Pareto's peas and Martin Luther King
In 1785, student Thomas Clarkson entered a Cambridge University essay competition and, stubborn and downcast, active and unstoppable, ended up becoming a pioneer of the abolition of slavery. In the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, Arnold Douwes managed to get many people in the small village of Nieuwlande to hide Jews: they weren't heroes, it was simply necessary for someone to push them to do it. And Arnold, a bit eccentric and a liar, did just that.
"You don't do good because you are a good person, you become a good person because you do good," writes the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman in the essay Moral ambition (Empúries, translated by Maria Rosich Andreu). Her thesis/proposal is that it is always necessary to take action. Good intentions are not enough. The contagion effect works not only negatively (as we see with the success of the far right), but also positively.
It was Martin Luther King who said, "Often, idealists are not realists, and realists are not usually idealists." Bregman urges young people and not-so-young people to be realistic idealists, to be morally ambitious, to give concrete meaning to their lives, and not to settle for theSmall is beautifulTo escape from the idea that everything is shit, I'm just getting by, and you can do it yourselves.
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, dedicated people can change the world. Indeed, it always has." These were the words of anthropologist Margaret Mead. Bregman calls for thinking big, wanting to leave a mark beyond a "like" click. It is the stubborn and persistent minorities that make us move forward. In scientific terms, it responds to the Pareto principle: "80% of the effects are a consequence of 20% of the causes" (the economist and horticulturist discovered in 1896 that 80% of the peas grew in 20% of the pods).
If you want to achieve something important, rather than attacking your enemies, you should target your lazy or well-off friends, as did the American Ralph Nader, son of Lebanese immigrants, who instead of becoming a millionaire lawyer promoted lobbying for the common good. In 1971, the New York Times He dedicated 141 articles to it (it's also true that in 2000 he ran as an independent candidate for the US presidency and in Florida, he siphoned off the decisive votes that allowed Al Gore to defeat George W. Bush; nobody's perfect). Here's a warning: purity is ineffective.
One day, the millionaire executive Rob Mather, moved by a television documentary, launched a fundraising campaign to help Terri (a girl who had suffered severe burns in her bed at home due to her mother's carelessly discarded cigarette): "Nothing for Terri" was the name. He then followed it up with "Nida Against Malaria," in which 250,000 people from sixty countries participated in 2005.
We could add more examples of people who take action and achieve incredible things. What principles guide them? Action, impact, radical compassion, open-mindedness, humanitarianism, a zest for life, and perseverance. The key is radical compassion and humanitarianism Because we could also blame Trump, who believes that the poor wretches have done something wrong. A lie: "If wealth were the inevitable result of entrepreneurship and hard work, all the women in Africa would be millionaires" (George Monbiot, journalist). It's a matter of structural injustice. How is success measured? If it's only in money, ambition can no longer be moral. If it's in knowledge, beauty, or justice, we're already in another paradigm.
We only have one life, let's make the most of it. And the goal can't be exclusively to pursue one's own happiness. Bregman's isn't a self-help book. Sometimes it seems like a book designed to complicate things. But it makes sense, a lot of sense. Against destructive fatalism, realistic idealism. Against the rampant far right, building solidarity with concrete goals. Against paralyzing pessimism, optimism with focused drive. Against the empowered human mediocrity of Trump and company, a vindication of talent with moral ambition.
