How To Be A King | What Stoicism Gets Wrong

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1:01Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these Stoic ideas, how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy.

1:27How to be a king. Most of us don't live underneath a king, and few of us would still ever want to be a king, at least in the sense of ruling a country by hereditary right. Even Marcus Aurelius would have conceded that this is wonderful, for he understood that most kings were bad and that the job was bad for most of the people who had it. Yet, as we talked about recently, the Stoics were still fond of the metaphor of the sovereign. Musonius Rufus would say that a philosopher was inherently a kingly person, and Seneca would write that to be fit to rule, one had to first rule themselves. So when we look at the lives of the Stoics, that's what we see.

2:05Men and women who were, to borrow a line from the Bible, diligent in their business and thus fit to stand before kings. Cleanthes carrying water to the gardens, as if it was philosophical business. Musonius Rufus teaching his students to have the strictest standards in their rhetoric and writing. Cato insisting on honesty and transparency and accountability in government despite the corruption around him. Antoninus, who was in fact emperor but so dedicated to the job, as Mark Surrealis observed, that he scheduled his bathroom breaks. We don't have to hold supreme power to be supremely powerful.

2:40We don't have to wear the purple, as they said of the emperor, to stand out. No, we just have to show up. We have to do a great job. Hold ourselves to high standards. We don't need to be honored to be honorable. That's not something the position gives. That's something that we give the position through our discipline, our courage, our justice, and our wisdom.

3:09The Stoics were not perfect. They were flawed people. They made mistakes. and there are flaws in the philosophy itself. I think it's just important that we don't turn Stoicism into a dogma and we don't hold the Stoics up as being more than what they are, which is just human beings.

3:28The Stoics are not perfect, and they certainly weren't infallible. They were human beings, like you or I, which means they made mistakes. More importantly, they lived a really long time ago. from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius is hundreds of years. So they were products of their time and place. The Roman Empire, the Greeks, these were some of the greatest societies that ever lived. I mean, we are still being informed by and inspired by them today, but they also believed in appalling things. They did appalling things. It was a brutal, nasty, violent place. The point is, this is not gospel. This is not the word of God.

4:05They're ideas, right? They're the best things that those people thought they knew at the time, and there were things that the people themselves often didn't fully live up to. So I'm Ryan Holiday. I've written a number of books about stoic philosophy. I've spoken about it to everyone from the NBA to the NFL, sitting senators and special forces leaders. In today's episode, I want to talk about what the stoics got wrong, because in some cases, we can learn as much from their errors in judgment or their errors in theory as we can from anything

4:34else. What do I disagree with about stoicism? I mean, one of the obvious ones is just the context within which all of this is happening. So look, Marcus Aurelius, in the opening paragraphs, he talks about how he's proud of the fact that he never had sex with any of his slaves. So he could sort of vaguely sense that there's something wrong with having sex with a slave, but he was thinking about it as a self-control issue, it didn't occur to him, which is a failure certainly, that like the act of owning another human being and then having sex with him, that was the problem. Even Epictetus, who is a slave, uses the analogy, the metaphor of slavery, but I don't think there's any passage where he comes out and specifically says owning a human being is a crime against humanity.

5:22And so this is the fact that in that time, these were assumptions that sort of went unquestioned, right? Even Epictetus and Seneca both, you know, sort of talk about, you know, not having a womanly soul, right? Or not being like a woman. So they're not even thinking of questions, like the idea that a woman is, is first off, not any different than a man, and that the female sex have their own strengths and virtues. All he's thinking about is this stereotype, which was a fact, you know, in Roman society. So I think we shouldn't be afraid to question these assumptions that some old dead white guys had 2 ,000 years ago.

6:03It's just people making the most sense of the society that they lived in. So they're way ahead of the curve on some stuff and then way fucking behind the curve on other shit.

6:17I'd love to have a conversation with you about something that I think stoicism is missed. Oh, let's hear it. Yeah. How dare you? Is the way that we work with emotions. Okay. There's an ordering in stoicism about thoughts. Get your thoughts right. Sure. You know, work from that place. And I go, yeah, thoughts are upstream. We know from best in class modern science that it is bi-directional. Thoughts influence emotions, emotions influence thoughts. And then in between, we've got feelings, which is our subjective interpretation of the raw data of emotions. So feelings are like private and they're internal and emotions are public and observable.

