Do Your Job | Right Thing Right Now Excerpt

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2:12Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Sundays, we take a deeper dive into these ancient topics with excerpts from the Stoic texts, audiobooks that you like here or recommend here at Daily Stoic, and other long form wisdom that you can chew on on this relaxing weekend. We hope this helps shape your understanding of this philosophy, and most importantly, that you're able to apply it to your actual life. Thank you for listening.

2:52We can't all be Cato's, but we can try. We're probably not going to find ourselves in the Senate anytime soon. Definitely not the Roman Senate. We're probably not going to be put in charge of the treasury or sent to administer a distant province. We're probably not our nation's last best hope against tyranny. Probably not going to be leading an army in a civil war. We're probably not going to have to choose between life and death, servitude under Caesar, or suicide. In Rome, they used to say we can't all be Cato's, a statement about the almost superhuman principles that Cato the younger seemed to live by.

3:27Well, we can't be a Cato for a lot of reasons. We live 2 ,000 years in the future, in a world that the tradition-minded Cato could have never imagined. We can't be Cato because we are not born to a prestigious family of great wealth and influence. We were not sent to the greatest schools and personally tutored by the greatest minds of antiquity. We also thankfully live in slightly less interesting times. As far as we know, we do not sit at the hinge of fate or a turning point in history. So we'll never be Cato, and maybe that's a good thing. But you know what? We can still strive to be like Cato.

4:00We can be honest. We can treat public money, indeed anyone else's money, as sacrosanct. We can respect the traditions that matter. We can toughen ourselves up like Cato. Cato liked to walk barefoot. And we We can avoid pretense. He often went bareheaded, too, ignoring the trends. We can be helpful to our fellow citizens. We can be tolerant of our relatives and friends, even when they don't live up to our standards, as Cato did with his brother. We can step in when we see bullies. There's a famous story about a young Cato ending a childhood game when he saw the older kids picking on a scared little kid.

4:34We can refuse bribes and petty corruption. They sent Cato to work in Cyprus, hoping he'd be a little bit more agreeable when he came back. We can raise our own children in the four virtues. Portia Cato, his daughter, was the steel backbone behind Brutus, who ultimately did assassinate Caesar. We can do what's right because it's right, even if they hate us for it, even if it doesn't succeed, even if it costs us. We can embody these Stoic ideas professionally and personally, whatever we do, wherever we live, whenever we live. When the Stoics talk about justice, this is what they mean. It wasn't Cato's role as a politician or the cases that he tried that made him an embodiment of this virtue.

5:15It was the little decisions that he made day to day, the things he did, the ways he lived. History gives us many examples of how showing up to do the right thing every day turns ordinary people into legendary heroes. That's why Seneca urged us to choose ourselves a Cato, someone whose principles can help us navigate even the most difficult and treacherous circumstances, as well as give standards against we can judge our own behavior on a day-to-day basis.

5:47So when you're writing a book, you don't know everything you're going to say, but usually for me, there's like a couple of things I'm really excited to say, like stories. I'm like, that's going to be a story in the book. I can't wait to tell that story. Harry Truman was one of the characters I was super excited to write about and write thing right now. Gandhi was one, of course, I did a couple of different podcasts about the biographies I was reading about Gandhi as I was researching it. But one of the stories I was super excited to tell, probably one of the first ones I wrote, was the story of this guy named Floyd Mann.

6:16And I heard about Floyd Mann in David Halberstam's book, The Children, which is about sort of youth movement inside the civil rights movement. And it's about this heroic Southern police officer. He was the public safety commissioner in Alabama who'd grown up in segregation, in Jim Crow. And so you might expect he's going to participate with his government's resistance of sort of federal oversight and with the activists who are attempting to blow segregation apart. I don't want to spoil the story because I'm just going to give it to you right now. I'm going to tell you this story. This is from the audio book of Right Thing Right Now, Good Values, Good Character, and Good Deeds.

6:57and it's one of my absolute favorite stories in the book. I'm so excited for you to hear it. There's a Bible verse in this one. It says, seest a man diligent in his business, he shall stand before kings. That's actually the sort of title of part one of the book, to standeth before kings. And I think someone like Floyd Mann is an example of that. A guy who had a somewhat regular job. He's not a hero of the civil rights movement that most people know about, But because he did his job and he did it well in this moment, he did his true duty, his true responsibility to all the citizens of Alabama. He became this heroic figure.

