It Can Make You Great | The Hidden Power Of Compassion

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0:55I'm recording this on a Monday and Monday is our grocery store day in our family. I usually pick my kids up from school and we go over to Whole Foods, get all our groceries for the week. Although here very shortly, we're going to go over there to get our Thanksgiving turkey because they've got a bunch of great options. Turkeys start at$149 a pound if you have Prime with organic birds at$299 a pound. And they only carry no antibiotic ever turkeys that will bring quality to your table at a great price. Whole Foods has great everyday prices on all your Thanksgiving essentials, whether you celebrate with a massive family or just a few close friends.

1:32Everything they sell has high standards to help you shop with confidence. Enjoy so many ways to save on your Thanksgiving spread at Whole Foods Market. Welcome 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.

2:09Not everyone thinks Marcus Aurelius was so great. And it's true, his record is not unblemished. He fought in imperial wars. He didn't stop the persecution of the Christians. His son was disturbed and unfit to succeed him. So can we really call him a philosopher king? How great a stoic was he actually? These are all good questions to ask in theory, but in practice, they're quite unfair, especially when it comes to looking at leaders. As a more recent president with his own blind spots for his flawed son has put it, don't compare me to the almighty, compare me to the alternative. The measure of Marcus Aurelius' greatness is that under an impossible test, being the emperor, he and his philosophy stood up pretty well.

2:51Absolute power corrupts absolutely, we're told, and yet with Marcus Aurelius, it didn't. He worked hard. He remained compassionate. He didn't indulge himself in pleasures. He sought peace. In the depths of Rome's financial crisis, he even sold off his own possessions to raise money for the country. He was especially good and decent in these ways compared to his predecessors, like Hadrian, who once stabbed a secretary in the eye with a pen for no reason, or Nero, who among a long list of monstrous crimes ordered the murder of his own mother, or Caligula, who killed a man's son and then forced the man to have dinner with him.

3:25Even a stoic like Seneca, who we've stipulated was not perfect, was clearly less flawed and corrupt than the famous advisor of Tiberius. That's the most powerful case for the study of stoicism, the effect it has on the lives of the people who decided to commit to it. It didn't make them perfect, but it made them braver, smarter, kinder. It made them do better work for a better world. And it's a measure of the effectiveness of this philosophy and the people who do their best to adhere to it that they seem to do much better at not being corrupted by power and success than people who don't. The same can be true for you if you give these ideas a chance.

4:02if you work them day and night like Seneca did, if you're still picking up your tablets and going to school to learn more about it, as Marcus Aurelius did even into old age. And whether you're a beginner at Stoicism or you've been studying it, there's something to be gained by getting up and going to school because learning, as Marcus said, is a good thing. And that's one of the reasons we just reopened our most popular course, Stoicism 101, Ancient Philosophy for Your Actual Life. It's the best of Stoic wisdom in 14 days taught by yours truly. There's a bunch of awesome stuff in it. It's 14 emails.

4:37We deliver them each day. There's two Q &As from me. There's a printable calendar, a bunch of awesome stuff. And look, it's cheaper than an intro philosophy class, even at a junior college. And I think it's much better. You'll learn all the things you need to know about Stoicism and you'll learn from me. We'll get to connect in these office hours and deep dives. I'm really looking forward to it. You can join us at dailystoic.com slash 101. That's dailystoic.com slash 101. Don't delay. Sign up now. Dailystoic.com slash 101.

5:15Expand the circle. At the 1932 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, a flashy Japanese equestrian named Shunzo Kido gave one of the most remarkable performances in the history of sport. He managed to grab the lead in a 22.5 mile 50 obstacle endurance race that he didn't normally compete in, that his horse wasn't even trained for. A teammate had been injured and Kido replaced him, but then suddenly clear of the pack and over the second to last jump, a gold medal nearly within his grasp, he pulled the reins and dropped out of the race. Why? Some part of him sensed that the horse could not take it anymore, that although he could win, the horse would not survive the victory.

5:53As the plaque on the Friendship Bridge along California's Mount Rubidoux Trail commemorating his unprecedented display of sportsmanship reads, Lieutenant Colonel Shunzo Kido turned aside from the prize to save his horse. He heard the low voice of mercy, not the loud acclaim of glory. How we treat the people who work for us, how we treat strangers, this says a lot about us. How we treat the defenseless, the voiceless, other species, according to Gandhi, it says everything about us. Whatever you have done to the least of my brethren. In Milan Kanderos' The Unbearable Lightness of Being, written about the Prague Spring and the Soviet military occupation, Teresa, the sensitive and compassionate female protagonist, tells her husband it is much more important to dig a half-buried crow out of the ground than to send petitions to the president.

6:43Of course politics matter, of course the big fights of our time matter, but so do the little things we hardly see. The Jains of India, a religion that dates back to the 6th century BC and emphasizes respect for all living beings, would, as a rule, not make their pilgrimages during the rainy season because they didn't want to trample on the new grass underfoot. What a beautiful and kind practice to build one's plans around. A practical as well as metaphorical reminder that even our smallest choices ripple through the world around us. It was certainly influential to Gandhi whose vegetarianism was the mother of all his other compassionate decisions.

