Didn’t They Know Better? | Revenge Is A Dish Best Not Served

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0:56Didn't they know better? They knew what was important. They had been tutored from an early age in history and the literature that showed them all the cautionary tales. They knew the perils of ambition. They knew the cost of ego. They knew that happiness was never about externals. They knew that they wouldn't be able to take any of it with them when they died. They knew it was all shadows and dust. Yet they did chase it, didn't they? Seneca piled up a huge fortune. He compromised himself to stay at the center of Nero's court. Cato, for all his principles, pulled some real creepy shenanigans with his marriage to keep his career going.

1:37Marcus Aurelius, as we said, wrote that he would have traded all the palaces and power of Rome for more time with his family. But he didn't actually do it, did he? We all know better. We know what happened to Alexander the Great. We know all the stories about the miserable billionaires, the insecure power brokers, the insatiable art monsters. We know where it got them. Nowhere. Yet here we are, following in their footsteps, nevertheless. Here we are telling ourselves that we just need to do a little more, just one more job, just one more term. We are like Odysseus in Tennyson's tragic poem, made weak by time and fate but strong in will, to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

2:23And this is tragic, to never feel like we have enough, to never be able to stop, to chase the wrong things. This is folly. It is the sirens on the rocks singing, no, it will be different for you. You'll actually get it. You'll be the exception. You'll be happy. We know better. We have to do better. We have to make better choices. History and literature and philosophy tells us, shows us why.

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5:22Revenge is a dish best not served. This is from today's entry, October 13th from the Daily Stoic. 366 meditations on wisdom, perseverance, and the art of living. The best way to avenge yourself is to not be like that. Mark Cerelius' meditations, 6-6. How much better to heal than to seek revenge from injury? Vengeance wastes a lot of time and exposes you to many more injuries than the first that sparked it. Anger always outlasts hurt. Best to take the opposite course. Would anyone think it normal to return a kick to a mule or a bite to a dog? That's Seneca's On Anger 372. And then today's entry from the Daily Stoic says, Let's say that someone has treated you rudely.

6:10Let's say that someone got promoted ahead of you because they took credit for your work or did something dishonest. It's natural to think, oh, that's how the world works, or one day it will be my turn to be like that. Or more common, I'll get them for this. Except those are the worst possible responses to bad behavior. As Marcus and Seneca both wrote, the proper response, indeed the best revenge, is to exact no revenge at all. If someone treats you rudely and you respond with rudeness, you have not done anything but prove to them that they were justified in their actions. If you meet other people's dishonesty with dishonesty of your own, guess what?

6:46You're proving them right. Now everyone else is also a liar. Instead, today, let's seek to be better than the things that disappoint or hurt us. Let's try to be the example that we'd like to see others follow. It's awful to be a cheat, to be selfish, to feel the need to inflict pain on our fellow human beings. Meanwhile, living morally and well is quite nice. It is funny, though, because I wrote this book, Conspiracy, about Peter Thiel and his sort of epic quest for revenge. And I'm fascinated by the sort of brilliant, diabolical, some would say driven by justice response that he takes against a media outlet that had not just rudely and I think wrongly outed him as gay, but it also bullied and picked on a number.

7:32people. And while I do discuss revenge at great length in that book, it wasn't until I was actually finishing up the book that that expression, revenge is a dish best served cold, that I actually got what it was saying. There's a funny joke in 30 Rock where he goes, revenge is a dish best served cold, like pizza. And he goes, really? Cold pizza is better than hot pizza? So what is it saying? Almost no dish is better cold than hot, except for maybe, I guess, dessert. but even the best desserts are hot if you think about it. I think the expression, the emphasis there is on the serving. The dish is best served cold because when you grab the hot dish, it burns you, right?

8:13And that is what the Stoics were warning against when they talk about revenge, that it often does evil to you. It changes you. It warps you. And I think you could even make an argument that this is the trajectory that Peter Thiel is on, right? From his sort of secretive, contrarian bet on destroying Gawker. This leads him to Trump. This leads him and some of his people to ultimately rent her office on despicable platforms. It makes him a sort of hated villain. I don't know if he would do it again in retrospect. The counterfactual is fascinating to me. You know, Nietzsche said that, you know, beware that he who fights monsters, meaning that you become like the monster.

8:53You could argue even America after 9-11. There's some sort of irony as we go to get our revenge, to get back at the people who do this. Now we're a nation with domestic terrorism and religious fundamentalism. And we squander trillions of dollars in the Middle East that makes us quite vulnerable and quite hypocritical when it comes to much more pressing and ominous and evil enemies. So revenge is something that we have to push away for the most part. Seneca does make an interesting distinction between getting justice. He says if someone kills your father, right, you should get justice, not revenge.

9:34I think that's important. But we have to make sure that as we are responding to treatment, that we don't become like the thing that so mistreated us, right? That we don't become like the enemy, that we don't become worse than the enemy, that we don't add insult on top of injury, that we don't add self-inflicted injury. on top of the injury. And that's today's message from The Daily Stoic. You can check it out at store.dailystoic.com, or I'll link to it in today's episode notes. Enjoy.

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