Ideas - It's time for a 'moral revolution.' This is a call to action

Episode Date: January 20, 2026

We live in an "age of immorality," argues historian and author Rutger Bregman, and the decay is everywhere."The moral rot runs deep across elite institutions of every stripe," Bregman says in his first BBC Reith Lecture. His series of lectures describes why he is calling for a moral revolution to counter the culture of cynicism and un-seriousness among global elites. Bregman says history has proven how small determined groups have catalysed profound moral change, and that legacy should be an inspirational guide for all of us today. IDEAS is featuring lectures from the BBC Reith Lectures, this is the first episode.

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Thank you for listening. Now on to today's podcast. Welcome to the radio theatre here at Broadcasting House in Central London for this year's Reith Lectures. And welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. You just heard the BBC's Anita Anand, introducing the Reith Lectures, the British broadcaster's flagship lecture series, an annual series of talks from influential thinkers of the day, and each year we broadcast them here on ideas.

Previous speakers include Robert Oppenheimer, Lester B. Pearson, Stephen Hawking, and Mark Carney. This year's lectures began with controversy. Hey, everyone, I have some really disappointing news to share. And honestly, I wish this wasn't true. But the BBC has decided to censor the opening lecture of a series they invited me to give. That's Rutger Bregman, this year's lecturer. He is a Dutch historian, journalist, and author of books like Utopia for Realists and Humankind, A Hopeful History. Before the first lecture went to air, the BBC decided,

to edit out one line from his talk, a line about U.S. President Donald Trump. I find it hard to express how shocked I am by the BBC's decision, because this is not just another media organization. And these lectures, known as the Reith lectures, have for more than 75 years been one of the BBC's most important public platforms for big ideas and free expression. Bregman took to social media to criticize the BBC. decision to edit the lecture.

And here's how the BBC itself reported on the controversy. The historian Rutger Breggman has said he is dismayed after a line from his Reith lecture was removed by the BBC. The corporation says it removed the sentence about Donald Trump after legal advice. Our media correspondent David Celito reports. The Reith Lecture, broadcast this morning on Radio 4 titled A Time of Monsters. Rooka Bregman, a Dutch historian, presented an argument that the world's elites had entered a period of moral decay. And he had this to say about Joe Biden and Donald Trump. I don't want to bore you with an exhaustive summary of all the madness of the past few years.

On one side, we had an establishment propping up an elderly man in obvious mental decline. On the other, we had a convicted reality star. When it comes to staffing his administration, he is a modern-day calligula. But there was in the middle of that. a little silence between the words reality star. I had a convicted reality star. When it comes to staffing... That was an edit.

A short sentence about Donald Trump was removed on legal advice, and that same BBC legal advice means, I can't tell you what was removed. The BBC says programmes have to be legally compliant across all jurisdictions where distributed, which is a considerable number, as it's also broadcast on the World Service. The topic of Bregman's lectures is moral courage, that in the face of rising authoritarianism, institutions need to be brave.

In his statement on social media, Bregman reveals the edited line and says the BBC's decision proves his point. They deleted the sentence in which I described Donald Trump as the most openly corrupt president in American history. That line is gone, and the irony could not be bigger. Because this lecture, titled A Time of Monsters, is exactly about the cowardice of today's elites, about universities, corporations, and yes, media networks bending the need to authoritarianism. Look, I am not here to dunk on the thousands of serious journalists who work at the BBC. I think it's one of the greatest media institutions in the world. The editors I worked with were excellent, and it has been one of the great honors of my life to deliver the prestigious reth lectures.

But this decision, by the leadership of the BBC, is very serious. It isn't even about me. It's about something much bigger. When institutions start censoring themselves because they're scared of those in power, that is the moment we all need to pay attention. democracies don't collapse overnight. They gradually erode in acts of fear. Let's not be afraid to name what's happening, and let's not be afraid to tell the truth. Rutger Bregman, this year's BBC wreath lecturer. So here from London is the first of this year's talks

introduced by the BBC's Anita Anand. Please welcome the BBC's 2025 wreath lecturer, Rutger Bregman. As the son of a preacher, I learned long ago that every good sermon consists of three parts. Act one, misery, act two, redemption, and act three, thankfulness. Now, this is going to be a hopeful series of lectures about the extraordinary era of human history we're living through, about humanity's wild possibilities, and about the power of small groups of dedicated citizens to determine our collective destiny. But I'm afraid that today we're going to have to spend most of our time on Act 1. Misery.

