Rutger Bregman

Let’s start with a little history lesson:

In the past, everything was worse.

Where 84% of the world’s population still lived in extreme poverty in 1820, by 1981 that percentage had dropped to 44%, and now, just a few decades later, it is under 10%.1

Back in 1989, the American philosopher Francis Fukuyama already noted that we had arrived in an era where life has been reduced to “economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.”

There’s no new dream to replace it because we can’t imagine a better world than the one we’ve got. In fact, most people in wealthy countries believe children will actually be worse off than their parents.1

The Italian poet Tommaso Campanella’s The City of the Sun (1602) offers a good example. In his utopia, or rather dystopia, individual ownership is strictly prohibited, everybody is obliged to love everybody else, and fighting is punishable by death

And it understands that, as Voltaire put it, the perfect is the enemy of the good.

To give a few examples: Why have we been working harder and harder since the 1980s despite being richer than ever? Why are millions of people still living in poverty when we are more than rich enough to put an end to it once and for all? And why is more than 60% of your income dependent on the country where you just happen to have been born?

Optimism and pessimism have become synonymous with consumer confidence or the lack thereof

Politics has been watered down to problem management. Voters swing back and forth not because the parties are so different, but because it’s barely possible to tell them apart, and what now separates right from left is a percentage point or two on the income tax rate.

We see it in academia, where everybody is too busy writing to read, too busy publishing to debate