167 – “Moral Ambition” by Rutger Bregman

[00:00:06] David: Hi, and welcome to the IDEMS Podcast. I’m David Stern, a founding director of IDEMS, and it’s my pleasure to be here again with Kate, another IDEMS director, and we’re discussing moral ambition today, I believe.

[00:00:21] Kate: Yes, we are. Hi David. All because you sent me a link to an article and then I went down the rabbit hole of reading the book because I, I was like, well, I can’t speak to the article alone, I need to see what this book is all about. So maybe I know too much now, but I still think it’s generally, it’s an interesting topic and it’s one that I see particularly, I think among people who are younger.

I think there was a desire for us too. It’s like we would just recognize we’re gonna have to stumble our way along and find our path. But I think there’s a real hunger in people who are younger to find these careers before they get too far down some other path that they feel like they can’t extricate themselves from.

[00:01:06] David: It is interesting you frame it like that because I definitely feel that from relatively young, I knew I’d have to find my own way. I never expected there to be a path laid out for me. Whereas I think you are right that there is now a sense that these paths should exist. And that is an expectation almost that these get created, where you can, and you should be able, there should be career pathways where you don’t have to compromise your morals, your ethical beliefs for your working life.

[00:01:46] Kate: Yeah, I think it’s because there’s a critical mass of interest where I think you definitely, and I definitely, I felt so alone in the things I was struggling with, where I wasn’t looking around and feeling like I was having conversations with other people where I felt like, oh, there are enough of us that there could be some movement here. There’s some new direction we’re all looking toward. I just stumbled and fumbled and felt like I was gonna have to find my own way.

And I think it is that there’s so much disaffectation, is that the right word? Disaffectation, I guess with existing structures and options, and a lot of it gets rolled into like anti-capitalism, anti work, but it’s not that. It’s like I just wanna be working on something that’s meaningful and has purpose.

[00:02:33] David: But it is more than that, isn’t it? I grew up in, I guess, a community or sets of people where people were working on things that they thought were meaningful, valuable, it was their job. The thing about the ambition is that they weren’t necessarily ambitious in the job. By doing a good job and doing it well, they’re making their contribution, they’re part of a system which is working well. And I never felt that.

I felt from a relatively young age that I’m gonna have to carve my own path because yeah, I can do these jobs well, but I don’t, I went through loads of different phases, but the most obvious one is, I got a PhD, I could have become a pure math lecturer. It’s stuff which I loved, and if I trusted the system, that’s what I wanted to do. But it didn’t satisfy my ambition because I didn’t feel I was contributing enough, I wanted to do more. And that’s, I think, the big difference of this generation in some sense.

[00:03:32] Kate: I don’t think it’s a difference of generation. I think it’s that the pieces have come together in a way where it feels more tangible. Because when I was coming out of school, I don’t think entrepreneurial ambition was such a thing, I didn’t even know that was a thing until I happened to meet my co-founder of my last business and she came from a family where they were entrepreneurial. And so there was more of the sense of, oh, you can do that, that is an option.

And actually I will come back to the book we’re referencing. So the book we’re referencing is Moral Ambition, and the author, I should have written it down, is, Rutger Bregman, we should find it and reference it. If we were really good podcast producers, I would’ve written like detailed notes. One way I was prepared for this was I did read this book and I can talk more about some of the points of it, and I take issue with some of the things.

He is a historian, so he looks a lot at like historical examples of people who had moral ambition and what they accomplished. I think in the sort of historical retelling, it probably elides a lot of pain and suffering and struggles and battles and breakdowns and various things as people really commit their lives to what are quite difficult challenges.

[00:04:44] David: My understanding was that it doesn’t actually shy away from some of that.

[00:04:48] Kate: It touches on it a little, but you definitely just get to see the big picture where you’re like, yay, it all worked out in the end, which certainly was not a given for these people, that it would all work out in the end. So I will just say I did write down notes about something.

So this author says, the four main ingredients of moral ambition are the idealism of an activist, the ambition of a startup founder, the analytical mind of a scientist, and the humility of a monk. And I thought that’s actually, I think that’s very well encapsulated. I think that brings together the things that I would have intuited but wouldn’t have necessarily listed that clearly. But that is the foundation I think of so much of what the ambition is.