Now, from an early age, I've been fascinated by stories of upheaval and collapse. Growing up in the Netherlands, I was especially gripped by the tales of how our small country was occupied by the Nazis. I endlessly asked myself, what would I have done? Would I have had the courage to do what's right? As an adult and as a historian, I still ask those questions and they feel more urgent than ever. I know I've made a name for myself writing hopeful books about the goodness in humanity and the utopias we can build together. But today, it would feel dishonest to begin on an optimistic note. As the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsky wrote in 1926, scribbling in a notebook from a fascist prison,

the old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters. To grasp the depths of our current misery, it helps to start with a classic story of collapse. When the great historian, Edward Gibbon, described the decline of Rome, he didn't speak in vague abstractions. He gave us names, dates, and details, page after page of cowardice and corruption. Reading the declin, the declares, decline and fall of the Roman Empire is like watching a civilization rot in slow motion, sadistic emperors and gilded thrones, generals who sold out their own armies, and senators who cared more for spectacle than statecraft. And yet, what shocks you most when you read Gibbon today isn't the depravity. It's the familiarity. Gippin wrote about

politicians who lacked seriousness, elites who lacked virtue, and societies that mistook decadence for progress. Now, 2,000 years later, we live in an age where billionaires dodge their taxes, politicians perform instead of govern, and media barons profit from lies and hatred. The Roman elite fiddled while Rome burned. Our elites livestreamed the fire and monetize the smoke. Immorality and ins seriousness,

those are the two defining traits of our leaders today. and they're not accidental flaws, but the logical outcome of what I call the survival of the shameless. Today, it's not the most capable who rise, but the least scrupulous, not the most virtuous, but the most brazen. I'll get to Europe later, but first, let's cross the Atlantic to the place where this logic has now reached its purest form, the United States. I don't want to bore you with an exhaustive summary of all the madness of the past few years. On one side, we had an establishment propping up an elderly man in obvious mental decline. On the other, we had a convicted reality star. When it comes to staffing his administration, he is a modern-day Caligula,

the Roman emperor who wanted to make his horse a consul. He surrounds himself with loyalists, grifters, and sycophants. Yet, what interests me is not left versus right, it's courage versus cowardice. Virtue versus vice. And the truth is, the decay is everywhere. The moral rot runs deep across elite institutions of every stripe. If the right is defined by its shameless corruption, then liberals answer with a paralyzing cowardice.

Dozens of corporations, media networks, universities and museums have already bent the knee to the new regime. Some of the most prestigious law firms rushed to pledge their loyalty. But let's not pretend that this was a fall from grace. These firms spent years defending Wall Street criminals, tobacco conglomerates, and opioid profiteers. They didn't betray their principles.

They revealed them. Their loyalty was never to justice or democracy, but to power and profit. And where were these loyalties forged? The answer is simple. At the world's most celebrated universities, at the greatest bastions of science and reason, in secular temples with grand columns

and motos inscribed in stone. Truth at Harvard. Light and truth at Yale. And in the nation's service and the service of humanity at Princeton. Every year, thousands of brilliant teenagers write beautiful applications essays about the global problems they aspire to solve.

Climate change. Bold hunger. Infectious disease. But a few years later, most have been funneled towards companies like McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, and Kirkland and Alice. A friend of mine who studied at Oxford

calls it the Bermuda Triangle of Talent, consultancy, finance, and corporate law, a gaping black hole that sucks up so many of our so-called best and brightest, a dark chasm that has tripled in size since the 1980s. Sure, I know such companies like to spray a thin layer of purpose or corporate responsibility over their dubious business models. Did you know that tobacco giant Philip Morris has a stellar ESG score? Have you heard that British American tobacco was named both a climate leader and a diversity leader by the financial times?

And they really deserved it. Their CO2 compensation programs are state-of-the-art, and their inclusivity trainings are among the best in the business. They are doing so much good while killing millions of people. Please, let's not kid ourselves. There has been no moral awakening in the corporate world. Business for good, conscious capitalism, social impact, it was all mostly a sham. Beneath the talk, the cultural tide has been running in

the other way for decades. Just look at the American freshman survey, which has tracked the values of first-year college students since the 1960s. Half a century ago, when students were asked about their most important life goals, 80 to 90 percent named developing a meaningful philosophy of life. Just 50 percent prioritized making a lot of money. Today, those numbers have flipped. Now, 80 to 90% say that getting rich is what matters most, and only half still value a meaningful philosophy of life. Now remember, this is not human nature, it's human culture. The kids are merely holding up a mirror, and what they reflect back is what we've been teaching them. Currently, around 40% of Harvard graduates end up in that Bermuda triangle

of BS jobs. And if you include big tech, the share rises to more than 60%, and the work there is often just as meaningless. In the infamous words of a math prodigy who ended up at Facebook, the best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks. On both the left and the right, America has been betrayed by its elites. Like Rome in its waning days, the empire is corroding from within, not by the absence of talent and wealth, but by the lack of courage and virtue.

I would love to be able to say that things are much better on this side of the Atlantic, that Europe has become the new leader of the free world. But we're not, obviously. Although our politics is not as brazenly corrupt, the same spirit of decadence haunts the old world. The truth is that the defining traits of Europe's elites aren't just immorality and unseriousness. It's also irrelevant.

