Saving elites from wasted lives
- sciart0
- May 17
- 2 min read
Excerpt: "The world is full of highly intelligent, impressively accomplished and status-aware people whose greatest ambitions seem to start and stop with themselves. For Rutger Bregman, those people represent an irresistible opportunity.
Bregman, 37, is a Dutch historian who has written best-selling books arguing that the world is better (mostly meaning wealthier, healthier and more humane) than we’re typically led to believe, and also that further improving it is easily within our reach. Sounds a little off in these days of global strife and domineering plutocracy, doesn’t it? Even Bregman, who is something of a professional optimist, is willing to admit that the arguments in his first two books — “Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World” (2017) and “Humankind: A Hopeful History” (2020) — land less persuasively now than when they were published.
... We’ve been talking about a shift in values, and I think there’s a real burn-it-all-down sense of anger alive in the culture now, which is a seductive feeling.
I want to connect that feeling to a book that you recommended to me: the autobiography of the philosopher and pacifist Bertrand Russell. In that book, he writes, in the context of public support in Britain for World War I, “I had supposed that most people liked money better than almost anything else, but I discovered that they liked destruction even better.”
Was he wrong? Bertrand Russell certainly had his cynical moments. It’s a dark truth about humanity, that we can go nuts pretty quickly. I don’t know where we’ll go from here. Where I find hope is that I know of historical eras in which things got really dark as well — the late 18th century in Britain, the late 19th century in the United States — eras that were incredibly immoral, unequal, and where we had elites that were irresponsible and selfish.
Then there was a countermovement, a cultural revolution that was started by elites. We desperately need that today. Someone said this to me recently: If you are watching the news right now and you’re not terrified for yourself because you have some savings or a nice job, then you are the person who needs to stand up.
We see an enormous amount of cowardice, sadly. I guess I found hope in the simple knowledge that it only takes a small group of people to start spreading a different mentality.
I like to see signs that that may be happening, and I just want to put more oil on that fire."