Rutger Bregman thinks most of us are wasting our lives. But is there a limit to how much we ought to sacrifice to do good?
Moral Ambition, he writes, is not another self-help book; it’s a call to live up to a high moral standard. You’re not fine just the way you are. Indeed, “you might just have to change your life.”
What does Bregman have in mind? He compares two people—really, two kinds of lives lived—and evaluates how much good they did for others. The first is Matthieu Ricard, a Buddhist monk who spent thirty years in a monastery and was dubbed “the happiest brain on earth” when an MRI revealed that sixty thousand hours of meditation had shaped his neural pathways to latch onto good feelings and downplay negative ones. Some might see Ricard’s life of contemplation as radical and holy. Bregman thinks it was a pretty selfish way to live: “Thirty years in which he did little for others, thirty years in which he didn’t lift a finger to make the world a better place.”
Contrast Ricard’s life with the hero of Bregman’s story: Thomas Clarkson, who helped build the movement to end the slave trade in Britain. Appalled by its horrors, he abandoned his career and became a one-man press and public-relations firm, cranking out pamphlets and lecturing widely. He cofounded the influential Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, conducted extensive research to support his claims, and pursued his mission so unrelentingly that he suffered a mental breakdown at thirty-three. But the man got results: the slave trade was outlawed in Britain in 1807. Bregman ventures that, unlike Ricard, Clarkson probably had a pretty depressing brain. But he helped countless people, changed the course of global history, and “didn’t get burned out from scrolling through never-ending spreadsheets or sitting through yet another PowerPoint.”
Like Clarkson, we need to pair moral clarity with extreme ambition, and we should be willing to take risks and make major sacrifices to achieve our goals. Bregman goes so far as to encourage us to “join a cult, or start your own” in the service of a worthy goal; be ready to come off a little weird and obsessed. He offers the example of Ralph Nader and his team of “Nader’s Raiders,” who worked tirelessly to expose corruption and corner-cutting in government and corporations. Nader was famously unrelenting in the demands he made of his team, but together they achieved significant wins for consumer and public safety.
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