[00:05:30] David: Absolutely. I mean, that’s a list that I would aspire to and some of them come naturally, I’m a natural scientist, I really aspire to that sort of humility and I don’t think I achieve it.

[00:05:42] Kate: I actually have a quick question for you there. This is an issue, I think, that is a struggle in this because to have the ambition of a startup founder, you have to have a certain amount of sense that you could achieve something, like, why not you? And so the humility of a monk, I think is something that feels less putting yourself forward.

[00:06:06] David: Not at all.

[00:06:07] Kate: So you don’t see those two things as being in conflict at all.

[00:06:10] David: Not at all. Because to me having a sense of self and sense of purpose, monks are perfect example, you have to have that strength of ambition in what you believe in. The humility part comes because you may be the only person who believes in it, and it doesn’t matter, it won’t shake your belief. That ambition in what you believe in, that desire to see what you believe in through, that’s not in contradiction with the fact that being really humble to recognize nobody else needs to believe in this, I can’t be sure that anyone else will really buy into this or do what I do. I’m not doing it for them.

[00:06:50] Kate: Yeah.

[00:06:50] David: What I do think is our startup culture doesn’t allow the two to go together because you have to sell yourself, and you can’t sell yourself if you’re humble as a monk. So the key thing is that startup culture is different in some ways.

[00:07:06] Kate: Well, it’s partly that, but I think it’s also partly that startup culture very much emerged from the US, which is very individualistic. I think the sort of hero frontier lone, like that is a very American story. And so I think there’s this myth of the hero entrepreneur who just comes, I mean, you look at all of the conversation around Elon Musk. But realistically, all of his stuff, he obviously brought skills, but so much of what was done was done by these big teams, was done by NASA scientists where it’s then he picks up this work.

There is so much collaboration, so many of the things that enabled this originally were actually a kind of ambition, a purposeful ambition, putting a man on the moon or whatever it was, you know?

[00:07:56] David: Standing on the shoulders of giants is the expression.

[00:07:59] Kate: Yes. Whereas like the narrative the US loves is like, no, it’s just Elon Musk, it’s all him. And it’s inconvenient somehow to, like Obama had this quote during his presidency where he said something like, oh, you have your startup, but you didn’t build that because it was built on infrastructure that others built and public investment, all of these different things.

The amount of controversy there was around that, the idea that you would not just credit the lone hero with doing everything. So I think that is what we’re now pushing back against of like, how do you hold onto the ambition that would drive someone to make those kinds of choices, take those kinds of risks. Because most startups do fail. Like a lot of this is very risky and is emotional and it requires a lot.

[00:08:53] David: I absolutely hear what you’re saying, and it is a perspective that I struggle with probably because I’m not as exposed to the American perspective on this. In many other perspectives and cultures that I’ve been in and working, the idea that this is something which has been bit off on money, you know, that is natural, that sort of accepted knowledge that you as an individual can make a contribution. And it needs individuals to recognize, to seize the moment, to actually make things happen. Individuals are powerful in that.

But they’re powerful as part of something much bigger. That sort of culture is one which most context that I come from recognize and accept. And so the fact that could be put into question is so alien to me. Now, different cultures, different perspectives. So for me that fact that as an individual, you can have an ambition, but you can be humble about your contribution to the whole. I recognize that most really big advances have been about seizing the moment and taking knowledge which already exists and reapplying it somewhere else.

[00:10:02] Kate: Yeah. One of the things that I recognize in that list is the one that was hardest and is always hardest for me is to be an activist. That sort of public voice, it’s not politics, but of something that’s, it feels very prominent in a way that isn’t necessarily my comfort space and isn’t necessarily even what I want to be in the world. I like to build things I like to work on.

[00:10:25] David: Can you just say, how did he frame that?

[00:10:27] Kate: He says the idealism of an activist. So I think like an activist is you’re motivated by this view that the world, you know, that there’s an injustice, the world could be better, it should be better. You are out just like really advocating for that in a way.

[00:10:43] David: Is it true? Is this what he said? ’cause what I hear is different to what you are describing.

