Give It Your All | Ask DS

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1:29Welcome 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.

2:11Give it your all. Cato fought a losing battle. He was trying to preserve a republic that was old and creaky in a rapidly changing world. He was trying to be honest and good in a political world in which corruption was the norm. clinging to idealism, as Cicero said, and refusing to accept that reality was the dregs of Romulus. Cato was going up against the most insatiable of foes, the ambition, the ego of a future tyrant. And yet throughout it all, he was implacable. When they tried to shout him down, when they threatened him, when they tried to kill him, nothing could stop him. Was Cato perfect?

2:48Far from it. He was an aristocrat. He was impractical. He did not compromise or play well with others. As we talked about in our podcast episode with Josiah Osgood, Cato was not totally in the right, but he was more in the right than Julius Caesar, who in the end marched troops against his own country. Cato could have folded. He could have fled. He could have tried to play both sides. He did not. Instead, he gave everything to this cause he knew was just. He gave everything to protect the ideals that Rome was founded on. He did not succeed, but he did the next best thing. He gave his best, which is what we have to do when we find a cause that is right.

3:25We must be like Matthew Arnold's beautiful poem, The Last Word. We must be like Cato. They out-talked thee, hissed thee, tore thee. Better men fared thus before thee. Fired their ringing shot and passed, hotly charged and broke at last. Charge once more and then be dumb. Let the victors, when they come, when the forts of folly fall, find thy body by the wall. I tell Cato's story in Lives of the Stoics, which I suggest you read. And definitely listen to Josiah's episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I really enjoyed this one. I'll link to it in today's show notes.

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5:13hi ryan thank you hi yeah of course um i have more of a general question um is that because you're in outer space i didn't have much choice in the background i'm at work and there's a whole there's a big mess behind me um um so i know a lot of the ancient stoics did not leave a lot of written material so we focus a lot on the big three you know marcus aurelius epictetus seneca because they left the most, whether it's written by them or their students. Are there any other Stoics that left reading material that we should perhaps, you know, learn more about, like as we, you know, proceed in Stoicism?

5:55So this book was translated relatively recently and I enjoyed it. This is Musonius Rufus, who's Epictetus' teacher. and it's called that should that one should disdain hardships and i read this in march last year i've read some of his stuff online before but it's basically um a like a set of notes from different talks um and like so one of them is uh that women too should study philosophy should daughters receive the same education as sons which is more effective theory or practice that kings should also study philosophy, that exile is not an evil. He writes an essay that exile is not evil, and he's exiled four times on trumped up charges.

6:42He says he has one on what is the chief end of marriage? Is marriage a handicap for the pursuit of philosophy? Should every child that is born be raised on food, on clothing and shelter? He has one on whether you should cut your beard or not. It's really fascinating. James Stockdale did a number of short books sort of inspired by stoicism. So I would check that out. As far as the originals go, pretty much everything else is fragments. If you read Lives of the Stoics, which is my book, It gives you pretty much everything that there is from those people, unfortunately. Almost everything else is like a letter here or a quote here.

7:33The record is pretty sparse. The only thing I do hold up some hope on is that we have now begun to develop the technology where they can take some of the rolled up papyrus that was entombed in the ash at places like Pompeii, and they can look, they can like x-ray inside it and read it. And so it may well be that in time, if the works haven't already been destroyed in various excavations, we may over the next 50 years discover or rediscover some of these lost works from the Stoics, which would be pretty awesome. Thank you so much. Yeah, of course. Good afternoon. First of all, I just want to say thanks for your book, Ego is the Enemy.

8:25yeah it literally stopped me from uh shall we say talking back to a previous boss that i was working under all right kind of help me put some things in context at the time um kind of two questions you had mentioned i thought in a recent email um that one of the downsides to the stoics was their persecution of christianity i wasn't sure mark is realizing particular stoics in general um was there a particular reason for that and i'm not saying like back back stoicism but i'm I'm curious what the reasons were for that. Yes. So I actually have a section on this in Lives of the Stoics. Let me find it because it's worth reading.

