with a big billboard campaign on the south axis, which is our Dutch little Wall Street. And these billboards said, We will pay you to quit your job. Or if you’re so talented, then why do you work here? And then we got hundreds of applications, not just from the Netherlands, but across Europe of people who wanted to join this small, very exclusive fellowship, very hard to get into. And then we selected the 24 very best, and we gave them a mission, actually two missions, because we had two fellowships of 12 people each.

This is what we call the Gandalf Frodo model. So Gandalf never asked Frodo, Oh, Frodo, what’s your passion? He said, Look, this is your mission. This is on the top of the to do list of the world. You need to throw the ring into the mountain. And so we also employ researchers who continuously ask themselves, okay, what are some of the most pressing, most neglected issues? And so then we create mission statements for our fellows. And then indeed, they they work for seven months. For us, it starts with a month of training. They learn a lot about the cause area and then we place them at partner organizations. Most of them are based in Brussels because public policy is a huge lever for change that is also very much neglected. So in the food transition space, for example, we saw that there are great opportunities coming up. Europe has huge horizon subsidies, which are big R&D subsidies. And one of the big problems here is that there’s way too little R&D money going to sustainable alternatives.

But very little of that is going to food, which is, as I said, 20% of the problem. So incredibly neglected. So we have placed these really smart lobbyists and lawyers at crucial points in the ecosystem in Brussels to advocate for the food transition. They’re sort of our radical nerds because, yes, sometimes you meet people in the streets like “extinction rebellion” on a highway, you know, occupying it and generating a lot of attention to the problem. But then you have the awareness. But at some point, you also need to translate the awareness into actual legislation. And that’s where our radical nerds come in.

IM: That’s good, because I thought that now more than ever, you have protests against and for everything. You have really huge and big movements like Black Lives Matter or the climate movement. But at the end of the day, demonstrations and everybody being aware about a problem, nothing happens.

RB: Absolutely. So this is one of the sad realities about the protest era that we live in. So there are I’ve seen estimates that say that in the period between 2006 and 2020, globally, the number of protest movements has tripled. But then if you look at the actual results of indeed movements like Black Lives Matter or also MeToo or the Women’s March,

I think the results have been disappointing. I’m not saying that there have been no results like that, but some results. But if you look at like actual legislation being passed, for example, it’s quite underwhelming.

So we we bump into this problem again and again because of the awareness behavior gap.

And that’s one of the central messages of the book. Moral Ambition is that it is about actually achieving the results. Right? The people who are currently suffering under inequality or poverty or exploitation. The animals that are currently being tortured in factory farms, they don’t give a shit that you’re right, you know, they don’t give a shit that your post it well on Instagram or on Twitter or whatever. They want real results, right? They’re happy if you actually make their lives a tiny little bit better. And there is a certain kind of activism, a certain kind of progressivism that has become so purist. You know, it’s become so much about people themselves, right. Where it’s like, I’m only going to work with the people that I like and that agree with me on all points. Well, then you’re 100% pure. But you’re a 0% effective. And I think that’s very much true for the so-called woke activists.Right. It’s something that we really need to leave behind us now. It is really time to move on from that and to adopt political strategies that are actually effective.

IM: That’s far too orthodox to this this woke movement.

RB: Yeah. Well, look, I think you can be very radical in your goals, as we talked about multiple times now. I’m a pretty utopian guy. But you can at the same time be pragmatic in your methods. This is what I deeply, deeply admire about the abolitionists and the suffragettes. On the one hand, they have this big overarching vision of a world without slavery. On the other hand, they fought for every small step along the way, and they used whatever they had in the moment and were willing to make compromises, willing to be pragmatic. And they understood that winning takes an extraordinary amount of perseverance. So of the 12 founders of the British Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, only one was still alive, when slavery was finally abolished throughout the British Empire. Of the 68 women who came together at Seneca Falls, the Great Women’s Rights Convention in the United States in 1848, only one was still alive in 1920 when women finally, finally got the right to vote. So I’m always deeply impressed by those stories of perseverance, of people who are willing to fight for something that was much bigger than they were. And we’re still, you know, trying to make some kind of incremental progress in the here and now. I think that’s really what it takes, and that’s what I would call moral ambition.

IM: Thank you so much. That was very interesting.

RB: Well, thank you. That was that was a lot of fun.