They Will Shove This In Your Face

0:00Ryan Holiday: Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom, into the real world.

0:14Ryan Holiday: They will shove this in your face. He had to compromise from the start. Seneca had no love for emperors, but Nero was his way back from exile, his chance to be at the center of things once again, having been unjustly exiled by Claudius in 41 AD. So Seneca swallowed some of his true feelings to advise and to teach Nero. And how did the emperor reward him for this commitment? By shoving the moral compromise in Seneca's face constantly. Seneca had to watch as Nero fixed the Olympics so he could award himself the prize. He had to help Nero give a speech after Nero killed his own mother. He stood aside as members of the ruling class were forced onto the stage, humiliated in performance, even sent into the arena to fight wild beasts.

1:05Ryan Holiday: It's a problem as old as time. Just ask Plato, who found himself in the same position with the tyrant in his time. Those that first ask us to bend our principles a little will ultimately return to ask for more and more. They will ultimately require us to contort ourselves into utterly unrecognizable positions. We think we're being pragmatic. In actuality, we're being humiliated. Moral compromise is never a single act. It creates a precedent, then another, and another. As James Rahm shows in Dying Every Day, Seneca at the Court of Nero, we have some signed copies at the Painted Porch, and in Plato and the Tyrant, and in his interviews on the Daily Stoic, This is how good men and women end up being trapped.

1:54Not all at once, but step by step.

1:57Ryan Holiday: And actually, James Rahm's book on Seneca was a book that changed my life. I read it during the sort of fall of American Apparel, and it opened my eyes to some of my own moral compromises. And it changed me. I've thought about his book many times in the years since. I'm fascinated by the example of Seneca. He's been on the podcast a couple of times. It was actually just here in Austin not that long ago, and I asked him about precisely this. And we talked about it. I'm going to bring you a chunk of that episode here for the rest of today's episode. James Rahm is great. Do read Plato and the Tyrant and Dying Every Day, and check out his fuller episodes on the Daily Stoic Podcast.

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5:00Ryan Holiday: Philosophers shouldn't be just writers. They should be doers. And maybe this is what leads Seneca astray too, is he wants to be in the room where it happens and loses his bearings as to when one should leave the room where it's happening. Yes, I know that you have the two books there. You can see I took a few notes on this one. Yeah, they're very parallel stories. Yes. And it's a fine line, I guess, between wanting to be a doer and not just a talker. And then when is your ego leading you into a bad place? That's right. And when do things get so messy that you have to extricate yourself? Seneca tried to extricate himself, but failed.

5:44Yes. And Plato succeeded, but then had to answer all kinds of questions about what went wrong. Why did he bail? And the disaster that he left behind became much worse after his departure. So, yeah, things got very sticky.

6:00Ryan Holiday: Well, I have this quote that I think is sort of it strikes me as maybe the sort of through line of both your books. But I had this on my desk. I don't know when or why I wrote it down. But Pompey's last words where you quote Sophocles, he says, whoever makes his journey to a tyrant's court becomes his slave, although he went there a free man. And so you think you're going to do good work for a flawed person or that you're going to be above the industry that you're working in. Right. Because most of us aren't going to go work for actual emperors or kings. But you think you can go into that place and not get your hands dirty.

6:37Ryan Holiday: But you can't. Right. Exactly. The philosopher has ideal notions of what politics is about as the republic. I mean, the republic enshrines those ideals in the highest way. And then when you hit the ground, hit the ground splattering, as it were, things don't work out so neatly. For Seneca, it's fascinating to me because obviously Nero doesn't start out as a tyrant. Right. Right. His mother is obviously flawed and maybe you could have said he could have seen it coming. But with Seneca, it seems much more like a frog in a pot. The heat is slowly being turned up. And then he is in that space where they say it's very hard to to see something that your salary depends on you not seeing.