[00:10:48] Kate: I’m saying that this is what I would describe activism as. What I know as activism is you have a cause, you are organizing, you are the voice of that. And so when I looked at activism, even though there were things I cared about, it didn’t feel like an avenue that was the one that I would pursue to affect the change that I wanted to see in the world.

Yes, David?

[00:11:14] David: Sorry, sorry, sorry. When I hear the idealism of an activist, I don’t see the actions of an activist.

[00:11:21] Kate: That’s the distinction he’s making, which I think feels comfortable to me, I do carry the idealism of the activist. I just don’t want to map those to the activist behaviours necessarily. Or not in that traditional way that I just articulated of what I conceived of what I would do with that idealism.

[00:11:41] David: I am privileged to have known and interacted all my life with activists in certain ways. And it is a behaviour which I know is not me. It is a behaviour I admire. And the key thing is exactly as you say, the reason his formulation resonates with me, I share those idealisms, I share that belief that the world can and should be a better place. What I don’t believe is that if I were to make the actions, if I were to become an activist, that I would be effective at making the world a better place.

[00:12:21] Kate: Exactly. I think that is what I appreciated about this. I was just listening to a podcast with some activists and they’re talking about their work, and I can see, I can imagine being in that audience and being young and you’re thinking, wow, that work is so noble and so great, but it’s not for me.

So I think in some ways this is a model where it’s okay, that’s not for you. But there are other ways to have moral ambition. And that is part of what he does explore in the book, where some moral ambition is an activist where you’re building a movement. So your startup thinking is actually like, how do I launch, whatever that movement is.

But startup thinking can be a product, it can be a charity, it can be many things, it doesn’t just have to take this one form. And I think like that is definitely in setting up that framework and giving different examples, if you do read the book, you’re giving people models, role models, really, of there are different ways to be the change you wanna see in the world. You don’t just have to be the activist as is commonly identified.

[00:13:24] David: And you know, I was reading in the news just recently about one of the greatest activists of our time, Greta Thunberg, who was recently doing what she does extremely powerfully, using activism to draw attention to the situation in Gaza and so on. And she’s now been, I believe the word was deported from Israel after they got diverted. And, I have great admiration. But as a way to change the world, it feels very expensive and ineffective. I’m not saying that it’s not important. I’m really glad there are people who do it.

But it is something where the human cost in so many different ways to actually getting that voice heard, and that compared to the impact of that voice being heard, which is often not great, it is something which, I come back, and I guess this is the scientist in me, I come back to saying, well, actually, what do I actually know? What do I know I can do? Where do I have the skills to actually make change? And this is, I suppose, the scientist, the scientist really focuses on what we know and what we don’t know.

[00:14:48] Kate: I also think that is one of the challenges. It’s certainly a challenge that I worked through where I feel like I went through a phase where there are so many things I care about and I could feel very pulled in a million directions and it’s hard to choose and you kind of end up being both burned out and diffusing your energy.

And I think there is an element in moral ambition of making hard choices where you decide you can’t fight every battle, which is a bit what I hear in your Greta Thumberg story is like, her platform is climate. And even though there are so many issues and other things, and she does have a prominence, I think in some sense it diffuses. It’s a hard one to get into because it has a lot of things to unpack in it. So I won’t even say that, I would say there is a lesson in like staying the course, the ambition you choose does require a certain amount of focus.

[00:15:45] David: I definitely wouldn’t have interpreted it in that way. But if I understand what you are saying, is that this moral ambition imperative requires you to pick your battles and focus on that, put your focus on that. But I see the moral ambition as being totally the opposite. In many ways, the ambition part of it is to say if you really want to make a change, be ambitious about the change you’re making. You don’t need to limit yourself to the piece you’re wanting to do. Be ambitious about it. That’s part of the ambition in some ways. Don’t do something small when you can actually dream big.

[00:16:21] Kate: No, it’s not that it’s small, it’s that it has a coherence to it that doesn’t diffuse the focus of what you’re doing. So it’s if civil rights is your topic, if that’s your thing, you really focus on civil rights, doesn’t mean you can’t at points have that, tentacles of that issue because obviously everything is intertwined and whatever one issue is, it probably relates to about 10 others.

