What history teaches us about our future

“Immorality and Unseriousness. These are the two defining traits of today’s leaders. Today it’s not the most capable who rise but the least scrupulous…”

In the first of four 2025 BBC Reith Lectures titled ‘A Time of Monsters’, the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman asks what can be done to counter the moral decay of today’s un-serious elites.

As the BBC faces legal threat from Donald Trump for their Panorama edit, BBC presenters and journalists have been told they cannot quote a line removed from this lecture you’re about to watch, in which Bregman accused Donald Trump of being “the most openly corrupt president in American history”. It’s a chef’s kiss moment that proves his entire argument.