6:59So heart pounding is an emotion. And then how you label it is your feeling. Okay. So I think we need more compassion. I think we need to work from emotion because we've numbed them for so long and we've been afraid of them for so long. And I do think at the time of stoicism, it made perfect sense not to be run over by emotions. Now, but if you can dance well with emotion and you can dance well with thoughts and you can play there just a little bit more, I think the world is calling for not an uncontrollable emotional human, but a thoughtful, compassionate, dare I say, person that is working to make something better.

7:41Well, there's this stereotype of the Stoics being totally emotionless, being robotic, sort of stuffing it all down, you know, suppressing it or being somehow getting to some monk-like transcendent state where you no longer feel emotions or anything at all, which I think totally misses it. So I did this book a few years ago called Lives of the Stoics, where instead of sort of really diving into what the Stoics said, I just tried to write these biographies of who they were. Now the Stoics got married, the Stoics had kids, the Stoics made works of art. The Stoics played sports. The Stoics fought for political causes.

8:13There was this whole generation of Stoics called the Stoic opposition, which was basically a series of resistance fighters who gave their lives in many cases against the tyranny of several bad emperors in a row, including Nero. And there's even one Stoic, there's a Stoic named Chrysippus, who died of laughter. He was just laughing so hard he was old, he probably had a heart attack and die so i think when we actually look at who they were in practice it's very different than maybe what comes off in the page and so my my sort of take and maybe this is a modern interpretation which i'm also okay with like they're dead they can't get mad at me for changing things but my interpretation is that the stoics were not about the suppression of the emotion but about understanding and processing and then hopefully making fewer decisions on those emotions so i like your distinction between having the emotion and the feeling like, like being angry and punching someone because you're angry are different things, right?

9:11So to me, stoicism is the stopping yourself before you throw the punch, as opposed to stopping yourself before you get upset that someone called you a terrible name. Yeah. And then the thing that I'm, I wrestle with, and I, just like I said early on, like stoicism is awesome. And I've been attracted to it. I wouldn't have thought this probably five years ago that, wait, we need more compassion. And then if you square it with relationship-based at Finding Mastery, we're using that in our culture to be a relationship-based organization as well. And to be in a relationship-based organization, I need to know not only your thoughts.

9:48That's good. I need to know your history. I need to know the way you feel about your future and your history. And it's the feelings that allows for the deeper knowing. I just want to ring the bell a little bit here about compassion is a really good thing in a world that is thrashing. Of course. And there's a vulnerability to be compassionate. So the cardinal Stoic virtues are courage, which I think people associate with the Stoics. Then there's discipline, which people associate with the Stoics. Then there's wisdom, which people associate with the Stoics. But the fourth one, which I guess would be the third, is the one I'm writing about now, which I think is less discussed, sort of skipped over, is the virtue of justice, which is where I would put things like compassion and empathy and fairness and kindness and caring about the world and trying to have a positive impact.

10:33So it's like, it's not like it was this minor afterthought, like a core pillar, like one of the four pillars is this idea of justice. And to me, one of the ways I've thought about this is like, okay, stoicism in what I control says like, hey, try not to go around being offended all the time. Try not to be overwhelmed by your emotions, etc. But that doesn't change the fact that other people get offended and other people have emotions. I don't think there's any contradiction about empathy in stoicism. It's saying, hey, you should probably go around and you yourself should probably not be an open wound that's horribly offended by what other people say all the time.

11:10That doesn't mean that you get to hold other people to that standard and say, yeah, look, I just call it like I see it. Radical candor here. I think we're probably more in alignment here than people might think. And one of the things that actually gets me upset and I find myself pushing back on it again to go to our point about not caring what the audience thinks. Like I know if I talk about courage, the audience, the stoic audience likes it. If I talk about self-discipline, the audience likes it. If I talk about wisdom and how to learn and get smart, the audience likes it. But if I talk about justice, then people get upset, right?

11:40And I can see people unsubscribe. I see them get mad. If I present stoicism as here's a recipe for being a better, more productive sociopath, that finds a larger audience and is less upsetting than if I go, hey, it's important that you give a shit about other people. And it's important that you give a shit about the planet and the ethics matter. I talk about those things at significant expense to myself because I think they're important. I think it's a really important part of stoicism. And I think it's why when you look at the lives of the stoics, you see that they got involved in politics and they participated and they served their country.