But there is always the danger, I think, that you end up getting distracted. The examples, and I don’t take this book as like the gospel truth, but the examples are very much about people who chose a lane. So it’s not that, you know, within the lane of tech, we’ve definitely decided to focus our energies on digital technologies, and doesn’t mean we might eventually, out of that, open up other avenues that we can focus on.

Even as I’m saying that, you’re saying, well, it relates to all these other things. It definitely does. It relates to governance business models, it’s why I find it so interesting and you do too. But the main, like when we plant a flag, we are standing, I don’t go into meetings being like, I’m a policy person.

Even when I was working on something related to sex work, like fundamentally my main interest was not sex work, it was digital and economic inclusion, how those things go together. There’s a core there that is shaping my focus. Whereas if the rights of sex workers was just like totally my focus, that would take me in a different activist direction.

So there is kind of a focus that I think constraints, whatever the ambition is, even as within that, it can have many things that emerge and kind of flourish from it.

[00:18:12] David: So it’s really interesting to hear you framing it like this, because my focus has never been, and, no, let me rephrase this. The digital tech piece is central to everything we do and to what we’re doing. But that’s a tool that’s a mean to the end. And this comes, I think I must have told you this story, when we were working on lots of really impactful things and I had a colleague who said I do this because of global social justice. And I said, I like the idea of global social justice, but I don’t believe what we are doing is gonna contribute to that.

And so fundamentally, my motivating factor is that to achieve the sort of social outcomes that I think eventually are needed, this has to be done in the current world through economic process. And the economic process which is going to actually succeed is digital technologies and how we can actually use those to be able to do this.

[00:19:11] Kate: I would agree that I see the digital technologies as a tool, but I could have chosen other tools. I could have said like the way I’m going to advocate for the things that I care about, which are democracy, economic inclusion, addressing wealth inequality, things like that, I could have chosen activism as my way, I could have chosen education as my way.

[00:19:31] David: I did choose education as my way, and then I came back to the fact that I couldn’t succeed at education without the economic piece, which is why I had to go back.

[00:19:43] Kate: Here’s the thing that’s interesting is like to identify the opportunity in your ambition, sometimes you look around and you’re like lots of people are already fighting in that, or have their ambition channeled in that way. And there’s already a lot of energy there. So maybe it is also that you sit in a place where you see something different that there is a different avenue toward whatever your ambition is.

This again comes back to what are the tools? Is it a charity? Is it a tech startup? Is it a movement? If I were someone who was like a community organizer and that was the world I knew and that was my strength, I definitely would be building a movement. That would be how I would be wired, where I’d be thinking toward the same goals, democracy, inclusion, but I’d be thinking, how do I build that movement?

And I meet those people all the time. It’s that I happen to sit in the space of technology and innovation long enough that I was like, oh, these tools are underutilized and not designed to support this movement, these tools should be working alongside community activism and movement building and all this stuff.

So you see okay, in my ambition, there is a lane that I’m choosing based on the convergence of my experiences, my expertise, the way I think, all of that kind of stuff. So I think that’s the point I’m making.

[00:21:07] David: And I suppose this is getting closer to something which resonates, but it is still different for me because I made my choice. I wanted to be an educator. I love education. I grew up in a context in Niger where I saw the changes I wanted to see, I had that feeling, I immersed myself in education in ways, which meant I was then able to become an educator and actually create some of the changes I wanted to see in the form of new degree programs, in the form of actually changing how education happens in low resource environments.

And this is I think when maybe the importance of the book right now, something we haven’t mentioned should come out. But the systems I was working in were so broken, I could see lots of people putting their life’s work into these systems and wasting their life’s work because the system was broken.

And that’s where I changed lanes. So I did change lane then, and eventually the entrepreneurial route, the sort of startup. Now I didn’t have that. That hasn’t come naturally to me, if I think of the different ones.

[00:22:14] Kate: No, and I would completely agree that I have been on the same very, and actually I started in education too, that was the path that I was interested in, that’s probably where we have a fair amount of common ground, even though from completely different avenues of education or, you know, subject matter.