9:03There's actually a fascinating novel called Blood of the Martyrs, which is by Naomi Murchison. It's a novel about Christians in Nero's court, which she was trying to sort of write. She was writing it as Nazi Germany is rising in Europe and sort of beginning their persecution. So it's a it's a tricky thing. So obviously, put it this way. Rome thought that the Christians were heretics and the Stoics at different junctures were in charge of Rome. And so I more think about it as the Stoics did nothing to stop a persecution or a sort of a set of discriminatory practices that they could have done something about.

9:56But let me see here. So Junius Rusticus is Marcus's philosophy teacher who Marcus puts in charge basically of Rome. He's the mayor of Rome. And it's Junius Rusticus who who persecutes or adjudicates the trial of Justin Martyr, one of the most famous Christian martyrs. You can contrast this. Seneca's brother, Gaio, who's mentioned in the Bible, adjudicates a case involving St. Paul and lets him go free. So it's not as if the Stoics sort of are universally caught up in this, but there is some unpleasantness here. So this is what I say. Justin had, in fact, studied under a Stoic teacher in Samaria, but left the school in favor of the Burgeoning Christian faith.

10:53Many of Justin's writings would evoke similarities between the Stoics and the Christians. and he may have well been familiar with Junius Rusticus's own philosophical work. He quite reasonably expected a favorable ruling from his Stoic judge. As a devout Christian, he knew that a century before Seneca's brother had fairly judged and freed St. Paul and Corinth. But this was Rome in a very different time, and Rusticus was not simply a pen and ink philosopher. His job was to protect the peace. These Christians refused to acknowledge the Roman gods, the supremacy of the Roman state. And this was to them crazy, disruptive and dangerous.

11:30Was it Rusticus's job to enforce the laws to prevent these kinds of things from happening? And perhaps with Marcus away at the front and no one to check him, Rusticus was a little lost in the sway of his own power. In her 1939 novel about Christianity in ancient Rome, written as fascism was crushing religious minorities in Europe, Naomi Mitchinson has a Stoic philosopher attempt to explain this collision course between the Stoics and the Christians. The Christians were being persecuted, he says, because they were against the Roman state. No Roman ever really bothered about a difference of gods.

12:04In religious matters, they were profoundly tolerant because their own gods were not of the individual heart, but only a social invention or had become so. And yet politically they did and must persecute equally and equally must be attacked by all who had the courage. So the point is there's this sort of Roman policy that the Stoics declined to question that puts them on a collision course with a faith or a religion that questions almost all the essential tenets of the Roman state. Does that make sense? No, that seems pretty fair as well, right? I understand why Rome persecuted the Christians. It's more so the Stoics were Roman, more that the Romans were Stoic.

12:50Is that fair to say? I think that's fair to say, but we also, this idea of learning from the past, I don't have any problem saying, you know, Rusticus sits at the head of this trial of this guy who's basically being set up on bogus charges for being a heretic. And instead of letting him off or exiling him or coming up with some symbolic punishment, he orders him to be scourged and beheaded. So there were options. And the Stoics don't take those options. And that's to their eternal shame. And there's just a quick second part of the question. Do you know of any writers who've written on the relationship positively between Stoicism and Christianity?

13:36I think you'd like this book, The Blood of the Martyrs. And then I do think there are some books out there. I've seen them. I just haven't. I just haven't read them. It was only sort of tangentially related to what I was talking about in Lives of the Stoics. But if you find something good, let us know. Thanks. Appreciate it. Yeah. So I recently listened to your podcast with Shane Parrish from Farnham Street blog. Yes. So I started looking at his blog. And so he has all these mental models and, you know, he has one article about how to make smart decisions without getting lucky. And so I just wanted to know if you have various mental models about various decisions that you make, various people that you reach out to.

14:19Yeah, that's a great question. Yeah, I don't know. I sort of go back and forth on the mental models things. When I read them, I find them very interesting. I just don't know if people actually explicitly use them. I don't know if Warren Buffett, when he's evaluating a stock, actually goes, let's divide by zero here or whatever the mental model is. It's one of these things that makes sense to me rationally. And then I wonder how they actually get applied. You know, someone's recommending that Shane has a good course on decision making. I would probably agree with that. I did talk about decision making in my interview with Annie Duke when I had her on the podcast.

15:10She's great. And she has a new book about this. So I might start by that.

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