Make Good Trouble | with Right Thing, Right Now Excerpt

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1:28Welcome 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 we like here or recommend here at Daily Stoic, and other long-form wisdom that you can chew on on this relaxing weekend. end. 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.

2:07Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. We've talked about this a bunch, but there is this perception, because Stoicism is about acceptance or assent is the word they often used implies. It's this idea of, hey, this isn't in my control, go with the flow, right? This living in accordance with nature, and nature isn't fair. It's unjust. There's evil out there, right? So people take that to mean that the Stoics accept or tolerate the status quo. Well, the history of Stoicism doesn't bear this out at all, as I talk a lot about in lives of the Stoics. The Stoics were incredibly disruptive.

2:45Like, why do you think Musonius Rufus was exiled four times. It's not because he was a go-along-to-get-along kind of way. Epictetus is exiled because the emperor at that time is so frustrated with the Stoics specifically that he just banishes all the philosophers from Rome. There's a group of Stoics that basically stretch from, you know, Nero on down that are known as the Stoic opposition. That's what a thorn in the sign they were of the powers that be. Cato, most famously, is willing to give his life to resist Caesar becoming the emperor. And then Brutus and Cato's daughter, Portia, make a pretty big stand against this.

3:24So the idea is that the Stoics were often getting themselves in trouble. Agrippinus inherits from his father, we hear from one ancient historian, a hereditary hatred of emperors. So the Stoics were troublemakers. And that's what I wanted to talk about in today's episode. This is one of my favorite chapters in Right Thing right now. It's the new book on this stoic virtue of justice. And it's somewhere where courage and justice come together. So you have this idea of what's right, what's important. And then maybe that's not what the law is, or that's not what the conventional belief is, or that's not what everyone else is doing.

4:01And so are you willing to cause trouble, disrupt, be a thorn in the side of the powers that be in objection or defiance of something that you believe is wrong. And that's what I talk about in this chapter. It's called Make Good Trouble, good trouble being a phrase from the great John Lewis, which he said was inspired by the example of Rosa Parks, all of which I get into in the chapter. So I'll leave you this. This is the audio book. I recorded that at the Painted Porch Studios there in Bastrop. I'm recording this in my closet before I head out on book tour. By the time you're listening to this, I think Right Thing right now will be out.

4:38We're still honoring the pre-order bonuses, though. You can grab that at dailystoic.com slash justice. We may have some of the signed first editions left. We may have some of the manuscript pages left. I don't know, but grab those as fast as you can. But if you want to listen to the audiobook, which of course this is an excerpt from, you can grab that on Audible or iBooks or Libby, wherever you check them out from your local library. The audiobook is there, and I hope you like it. I'm so proud of this book. This is one of the chapters I knew from the beginning I wanted to write because it's such an important and underexplored part of stoicism.

5:13And I hope you get out there and make good trouble for some good causes. And I hope you like the new book.

5:28Make good trouble. Arthur Ashe was one of the world's best behaved athletes. While other tennis players threw fits and had affairs, while they broke rackets and drove fancy cars. He was self-contained and dignified. They chased money. He went to West Point and served his country. They were driven. He was disciplined. It's not that he was passive or apolitical. It was simply that he had learned from his father's example not to let his emotions get the best of him, to work quietly but firmly on his goals without drawing unnecessary attention to himself. So you can imagine Ash's father's surprise in January 1985 when Arthur called him to say, Daddy, I want you to know I'm probably going to get arrested tomorrow in Washington.

6:16In an instant, his father knew that this was about apartheid, a cause that their family, having lived in segregated Virginia, knew personally. Well, son, he said, South Africa's an awful long way from us here, But if you think you have to do it, then I guess you have to do it. I have to do it, Daddy, Arthur replied. The next day, Ash, the Wimbledon Australian Open and U.S. Open champion and captain of the U.S. Davis Cup team, was arrested alongside nearly 50 public school teachers in front of the South African embassy. It surprised his fans and upset his sponsors. So it goes. Most justice is inherently disruptive.

6:56It means challenging how things are. It means upsetting people. It means taking risks. It means saying things that are impolite, unpleasant, and even offensive. But when you know how the other half lives, when you know there is preventable suffering or state-sanctioned injustice out there, well, you don't care as much about niceties anymore. As a young man, John Lewis saw the same signs that still existed when Arthur Ashe was a boy. The ones that said whites and colored. Signs that separated the world. signs that were tinged with the implicit threat of deadly violence. When he would ask his parents and grandparents what these signs meant, they would tell him that's the way it is.