If America resembles the fall of Rome, spectacular and vulgar, then Europe is reliving the slow death of Venice. One empire collapses in flames, the other sinks in silence. One is consumed by fire, the other lost in fog. Perhaps you're familiar with the story. At its peak, Venice was a marvel of commerce and innovation. A small city built on a lagoon had become a maritime empire dominating Mediterranean trade for centuries. Its success was rooted in a relatively open system. Merchants could rise through merit, trade was well regulated, and institutions like the Great Council struck a balance between aristocracy and accountability.

But by the 14th century, that openness began to vanish. The seats of decline were sown in 1297 with the Serata or closing of the Great Council. Membership became hereditary, creating a class of entrenched nobles who guarded their privileges. fiercely. This selfish elite monopolized government positions, blocked newcomers, and rewrote the rules to protect their wealth and power. Over the centuries, Venetian politics devolved into rent-seeking.

The ruling families extracted profits from trade monopolies without reinvesting in innovation. They port their wealth into palaces and casinos and ignored the growing threats from emerging powers like the ultimate empire. Young elites didn't want to become merchants and admirals anymore. Instead, They preferred a life of leisure and luxury. And over time, Venice became a shadow of its former self. Beautiful on the outside. Hollow on the inside. Now, does that remind you of anything?

Today, the whole of Europe risks turning into one big Venice. A beautiful open air museum. A great destination for Chinese and American tourists. A place to admire what was once the center of the world. Just look at our most valuable companies. In the US and China, the commanding heights of the economy are in technology and industry. AI, electric cars, solar panels, batteries, whatever you think of big tech and it's oligarchs, these are power industries, shaping the future.

In fact, all the American giants, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Nvidia, Alphabet, are individually worth more than the entire German or French stock market. By contrast, Europe's top companies are dominated by big fashion. Dior, Louis Vuitton, L'Oreal, we've become the continent of handbags instead of hardware. At the same time, our societies are rapidly aging. Birth rates are plummeting, growth is stuttering, and Europe's wealth has become largely dynastic. In Germany, three out of four billionaires inherited their fortunes. In the UK, families with children haven't seen.

their incomes rise for 20 years, while pensioners' incomes have kept on growing. In France, the elderly now enjoy higher incomes than the working age population, and that's a first in world history. Politically, we've become naval gazers, mainly obsessing over immigration, even though only 10% of us were born outside the EU, and will need those newcomers to sustain all those pensioners and inheritors. Sure, Europe has long fancied itself as the continent of values. We love to lecture others on democracy and human rights. But just look at us this year. While Israel dropped the equivalent of six Hiroshima's worth of bombs on Gaza, European leaders could barely bring themselves to express their concerns over the humanitarian situation, as if this

was some kind of natural disaster. But while Europeans aren't very successful at restraining others, we've become very good at regulating ourselves. China, is the world's industrial powerhouse. The U.S. is the world's technological powerhouse, and we lead the world in rulemaking. We've trained a whole new class, not of builders and creators, but of compliance officers, ESG auditors, sustainability verifiers, and data protection consultants. Regulate before you innovate, supervise before you create. That seems to be Europe's mindset right now. We proudly announced our AI Act to the world, even though we had no frontier AI companies to speak of. We're brilliant at governing industries that we don't have. Just like Venice,

in the 14th century, we have an economy that rewards those who increase complexity and extract rents. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm an old-fashioned European social democrat. I'm not here to peddle anti-government or anti-EU cliches. I am well aware that a recent large-scale study found that so-called BS jobs, jobs employees themselves see as socially meaningless, are three times more common in the private sector than in the public sector. And I also know that even after Brexit, the UK government's pathologies are worse. For example, its tax code now runs to 22,000 pages the longest in the world. In Europe, we should be proud of our strong welfare states and our ambitious climate efforts. And we definitely need to regulate.

big tech. But social democracy should focus on building the future, not just regulating the present. And regulation should be simple, transparent, and open for newcomers, not dense, obscure, and protective of the status quo. What we're now getting is a huge waste of talent. Our best minds aren't building startups or solving real-world problems. They're writing reports and preparing for audits. In the name of climate inequity, we've built a compliance economy, one that punishes productivity and rewards bureaucracy. The state has lost much of its capacity to deliver because civil servants who once knew how to build have been replaced by consultants. So you might wonder, where is the pushback? Surely, in the face of so much decay,

a new left, a new progressive movement would have risen, one determined to make government great again. But no. A big part of the world. of the modern left, especially in Europe, has turned into the party of no. No to growth, no to building, no to ambition. Its new gospel is degrowth. To be fair, the degrowth movement names something real. Our economies cannot go on like this, cutting down forests faster than they can regrow, emptying the seas of fish and flooding the atmosphere with carbon. The warning of degrowthers is serious, but their answer is not. They are allergic to technology and suspicious of prosperity. They wave away stubborn facts of supply and demand, pretending that you can have housing prices by decree or abolish poverty by slogan.