7:35And John Lewis makes an appearance in this chapter and some other heroes of mine. So I'm excited to bring that to you. And by the way, you can preorder Right Thing right now, Good Values, Good Character, and Good Deeds anywhere books are sold. But if you want a signed numbered first edition and you want a bunch of other bonuses, go to dailystoke.com slash justice. Enjoy this excerpt.

7:59Do your job. He was a Southern good old boy. He'd never gone to college. He'd been a police chief in a small Alabama town at the height of segregation. And he'd known John Patterson, the state's racist governor, since he was in third grade. So when the governor had ranted about and tried to stop the Freedom Rides, which attempted to integrate buses across the South in 1961, everyone had expected him to tow the party line. That's my public safety commissioner, Patterson told the representative of the Justice Department. His name's Floyd Mann and he can't protect him. Tell him, Floyd, he said. With that, Floyd Mann took a deep breath and made the most momentous statement of his life.

8:45Governor, I'm the commissioner of safety, he said. If you tell me to protect these people, then I'll protect them. and then Mann proceeded to lay out the most ambitious protective detail offered to protesters in the history of the nascent civil rights movement. Highway patrol in front and behind integrated buses, helicopters and airplanes above with the reserve of highway patrol cars ready at the first sign of trouble. The room was stunned and nobody more so than the governor. The only person who didn't find this strange at all was Floyd Mann, who seemed to actually take seriously the duty of his position, which was, after all, to keep people safe.

9:24While the Justice Department and those brave freedom writers had notions of equality and societal transformation on their minds, Floyd Mann was thinking of a smaller kind of duty. My purpose was law enforcement, he later reflected, trying to make sure that nothing tragic happened to those people while they were in Alabama. It's a powerful thing, isn't it? When someone does their duty, when they take their job seriously, even in the face of private pressure or public condemnation, when they put the details aside, when they say, as long as I have this authority, wear this coat, bear this license, or wear this badge, I'm going to do what's right.

10:03It says something about the world today that the phrase, I was just doing my job, is more likely an excuse for disturbing behavior than to be an explanation of heroic behavior. It's a way of letting yourself off the hook when really what a job, what a duty is, is all about what it demands of you, from you. The writer Yuval Levin, despairing at the decline in so many of our precious institutions, spoke of the need for each of us to force ourselves in little moments of decision to ask the great unasked question of our time. Given my role here, how should I behave? That's what people who take an institution they're involved with seriously would ask.

10:47As a president or a member of Congress, a teacher or a scientist, a lawyer or a doctor, a pastor or a member, a parent or a neighbor, what should I do here? What he's talking about is duty, not what's convenient, not what's easy, not what everyone else is doing, but what we are obligated to do as a result of our potential and talents, as well as the professional roles we have selected for ourselves in the world. In business, they talk of the duty of a fiduciary, meaning that once someone has taken on a role of responsibility to a company, to investors, to the customer, they can't simply do whatever is best for themselves.

11:27In a famous case in New York in 1928, Chief Judge Benjamin Cardozo ruled against a partner who had attempted to enrich themselves at the expense of another partner. A trustee is held to something stricter than the morals of the marketplace, he wrote in his decision. Not honesty alone, but the punctilio of an honor the most sensitive is then the standard of behavior. The level of conduct for fiduciaries has been kept at a level higher than that trodden by the crowd. Some duties like that of a fiduciary are codified in the law. Some are defined and enforced by a strict professional code, like in journalism.

12:08Others, like the role of a soldier, are a combination of both. Unfortunately, most jobs and professions are not so clear. Or worse, the professionals have abandoned their duty. Was Pontius Pilate doing his job as a magistrate when he sent Jesus to be crucified? Yes, it's true his job was to judge cases, and in some of those cases met out the strict punishments of Roman law. But Pilate also knew that Jesus was innocent, remarking several times that he could see no offenses in which Jesus had actually broken the law. Still, he sentenced him to die because that's what the mob wanted, because it was the most expedient choice.

12:50He knew this, literally telling the crowd that he washed his hands of the matter, that the blood was on their hands as he turned the job over to them. The job of the police officers in Alabama was to protect and serve people, not do whatever the governor told them. Certainly, the governor had ditched his responsibilities, deciding to serve public opinion rather than enforce his constitutional obligations. Meanwhile, the local police and cities the riders traveled through were collaborating with the KKK to target the activists. Such was the scene in Montgomery, where a racist mob encouraged by the police attacked the riders with ravenous, deadly anger.

