No One Escapes This | When Good Men Do Nothing

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2:00Welcome 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, and 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.

2:41No one escapes this. There is not a single person doing public work today or in the ancient world who has escaped this. No one who has ever written, performed, launched, built, run for office, or opened for business has ever managed to escape it. It's just a fact that if you make stuff for the world, some percentage of the world is not going to like you or it. We talked about this recently, that it's just impossible to hope that everyone is going to love what you do. Some percentage of people are not. It's worth also preparing for the fact that some smaller percentage of people are really not going to like it.

3:16people like your opponents, your competition, your ideological enemies, people who disagree with you, people who have their own issues or problems. How far they're going to take this disagreement varies, but it can be pretty bad. In his poem, If, Rudyard Kipling prepares his son to bear to hear the truth you've spoken, twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools. Marcus Aurelius would have known this feeling, so would Seneca and Cicero and Cato and Zeno. They had political enemies who didn't fight fair. They had philosophical opponents who argued in bad faith. Literally, the first appearance of Stoicism in Rome had to deal with this.

3:49Diogenes brought the philosophy from Greece to Rome as part of a diplomatic envoy, and Cato the Elder, the great-great-grandfather of Cato the Younger, accused him of corrupting the youth. You think Zeno and Cleanthes and Aristo and Chrysippus always agreed with each other that they were somehow above the petty squabbles and backstabbing we see in modern academics? Please. This isn't to say that everyone who disagrees with you as a fool, only a fool would think that. But people are going to twist what you say. They're going to cherry pick. They're going to say things about you behind your back or in forums where you don't have the opportunity to defend yourself.

4:23And worse, some people are going to be persuaded by that. Nearly every week, there is some thread on Reddit about how Daily Stoic is to this or that, and people pile on with their pent-up resentments and conjectures. Every couple months, there is some trend piece about how the resurgence of stoicism is problematic for this reason or that, still corrupting the youth apparently, or that Daly Stoke is getting it wrong, making it too simple, too popular, too commercial, whatever. But this is just life. It's a story as old as time. You'll drive yourself crazy if you think you're exempt from it. You'll never be happy or feel good if your sense of worth is tied up and always being well-received.

4:58If you can't handle the injustice of being misunderstood or unfairly criticized, you got to focus on what's in your control. You got to leave the knaves and the fools to their own business while you do your best to improve yours, to hold yourself to your standards, and to try to get better as you go. And again, I said this on a similar email, but maybe you love Daily Stoic. Maybe you hate it. Maybe your friend is making you listen to it right now. Maybe you're on the fence. I'll just say, I appreciate you listening, and I hope you stick around.

5:36hey it's ryan it's july 26th and i am holding in my hands the daily stoic 366 meditations on perseverance wisdom and the art of living you can grab a premium leather edition you grab signed editions at store.dailystoic.com. We've got a short entry here today from the book that ties to the themes in Right Thing Right Now, and it's When Good Men Do Nothing. Often, injustice lies in what you aren't doing, not only in what you are doing. That's Marcus Aurelius' Meditations 9.5. History abounds with evidence that humanity is capable of doing evil, not only actively, but passively. In some of our most shameful moments, from slavery to the Holocaust, to segregation, to the murder of Kitty Genovese, guilt wasn't limited to the perpetrators, but to the ordinary citizens who, for a multitude of reasons, declined to get involved.

6:33It's that old line, all that evil needs to prevail is for good men to do nothing. It's not just enough to not do evil. You must be a force for good in the world as best you can. And actually, I touch on this very key stoic idea in right thing right now. And I get into that quote there, that idea that all that evil needs to prevail is for good men to do nothing, because the idea behind that quote is a little more complicated. The attribution is not just right. So I'm going to pull up, this is page 143, part two. And I tell the story of Joseph Kennedy, the father of future President John F. Kennedy, who was the ambassador to the United Kingdom from 1938 to 1940.

7:18Germany rushed to rearm, portending not just war, but the Holocaust, which was the logical, in fact, promised end of Hitler's vision. Famine, destruction, carnage, the signs were all there, and so were the opportunities to prevent it. Instead, Kennedy, an isolationist, urged restraint. He made false equivalences and raised whataboutisms. He blamed the victims. He tried to meet with Hitler. He supported appeasement. He discouraged any potential American aid to Britain, even as the bombs fell. It wasn't that bad, he said at first, and then later that it was helpless. Joseph P. Kennedy was not some secret Nazi, but like a lot of people then and now, he wanted a looming problem to not be his problem.

7:55He was looking for a way not to have to care, to not get involved, to not have to risk anything. So perhaps we should forgive his son, John, for misquoting Edmund Burke when he spoke to the Canadian parliament as president in 1961. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, Kennedy had said in quotation, is for good men to do nothing. Burke had said no such thing, but the gist of the idea had rung true for a son haunted by his father's cowardice and cruelty and the loss of his brother in a war that his dad had allowed to happen. Even Kennedy's foreign policy overreaches in Vietnam and in the Bay of Pigs take on a different light with this context.

8:32So, too, does his steel-spined response to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Kennedy learned by terrible consequence that there is no such thing as neutrality in a world where evil exists. He learned that cancer, if ignored, metastasizes. And this also explains another misquotation that Kennedy frequently made. Dante once said that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality. These quotes weren't factual, but considering his father, they were Freudian. They are also illustrative of issues today, because that's the thing about letting evil triumph.

9:08It's not just that it's wrong, it's that it's usually stupid and self-defeating. And I go on, I tell a story about how America responded to the crack epidemic, which was we dismissed it as this inner city problem. And instead of responding to it as a public health crisis, instead of building the infrastructure to deal with addiction and drugs and crime, right, we made ourselves vulnerable to another drug crisis, the opioid crisis, and the fentanyl crisis, which continues to this day. So I think we have this idea of the Stokes as being passive, as being resigned, as not being involved. But that's, of course, not what they're about.

9:43And that's what Marcus Reulis is talking about. So sometimes people get mad here. I talk about political issues from time to time. I talk about things that are happening in the news. That's because you have to get involved. You can't just sit back and pretend it's not happening. In fact, I have a little note card here on my desk that I wrote while I was doing the justice book. I said, beware of explanations or views or opinions that make it possible for you to say, now I don't have to do anything, right? The insidious logic that dismisses something as an aberration, dismisses something as being a certain culture's fault.

10:15It says, oh, it's far away. It says, oh, I can't do anything about it. Oh, things like this have always happened. I want to be really aware of when we're letting ourselves off the hook. Not that we have to get involved and intervene everywhere. I mean, that is the cautionary tale of Vietnam. It was a mistake in so many ways. And yet it was also a mistake for people not to get involved in stopping the involvement, right? So the idea is that the Stoic gets involved. And that's what I talk a lot about in Right Thing right now. Good values, good character, good deeds. This Stoic virtue of justice is an essential one.

10:46It's a difficult one to get right, but it's an essential one. And that's the message for today. Don't do nothing. Don't turn away. Don't close your eyes. Face it. Do what you can. I'm heading over to Australia in a couple of weeks. I'm going to be in Sydney on July 31st. I'm going to be in Melbourne on August 1st. Then in November, I'm doing Vancouver and Toronto, London, Dublin, Rotterdam, all awesome cities I'm really excited to go to. If you want to come to those talks, they're open to the public and you can grab those tickets at ryanholiday.net slash tour.

11:28Thank you.