The Cult for Moral Ambition
How Zealot Capitalism is Stealing Corporate Talent to Attack Consumerism
Editor’s note: Regular Firebreak readers will instantly get the satire running between the lines of this article. Sadly, there are many vulnerable young people who will fall victim to these manipulative cult techniques. If you feel that the School for Moral Ambition is the solution to your problems, please talk openly to some friends or family before making any life-changing decisions.
Are you feeling like your job is going nowhere?
Do you think the only purpose of your work is to make more money for billionaire shareholders?
Did all of that hard work to earn a top-level degree now feel like a waste of time?
Is it hard to find meaning or worth in anything you are doing?
Why don’t you quit your job and join a cult?
The School for Moral Ambition has just the program for you. We can lift your sense of purpose to a higher level, giving you the chance to do good, feel good about yourself and finally find meaning in your life. When it seems like everyone around you is debasing themselves in the immoral squalor of industrial crime, we have marked out the path of righteousness for you. Just leave your job and follow us!
We are unlike those other one-stop virtue shops, like that “Good Lobby” and their smarmy Alemanno poser who has gotten into bed with some ethically-compromised activist groups. Nor do we preach an “Ethics for the 21st Century” like those robber philanthropists at that Effective Altruism cult. They got too caught up brainwashing crypto Boy Wonders like Sam Bankman-Fried, motivating him to steal from clients for those golden donor-advised commissions. The School for Moral Ambition is on a much higher ethical plane, designed for those who are serious about doing good with their lives and are ready to abandon everything to pursue that goal.
Now who wouldn’t want that?
The Robin Hood of Talent
And like any good cult, joining is easy. First, contact one of the thousands of Moral Ambition Circles opening up around the world. Engage in the targeted discussions and see where you can use your expertise and experience to truly make a difference. In these circles you will find other young aspirational people just like you, full of hope, energy and a certain level of vulnerability that makes them ripe for exploitation. The circle discussions will help guide you on your path to righteous fulfilment.
You will be encouraged to apply for a School for Moral Ambition fellowship in line with one of our many programs. We have classes at this moment working on important moral crusades like stopping livestock farming, eliminating processed food and blocking tobacco harm reduction strategies. We select candidates with the strongest CVs, offering them seven-month fellowships with salaries that can compete with their dead-end middle-management pay grades. After a month of indoctrination (euphemistically referred to as “training”), the fellows are then farmed out to our partner campaign organizations as apprentices where they can bring their experience and talents to the front, network more widely and be ready to take on the world with the moral ambition only a righteous zealot can muster.
Our founder, Rutger Bregman, referred to us as the “Robin Hood of Talent”. As the capitalists are stealing from the poor, we feel emboldened to steal the talent from their companies and use these angry young geniuses to upend the failed, immoral capitalist system. And if our “school” profits nicely from such campaigns, well, … the spoils of war and all that…
Case Study: Our Strategy for Good Winning over Evil
The School for Moral Ambition has just completed one of its first classes of professional activists taking on pure evil - Big Tobacco. In 2024, we accepted 24 fellows for the Tobacco-Free Future Fellowship class of 24-25 that campaigned to try to abolish vaping. One of the fellows, according to the Daily Show interview, was recruited from a tobacco company. These highly skilled professionals were then placed within partner organizations to fight against vaping and other nicotine products. The School for Moral Ambition fellowship website lists ten fellows from the Tobacco-Free Future’s first fellowship class, most of them partnering with Bloomberg-funded NGOs like Vital Strategies, the Global Alliance for Tobacco Control and the World Health Organization (another Bloomberg-funded NGO).
Once their fellowships are completed, the alumni can move to the next projects or coach incoming indoctrinatees for the 25-26 Tobacco-Free Future Fellowship cohort. The professionals were selected because they are highly-skilled, natural leaders so there is no problem leveraging them within our network. Imagine the scalability of unleashing waves of talented and morally determined activists into new projects every seven months.
The anti-nicotine Impact Unfiltered project is one of the outcomes of this fellowship and is a good example of how these highly-skilled professionals can move forward once their fellowship is complete. Impact Unfiltered is funded by the School of Moral Ambition and two Dutch foundations: the Contribute Foundation and the Nieuwe Waarde Foundation. The Contribute Foundation is a fiscal sponsor, taking donor-advised funds that they use to run programs. We don’t ask where these dark donor-advised funds are coming from since we are all in the business of doing good (and nothing bad can come from that).
The “Willy Suttons” of Virtue
This fall, the School for Moral Ambition opened an office in New York and started promoting our strategy even more ambitiously. In Manhattan we are able to mingle among the highly trained but poorly appreciated vulnerable professionals who make up our target audience. That is why our founder and high priest, Rutger Bregman, went on The Daily Show to speak directly to those we seek to draw in.
But we are not only drawing from an enormous global talent pool to develop the next class of warrior activists. We moved from the Netherlands to the US in order to tap into the vast opportunities for funding. America is the land of milk and honey for entrepreneurs with the products of virtue and goodness ready to sell. Foundations and donations are but the tickets to redemption for ill-gotten gains.
The School for Moral Ambition was expressly designed to appeal to philanthropic foundation annual reports. We portray ourselves as the “sick kids” of left-wing activist lobbying campaigns and no deep-pocketed foundations would ever second guess our intentions. Our kick-ass marketing team is busy, as I speak, designing different color-coded levels of giving as well as charitable ambassadorship titles for billionaire philanthropists who seem to need to feel as good about themselves as the vulnerable middle-income professionals we are feeding through our moral meat grinder.
With the hundreds of millions of dollars of annual funding we should be able to raise from US tech billionaires who are beginning to question the righteousness of all of their climate change donations, the School for Moral Ambition will soon be able to unleash an army of highly-educated, heavily-indoctrinated, well-networked lobbyists and campaigners ready to fight on any activist issue. This is a new breed of opportunism - zealot capitalism.
The goal is to change public policy for the good on behalf of the righteous. Like the emancipation of slaves or universal suffrage, we will soon be able to set people on the right path, freeing them from the evils of meat, sugary foods, alcohol, vaping and the use of plastics. With talent, unlimited funding and a deep sense of righteousness, who would be able to stop us?
But why stop there? Our moral ambition seeks purity over tolerance. There is no end to our moral ambitions. So join our movement, be the change and find meaning in your life (as we crush the infidels).
To the Cynics…
Some may be cynical and think that the School for Moral Ambition is:
just trying to develop another breed of activism building up an army of cult-imbibed professionals to try to control the narrative, public policies and consumer choices.
They may think that these post-capitalist zealots are merely entrepreneurs bringing exploitation and opportunism to a much higher level.
They may feel for the vulnerable people who are seduced by the promises of meaningfulness and virtue.
Then there are those who wonder how much money the School for Moral Ambition is able to fence from innocent foundations and endowments with this persuasive virtue pantomime.
The cynics who think these things should be silenced as they are clearly acting from inferior values and a lack of ethical standards. These offensive low-lifes could not possibly understand all of the good we are doing.
Endnote: Willy Sutton was a bank robber who was once asked why he robbed banks. “Because that’s where the money is!”