What they offer is not a practical program for solving problems, but a deeply unpopular and quite elitist ideology of managed decline. Most baffling, I think, is the commandment issued in certain corners of the left to have no children anymore. Democrophers tell us that across the developed world, the drop in birth rates is overwhelmingly driven by people on the left opting out of parenthood. Think about that for a moment. The tradition that once stood for the future now treats the most beautiful thing in the world, new life, as a crime against the planet.

If you wanted to design a strategy to make your movement irrelevant within a generation, you could hardly do better. The deeper tragedy is that the left once believed in progress, the idea that people and nations could grow, develop, mature. This was a tradition of education and emancipation. As the American historian Nelson Liechtenstein has written, all great reform movements from the crusade against slavery to the labor upsearch of the 1930s

defined themselves as champions of a moral and patriotic nationalism, which they counterposed to the parochial and selfish elites, which stood atwart their vision of a virtuous society. But today, that utopian horizon has dimmed. Instead of inspiring people with a vision of a better future, the left has turned inward, fragmenting into ever smaller moral circles. It has become quick to cancel, slow to compromise, quick to judge, slow to persuade.

The catharsis of public shaming has replaced the grind of building coalitions. So today, we have pronouns, but no progressive taxation. Land acknowledgement, but no affordable housing, inclusive language, but exclusive zoning. We've got the optics, but not the outside. outcomes. Should we really be surprised then that the left is losing across the developed world? Of course not. When you stop building and organizing, you don't just lose elections. You lose the people. You're listening to the Reith Lectures, the annual lecture series from the BBC.

Rutger Bregman is a Dutch historian, journalist and author. This is Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. Every day, your eyes. are working overtime, from squinting at screens and navigating bright sun to late-night drives and early morning commutes. They do so much to help you experience the world. That's why regular eye exams are so important. Comprehensive eye exams at Spec Savers are designed to check your vision and overall eye health. Every standard eye exam includes an OCT 3D eye scan, advanced technology that helps your optometrist detect early signs of eye and health conditions like glaucoma, cataracts, or even diabetes.

It's a quick, non-invasive scan that provides a detailed look at what's happening beneath the surface. Don't wait. Give your eyes the care they deserve. Book an eye exam at Specsavers from just $99, including an OCT scan. Book at Spexsavers.ca.cavers.cai.a. Eye exams are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit Spexavers.cavers.cai to learn more. This ascent isn't for everyone. You need grit to climb this high this often.

You've got to be an underdog that always over delivers. You've got to be 6,500 hospital staff, 1,000 doctors, all doing so much with so little. You've got to be Scarborough. Defined by our uphill battle and always striving towards new heights. And you can help us keep climbing. Donate at lovescarbro.cairbo.ca.a. The wreaths are the annual flagship lecture series from the BBC. The focus of this year's lectures is moral decay and moral courage.

Rutger Bregman argues the elites of the world are suffering from moral cowardice in the face of rising authoritarianism. From London, here is the second part of the talk, followed by a Q&A hosted by the BBC's Anita Anand. So now the bad news. If you think the fall of Rome or Venice was scary, let me assure you, it could get much worse. Yes, we have clowns and cowards among us, but we also have actual fascists in our midst. We could end up ruled by feudal rent seekers who slowly drained a life out of our society,

but we could also be taken over by people who destroy it outright. I recently attended an exclusive Silicon Valley conference. Over dinner, the conversation was dominated by a tech bro who spoke in ways that reminded me of 1930s fascists like Mussolini. I pointed this out to him, and he replied, without irony, Yeah, I think we should get a little fashy. This wasn't just one guy. He's part of a broader resurgence of fascism across the Western world.

Do we really need to use the F word? Yes, we do. Just as genocide scholars can clearly classify what's happened in Gaza, scholars of fascism can identify the science of what's rising now. We see armed troops patrolling the streets. We see masked men dragging people into vans. We see raids on the homes of political opponents. We see the rise of a paramilitary force that's loyal to one man alone. It's no coincidence that some of the leading experts of fascism have left the United States. One of them said that the lesson of 1933 is to get out early,

not late. All the while, white supremacists are celebrating. Eight years ago, you were an extremist if you protested being replaced by immigrants, a leading neo-Nazi recently wrote on Twitter. Now it's official White House policy. Or look at the rise of neo-fascist influencers like the blogger Curtis Jarvin. He wants to dismantle democracy and replace it with a techno monarchy, led by a CEO with absolute power, someone like Elon Musk or Jeff Beehner.

Jesus. Jarvin has inspired billionaires like Peter Thiel, who in turn helped bankroll the rise of J.D. Vance, the current vice president, and others go further still. Michael Anton, one of the most influential Maga intellectuals, has popularized the idea of Red Caesarism, a form of one-man rule that he describes as halfway between monarchy and tyranny. These people are ruthlessly power-seeking. They literally believe it's time for a new Napoleon or a right-wing Lenin to take over. And like Lenin, they know they're deeply unpopular, that they would never win free and fair elections,

which is why they're against democracy and why they're betting on our apathy. They want us to plug out, to scroll, to binge, to put on our VR glasses and noise-canceling headphones while they take over the world. If you're horrified by the news today, then I urge you, expand your imagination. Picture yourself 10 years from now reading a history of the coming decade.

