This Is Why You Have To Care

0:00Shopping at Whole Foods is one of the things I do in our family like the grocery shopping is my job so I was glad to be able to do that even on vacation and then you know being here in Hawaii it was the same thing you know it's a whole food is a whole food is a whole food is a whole food is a whole food is a whole food is a whole food is a whole food is a whole food a whole food is a whole food is a whole Whole Foods Market, and maybe I'll see you at the Whole Foods in Austin sometime. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

0:49Seven or eight years ago, it was late at night. I was driving home from the airport, just trying to get home, and I got pulled over in rural Texas, where I live. It was a weird experience. I get pulled over. I get to the side of the road and the cop walks up. And as he walks up to my car, he sees me, immediately relaxes and then basically lets me go. And it wasn't because he recognized me or anything like that. And I didn't quite understand why I'd been pulled over or why I was let go until a few months later, I read an article that was about traffic stops here in Bastrop County, where I live.

1:23And it turns out that our sheriff had been doing targeted traffic stops, basically ticky-tack violations, to try to catch Latino immigrants who were then detained and eventually deported. And this was a major news story, and I didn't realize until I read it that I had been caught up in exactly that. Now, you might say that this is an example of what we call privilege, right? I got off because I'm privileged, and people who didn't get off were not privileged. But I actually think, and I wrote a piece about this not long after the murder of George Floyd and then of Ahmaud Arbery, that privilege is precisely the wrong way to think about this.

2:02Because what I experienced was not privilege. What I experienced was my constitutional rights. Actually, it's more than a constitutional right. According to the founding fathers and many philosophers before and since, the rights to life and liberty and property are beyond constitutional. They are inalienable. The right not to be harassed, the right not to have some goon demand to see your papers, not being strangled to death for suspicion of some minor crime, the right not to be tear gassed or thrown to the ground for monitoring the police, the right not to be murdered, to not be menaced by people with guns, to not be targeted or exploited or incarcerated unfairly.

2:53to speak your mind, to pursue your religion, for your home to be a safe haven. These are not things that the governments give to their people. These are things that God or generations of evolution and progress were endowed to us at birth. And then we in turn give to the government to protect. We give them the power to protect that right for us and for all of our fellow people, right? All of us, whether we're black or white or rich or poor or young or older, whether you're a Republican or a Democrat, whether you're a socialist or a communist, even if you're an annoying, obnoxious idiot. And the point we have to understand is that if these basic rights are threatened for one person, for one community, then it's threatened for all people.

3:42But now, and I've been seeing them on my social media feeds constantly, people will say, oh, but some of these people came here illegally or, oh, what about all the people that the Biden administration deported or that Obama deported? They say, oh, but some of these people are criminals. To which there is an obvious reply. And that reply is due process, due process, due process. That is the answer to every one of those objections. Even a serial killer is lawfully entitled to their day in court. Look, I don't know how to say this to people, but the punishment for filming ICE is not summary execution.

4:18And the punishment for fleeing in your vehicle is not extrajudicial murder, even if that federal agent thinks you're a fucking bitch. And look, being shot in the face three times is not punishment for hitting a federal officer with your car either. I think it's worth saying. Right. The punishment for coming to the United States illegally for whatever reason, the punishment for overstaying your visa or honestly for any kind of violation of immigration laws is not and never will be and certainly never should be a trip to an El Salvadorian torture prison. And look, I get it. Immigration is a complicated issue.

4:58Maybe it doesn't affect you personally. Maybe you think we should have a lot less immigration, right? Maybe you've got a lot of problems going on in your life and you don't understand why this is such a big deal. I also get that crime is complicated, right? And law enforcement is complicated. My dad was a cop for 20 years. I understand. It is a hard job. But this, this is not complicated, right? Heavily armed, masked agents should not be storming American streets demanding to see people's papers. They should not be harassing citizens. They should not be making arrests and sorting things out later.