7:30Ryan Holiday: And he can't he can't get out. Yeah. Nero started off a relatively good path. The first five years of his reign were later referred to as the Quinquennium Neronis, the best time of the Roman Empire. It wasn't until he became a 20 or he approached his 20s and had the – actually, no, he was well into his 20s after five years and more gumption, more autonomy and took the reins into his own hands more. and then things started to really crash. Yeah, and is it mental illness or is it what power, is it that power is itself kind of a mental illness? In his case, very much so. The freedom to do anything, to have whatever pleasures he wanted, to kill his mother or whoever else he wanted, have the Praetorian Guard at his beck and call, Those would drive many human beings into delusions and insanity.

8:32And in his case, he was already a little shaky to begin with. So it just sort of exaggerated his natural flaws.

8:41Ryan Holiday: It's this tension between access and integrity. Yes. And I got to preserve my access, even though I'm slowly compromising my integrity. That's the tension. And obviously, they all failed that test at some level. Yeah. Of course, what's missing from our society, which is present in both the Greek and Roman picture, is that a philosopher who's widely respected, as both Plato and Seneca were, has automatic access because the ruler needs that legitimacy. He needs a philosopher, an esteemed philosopher at his court in order to appear to be an enlightened person. Yeah. Yeah. We have lost that. Also, like for them, politely declining is not so much an option, right?

9:34Ryan Holiday: The specter of death and real danger, you know, now it's I don't want to lose my access. It's like, OK, so you don't get reelected and then you go make millions of dollars as a lobbyist or a consultant. Like you're not actually the downside is so much lower in today's political environment. So it is much it's even more about ego than than the sort of calculated, you know, balance between all the different factors. I think that's the timelessness of of the the seduction, which is like over here, I'm saying and showing you this. And then over here, I'm saying something different. and the human capacity to hear which one of those we want to hear.

10:22Yeah. And for Plato to have gone back to the court of Dionysius II a second time, five years after departing in a terrible debacle the first time and having caused a rift in the royal family that resulted in his protege, Dion, getting exiled. That is really, it's another stunning example of self-deception.

10:47Ryan Holiday: Yeah, the mental gymnastics that humans are capable of will never cease to surprise you. That's right. And Plato says that he devised a test. You know, this is really a testament to his naivete. He devised a test to see whether Dionysius was a suitable student, that he was going to tell him exactly how hard it was going to be to become a philosopher. And probably he had in mind years and years of studies, starting with geometry and astronomy and higher math and going up to dialectic. And he was going to see how he would react. So he lands in Syracuse for the second time, well, the third time, but the second time under Dionysius the Younger and presents him with this scenario.

11:37And Dionysius says, oh, well, I already know all this stuff because other people have told it to me. And at that point, Plato is sort of done. But the fact that after having lived with him five years earlier for months and months and seeing exactly what kind of person he was, you know, a drunk, a libertine, an unstable emotional figure that he still thought, well, you know, maybe he'll pass the test and I'll have a true student on my hands.

12:06Ryan Holiday: I imagine Seneca, you know, he's somewhere in one of his villas and the messenger rushes in. You know, we have news that, you know, Nero's tried to kill his mother and Seneca's grabbing his toga, you know, and rushing over to the palace. I'm going to tell him this time, you know, it's this has to end. You can't do this. It's like, I'm really going to confront him. This is it. You know, it's like, we're going to have the come to Jesus conversation, which maybe he literally could have, he could have used that expression. Jesus having overlapped with Seneca. But, you know, we're going to have it.

12:41Ryan Holiday: And he's walking there. I'm going to confront him. I'm laying on the line. I'm giving him the ultimatum. And then by the end of it, you know, Nero has talked himself out of it. Right. And then soon enough, he does kill his mother and crosses the next red line and crosses the next red line. And the real skill of the Nero's, of the tyrants, of the Trumps, etc., is their ability to read those people and to know what they have to say to them and what their levers are and how to manipulate them. That at some level they see through them and they know how to get them in their pocket.

13:28Thank you.