If it taught the story of an authoritarian takeover, then what you are seeing today is exactly what you expect in the opening chapters. I did warn you, this lecture was going to be misery. A decade ago, when Donald Trump was first elected, liberal elites spent countless hours analyzing and debating the divide between their values and those of millions across America and Europe. if only we'd listen and feel empathy for Trump voters or Farage voters or Le Pen voters or AFD voters or Wilders voters, then we could heal the world. Or so it was said.

The educated elites didn't realize that their true betrayal had not been a failure of listening or empathy. It was not a lack of checking your privilege. It was a lack of using your privilege. It's been a failure to generally contribute to society. So that is what I want to emphasize at the end of the first lecture in this series. This is not a story about a certain number of people. It's about a deeper failure of leadership across the Western world. A generation of elites has inherited extraordinary privilege,

access to the best education, the most powerful institutions, and used it not to serve the public, but to serve themselves. We've taught our best and brightest how to climb, but not what ladder is worth climbing. We've built a meritocracy of ambition without morality, of intelligence without integrity, and now we are reaping the consequences, declining trust, rising cynicism,

and a new generation that sees power as inherently corrupt and all virtue as performance. Of course, not everyone in power is like this. Not all ambition today is hollow. There are still leaders and citizens trying to hold the line. Civil servants who resist political, pressure, journalists who risk their safety for the truth, lawyers and judges who refuse to portray their principles. But they remain exceptions, outnumbered and outshouted. Their sparks have yet to

catch fire. What we need now is not just better policies or better politicians. We need a moral revolution. We need to revive an ancient idea, almost laughable in today's climate, that the purpose of power is to do good. And that is the goal of this lecture series, to argue that the most urgent transformation of our time is not technological or geopolitical or industrial, but moral. We need a new kind of ambition, not for status or wealth or fame, but for integrity, courage and public service, a moral ambition. This may sound naive. And yet it's precisely because things can get much worse that they can also get much better. History is not just a record of the clients.

It's also full of astonishing turnarounds. In my next re-le lecture, I will show how moral revolutions have shaped the past and how we can make it happen again. Thank you. In a moment, I'm going to open this up to the audience. I had a question for you. I mean, you've been scathing about the rot that exists

in the left and the right, your disappointment in political leadership. there are going to be those who say, you know what, put your money where your mouth is, stand yourself. You have to be a politician. What would you say to that? Well, I think we can be a bit more ambitious than that. In my third lecture, I'll be talking about the Fabian society, right? One of the great societies, great think tanks, great movements that really revolutionized Britain and laid the foundation for social democracy in this country. They build a whole network of think tanks of also political parties. and I really think we need something similar today.

Look, what I've been fascinated by my whole career is how is it possible that small groups of thoughtful committed citizens, as the great anthropologist Margaret Mead said, how can they change the world? Like, how does that happen? That's what I'm obsessed with, and I think we can do that again. Okay, well, let's open this up to questions from the audience. You're talking a lot about America.

Now, Jennifer Ewing, you are with Republicans abroad. That's right, isn't it? Republicans overseas, UK. Republicans overseas. Thank you. I stand corrected. Now, from what you have heard, do you feel chastised? Do you feel unfairly betrayed? I mean, what do you say? I was mostly dunking on my own people, was it? Yeah, I was actually going to say, thank you so much, by the way, great lecture. And I think you're kind of a populist. You know, a lot of what you were saying was challenging the elites and looking at these institutions that do not serve the people. Part of the reason that President Trump was elected about a year ago, is not because he's perfect, but because there's a large group of working in middle-class,

middle-class, as we use the term, that did not feel that the country was working for them anymore. And they got together with a lot of these other coalitions and kind of said, let's tear this down. So I don't think it's the end of democracy, but I'm curious as to your views, I mean, you asked me to comment, so I commented rather than go straight to a question.

But I guess what I'm wondering is you mentioned a lot of populists on the right, you know, here in this country and Germany and obviously in the U.S. But there's populism growing on the left as well. And do you not think that populism of left, right, you know, center, whatever, serves a purpose? I absolutely do. And I increasingly think that we need, perhaps need a Trump-like phenomenon on the American left today. If you just look at the Democratic Party, which is so unpopular, I don't think it's ever been so unpopular as it is today, it is ripe for takeover, basically,

just like the way Donald Trump took over the Republican Party. Now, you and I probably disagree about his policies, his politics. He's responsible for massive tax cuts, for his billionaire friends. I mean, I had a whole passage that I had to delete from the lecture because it was getting too long. But it was kind of fun to research, like from, you know, so many criminals being pardoned, but also the meme coin that you read about that one, you know, just launch a coin in your own name.