12:20They were involved. We have this understanding of philosophy as something that withdraws you from the world, which is what the Epicureans did, right? The Epicureans retreat to this garden and they work on sort of perfecting their own development. And stoicism, I think, at its core says that's not right. Somebody has to be involved because if you seed the field, somebody else takes over. And so, long story short, I do think there is a place for emotion, particularly compassion and socialism. And I think caring and participating is not just like a part of it, but like a key obligation of the philosophy.

12:58What do you think the Stokes got wrong? That's a hard question because not a lot. Early Christianity is hugely Stoic. Yes. But it takes one extra twist. It takes one extra turn of the screw. where St. Paul says, he talks about the thorn in his flesh. And he says, when I am weak, then I am strong. He uses his weakness as a form of strength with other people. And in so doing, he gives his heart away to others. I think the Stoics didn't quite get there. I think there's one more pass, which is pure love. I can live a Stoic lifestyle, but if read textually, it's a little desiccated for my taste. Interesting.

13:39thing. At the end of the day, happiness is love. At the end of the day, that's all you have. Now, I sound like I'm John Lennon or something, but that's not what I mean. The habits of the happiest people fall into four categories, faith, family, friends, and work. And when I mean faith, I don't mean religious faith. I don't necessarily mean my faith. I give people four examples when I'm talking to young people. Study the Stoics, walk in nature before dawn, study the fugues of Johann Sebastian Bach, join a meditation group. Or the fifth one is follow the faith of your youth, which in my case is Catholicism and it's the center of my life.

14:11But the whole point is you need to transcend you. That's what faith actually means. Family, friends, which are relatively self-explanatory, although woefully underpracticed, and work, which is serving other people. The point is love of the divine, love of your family, love of your friends, and love of everybody as expressly your work. That's the ultimate secret to it. Now, I know, I'm positive that Epictetus got this. How could you not as a slave? Well, I don't know. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And, and, and. The visibility part of it. I'm sure Seneca did. I'm 100 % sure Cicero did.

14:42I mean, he was writing this stuff for his son. Yeah. For his peace sake, whom he loved, right? Yeah. Here's how I'm thinking about it. Life has two parts to be successful. To have a successful life, which means a happy life and a complete life. There's preparation and there's performance. Yeah. Life is preparation and performance. Sports is preparation and performance. Music is preparation and performance. You can't stop with preparation. You got to go on to the performance. You got to get on the stage. You got to get on the field. And that means improvising and that means loving. And that means, and a lot of the way that people read the Stoics today and a lot of the ways that it's interpreted and understood is all preparation.

15:15And so it's all wind sprints. It's scales and arpeggios and a lot of that. And the whole point is the practice of that is the practice of giving your heart away. So I don't think the Stoics got it wrong. You think about meditations. It's just what he happened to write, not everything he thought, but it can feel like an omission. Maybe he had a second diary full of sentimentality. Yeah, right. No, no, that's a great point. But The Meditations is not a sentimental book. No. It's an empowering book because it's not a sentimental book. Look, the problem in our society today, it's all feelings. And the reason that people read meditations and it changes their life is because it's like, huh.

15:48Yeah. I don't have to be shackled to those feelings. I get it. I completely get it. But the truth is that if you stop with just what Marcus says in The Meditations, it's not enough.

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17:07But when I think of broicism, when I'm steel manning the argument against broicism, the idea that here's this philosophy that tells you to stuff down your emotions. Here's this philosophy that's about your personal development, that's turning away from your obligations to other people. There is this version of stoicism that I think has become popular online that's like, Here's the recipe for being a better sociopath, right? And that I am disturbed by. And there's also a version of the stoicism I think has become kind of seized by a kind of a movement you might call kind of a modern day know-nothing-ism.

17:43There's misogyny there. There's racism there. There's sort of political callousness there. That version of stoicism to me is a profound perversion, especially of what Mark Sreelius is talking about. Yeah, stoicism is not supposed to turn your heart to stone. It's supposed to mean you're not overwhelmed by your emotions, you're not this walking open wound. But I mean, when I think of the circles of Hierocles, I think about someone who's actually working quite hard to care about as many people as possible. At the beginning of Meditations, Mark Sirius talks about one of his teachers taught him to be free of passion, but full of love.

