The Past Is a Lie | Would Ryan Holiday Ever Run for Office?

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1:16Ryan Holiday: The past is a lie. It's very easy to glamorize the past. We did it in yesterday's Daily Stoic email and podcast, marveling at what it must have been like to live in an age of Cato's or Marcus Aurelius's, a time of philosopher kings, a time of honor and virtue, to see the forum before it fell into ruin, the glory that was Rome, Caput Mundi, the center of the world in all its marble splendor. Except this is a lie, or at least it's an illusion. After all, Cicero had to remind Cato that they did not live in Plato's Republic, but in the dregs of Romulus. There was corruption everywhere in those days.

1:57Ryan Holiday: There was political violence and nearly unimaginable cruelty. Life was incredibly difficult and capricious. Marcus Aurelius buried eight children. This was not particularly unusual. It's easy to glamorize the past and sleep on the present. For all that's wrong today, for all the old-fashioned values we have forgotten, this is almost certainly the greatest time to be alive in human history. The rule of law, a current administration notwithstanding, is better now than it was a hundred years ago. Gangster days of prohibition? And far better than it was a thousand or two thousand years ago. With, you know, slavery and wars of conquest, we are lucky to live in this moment, however flawed.

2:39Ryan Holiday: And better yet, we have a chance to make it better.

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4:23Ryan Holiday: Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On one level, Stoicism is something we do alone, right? We're reading our books, listening to podcasts, we're writing in our journals, we're trying to get better as individuals. But the Stoics didn't take philosophy as something that disconnected them from others. They found it as something that reiterated the imperative of being involved and of service to others. Almost all the Stoics were involved in politics in some way. It's sad that when we talk about getting political, we think it means like having some disagreement. No, getting political is volunteering.

5:05Ryan Holiday: Getting political is running for office. Getting political is protesting. Getting political is moving back to your hometown and opening a small business, or in my case, opening a small business in a small town that you have nothing to do with, but it's where you decided to make your home base and you want to make a civic contribution. It's getting to know your neighbors. it's being involved. Actually, that was in the ancient world, like the word idiot meant someone who is not involved in politics. Soicism is about not being an idiot. It's about not being an idiot in a lot of ways and literally in this way, like being involved in public life.

5:40Ryan Holiday: Seneca said that was the difference between the Stoics and the Epicurus. One was involved in public life and one wasn't. This is something I talked about with my dear friend, Stephen Pressfield, who's been one of my writing heroes for a very long time. Stephen Pressfield wrote The War of heart, gates of fire, do the work, turning pro, the daily Pressfield is a new novel called The Arcadian. I've loved all this stuff. I've raved about all this stuff. I was walking with my father on law the other day. We saw a little lending library by the side of the road. Again, talking about politics. The decision to put one up is a political act.

6:09Ryan Holiday: Someone put one up. We have one next to the bookstore. We have one in front of Tracy's, my wife's coffee shop. Anyways, there was a copy of Tides of War in there. One of my favorite Steven Pressfield books. I was like, to my father, I was like, you've got to have this. You haven't read this, right? And I took it. He went home and read it. In this episode, Stephen and I are talking about this obligation, the one that writers and citizens have to get involved. How, unfortunately, too often, though, we take that to mean opining on social media about national politics, not enough about actually participating in local politics, and how politics and morality are ultimately intertwined.

6:43Ryan Holiday: I think this is a great episode, and I think hopefully it will explain where I'm coming from. I know Sometimes people get upset when I do get quote unquote political. I explain a bit of that in this conversation with Stephen. You can grab signed copies of Stephen's books at the Painted Porch. He signed a bunch while he was here. He's the best. Check out his new novel, The Arcadian. You can follow him on Instagram at Stephen underscore Pressfield. And I've subscribed to his blog for, I don't know, 15 years. It's one of my favorite things to read when it pops up in my RSS reader. That's StephenPressfield.com.

7:12Steven Pressfield: I have to ask you this question. Okay. Do you ever think about getting into politics? Not really.

7:18Ryan Holiday: I've been asked. Why?

7:20Steven Pressfield: Well, because you sort of are bordering on politics now and being outspoken about the political situation now. And it certainly wouldn't surprise me if there were many people out there who thought that Ryan Holiday, this guy, we should run, I'd vote for him. But then again, if it were me, I would think, well, you can probably do more good in other ways than being trapped in Congress or something like that. You know, but I but I wondered if you were thinking in any of those terms.

7:49Ryan Holiday: You know what the word idiot meant?

7:52Steven Pressfield: Yes, I do.

7:52Ryan Holiday: It means like not being involved in public. Yeah, yeah. It is weird that like on the one hand, if you speak out about what's happening in the world, people go like, why'd you have to get political? As if like, you know, defending sort of basic values is the same as as lobbying for a tax bill. You know, like that doesn't strike me as political. That strikes me as ethical sometimes. So on the one hand, people are like, don't get political. And then when people go, you know, we should get involved in politics. We seem to think that means you have to run for office as if you can't contribute and be involved politically in other ways.

8:34Ryan Holiday: It's like all or nothing. There's something weird about that. Yeah.

8:36Steven Pressfield: But like, say, Timothy Snyder. Yes. He's not running for office, but he's very definitely contributing to the debate. So what do you think about him moving to Canada? I actually applaud that. Okay. Because, you know, this is for real, you know? And you know he's on a list. He's on a lot of lists. Yeah. And there are people who are thinking, how are we going to get this motherfucker?

9:00Ryan Holiday: Yes.

9:01Steven Pressfield: And so I hope Canada's far enough away. I don't know if he actually, did he move there or he just took a job teaching at?