So we have that form of populism as, as well. I don't think we'll reach agreement on that one. But I really like your point that indeed, there's a lot of value in that popular standard. Well, I mean, the microphone has moved, but yes, we can definitely say there is no agreement.

Phil Rosenberg, President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, I think many of us will have a lot of sympathy with your concern, criticism, cynicism about the current political and corporate elites. But there is another rising force in our lands, which is malignant, and you've referred to it, extremism, whether the

Islamist extremists, who launched a murderous attack at a synagogue, far-right hooligans who keep setting fire to mosques and are planning far worse, or far-left thugs who are very good as you sort of describe it as breaking things up rather than building things up. And so how do we build and stimulate and excite the people of the moderate middle, the common good, to achieve the change that we need to see? So your point reminds me of the landscape of influencers, or perhaps I should say man influencers that we have today. So on the right, we have idiots like Andrew Tate, right? But on the left, we had people like Luigi Mangione celebrated as some kind of leftist hero. And I found it disgusting, absolutely disgusting, to see so many leftists and progressives

celebrating the death of someone, you know, who has a family. It's just deeply, deeply worrying. And what it made me think is that we've given up something here. Maybe it's about masculinity in this case, because we're talking about two guys, right? Everyone knows about toxic masculinity, right? And I think Luigi Mangione and Andrew Tate are good examples of that, of how you use your power for destruction. But if toxic masculinity is real, and I deeply believe it is, then the question is, what's the opposite of that? And I think the answer is pretty simple. It's heroic masculinity.

Like, our culture is full of stories of heroes from the Luke Skywalker's to the Frodo's to the eragorns, again, connected to the point I made during my lecture, who used their power to do good. And I think we need way more influencers like that. And we need to give them way more attention. The tragic thing about social media, as it currently is constructed, is that it seems to be harder for that kind of heroic masculinity to go viral. Can I go back to the question, I mean, what is your take? Well, I'm looking for answers, really. I mean, it seems like we have a battle for the soul of our nation and the soul of other nations as well.

I think there's probably something about, in what you say, about stimulating this heroic response that represents our values without being wicked to others. We need some of that special source to move it forward, I think. Thank you very much. Sunder Katwalla from the think tank British future. I think the central sense I got from this first lecture is that you think the authoritarian populace you oppose

have a much clearer sense of the future, therefore, than the alternative coalition you hope to rally Does that mean you're telling us we should expect things to get worse before they get better? Well, what I really admire about a lot of authoritarian populists is their perseverance, their willingness to build these great coalitions. I mean, just look at the Maga Coalition in the US. I mean, it's a very crazy coalition, right? Of Christian evangelicals, of the tech right, of people who don't believe in the German theory of disease.

I mean, it's very strange. but that is what it takes to build power. You work together with people who are quite different from you because you have a common goal. And then the perseverance, right? Look at something like the destruction of Roe v. Wade, the federal right to abortion. I mean, I just deeply admire the long-term strategy behind that. They started in the late 80s, the early 90s, the Alliance for Defending Freedom, right? They launched hundreds of smaller lawsuits.

It all built up to that big moment of the Dobbs decision. And at that very moment, what were all the pro-choice groups doing in the US? They were canceling each other. They were fighting one another. So, yes, I think we can learn a thing or two. Or people who want to preserve democracy can learn a thing or two from those who are now trying to take it down. Thank you. Good evening.

I'm John Nixon. I used to be a fundraiser. And I'm now a philanthropist, which is a very strange way of describing oneself. I think we're all agreed with you that the greatest threat from populist monsters is to democracy and our liberty

because they speak with a moral conviction that makes the disconnected feel disconnected and our own leaders lack the moral authority and ambition to bring us together to solve our problems so I think we're going to have to do it for ourselves so do you agree with me

that in addition to the rich paying their fair share of tax we need more of them to be moral ambitious, to become philanthropists, to lead a revival of civil society, to restore social and economic justice, and to reboot civil society because it's the bedrock of our democracy. Thank you. My answer is yes. And a lot of people have hurt me, you know, dunk on philanthropists when I was at Davos. I said, you know, stop whining about your philanthropy, start paying your taxes.

I still stand by that. But as a historian, I also know that there are beautiful exceptions. From the abolitionists to the suffragettes to the civil right campaigners, these people were not funded by government, you know. They were a fighting government in most cases. So they needed brave men and women who used their privilege, who used their wealth to take on some of the greatest challenges we face. Okay, just on philanthropy and having oodles of money.

