This Kindles the Soul | Why You Can't Ignore What's Happening

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

0:14Marcus Aurelius said that if you ever found anything better in life than courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom, those four Stoic virtues, that it must be an extraordinary thing indeed. Which raises the question, is there anything better? Well, here's one pretty extraordinary thing. Love. Sure, you could argue that love fits within the virtue of justice, but it's notable how much the Stoics speak about it. Hakato said, I can teach you a love potion made without any drugs, herbs, or special spell. And it's this, if you would be loved, love. Marcus Aurelius himself says in meditations that he learned from his teacher, Sextus, that the key to life was to be free of passion, but full of love.

0:57Indeed, there is almost no situation in which hatred helps, But almost every situation is made better by love. Love is something that transforms us. Pure love, careless of all other things, kindles the soul, Seneca said. It makes us selfless and inspires us to be better. In the end, the Beatles wrote, the love you take is equal to the love you make. And that love is the thing that gives us meaning. Love may not be better than the four virtues, but is certainly their equal. It emboldens courage. It inspires discipline. and it strengthens justice. It gives purpose to wisdom. And it is an extraordinary thing indeed.

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4:43Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. So I am the grandchild of immigrants. My grandmother and grandfather both came over here from Europe in the late 40s, early 50s. My grandfather on my mother's side was actually in a refugee camp in Graz, Austria, which I went and visited maybe 10 years ago. Actually, the Obstacles of the Way came out. I went and I visited. It's like an apartment complex now. But he got sent to this camp. And he ended up being pulled in to be a translator for some soldiers. He ends up somehow securing a contact wherever he gets a visa to come to the United States.

5:26I was talking to my uncle about this, and he was saying that, like, the people that went back home, almost all of those men did not survive. They got shot. And so he makes it to the U.S. I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for that. I have a place in my heart for the immigrant story. And a couple of weeks ago, we ran an episode titled This Is Why You Have to Care. And I was trying to react to something I was seeing in the news, which was not just the sort of cruelty and the lawlessness of what's happening with the ice raids happening all over the country is a situation that was on the verge or is on the verge of spiraling out of control, but more the indifference to it that I was noticing.

6:05I think there's a version of stoicism where you go, I just focus on what's in my control. I can't follow every news story. Maybe it's even one that's like sort of really logical, like they broke the law. A country can't have too many immigrants. Maybe you're just thinking about this as like a political issue and not a thing involving real human beings. Now, obviously, in talking about this, I got a number of comments. Maybe you're one of those people that left those comments. You know, I'm super woke. I don't know what I'm talking about. I'm drinking the George Floyd Kool-Aid, someone said. I don't know exactly what that means.

6:42But a lot of it was that, like, isn't it a stoic principle that you don't have to have an opinion about everything? And what about the idea of justice? Didn't these people break the law when they were coming here? I didn't know exactly how to respond. So I wanted to get more information. So I reached out to someone I know. He's a reporter for USA Today. His name is Rick Jervis. We met under some weird circumstances, actually. I was in Rosemary Beach, Florida. I was walking to see a Christmas tree lighting with my family. And he stopped me on the street and said, hey, aren't you Ryan Holiday? I said, yeah, I am.

7:14He's like, oh, I write for USA Today. I'm an author. I just signed a bunch of my books. There's a lovely little bookstore there called The Hidden Lantern. And I myself had just signed books there. So I went back later in the trip and I grabbed it. He wrote this book called The Devil Behind the Badge, which is about a Border Patrol agent who has some kind of mental break and becomes a serial killer. It was a haunting, fascinating, terrifying true crime novel. But Rick is a reporter for USA Today. He covers immigration. He's won a Pulitzer Prize. He knows way more about this than me, not just historically, but through the coverage he's been doing lately.

7:50And so I wanted to start with the question that a lot of people threw at me, which is like, why should anyone care about immigration? Your average busy American maybe is seeing what's happening on the news. They're seeing these horrible videos, but then also the sort of typical political disagreement about it. Why should a person care about immigration enforcement, especially if the people that are being caught up in it came here illegally? Right. That's, I think, the question people have. I guess a number of different reasons. One is because like immigration touches almost every different community here in America.

8:27Every community has some segment of an immigrant population living in it. Everybody walks by it every day, sees it every day. But this seems to be a very pivotal time like here in America where the courts and the federal government are basically combating, trying to figure out what is the best way to go about doing immigration enforcement. And there's a lot of disagreement right now between the courts and the federal government as to how to go about doing that. So even if you don't think that it doesn't affect you, this is your country playing out its systems of checks and balances and law and order.

9:01So I think it's a really interesting time to pay attention. I'll link to his most recent article in the show notes. But I also wanted to know, like, what is actually happening, right? Like, what's going on? What is an ICE detention center? What is happening there? What are these centers like? Because you've been to some of them, right? I have. Some of them are better than others, but they're not really great places. You know, these are big places where a lot of these folks are grouped together. Some of them have kind of bunk style beds and like rooms. Others is just a big open area and they have cots.

9:35And almost all of them, like the lights are kept on 24-7. So people talk about sleep sort of deprivation a lot. And it's just a really tough, tough place to be. And what they're doing more and more now is basically detaining families. And that's something which wasn't happening under the previous administrations. There are, you know, laws, there are settlements, past settlements, which detail how you're supposed to sort of detain immigrant children and families. And a lot of those things are just being bypassed. And they're detaining a lot of these families in these sort of detention centers. And, you know, as a great reporter, Rick doesn't obviously just talk to immigrants, people in the activist community, but he has embedded with and interviewed law enforcement officers.