But yeah, it was a circuitous, tortuous, path to figuring out how my intersectional, this odd intersection of the way I think and what I’m good at and where I see, how I understand the system. Like it takes time. And actually, this brings me to another point of the book, which I don’t know the right answer to, and there isn’t a right answer.

There’s definitely this idea of you should be choosing the path of moral ambition right out of university. Instead of going into something else, you immediately set yourself on a path, you know, he gives the example of this school in London, which I actually didn’t know, but it’s basically like building the next charity, having ambition through this idea that you’re creating an impact startup, which is charity.

And I sort of think, I’m not sure what I think about that. It’s great, there are problems that need to be solved, but it sounds a little bit like it reinforces hero entrepreneur thinking, the odds are good that anything that’s a charity, other people are also working on these things. The UK has an insane number of charities. It has 180,000 charities, I think is the number. Obviously a lot of those are local, and so maybe you do need the more ambitious one.

But I guess my question is, how does, what is the journey? And I don’t think there’s a right journey, but is the answer to have a bunch of people right out of school deciding like they’re going to start this charity and that’s the way they’re going to bring about change? I found some skepticism.

[00:24:12] David: Healthy skepticism.

I think that we are not trying to discourage people right out of university to have moral ambition. I want to be clear on that.

[00:24:23] Kate: Yes, absolutely.

[00:24:25] David: But we are, I think, both in agreement that there is no replacement for experience.

[00:24:31] Kate: Right.

[00:24:32] David: Experience is what I’ve certainly gained the most from. The experiences I’ve been through are what have made me able to think as I can now about problems with complexity. And I think this is the key point, that if you don’t have experience, then often you think with simplicity.

[00:24:54] Kate: You have introduced me to two people recently, I will not name them, but they are both people in their probably late twenties who actually spent a few years out of university working in quite mainstream jobs. And I see from talking to them that was really good for them. It gave them not just I sense this is something I wouldn’t like, and it’s not even that they don’t like it, they see the value of it, they see that there’s work happening there. It’s just not the work that they want to be doing. And it’s not the way they want to apply their brains, their skills, their curiosity.

I think the commonality is they’re naturally just so curious about systems and problems and they were in these roles where they were discouraged from identifying the way that this neatly built system was actually really problematic or had major flaws in the logic because it completely neglected to consider that there was this vulnerability in this way, or consequence or harm in this way.

And so that, I think that kind of thinker is the kind of moral ambition that you and I, which is not necessarily saying that’s the right moral ambition, it’s a kind of moral ambition, where there’s a lot of complexity there that takes time to…

[00:26:14] David: Let’s be even more concrete about this. We’ve discussed this in other contexts where if we are taking people straight out of university, if we were to take them into an organisation like IDEMS, we wouldn’t be wanting to set them forth directly. We’d be wanting to give them experience, you know, wanting to actually get them to experience things, to be part of things, to see them in their complexity, to contribute to things which are good but imperfect, and actually get exposure to those things.

There is this, I believe myth, that there are pure, simple solutions if only you can find them. The reality is complex, but there can be pure, complex solutions. You don’t have to compromise morally because of complexity. And that’s what I think people often get mistaken with, if there’s complexity that it has to be a compromise and you have to be compromising things which you don’t want to compromise.

No. Compromise is not always bad. Compromise can be healthy and good and positive. You mentioned the fact that the US in particular is quite an individualistic society, as is Europe, but spending time in Africa where communities are more communal than individualistic, that complexity is ever present and it’s not seen as a negative, it’s just an inherent part of life.

I’m gonna give one very simple example of that. Haggling at a market stall. I’ve had friends for whom this was totally alien who went and they, let’s say they got some cloth or something from someone they liked. And they haggled it down and they got it, and then the next day they actually had somebody else, oh, you’ve got that. Could you get me some too? And so they went back and they said, can I get up to the same price? They said, no. And they went straight back up to the top price. You gotta do the work again. This is part of the game. This is the social interaction. You did well yesterday. Can you do as well today?

it’s not just a game, it’s a social interaction. That human interaction and the value of the human interaction, and the fact that efficiency isn’t necessarily good. If you are in a hurry you might have to pay more because you don’t want to spend the time. If you are willing to spend the time, the time is part of the commodity. Interesting one.