Let's come to you. I'm looking at you, sir. Just say who you are. I'm Tom Hughes-Hallet, and I'm the founder of the... Marshall Institute for Philanthropy and Social Entrepreneurship at the London School of Economics. I think more importantly, I had a BS job. I was a terrible banker and quite a successful one and managed to accumulate wealth. And I gave myself a serious nervous breakdown by doing that. In 2000, J.P. Morgan and Chase bought the bank that I was a partner of. And I told my children that I was considering taking on a...

another banking job. And they stopped and said, Dad, we wanted you to do something we can be proud of. And I realized that I'd wasted 30 years of my life. So my wife and I then committed the rest of our lives to moral revolution. We decided the only thing to do is to act. My question to you, therefore, is how are you going to instill a revolution from people who have power, have money, and have ability, but are allergic to politics and think tanks, and just want to get on and do it. I think that every great movement was grounded in a cultural shift, a more fundamental, deeper cultural shift,

which was all about making doing good, fashionable once again. Let me illustrate it with one short story. I told at the beginning of this lecture that I've always been fascinated by resistance during the Second World War, and endlessly asked myself that question. what would I have done? I did a bunch of research into exactly that question, like what makes a resistance hero?

And I expected that there would be some kind of psychology of resistance, right? Surely some people who had the courage to hide persecuted Jews in their cellars, for example, surely, I don't know, maybe they were young or old or rich or poor or a left wing or right wing. Surely there must have been something there, but the answer is no, there was nothing. This was a cross-sectional population, and hundreds of interviews have been done by researchers, and they couldn't really find anything after the war that suggested there was a kind of psychology. Well, they did realize at some point

that there was a sociology. So resistance was like a virus that spread. And you know what? The most predictive factor was whether people had been asked to join the resistance. So in 94% of all cases when people have been asked to do the right thing, they said yes.

So that's how I believe that moral revolutions can happen. Thank you. My name is John Gelder, and I'm the wonderfully title of Director General of the Institute of Directors in the UK. And we have a rather odd position because we do seem to have the era of government. Whether they listen is, another matter. My question is, can business be a force for good? So I think it absolutely can. But what it should do is to look for its moral maximum instead of its moral minimum.

What we've seen the past couple of years and decades is so many movements, that have all been about, like, hey, if we do this, like the bare minimum, maybe recycle our garbage, compensate our CO2 emissions, give a tiny, tiny fractions of our earnings to some kind of philanthropy that's basically just a form of sponsorship. Maybe then we're good people? No. We really got up our game.

So at the organization I co-founded the School for More Ambition, we're now incubating actually initiative. That's called Profit for Good. And we're setting a simple benchmark. Like for us, profit for good is donating 10%. of your earnings to the most important movements of our time, I would love to see much more of that, where our business leaders aren't just talking a lot

about their relatively unambitious attempts to do a tiny little bit of good, but where they're really trying to take risks and do so much more, because that's what's necessary now. Did you want to come back on that? Actually, we would agree with the principle. There are bad actors in business, as there are bad actors all over the world.

my concern is by characterizing the many as being bad, the few may be missed and therefore unable or unwilling to join the movement. So this is about what motivates people. There are a lot of people who say shame doesn't work. I deeply disagree. I think shame works very well often. It's always got to be a mix of different things, right? I think this movement, this moral revolution should be 80% enthusiasm and 20% shame and guilt.

But evolution has given us this for a reason. We are the only species, or one of the few, at least, in the whole animal kingdom with the ability to blush. That tells us something about the power of shame and guilt. The woman in the middle, yes. Suki Fuller, intelligence professional. The question I have has to do with technology, because we haven't really addressed that, especially when we have technology bros, basically mandating how the next generations react, behave,

and where they find their moral compass? Where do you think we are going to be able to make that generation understand what morality is, what a moral revolution looks like, and how we can bring them into the fold? Thank you very much. So we are currently living through a moment in world history where a lot of baffling and worrying things are happening. Take the rise of the far right, which is happening across the world.

Take the declining birth rates, which are happening pretty much everywhere, not just in richer countries, but also in poorer countries and more religious countries and more atheist countries. So when you look at such fundamental big developments, you start to wonder, hey, maybe there is a deeper thing at war. Like what could explain this happening in all those places at the same time? And I think that very often the answer will be technology. Now, I think what we should really resist here is the determinism.

The idea that technology is just a force that happens to us and that we're not in control. That is honestly not what history teaches us. Technology is a force of humanity. It's being shaped by us. Thank you. I'm Nizija Saeed from a startup incubator called Telos House. I want to thank you for your speech. It was very interesting, but I think what I could feel was being discussed a lot of the times was this idea of goodness, of virtue, right? But it was like there's an underlying assumption that every single person has an intuitive sense of morality, an intuitive sense of what goodness is. But if you look at, for example, I mean just at what you mentioned earlier, right, with the overturning of Roe versus Wade, I mean, the Republicans fundamentally, they were driven by morality from their perspective. they believed that what they did was the right thing.

And perhaps some of them would say that that was a moral revolution. So, I mean, if you're calling for a moral revolution, how do you justify that if there's fundamentally no objective morality for that to be based on? Yeah, that's a great question and a hard question. Abortion is an example of a very hard moral issue. And I think I'm personally pro-choice, but I think we have to take those on the other side very seriously and think really hard about why do we think what we think.