10:23He's talked to Border Patrol agents and ICE officials and administration officials, and he wanted to get their perspective, too. I've met a lot of these folks, especially down in the border. I've met a lot of Border Patrol agents. I've done embeds with Border Patrol and driven around with them. And I found a lot of them are really professional stand-up guys who are in it for all the right reasons. And I've actually seen them in action. I've actually seen them approach like a group of immigrants and offer them water, make sure that they're okay, and then like drive them off. I can't imagine them basically enjoying this latest phase, you know, because they really do rely like on their reputation.

11:02Right. And they really rely on all agents acting with sort of professionalism. And so to like see some of these sweeps and some of the things which are happening. Well, because you want to think you're the good guy. Have you seen that famous, are we the baddies sketch? It's like this, it's this German soldiers in a trench in World War I or World War II. They're like repeating the propaganda to themselves. Like, we're the good guys. And then the guy's like, so like, why do we have these like skulls on our jacket? You know? And like, and they're like going through and it's like sort of slowly done.

11:30He's like, are we the bad guys? You know? And like, to me, there's something there that, I think you can go through in any industry, in any kind of job where you're just like you have you have what you got into it for and you have the stated reason and you have all the protections and the imagery and the symbolism. And then it can kind of crumble on you. Yeah, I mean, it's got to be so hard, you know, and I mean, this is a country built on laws. This is a country known for its laws and its sort of adherence to like laws and to see a lot of these things happening outside the law or in bending of some of the laws for other goals.

12:09It has to be hard on agents. It's hard on the public to like see this happening also. So it's hard on the courts. It's hard on the courts, for sure. It's hard on lawyers. It's hard on, you know, it's hard on a lot of people. It's just interesting to see where it all goes. One of the comments I got a lot was that didn't Bill Clinton and Obama and Biden, you know, deport a lot of people. You weren't upset about that. Actually, that's not true. The first immigration event and protest I went to was while I worked at American Apparel nearly 20 years ago. There's a big series of immigration rallies in L.A.

12:42every May. Bought a back page ad in the New York Times for an immigration campaign we were running at American Apparel about immigration reform. Again, nearly 20 years ago. So this is an issue I've cared about for a long time, and I'm mad at abuses and injustices wherever they happen to be. But I wanted to relate that comment to someone who knew a bit more about it. If you go back to the Obama administration, he was known as a sort of deporter in chief because he actually deported a lot of people. And he was actually deporting a lot of people. The difference was that he was deporting a lot of people just as they came over the border and repatriating them back into Mexico or back into their countries.

13:19And these are recent arrivals. As soon as they came in, it was like administration would basically deport them right away. The difference that's happening now, again, like are these sweeps. They're trying to detain and they're trying to deport people who have been in this country six, seven, ten years who have like established roots here. some of them with children who were brought over as infants who are now like in grade school or middle school, and they're being swept up and they're being lumped in with all these other people, with the recent arrivals, with people who have criminal records.

13:51And it's a much more visible thing, you know, like they're going to factories, they're going to schools, and it's a much more theatrical and visual way of doing things now, whereas previous administrations try to, as much as possible, deport people who the courts deemed were basically sort of deportable. And it strikes me maybe a difference there is like there's a difference between getting someone who came over the border, sending them right back over the border, and catching someone in New York City, putting them in a camp or detention center in West Texas for an extended processing period and then deport.

14:32So it strikes me that the more logistics that are involved, the more chances for abuse and suffering compounded on top of what, even if the deportation is unavoidable. And I guess it's worth pointing out, immigration enforcement has the word force in there. It's never going to be a pleasant thing. But when you're grabbing large groups of people, transporting large groups of people multiple times or then sending them to some third country, that starts to become ripe for abuse and mistakes and other kinds of things that can happen, right? Abuses. I mean, immigrant advocates have been complaining about abuses for years, right?

15:14For like decades, even in much softer administrations who like didn't view sort of immigration enforcement like the same way. And they've been complaining that these folks are picked up and treated as like secondhand citizens. I think the administration, though, is really kind of up against a wall at this point because they are trying to fulfill this quota system, which means that they're just trying to round up as many people as possible. It's really about numbers for them. They just don't have the actual detention space either. And so they are playing whack-a-mole trying to like round up as many people as possible and trying to figure out what to do with them, where to put them.

15:53And so like you see them crossing state lines and being placed in sort of detention centers that are two or three states away. And like you're absolutely right. You know, that basically opens up the offense for a lot of different abuses, whether it's how they're picked up or how they're detained. And what sort of legal remedies do these people have once they go through this labyrinth? You know, because it's like really hard to track them. It's really hard for somebody who's being transported from two, three different sort of detention centers to even obtain legal help. It's really hard when they were just in one place for them to have the sort of wherewithal to like know how to access legal aid.

16:34Now they're like being transported between different detention centers, ending up three states away. So their legal rights are really being glossed over. So, look, I try not to let comments get in my head. I try not to let the cruelty and the meanness of the moment that we're in get to me. I try to take that energy and use it to learn more, to understand more, to ask people who know what they're talking about what's actually going on. So I really appreciate Rick coming on the podcast. Rick is a national correspondent for USA Today. He's based here in Austin, Texas. He began at the Miami Herald, where he actually won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism.

17:13He did a series on voter fraud. He's worked for the Wall Street Journal and the Chicago Tribune. He was USA Today's Baghdad bureau chief for two years. He covered the Shiite-Sunni conflict, the trial of Saddam Hussein, and was embedded with a number of different troops. He gave me a lot to think about. I hope you got something out of this episode as well. We're trying to do more of these sort of deep dives into different topics. As I said, if you are a true crime or a narrative nonfiction reader, his book, The Devil Behind the Badge, is just an incredible book. I think you'll really like it. And I hope you check it out.

18:06the couple of years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please spread the word, tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you.