TED talk by Rutger Bregman
I don’t often watch TED Talks. I don’t know why, but I kind of took against them, early on. I think the reason I took against them was thanks to watching CEOs of large corporations doing the same sort of schtick.
It all seemed a bit vain and egomaniacal, and there was a whiff of evangelical smugness about the format. Look at me up here, a picture of success; sit at my feet, and hope that maybe you’ll pick up a few gems, the crystallised diamond beads of wisdom that drip off me!
The truth is, however, that the describe actually watched or listened to, have usually been quite good. Or at least quite interesting.
This popped up in my FB feed. I guess FB’s AI has learned me quite well. To my own surprise I decided to watch a bit. I was all too ready to dislike both speaker and subject.
But as I listened, I thought what he said sounded, well… sound. When he directly contradicts one of Margaret Thatcher’s basic tenets (‘poverty is a character defect’*), I start to like the guy.
This TED talk sounds rather like the prologue to a book length argument. And as such it feels like it lacks in depth and detail. But the basic idea, the basic argument, seems both cogent and – rather surprisingly, to me – quite uplifting.
The moral positivity such a philosophy requires, in a world currently ruled by the amoral heirs to Thatcherite strains of ideology – the ‘I’m alright, Jack’ and ‘dog eat dog’ mobs – is refreshing.
* Good God, Thatcher was an appalling idiot.