[00:28:48] Kate: So there are a couple things in here. One, one of the things that we’ve been talking a lot about is like, how do we build kind of a Peace Corps apprenticeship, like some sort of period where you just are getting exposed when you’re entering, where you’re just kind of out in the world learning about all these complexities and social variability. And at some point you’ll start to notice commonality, but you’ll recognize in some cultures there’s always variation. And so how do you understand that complexity is vast, but also at some point, not as unmanageable as you might think.

And I think somehow this is, I don’t know if I’m gonna manage to bring these all together in my point, but there’s, the big topic right now is that AI is going to take away entry level jobs. And it is if the way you are training entry level jobs is for efficiency, and I just need you to do things this way. Yes, you should be replaced by AI. But really what’s needed, and this does feel very related to moral ambition, is this early apprenticeship training ground where people are just exposed and they don’t have expectations of you have to deliver on your performance metrics and all these things.

I just need you to really understand, and I’m, you’re gonna do some work because we still run a business and things have to get done. But part of your value to impact is going to be that you’re going to do things badly if you don’t understand the complexity. In the short term, it might have value, but in the long term, ugh, the cleaning up the messes and just like the disconnect from what’s needed, I think will be profound.

And so I think so much of our job, I guess I would say, as people who are older and are in a position to do something about this. And so maybe this is like what I would say out of this, I think we need way more ways to give people who are just coming into the professional world this development period of like really understanding.

[00:30:41] David: I don’t know if I’ve told you this story, this would be a great one for me and Danny to do on a podcast. But when I first met Danny, he was actually working in South Africa at AIMS and we invited him to a maths camp. And I was busy running the maths camp, and had a whole set of volunteers and Danny was one of them. And about three, six months later I met him in South Africa when I was teaching a course there, at the same AIMS Institute. And we had a discussion. And when we met, I said, I really appreciated how observant you were during the math camp. And he said how did you, what? How did you see that? And it was more than that because this was the thing he felt that he hadn’t contributed as much as everyone else.

Whereas what I observed was that while everyone else was just immediately getting things and doing them, he was observing and trying to understand. And that was, that’s the skill I want. That’s the skill I’m looking for. And he had it from day one, he would be there and he would observe things that others would just slip them by, because he was being, he had good attention to detail, he was careful. And this is the thing in that apprenticeship, you can be in that apprenticeship and trying to impress and running around and doing all sorts of things and you don’t observe.

What I want from people in that position is that being able to observe, to actually see, oh, when you went in and just being a fly on the wall sometimes in meetings as he then did with me for many years, ah, you presented it slightly differently to this person, why? And then asking that question, having that discussion about what was it about the different people and how you present differently, how things change from one context to another.

Why are you doing things differently in Ethiopia than you’re doing them in Kenya? There were subtleties, there were differences as well as similarities. And that’s what you want. You want people who observe that. And when they’re starting out, being observant, there’s no replacement for that to build good experience.

[00:32:53] Kate: Yeah, that’s a cultural change that’s needed, because I think people don’t even feel like that’s a safe thing to do often. Like the fact that Danny would’ve said, oh, I thought I wasn’t contributing shows the particular behaviours that are rewarded.

Okay. I think we’re out of time. So the book, if anyone wants to read it, is Moral Ambition and it’s Rutger Bregman, I got it right that time. But yeah, this was an interesting conversation and I think this topic is going to be percolating and coming up and I think interesting things are going to start to take shape.

[00:33:22] David: Absolutely. I think it’s great that, we don’t often do this where we take somebody else’s work, we highlight it in this way. We should make it clear we’ve not got any endorsements for this. If anyone wants to give us an endorsement for promoting this wonderful book, great. We have not currently got them at time of recording.

[00:33:40] Kate: And I checked it out from my local library, so I recommend that.

[00:33:46] David: It’s absolutely, it’s been a pleasure. This has been great. I look forward to chatting again soon on another interesting topic.

[00:33:53] Kate: Yes.

[00:33:54] David: Thanks.

[00:33:54] Kate: Thanks David.