9:09Ryan Holiday: He gave up tenure at Harvard or whatever. Oh, he did? As far as I understand it. It is weird to even think that reprisal and persecution is part of the political equation now.

9:24Steven Pressfield: Yes, but it is. Yeah. Uh-huh. You know, and you think of all of the Jews that later that came to the States, you know, in the 30s, and even somebody like Billy Wilder or some of the, you know, the movie director that really contributed. Sure. And what would have happened had they not? Yeah. You know, which is another pathetic thing that they came here. Yes. Now people are leaving here.

9:49Ryan Holiday: There is something darkly ironic about the Nazi war machine being ultimately undone by the people that it pushed out. You know, like their inability to deal with people that they disagreed with or disliked or were different was an enormous brain drain that fueled America, not just for the five years of the war, but for the rest of the 20th and 21st century. And now, yeah, now we're labeling everything as woke and, you know, silly because we don't like it. And, you know, driving those people out of the armed forces, driving those people out of public life, driving them to move to other countries.

10:31Ryan Holiday: It's the biggest self-owned since then.

10:35Steven Pressfield: It's going to be, it's a huge strategic and cultural error. Yeah. On the other hand, speaking of Timothy Snyder, maybe I'm reading you wrong, but you were thinking like if he stayed here, that would be a different statement to fight from inside.

10:48Ryan Holiday: I don't like the don't obey an advance guy moving to Canada before they've actually rounded anyone up.

10:55Steven Pressfield: Yeah. I'm of two minds there, too.

10:58Ryan Holiday: It's like I understand it on a personal level. It's a statement, though. It is a statement that's powerful, you know? It's a canary in a coal mine kind of a thing that you don't like. But anyways, to go to your point, your question, I do think about that. I think it's very important to be engaged politically, to not just pretend that what's happening isn't happening and to speak up and to be involved. I just think it's, you know, it's interesting. Today, I have to vote. For some reason, in a small town, we have to vote like every three months. It's like some primary runoff and mayor thing. And I was like, I don't know if I have time.

11:30Ryan Holiday: And then I was like, you know, we talk about being engaged and then 50 percent of the population doesn't even vote. Yeah. Right. Like the mayor of this town, the election is going to be decided by like a few dozen votes, you know? And so it is interesting how we tend to I think we focus too much on geopolitics and national politics and not enough on local school board and all that kind of thing.

11:55Steven Pressfield: Yeah. Where the actual decisions. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, I'm just curious what you were.

12:00Ryan Holiday: No, and I do sometimes wonder, too, if talking about these political things pushes people out of being interested in stoicism, that they would have found a lot of value in the philosophy. But maybe we do have different views on, you know, some basic policy issues. So there's a tradeoff. But at the same time, I do. It feels weird not to say what you think because you're worried about losing your audience. Yeah. So that strikes me as a plan. Yeah.

12:28Steven Pressfield: What about you? You talk about it sometimes. Not as much as I think maybe I should. But I look at it, you know, I don't know if I'm making excuses for not doing it or not. But there's sort of somebody was talking about a point of leverage. Where can you place yourself where you make the most of what you're doing? And there are, at least this is what I tell myself, maybe I'm just rationalizing, but there are so many voices. As ominous thunder goes in the background, yeah. So many voices out, including yours, that are saying what I believe. Yeah. And am I going to help by just repeating? I'm sort of, maybe I'm waiting for a moment, you know?

13:10Steven Pressfield: Sure.

13:10Ryan Holiday: There's a book in the bookstore I'll give you, Stephen Greenblatt, who's this amazing Shakespearean scholar. He wrote this book called Tyrants. It's similar to Snyder's book, but it's a look at Shakespeare's political plays. And he talks about at the beginning that Shakespeare sort of makes one contemporary political reference in his life and it like immediately lands him in jail. Oh, really? And almost gets him sort of deplatformed. So he decides in that moment, like, never again. And yet almost all of his plays are statements on government and personality and rights and courage and virtues. And so basically his argument was that he just slightly subsumes his political and moral and ethical beliefs.

13:58Ryan Holiday: He decides it's much safer to talk about Roman politics as a means of making political commentary on Elizabethan England. Yeah. And aren't we glad he did? Of course. And by the way, if he had mostly talked about Elizabethan England, would we still be talking about him 500 years later? And so I think most of the political writing I do is in the Stoics themselves.

14:26Steven Pressfield: Politics and morality are really, you know, in many ways the same thing, you know. I don't know if everyone believes that. Certainly these days they are, I think, you know.

14:36Ryan Holiday: Yeah. And I think the founders obviously believed that you couldn't separate the two. Like it was inconceivable to them. It was funny. I just did this event at Stanford with General Mattis. and watching, he's such a calm, contained guy. And they were asking him about the political situation. He goes, you know, things have been bad before. He's like, this country almost elected Aaron Burr. And it was like, you could tell how animated he was. But the point was that the founders believed that you really couldn't let people without honor or virtue anywhere near the levers of power or you'd have a problem.

15:14Ryan Holiday: And that's, I think, why we're in the mess that we're in.

15:17Steven Pressfield: So true. So true. They couldn't inoculate us in advance against that, you know? And that's what, that's the sort of the crack that let the, you know, the cancer into the body politic. That's right.

15:31Ryan Holiday: Yeah. John Adams said a country without virtue in the people would go through the Constitution like a whale through a net. And so you get some singular figure who doesn't have shame, who doesn't feel compelled to be honest, who embraces corruption and cruelty. And all of a sudden you find it's like they're speed running through all these checks and balances. It's crazy.

16:01Thank you for tuning in.