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“Moral ambition is the desire to stand on the right side of history before it is fashionable, to basically devote your career, your life, to some of the most pressing issues that we face as a species.”
Rutger Bregman, historian and author of Moral Ambition, believes that too many of us are in what he calls “bullshit jobs”.
“What I see is an enormous waste of talent,” he tells Hannah Moore. “So many people who could go on and do great things, who are stuck in cubicles, writing reports no one’s ever going to read, creating PowerPoints no one wants to look at. It’s pretty sad, and that needs to change.”
He has founded the School for Moral Ambition, which aims to match such individuals with a cause to tackle.
“We want to recruit a Swat team of very talented wealth managers, bankers and corporate lawyers who are currently working for the Empire – sorry, this is a Star Wars reference – and we want to convince them to work for the Rebel Alliance.”
He believes they should be “fighting tax avoidance, fighting tax evasion, because it’s not enough for me to just shout, ‘tax the rich’. You also need the radical nerds who understand everything about all the loopholes and make all the difference.”
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