I don't think that human morality is anything goes, though. I've written a book called Humankind, which is about why we have conquered the globe, why not the bonobos, why not the chimpanzees? Like, what makes us special as a species? And I think that it's been the result of a process that evolutionary psychologists call survival of the friendliest. So for millennia, it was actually the friendliest among us,

who were best at cooperating with one another, who had more kids and passed on their genes to the next generation. That's the secret of our success. And I think that's where our morality comes from, the desire to work together, to protect the weak, to recognize the inherent dignity of everyone. This connects to my earlier point about the need to expand the moral circle. At the same time, you've got to recognize that there are some others

on the other side of the political spectrum. I mean, I had a whole part about J.D. Vance that I also had to delete from the lecture. It was getting way too long. But yeah, he's a really good example of someone who showed that you can have a very different kind of morality that has a much of a smaller moral circle. So where he says like, hey, for example, being an American is all about actually having, you know, being born here or having a connection to the soil itself. And that stands in contrast to a very different conception of what it means to be, you know, a British citizen or an American citizen, which is, hey, it's an idea, right? If you subscribe to certain ideas and values, then you're part of the... community. Thank you. I'm going to ask a question about history in a moment, and I'm looking at David

Ossook, so I'm going to bring you in on that. But let me pick up on one point. Do you really think that people wake up in the morning thinking, I'm a baddie, a moral monster? Sure, that's a very rare thing. So I agree with you. Like most of the great criminals in history, you know, from Lenin to Hitler, were obviously motivated by a moral ideology or what they perceived as the right thing to do. That's That's very clear. So that's why I also wanted to be very clear about where I'm coming from, you know, as an old-fashioned European Social Democrat who believes that it is our moral imperative to expand the circle, that that has been the great source of moral progress in the last two centuries.

Are we living in a more monstrous time now than we have in the past? David Olshiger, how monstrous are we compared to the past? I'd argue that the aberrant period has been the period from 19, 1945 until very recently of unique stability, where nations for the most part were not invaded, annexations did not happen, borders did not shift across the map. And this is a return to reality. Most of history has been more like this than the previous 70 years. I'm struck as I always am when I hear it by the Gramsky Monsters quote. Because between Gramsky saying that the world he had known was ending and the new world was struggling to be born between him saying that and the birth of that new world

was a war that killed 70 million people. I mean the thought that keeps swirling around in my mind is do we take warnings as a species? Are we empiricist? Do we have to go through the fire in order to reach the redemption on the other side? For me the most fundamental lesson of history has always been that things don't have to be this way. They can radically change for the better or for the worse. So every milestone of civilization that we take for granted today, and we've been talking about them, the end of slavery, women's rights, the women's right to vote, the welfare state, the enormous prosperity we have today. I mean, all of that was unimaginable sometimes. We live in the utopia of the past, you know, that people imagined. But indeed, it could also get so much worse.

This is such a simple thing, but it's so easy to forget is that the people who lived in the past didn't know how their story was going to end. Right. So if you live in 1933, you don't. You know, you know, how the story of Nazi Germany is going to end. There's the great Kierkegaard quote, that life has to be understood backwards, but it has to be lived forwards. So we are in that moment right now of extraordinary historical flexibility. Can we learn from the past, do or do we have to experience these tragedies again? Obviously, I really hope not. And what gives us to the me that hope is I'm a big believer in historical contingency. So there are some historians who would say, like, look, in the end, it's just the hard laws of history, it's geography, it's

democracy, I mean, we humans, we are mere puppets of the big thing called history. And I think there's real power in that analysis. I think that's true for a lot of the time. But we still have agency. There is still contingency. There are examples of small groups of people, of individuals, who just made a massive difference and were able to steer the direction of history in a much more positive direction. You promised us misery for this first lecture. You couldn't help yourself.

You ended on a hopeful note. Next time we're going to be in Liverpool where Rutger is going to be talking about the 18th century abolition of slavery. That is going to be the centrepiece of your next lecture. One of the greatest historical lessons of all time is how you've put it, showing how small groups can change the world.

But for now, our thanks to our audience here in London and especially to our wreath lecturer, Rutger Bregman. You were listening to Ideas and to the annual wreath lectures from the BBC, featuring Rutger Bregman, historian, journalist, and author of the books, Utopia for Realists and Humankind, A Hopeful History. In his next talk, he argues that looking to history can give us hope for the future. And if you enjoyed the podcast, I encourage you to let your friends know about it and leave a review on your podcast app. This series was adapted for ideas by Matthew Laysen Ryder.

Special thanks to Laura Lawrence and the BBC World Service. Lisa Ayuso is the web producer for ideas. Technical production, Sam McNulty. Our senior producer is Nicola Luxchich. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas. And I'm Nala Ayy.