May This Be The Last One Standing

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1:42Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom in everyday life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2 ,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at dailystoic.com.

2:10May this be the last one standing. For years, the Stoics had fought. First, they fought moral and spiritual decay, trying to preserve Rome's tradition in the midst of all their success. Then they fought, as Cato did, to keep the Republic intact as Caesar attempted to overthrow it. They fought later in a ragtag group known as the Stoic Opposition against a series of tyrannical and deranged emperors. The Stoics did not win all these battles. In fact, they lost nearly every single one. But they kept fighting, not just politically, but also culturally. They preserved through exiles and imprisonments, through trumped-up charges, slander, and brutal execution.

2:51Nothing deterred them. They clung to their principles. They tried to embody their philosophy. It was a pretty magical day then, a rather surreal turn of events, when in year 161 AD, Marcus Aurelius became the emperor. It's a story I tell in Lives of the Stoics. Stoicism had not just outlasted its enemies, but triumphed over them. Good had beaten evil, and all that struggle had not been in vain. The Stoics would have loved a toast given by Admiral David Farragut in the American Civil War, a similar fight of good against evil, a struggle of many years, not just to keep the country together, but to triumph over the evil of slavery and then white supremacy.

3:32What matters it, General, he said, whether you and I are killed or not, Farragut said as he raised his class. We came here to die, he said. It is our business and it must happen sooner or later. We must fight this thing out until there is no more than one man left and that man must be a union man. Here's to his health. Today's world has its own struggles, its own battles. Perhaps they are less violent, but they are no less existential. Good and evil go against each other still. The dark energy that the Stoics resisted and stood fast against, it's still here. We have people who are trying to overthrow age-old traditions of equality, fairness under the law, justice and freedom, as well as virtue itself.

4:15There is the modern nihilism, excess and hopelessness. We have to fight for our ideas. We have to put ourselves on those front lines. Will we survive? Will we witness the victory? Who knows? What matters is that the last person standing is on the side of the angels, on the side of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom, that they're a stoic in every sense of the word. Here's to their health.

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