It’s Tempting To Tell Yourself This | with All For One, One For All

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1:05Welcome to the Daily Stoic podcast. On Friday, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the Daily Stoic, my book, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance in the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful collaborator, translator, and literary agent, Stephen Hanselman. So today, we'll give you a quick meditation from the Stoics with some analysis from me, and then we'll send you out into the world to turn these words into works.

1:46It's tempting to tell yourself this. For thousands of years, ambitious people have been telling themselves some version of it. They can see their boss has lost their moral compass. They can see that their industry is corrupted or bad for the world. They don't like where things are going. They can see the trend lines. They have a pit in their stomach about it. But what do they do? They keep showing up for work. They keep on doing their job, even advancing in it, getting promoted, making money. They don't see themselves as part of the problem because they're not like the other people. They may even pat themselves on the back for the little good they've managed to do or the bad that they've stopped.

2:23This, of course, is the story of American politics right now. It's the story of Seneca in Rome in the first century AD. As Dana Giori writes in a fantastic introduction to one of Seneca's plays, the Roman mind was ruthlessly pragmatic. Even as he slipped into moral compromise, Seneca probably saw himself achieving public good by out-talking the venal gang of pimps, charioteers, actors, gamblers, eunuchs, and dancers who served as Nero's other confidants. Seneca's detractors rarely point out that his moral treaties contain many confessions that his own conduct falls short of his ideals. As Michael Grant observes, struggling with ill health and confronted with all the perils that the contemporary court and society had to offer, he did at least always try to accept the least of possible evils.

3:15And this pragmatism is not entirely incorrect. In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius reminds himself that he doesn't live in Plato's Republic. Cicero made the same observation about Cato, that Cato wrongly believed that he did live in Plato's Republic and not, in fact, in the dregs of Romulus. But there's a fine line between making the best of a bad situation and being complicit in that bad situation. Seneca struggled with that line, just as the manager at a company doing illegal things might, just as a soldier in an increasingly unjustified war might. We can flatter ourselves that we're essential, that we're one of the good guys, that we're preventing things from being worse.

3:54But are we? Or is that just what we want to be? And look, philosophy isn't just about ideas. It's how you live them, especially when it's hardest. James Rahm explores this in Dying Every Day, which is an incredible biography of Seneca. I'll link to that. And I talk a lot about this and the morally vexing positions that Cato and Marcus found themselves in. That's what basically the new book is about, Right Thing Right Now. Good values, good character, and good deeds. You can check that. You can grab a signed copy. I'll link to that in the notes as well.

4:32All for one and one for all. This is today's entry, October 4th in the Daily Stoic. 366 meditations on wisdom, perseverance, and the art of living. by myself and my dear friend and translator, Stephen Hanselman, starts with a quote from Marcus Aurelius' 6.5, that which isn't good for the hive isn't good for the bee. Inherent in the Stoic concept of sympathia is the notion of an interconnected cosmos in which everything in the universe is part of a larger whole. Marcus Aurelius was one of the first writers to articulate the knowledge of cosmopolitanism, saying that he was a citizen of the world, not just of Rome.

5:15The idea that you're a bee in the hive is a reminder of this perspective. Marcus Aurelius even states the reverse of this idea later in meditations, just so he doesn't forget. That which doesn't harm the community can't harm the individual. Just because something is bad for you doesn't mean it's bad for everyone. Just because something is good for you definitely doesn't mean it's good for everyone. Think of the hedge fund managers who bet massively against the economy. They profited by rooting for essentially everyone and everything else to fail. Is that who you want to be? A good Stoic understands that proper impulses and the right actions that arise from them naturally carry the good of the whole, which is the wise person's only good.

5:56Conversely, good and wise action by the whole are what's good for the individual. One of my favorite chapters in Right Thing Right Now is titled The Great Oneness. And it's about this idea that we are all related. Einstein wrote this beautiful letter to this grieving father, and he says, a human being is part of the whole, called by us, the universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself from this delusion is the main issue of true religion.

6:34Not to nourish the delusion, but to try to overcome it is the way to reach an attainable measure of peace of mind. But my favorite quote, which I talk about in this chapter, I think about all the time, comes to us from James Baldwin. He said, you think your pain and heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, and then you read. It was books and history and philosophy, Baldwin said, that taught him that the things that tormented me were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive or who had ever been alive. It's this idea that we're all one, and it's easy to forget, but it's very true.

7:09No one, of course, has felt this more profoundly than the astronauts who had the unique experience of seeing Earth from space. They experience what they call the overview effect, this kind of instantaneous global consciousness, an inescapable sense that everyone is in the same boat no matter where they live or what they believe. What they experience looking at the blue marble is what the Stoics talked about many thousand years earlier. A Stoic named Hierocles talked about these concentric circles, that there's sort of us at the center, the selfishness, and there are these rings, and these rings encompass more and more people, right?

7:45It starts with our family, our friends, people who speak the same language as us, people who, you know, happen to share a same plot of land as us, and it gets bigger and bigger, and we pull this inwards. He said that was the beautiful madness of philosophy. This is what Gandhi would call the great oneness, who I talk a lot about in the book. And it's a shame that we lose sight of this. It's a shame that people use stoicism as an excuse for selfishness, right? Pericles in 431 BC said, I am convinced that people are much better off when their whole city is flourishing than when certain citizens prosper, but the community has gone off course.

8:24When a man is doing well for himself, but his country is falling to pieces, he goes to pieces along with it. But a struggling individual has a much better hopes if his country is thriving. And in the chapter, I talk about that quote from Marcus Aurelius, and I add another one. He says, we have to see the world as a living being, one nature and soul, where everything feeds into that single experience, moves with a single motion, and how everything helps produce everything else spun and woven together. To be fair, and I talk about this, did Marcus's policies and decisions always reflect this? No.

9:01In his biggest failings, the persecutions of the Christians by the Romans at that time are a reflection of what happens when we lose track of this great oneness as our ultimate North Star. But it's something we've got to think about. It's something we've got to work on. And it's a key part of this stoic virtue of justice that I'm trying to apply more and more in my own life. And I found my happiness and my relationships and my actions to be enriched by filtering it through this lens. And so I'll leave you there. You can grab Bright Thing right now anywhere books are sold. We've got signed copies at store.dailystoic.com.

9:33Of course, you can come grab one at the Painted Porch as well. Although if you're listening to this, maybe you like audiobooks and you can grab an audiobook of it on Audible or wherever audiobooks are sold. I recorded it. Not where I'm standing right now because I'm recording this in my closet, but I did record it at the Painted Porch Daily Stoic Studios here in Bastrop, Texas. So check out Right Thing right now. But most of all, let's try to think about how what's bad for the hive is bad for the bee and how connected we all are.

10:05Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoic podcast. If you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day. Check it out at dailystoic.com slash email.

10:39We'll see you next time.

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