13:33As a young John Lewis disembarked, he was besieged and beaten. Watching helplessly on the ground as his friend, Jim's work, was almost killed. As he attempted to reconcile himself to his own impending death, two shots rang out. One man marched forward through the surging crowd, undeterred even as his clothes were nearly torn from his body by frenzied fleeing attackers. He knelt beside a white man murderously slamming a baseball bat into a helpless victim, put his gun against the man's skull and said calmly, one more swing and you're dead. It was Floyd Mann and the riot ended right then.

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15:54Seest a man diligent in his business, reads the Bible verse. he shall stand before kings. In that moment, Floyd Mann, a public servant with a rather boring title, was every bit the hero and king. Of course, he had no sense of that as he did it, no fantasy of riding into the rescue or capturing the limelight. It was something much simpler and earnest, a friend would later reflect. The man thought he was doing his job the way a good law man ought to. The man had sworn an oath. It didn't matter that it was dangerous or that it was unpopular, he was going to keep it. Sometimes doing their job requires extraordinary measures.

16:34Other times it's very ordinary, but it's always heroic. We should learn to recognize equally not only the journalists willing to go to jail to protect their source, but also the journalists doing their day-to-day job, insisting on objectivity and fairness, resisting the temptations of clickbait, speaking truth to power. It's not just John Adams representing the British soldiers involved in the Boston massacre. It's every lawyer representing any client, even the guilty ones. It's not just Helvidius defying the Emperor Vespasian in the Senate, or Harry Burns' vote to ratify the suffrage amendment at the cost of his political prospects.

17:15It's your ordinary local official putting party aside and doing the people's business. It's not just Galileo refusing to turn his back on science, but also Dr. Catalan Carrico studiously working in her underfunded, underappreciated laboratory for decades as she pioneered the mRNA research that would develop the COVID-19 vaccines. Her job was to keep doing her job. Even when her bosses left, She had to reapply for that job time after time, even if recognition and appreciation were hard to come by. We do our job, whether it's recognized or appreciated, because we signed a kind of oath when we took it.

17:58We signed a contract. We put on the uniform. They paid us money. And now we have to hold up our end of the bargain. Sometimes our job will place us in situations of life and death, like Floyd Mann. Sometimes they involve the big news events of their time or huge scientific breakthroughs, but they can also be much more ordinary. Saving lives, battling evil, these things are important, but so is deciding not to be a dishonest or unreliable contractor or an inept bureaucrat. To decide to actually give your all to the teaching profession, to leave no child behind, even as your hours are extended and your salary frozen.

18:37to zealously represent a defendant you can't stand, to be an athlete and a role model. Maybe this doesn't seem that hard, but it's rare enough that we know that it must be. Professionalism, duty, commitment, putting the citizens, customers, audience, patients first, and not just in our chosen line when everything is wonderful, but when the chips are down, when the line's a razor's edge. This makes you extraordinary. When we do this, When we do our job, we are not just helping the people in front of us, but society as a whole. Maybe it won't make a difference. Maybe you won't get the credit. Maybe you'll even piss your boss off.

19:18But the alternative should be unthinkable. And it should be said, if they ask or expect you to do something that is wrong, it is not your job. If your profession doesn't have a code of ethics, then make one. To not have one is a recipe for moral dilemmas, for slip sliding. if only unintentionally into gray areas. How could you possibly do right if you don't know what right is? How could you possibly do your job well if you haven't defined it? Some jobs are lofty, some are quite lowly. Each has his or her place in the procession, Walt Whitman once wrote. But do we play it well? Do we fill it credibly?

19:58Do we bring honor or shame to it. That's on us. There is, in fact, a guideline for each and every profession. What is your vocation? Marcus Aurelius asked himself. Wasn't just ruling the empire, writing philosophy books, just as yours isn't making money or getting the paperwork in on time. It's something simpler and more basic. To be a good person, he said. That was his job. And so it goes for you. Your job is to be like Floyd Mann, whatever that happens to be in your chosen line, in your troubled times. Keep the people safe. Show up. Be honest. Care. Act like a fiduciary. Even if you aren't legally obligated to be one, you must obligate yourself to a standard higher than the one trodden by the crowd.

20:49You swore an oath to yourself. Now keep it.

21:05Thanks for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Just a reminder, we've got signed copies of all my books in the Daily Stoic store. You can get them personalized. You can get them sent to a friend. The obstacle is the way. You go as the enemy. Stillness is the key. The leather-bound edition of the Daily Stoic. We have them all in the Daily Stoic store, which you can check out at store.dailystoic.com.

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