Can You Build a Castle? | Ask DS

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1:02Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. Well, on Thursdays, we not only read the daily meditation, but we answer some questions from listeners and fellow Stoics who are trying to apply this philosophy just as you are. Some of these come from my talks. Some of these come from Zoom sessions that we do with Daily Stoic Life members or as part of the challenges. some of them are from interactions I have on the street when there happened to be someone there recording but thank you for listening and we hope this is of use to you

1:44can you build a castle oh Cato might be a folk hero now but at the time at the time they hated him the expression we can't all be Cato's was not meant kindly it was dripping with disdain The fact that there were no statues of him in Rome was not an oversight. This was a man who was forcibly driven from the forum on multiple occasions, a man they sent into exile, a man not unfamiliar with jeering mobs or death threats. To paraphrase the song, you could build castles out of the bricks they threw at Cato. And they threw it at him for what? For doing his job? For not being corrupt? For sticking to his principles?

2:18For protecting Rome's old ways? But the funny thing is Cato didn't need to build castles with those bricks because he had something better. Stoicism gave Cato an inner citadel, a sense of purpose and confidence and strength for which no amount of external criticism, pressure or violence could touch. As Marcus Aurelius, no stranger to criticism himself, would write in meditations, they kill you, cut you with knives, shower you with curses. That somehow cuts off your mind from clearness and sanity and self-control and justice. The answer for Cato was no. No, it doesn't. Marcus Aurelius did his best to supply the same answer.

2:55And that's what he was trying to remind himself of in the pages of Meditations. So we must strive to do the same, no matter how many bricks or curses or tempting offers they throw at us. Nothing should cut us off from the four virtues. Nothing about it should touch our inner citadel. And that's the idea of the four virtues, which I'm, of course, in the middle of this series about. courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom. I've got the four virtues tattooed on my wrist here, but we have a cool coin version of it in the Daily Stoic store. That's what I'm holding now. There's a ring version of it too.

3:29You can check it out at store.dailystoic.com.

3:42Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Thursday episode of the Daily Stoic podcast. I've been joking lately that on the Thursday episodes, I answer your questions, but not really your questions, just random people's questions. In this case, you actually could have asked me a question because I was at the Barnes & Noble in Union Square for the launch of Right Thing Right Now. Will Gadara was the host, but then we kicked it to an audience Q &A and all the people that were nice enough to show up were able to ask questions. And that's what I wanted to bring you today. This is me answering those questions.

4:15I will say the mic wasn't amazing for the audience. So the first question was someone was asking me about Cato. Was Cato too rigid, too self-righteous, too firm in his sense of justice sometimes? And was that a personality flaw? Cato being a sort of person of immense rectitude and principle, but this ultimately makes him somewhat ineffectual if not ultimately problematic politician because politics is about compromise. And he struggled to strike that balance between doing what was right, no matter the cost, and solving problems partially, which might have allowed them to solve them more fully.

5:03But he sort of, there's an argument that he brings about the collapse of the Republic by his intransigence as much as Caesar brings it about by his ambition. Seneca is a fascinating example. No one writes more beautifully about the theme of justice than Seneca and yet no one worked as closely with an evil person as Seneca being the advisor to Nero but we're talking about the timelessness of all this stuff. It's such a, you know, depending on what time I go side of the bed I wake up on I go Seneca was the worst, Seneca is the best. You know, Seneca probably told himself he was the adults in the room and he was saving things from being worse and then other people said he was complicit and an enabler and people are having to make politicians and leaders and you know officials in this country right now are having to make very similar decisions and trade-offs and and we can see where they fall short and where they struggle and these are not easy decisions.

6:04You see you're almost saying the same thing about Jimmy Carter I guess, right? There's an argument that Jimmy Carter should have been more pragmatic and was was ultimately the job of the politician is to be reelected and and he failed in that regard. But then I was talking to someone about this this morning. Jimmy Carter is my guy. You only have the argument he would make is you have the presidency now. Just because you put things off to get reelected does not mean you get reelected. So you have it again. This is a debate people are having right now. You have the presidency now. What can you do with it now?

6:47And by and large, the things he did with it then were good things, and in some cases, things very ahead of their time that we came to understand later were the precedent. So you have it now. You have the opportunity to do the right thing now. Your pragmatism says, oh, but if I do it later, I can do more good later. Or is that just Seneca? Seneca says, if I leave someone worse, it will replace me. OK, but he's doing bad shit now. We'll be there. So these are complicated moral questions, for sure. And I think the Stokes provide us the opportunity to turn these questions over and then try to get lessons that we apply in our daily lives now.

7:28Somebody asked me if I could ask Marcus Aurelius a question, what would that be?

7:58virtuous. You have this wonderful person, you know, it's wonderful thinker, this wise, just virtuous person. And then his son, his successor, is so abhorrent and unsuccessful. And what gives, you know, is this a is this a struggling to put things into practice? Was he actually a not good father, which would be a, you know, a mark against all the other wonderful things that he it? Was it a court of history? I'm endlessly fascinated with that. It was funny, we were just talking to Gary V about the, you know, meet me in the middle and how the virtues are the midpoint between two vices. Someone was asking me about, you know, some tips and tricks for hitting the golden mean.

8:44So for people who don't know, the golden mean is this idea from Aristotle that most virtues rest between two vices. So you have recklessness and you have cowardice, and courage is actually in the middle. You have wastefulness and stinginess and generosity in the middle. And so this idea of virtues being a midpoint, I think it's really interesting, this idea of moderation. And any of the things taken to an extreme can become twice. And Kate is probably a great example of this. It's sort of unbending this works on paper, but what about sticky, complex situations involving other human beings? And I think maybe that's where we can ask ourselves, is this taking into account reality?

9:39You know, the fact that human beings are imperfect, the fact that we have imperfect or incomplete information. To me, that's kind of the question. It's like, am I being practical is maybe the wrong word because practical and expediency are often excuses for not doing the right thing. But how do we think about this in terms of the real world where it's going to land? It's tough. The goal of me is very simple, but then finding what that is is a process of dialing in and maybe giving yourself some grace that sometimes you're gonna be a little too far this way sometimes you're gonna be a little too far this way but then your life is a process of kind of tuning this dial to maybe a good way and then somebody was asking me about Nietzsche and his connection to the Stokes which I'm by no means an expert on and probably could know more but I thought it was an interesting question I think it's the fundamental question of being a person.

10:41How should one be? What should one do? How should one treat others? And we've got a lot of different answers to that question. And for some of us, you know, God says X, Y, or Z is a sufficient answer to that question. And then for others of us, we go, but why? What about this? What about this? And so what I like about the Stoics is that they try to get the answer to that question somewhat logically. And, you know, they're saying, you know, not, hey, if you're a bad person, you don't go to hell. They're saying, hey, if you're a bad person, your life will be a kind of hell. And they have ample evidence of that.

11:23They're looking at these powerful Romans and Greeks and kings and, you know, wealthy business people who can do whatever they want. and they do whatever they want and it seems wonderful. And it also is up close and it's quite terrible. So I think we're just, this is the thing that everything pivots around, you know, that our sense of justice, our sense of right and wrong. If you want to listen to me and Will chatting, I'll link to that in today's show notes. Thanks to everyone that came out. Thanks to everyone that bought Right Thing Right Now. And actually, someone sent me a picture of a table at the Union Square, Barnes and Noble where they had some of the extra books that I signed.

12:04So there might still be some there. And I will talk to you tomorrow.

12:32say thank you.

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