7:17One ancient philosopher would say that kindness was bigger than justice, because justice was about the law, about human beings, but kindness was also about how we treat animals and all living creatures. That's what the Stoics were trying to do, to expand the definition of whom they owed kindness and justice to. Leonardo da Vinci is known for his brilliant paintings and his creations, but his friends? They knew him as the kind of person who would see a caged bird in a market and buy it only so he could set it free. Before Lincoln even knew what slavery was, his moral empathy was awakened when his younger stepbrother, John Daniel Johnson, caught a turtle and smashed it against a tree for fun.

7:55The turtle's painful and pointless death was too much for the boy, who began, his stepsister reflected, to preach against cruelty to animals, contending that an ant's life was to it as sweet as ours to us. So of course, years later, when Lincoln first saw slaves chained together, strung together precisely like so many fish on a trot line as he vividly described it, he was just as appalled. This was no way to treat anyone or anything. Of course, it's easier not to stop and think about what it must be like for a bird in a cage. It's easier to think only of the smell when you pass a factory farm, to think only of price as you're weighing two very differently sourced items at the supermarket.

8:34It's a pain to stop to catch a dog in the street, but just as we must concern ourselves about how the other half lives, we must consider the lives of billions and billions of other life forms on this planet. Have you watched the famous video where Coco the gorilla, after years of watching Mr. Rogers on television, finally gets to meet the man? In an instant, she reaches down to remove his famous blue shoes, a gesture of neighborliness from across the animal kingdom, a reminder that evolution has given many species the capacity for kindness too. and as a result, obligates us to be kind too. Cato the Elder, Cato's great-grandfather, was judged in his own time for the way he used up the animals that worked on his farm.

9:14Not content with simply benefiting from their labor, he worked them to death and then replaced them. It was plenty legal and surely profitable, but that didn't make it right. It's good that we recoil when we hear it, just as we do when we look at an old map and learn that just a few generations ago, our ancestors divvied up an entire continent by what they could take from it. The Gold Coast, the Ivory Coast, the Slave Coast. It's naive to think that these impulses, this crude exploitation has simply disappeared. We must examine the thoughtless profitable cruelties in our own way of living, in our own businesses, and do our best to resolve them or at least mitigate them.

9:51The work of Temple Grandin, for instance, has helped reduce the suffering in slaughterhouses, just as the work of animal rights activists has challenged millions of people to question whether they should be eating meat at all. Both have different understandings of what justice is in this case, but both are making the world a better place. The same goes for hunters and farmers who have radically different relationships with wildlife than environmentalists, but in the best cases have found common cause in the preservation of endangered species, the climate, and the world we all enjoy. Just as each person ought to be able to sit under their own fig tree and not be afraid, so should the majestic wildlife on this planet, animals that have been here far longer than us, be allowed to survive and thrive and do what they do.

10:33And not just the majestic species or the cute ones, the fig tree itself deserves protection. The vine deserves rich soil. The rivers should flow unpolluted. The grass should be able to grow so high it bends under its own weight. As Marcus Aurelius once observed, the whole world is a temple, the Stoics said. Nature is God. We commit a sacrilege when we abuse it. A man is really ethical, Albert Schweitzer wrote, only when he obeys the constant laid on him to help all life which he is able to succor, and when he goes out of his way to avoid injuring anything living. He does not ask how far this or that life deserves sympathy as valuable in itself, nor how far it is capable of feeling.

11:12To him, life as such is sacred. That's what made Schweitzer a vegetarian and put aside most of his philosophical work to run medical clinics in Africa. He had a beautiful phrase that came to him on a boat trip in what is now Gabon, Africa, a reverence for life. We have to care about all life forms, even though our lives are besieged by so many more personal or urgent cares, because it says something about us. Because it is a legacy, we will leave the future. And in fact, it may well determine whether there is a future. It should not surprise us that Cato, so uninterested in the lives of the animals he owned, was also a ruthless slave owner, which is sort of the point.

11:52The logic that says some humans are less important than others because they don't look like us, because they live far away from us, because they're not related to us, is the same logic that says other forms of life are less important. This is not only anathema to the principles of justice, it's corrupting and dangerous to the person who holds it. Unkindness, indifference, cruelty in one area bleeds over. It's also the opportunity. The more we open our hearts in one area, the more open we can be in others. By expanding the circle, as the philosopher Peter Singer terms it, we make the world better.

12:25We also make ourselves better. Every day, I send out one Stoic-inspired email, totally for free. Almost a million people all over the world. If you want to take your Stoicism journey to the next level, I would love for you to subscribe. It's totally for free. You can unsubscribe at any time. There's no spam. Just go to dailystoic.com slash email. Love to see you there.

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