18:18And I think that's lovely. Yeah, Philostorgia, which is like family love, paternal love. there is toxic a bad stoicism out there andrew t did a video where he talks about marcus aurelius some of these guys are definitely associating with capital s stoicism yeah but what they're talking about is lower case stoicism which you know is a like a hot potato or whatever in the field of therapy because i mean very simply i've said this a million times but i guess one of the main things that i'd say from my perspective as a former psychotherapist is that there's a significant body of research that shows that lowercase stoicism, we measure it using several tools.

19:00One is the Liverpool Stoicism Scale from different research teams around the world that show that it's unhealthy and it has multiple problems. Let me do a very quick deep dive, right? Because I think people should need to understand some of this stuff, right? And it's not complicated. People who view anxiety or fear or sadness as bad and that they have to repress them or suppress them or conceal them from other people tend to number one there's a well-known phenomenon called the rebound effect or the paradox of thought suppression so if people try to suppress a thought or a feeling that's automatic it usually recurs more frequently and more vividly in the future so there's a number of experiments that show that happening not consistently but it happens enough times that it's a we also know that people who judge the belief that anxiety is bad for example people who rates strong agreement with that statement show poorer outcomes long term in terms of their mental health your brain is designed by evolution to allocate attention automatically to threats if you think that your own tears are a threat yeah like if you think that your hands shaking is a threat if you think that blushing is a threat If you think that emotions or certain thoughts are a threat, your brain will allocate attention to them automatically.

20:21It will narrow its scope of attention down. It will give attention to them highly selectively. You'll get tunnel vision for them. And that will magnify them and exacerbate the effect that they have on your behavior. In addition to those problems, if you're focusing too much attention on coping with certain feelings rather than just accepting them and riding them out, increases cognitive load. So for instance, somebody has social anxiety. If they think, oh my God, having social anxiety means I'm weak. It means I'm not a real man. It means like I have to keep a poker face. I have to prevent other people from realizing that I'm scared inside because it's not manly enough or it's not tough enough or whatever.

20:59We've got to stop people from seeing it. In addition to actually just magnifying it, in addition to making it more likely to recur in the future, it's confusing because it means you're using a lot of your brain power now. You're trying to walk and chew gum at the same time. to try to have a conversation with somebody or give a wedding speech or something while also simultaneously worrying about and attempting to suppress and conceal your anxiety. Like rubbing your tummy and patting your head or something like that. The internet's awash with bad self-help advice that clashes with stuff that we know from research and psychopathology and psychotherapy.

21:31Jordan Peterson is another guy that gives what I consider to be quite bad psychological advice at times. I think he needs some psychological advice. I think over time, Jordan Peterson has kind of dug himself a hole. I try it. It's hard not to make fun of some of these guys, right? He recommends that people should stand up tall and look people in the eye when they're talking to them. Now, the reason he's saying that weirdly, he doesn't mention this ever, but he's talking about something called the James Lang theory of emotion, which is a 19th century famous psychological theory that says, that speculates that if people adopt certain physical posture and body language, it can affect how they feel emotionally.

22:08And there's some truth in that. yeah fake it till you make it like there's some truth in that the problem is often we find in psychology there are things that there's some truth in that don't what the gold standard this is my buy in cbt we love randomized control trials because psychology is full of things that look like they should work but don't yeah so the james lang theory kind of looks like it should work it sort of makes sense there's some validity to it it's not entirely true however it doesn't necessarily pan out like that in clinical trials when you get people to do it in practice. Why not?

22:41Because there's competing factors at play and one of them is that if you try and stand up straight all the time and make eye contact with people, you increase self-focused attention. And we know that that's one of the main things that exacerbates social anxiety. Andrew Tate's another one, you know, he'll tell people to do things to cope with their emotions, but he doesn't know anything about psychology. There are loads of other guys that are giving similar advice and appeal to the same audience right they're the kind of watered down version of the android there are 101 andre take lights and it's easier to pick him because he's already to a large extent debunked his own reputation because of the criminal well what i see is that audience exists right and you want to talk about the temptations of seneca or any of these people it's the same it's the same fundamental thing which is those people exist and there's something that they would like to be told that they will compensate you for telling them what you have to decide as a writer as a creative as of personalities, you go, am I going to pander to that audience?

23:38It's pandering. Or am I going to say what I think is true and what's important? Am I going to do what's right?