7:35Don't get in trouble. Don't upset the order of things. It's not safe. It's not worth it. But then Rosa Parks came along. With incredible courage and discipline, she challenged those signs, doing what she thought was right. Years later, Lewis would explain how her example had inspired him to get in what I call good trouble. necessary trouble. For the rest of his life, John Lewis kept getting in good trouble. He was arrested something like 45 times, including five times while he was in Congress. In 2009, at almost 70, he was arrested by the Secret Service in a protest against the genocide in Darfur.

8:14It would be wonderful if this kind of disruption didn't need to happen, if following the law and being on our best behavior was synonymous with doing the right thing. But that's just not how the world works. Certainly that's not how history has unfolded.

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9:57The pursuit of justice rarely involves respecting the status quo. How could it? If injustice exists, then by definition, you must reject the status quo in order to address it. When Nietzsche described the philosopher's war against convention as one of knives, He was also describing perfectly the reality of the activist. It is a brutal fight, an up-close-and-personal one. People will get hurt. Things will be cut to ribbons. It means you throw yourself into the spokes, put yourself in front of the tanks, be the squeaky wheel, the one who won't shut up, the one who repeats the truth that people don't want to hear.

10:35Who do you do this for? You do it for the little guy. You do it for the people who can't do it for themselves. You do it for what is right. No woman has ever so comforted the distressed or distressed the comfortable, Claire Booth Lucy would say of Eleanor Roosevelt. Jesus and Gandhi are two men for whom the same could be said, and it should not surprise us that they both had reputations as agitators too. Like Ash, they had a choice to make. Did they hate the injustice more than they loved decorum? Yeah, we want and need allies, but we can't be paralyzed at the thought of creating enemies. Larry Kramer, an award-winning playwright and gay rights activist who was relentless in raising awareness about the HIV and AIDS epidemic, he didn't always get the balance right, notoriously alienating many of his friends.

11:23But look, his job in that crisis was to wake people up, and the stakes were high. That required dispensing with some niceties. You're all going to be dead in five years, every one of you fuckers, Larry Kramer told the gay community point blank as AIDS began to ravage their ranks. How about doing something about it? Why just line up for the cattle cars? Why don't you go out and make some fucking history, he said. And that's exactly what his group ACT UP did. Like the suffragettes, they disrupted public events and heckled politicians. They dumped the ashes of AIDS casualties on the White House lawn.

11:59They wrapped the home of a homophobic U.S. senator in a giant condom. They stormed the New York Stock Exchange and St. Patrick's Cathedral. They shut down the FDA in protest. A couple of years later, disability activists used a similar playbook with their harrowing capital crawl, where they ditched their wheelchairs and crutches and crawled up the steps of the U.S. Capitol to demonstrate the barriers they faced in daily life. How could lawmakers not respond to that? This kind of publicity is a compelling form of communication, a way of forcing leaders and the public to see how the other half lives.

12:36It creates pressure, and the pressure leads to meetings and policy changes. And when authorities react poorly or worse, overreact, the ACT UP protesters were arrested countless times. It only further undermines their moral authority. Good trouble does good work for good causes. Sure, there are consequences for causing trouble. The jails that activists are thrown in, particularly the ones known to the suffragettes and civil rights protesters were not pleasant places. They were dangerous hellholes. Nor did all the activists live to be vindicated and recognized for their service, as Lewis and others did.

13:14But there is a stain in doing nothing too. Larry Kramer saw something. He knew something. He refused to be silent about it. He insisted on saying something until people heard him. And had more doctors and administrators and politicians been willing to listen sooner, thousands of innocent people, including Arthur Ashe, might still be with us. We need more people to cause more trouble. Florence Nightingale caused plenty of good trouble, but where was her activism against war itself, against colonialism itself? James Stockdale put incredible pressure on his captors, but given what he himself had witnessed in the Gulf of Tonkin, what kind of pressure might he have applied on the Nixon administration for the final two years of the war after he returned home?

14:01In the end, we are more likely to judge or be judged for trouble that wasn't caused than trouble that was. Don't just go along. Don't give the status quo more respect than it deserves. Fight. Fight to help. Fight to make things better. The goal is not to be liked. The goal is justice. Like Arthur Ashe, the great Bill Russell chose to be difficult. Playing in an almost all-white game in the 1950s and 60s, he chose to ask questions. He staged protests. He chose confrontation. It wasn't always understood. It didn't always make a difference. But as he said, it's far better to accept the disputes of the world, the harassments, the arguments, the tensions, the slander, the violence, than to ignore them, than to be the tender turtle on the sidelines.

14:46Men who ask have always succeeded, he said, or been followed by men who have succeeded. Which will you be? What trouble will you seek? What good trouble will you make?

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