5:38They should not be harassing people because they don't look like or sound like citizens. They should not be entering schools or hospitals or courthouses or churches to try to take people away. This should not be controversial to say. And in fact, it's our job as human beings and certainly as Stoics to say this, to say it over and over and over again. Because callous indifference to suffering, suffering at the hands of authorities towards minorities or the poor or the voiceless, this is not just like a lamentable fact of modern life, just a status quo reality. No, it's an active crime. And it's one that we are complicit in if we rationalize it or ignore it.

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7:43Something like 2 ,000 years ago, Mark Sturilus would write in meditations that it's also possible to commit an injustice by doing nothing, by turning away. The Stoics believed that to harm one person was to harm all persons. You can see in meditations that some early antecedents of that idea from Martin Luther King about how injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. King said that we are caught up in an inescapable network of mutuality. He said we're tied in a single garment of destiny, that whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. I mean, that could be in Marcus Aurelius' meditations.

8:27I could put them side by side and you would not know who said it. And I get you might not want to think about this. I get that you might not want to hear about this from me, right? I write and talk about self-improvement. I write and talk about philosophy. I write and talk about history. I write and talk about books. That's true. But what do you think all of that is for? What do you think the reading is for? The study is for? The thinking is for, right? It's not so you can make a little bit more money. It's not so you can live in your own bubble or have interesting dinner conversations. No, it's so you can be better.

9:02It's so you can be a better human being. So you can do the right thing when it counts. So you can see through the spin and lies and propaganda. So you are not complicit in injustices that are happening around you. We have to realize that if the state can find ways to deprive someone of their rights, then they can find ways to deprive you and me of ours. That's what I realized there by the side of the road, that this could have gone very differently for someone else. But if it could go differently for someone else, in other circumstances, it could go very differently for me. If they can get away with brutalizing one group, eventually they'll brutalize you.

9:44And in fact, this is an inexorable law of power that you realize when you study history, when you study different regimes and administrations, that whether power is held by segregationists or Stalin, bureaucrats following orders or malevolent demagogues, When you give power an inch, it takes another. When you allow evil to happen because it doesn't affect you or people that look like you, it will eventually find its way to you. If not to you, then to someone you love or to your great-great-grandchildren. When you allow in your name evil to be done in faraway places or out of sight, it eventually comes back to you.

10:26There's actually a concept I learned about recently that explains this. It's called the colonial boomerang, that actually much of the destruction that is visited on Europe during World War II was just a more modern version of what they had themselves visited on peoples in the New World, in Africa, and in other places all over the world as colonial powers. Again, you think it doesn't affect you, but it does. That's what Martin Niemler's famous poem, First They Came, is about. You've probably seen it or heard the refrain. You just maybe didn't know it was from a poem. It goes like this. He says, first they came for the socialists and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist.

11:11Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me. Niemler's words, they're not theoretical. He had tolerated, even complied with policies that he didn't agree with during the Nazi Reich. He had rationalized them. He had assumed that his Christian church would be protected, that he was part of the in-group. And for a while, it was. But in the end, he found himself in a concentration camp where he nearly died.

11:52And someone later asked him how he could have been so self-absorbed, how he could have been silent when it mattered. And he didn't try to excuse any of it. He said, I'm paying for that mistake now. And he said, and not me alone, but thousands of other people like me. It's essential that we see not just this situation in front of us this way, but all kinds of injustices. Because when you do, you realize that injustice affects you, period. It affects everyone. Again, even if it's far away, even if it's affecting a group you don't like or disagree with, it affects you. It matters. It matters directly.

12:31It matters urgently. There is no such thing as an injustice that doesn't affect us, that doesn't matter. We're all bees of the same hive, Marcus Aurelius writes in meditations. And there is no injustice far away enough, no victim different enough or unsympathetic enough, no rationalization clever enough to make us exempt from that hive that we share. And again, the issues at hand may be complicated, but our obligations aren't. We have to care. We have to speak up. We have to try to stop them.

13:15Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it. And I'll see you next episode.