23:46I heard about this case, I think it was in the UK. This guy gets fired from his job. He didn't shower. He was rude to his fellow employees. And then when he gets fired, he goes, you're persecuting me for my religion. And he says, I'm a Stoic, which I think is, of course, a complete and profound misreading of Stoicism. But I do think there is a certain strain of thinking that says, hey, once you get to the truth, once you understand the really important things, then you don't care about all these silly things that the rest of society cares about. You're saying, I actually know these things are very important.

24:15The truth is somewhere in the middle. We shouldn't be slaves to the opinions of others, but we are an inherently social species. Like, we become fully human in relationship. True freedom is found in restraints, right? And other people are restraints and self-imposed restraints. And that's where we become truly free and we become fully human and humane. This is like the idea of the humanities, like this mode of education that cultivates our humanity. But also it's the liberating arts, the arts that liberate us from our baser desires, from being enslaved to just our passion.

24:49You shouldn't accept anything uncritically or unquestioningly. and we should look for the flaws in not just stoicism, but we should look for what's good in other schools of philosophy to add or to supplement stoicism. So first off, I love the impulse. And I would say that you're also right. Most of the critics of stoicism tend to be these sort of straw man critiques. I'd prefer a steel man where someone's going, okay, here's what's good about stoicism. Here's where they're coming from. But here are the following weak points in the arguments. We could sort of put these into two categories. So one would just be like, what are the assumptions of the time that are incorporated into Stoicism that are flawed?

25:31Slavery being one, there's a sort of a casual misogyny in the Stoics. You know, Marx is saying, what kind of soul do you have? Do you have a woman's soul? You know, he doesn't mean that in a complimentary way, right? So there's a kind of a casual racism, misogyny. you know, the Romans saw anyone who didn't speak Latin as being a barbarian. Baked into Stoicism is just the assumptions of the world 20 centuries ago that is not always correct, and in often cases is not correct. And then there's maybe a second category, actually I maybe say there's three, a second category would be the mistakes that the Stoics make.

26:11So Marcus Aurelius deciding to elevate his son Commodus to succeed him is obviously a catastrophic error. Pato's high-mindedness alienates Pompey and drives him into the arms of Julius Caesar. This is a major strategic error. There's a Stoic named Rutilius Rufus who's brought up on these. He's a contemporary of Julius Caesar. Caesar and Sister, I talk about him in Lives of the Stoics. He is brought up on these fake corruption charges for which he's not guilty. And he believes that his duty as a Stoic is to not even defend himself. He just sort of quietly is martyred. He doesn't utter a sentence in his defense.

26:52This is probably a strategic error. Seneca working for Nero. This is another mistake that a Stoic makes. So we have the mistakes of the Romans at their time, which is incorporated into Stoicism. And then we have the mistakes of the Stoics themselves, which are many. And then I would argue we also have just some philosophical problems. I think the Stoics don't really talk anything about the idea of collective action. So they talk about whether something is in your control and what's not in your control. But if everyone only focused on the things that were in their control, we would never be able to pool our limited amounts of control and change the world.

27:33So there is, and I think this leads back to those first two things, there is a certain amount of resignation to the Stoics in the face of injustices or flawed systems or inequality, even you could say like the plague or any type of problem. I don't see in Stoicism much in the way of a robust toolkit for solving the problems of society or moving the ball forward or creating progress. So I think that's one, you know, I think the Stoics flirt very close to the idea of predestination or a sort of a determinism that I don't exactly buy either. So I think there's a number of flaws with the philosophy itself, but I guess we could talk about this for hours.

28:14The Stoics were not perfect. They were flawed people. They made mistakes, and there are flaws in the philosophy itself. What those are going to jump out differently to different people. I think it's important that we don't turn Stoicism into a dogma, and we don't hold the Stoics up as being more than what they are, which is just human beings. When I wrote The Daily Stoic eight years ago, I had this crazy idea that I would just keep it going. The book was 366 meditations, but I'd write one more every single day and I'd give it away for free as an email. I thought maybe a few people would sign up.

28:49Couldn't have even comprehended a future in which three quarters of a million people would get this email every single day and would for almost a decade. If you wanna get the email, if you wanna be part of a community that is the largest group of Stoics ever assembled in human history, I'd love for you to join us. You can sign up and get the email totally for free. No spam. You can unsubscribe whenever you want at dailystoic.com slash email.

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