We All Carry A Debt (Will We Repay?) | Role Models

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1:29Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Each day we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, illustrated with stories from history, current events, and literature to help you be better at what you do. And at the beginning of the week, we try to do a deeper dive, setting a kind of Stoic intention for the week, something to meditate on, something to think on, something to leave you with, to journal about, whatever it is you happen to be doing. So let's get into it.

2:10We all carry a debt. Will we repay? Ralph Ellison was walking through a building on the grounds of Harvard after dinner one evening, when by chance he happened to look up. There in Memorial Hall, which sits on Cambridge Street just across from Harvard Yard, he saw a long list of names carved into the marble. I knew its significance almost without knowing, the author later recounted, and the shock of recognition filled me with a kind of anguish. Something within me cried out no against that painful knowledge, for I knew that I stood within the presence of Harvard men who had given their young lives to set me free.

2:47Ellison had not had an easy life. He had experienced race riots and lynching and all the terrible injustices that came from the era of Jim Crow. Besides, like many of us, he was busy with his own life, his own problems, his own ambitions. But there, looking at the names of the Union dead from Harvard, he was struck by a sense of indebtedness that would never again leave him. This indebtedness is something we all carry, whoever we are, wherever we come from. We are indebted to the good that was done for us. Someone took care of us when we were small. Someone invented the device that you are listening to this on.

3:21Someone sacrificed for a future generation to have what it has. The Stoics learned the hard way many lessons that we are able to gain easily by reading a book. We have to pay that forward. There's also a debt that we have to pay back. Our ancestors are not all Union men. We live on stolen land. Our museums are filled with looted goods. Our progress came at great expense to the environment and to other species. Who made the device you're holding? Who made the t-shirt you're wearing? Who worked the land that fed Seneca while he wrote his letters? Hint, it was slaves. One of the subjects in Right Thing right now, the new book, is Albert Schweitzer, a philosopher and doctor who dedicated his life to setting up and working in medical facilities in South Africa.

4:06When asked why he did this, he explained that in light of the horrors of colonialism from the then only recent past, he didn't have a choice. We are burdened with a great debt, he said. We are not free to confer or not confer these benefits on these people as we please. It is our duty, he said. Anything we give them is not benevolence but atonement. This is the foundation from which all deliberations about works of mercy must begin. Our ancestors were wonderful and they were terrible. We, their descendants all over the world, are indebted to them for both. We have to pay forward the good they did.

4:43We have to make right the wrongs they did. We don't control what they did, to borrow from the dichotomy of control at the center of stoicism, but we control what we do now, here in our own times. Doing better is up to us. This is what the virtue of justice demands. This is what decency and duty demands of us. Will you do it? This idea of paying forward good deeds, of contributing to a brighter future in the presence, it's one of the themes in the new book, Right Thing Right Now, Good Values, Good Character, and Good Deeds. It's officially out on June 11th, which is, I can't believe it, in a couple days, but it's gotten some great reviews.

5:19I'm so excited. I've been able to talk about it now on a bunch of podcasts. I'm so excited for you to read it, and I've got a bunch of awesome bonuses for you. You can grab it at dailystoic.com slash justice. You can get signed pages from the manuscript. You can get signed first editions and a bunch of other awesome stuff, including the playlist I made when I was writing the book and some bonus chapters I couldn't fit in the book. You can grab all that at dailystoic.com slash justice. You can get the book as an e-book, audio book, anywhere books are sold. But I would love for you to grab it over at dailystoic.com slash justice.

5:50That's where all the details are. Right thing right now. Good Values, Good Character, Good Deeds comes out on June 11th. Thanks.

6:03Role Models. And this is from this week's entry in the Daily Stoic Journal. You can check out the Daily Stoic Journal, 366 Days of Writing and Reflection on the Art of Living by me, Ryan Holiday, anywhere books are sold, including The Painted Porch, my bookstore at thepaintedporch.com. Adoption was a widespread practice in Roman society, especially the senatorial class, and as a provision for imperial succession. Marcus Aurelius was himself the adopted son of the emperor Antoninus Pius, who himself was adopted by the emperor Hadrian so that Marcus could one day succeed them both to the purple.

6:39While Seneca was never adopted, his brother Novatus was, becoming Gaio, who in the New Testament refuses to press charges against St. Paul. But Seneca liked to look at the phenomenon of adoption the other way around, saying that we can always choose whose children we want to be. For him, Cato, the towering, resolute stoic who railed against Julius Caesar in defense of the Republic, was always standing by in his mind. The first book of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, in fact, is a catalog of all the people that Marcus had learned from and the lessons he had taken from their lives. So this week, take a minute to think of the models that you can follow, wise and admirable people that you can measure yourself against.

7:21We like to say that we don't get to choose our parents, Seneca said, that they were given to us by chance. Yet truly, we can choose whose children we'd like to be. That's in On the Brevity of Life. But then, in moral letters, Seneca said, we can remove most sins if we have a witness standing by as we are about to go wrong. The soul should have someone it can respect, by whose example it can make its inner sanctum more involable. Happy is the person who can improve others, not only when present, but even when in their thoughts. I think for me, this idea of choosing whose children you want to be is great, right?

7:58Whether you had amazing parents or the world's worst parents, you can also choose to be the children of the greats of history. We did a Daily Dad email not long ago where Bruce Springsteen is talking about being an ancestor or ghost? You know, who are the ghosts that haunt you and who are the ancestors that inspire you? And how can you choose to follow in the right footsteps? For me, Robert Greene is kind of an adopted father. He's about my father's age, but he's who I want to be as a person in many ways. Professionally, he's deeply inspiring to me. The way even that he has spent so much time and energy and patience shaping me into the writer that I became.

8:39That in and of itself has been inspiring and is an example I try to follow in. So, I've never met Marcus Aurelius. I'm not related to Seneca. I have no lineage that puts me back into ancient Rome with Epictetus, but we can still be the descendants of these people. We can still be their children. James Baldwin was famously talking to his nephew and he said, you come from steady peasant stock, people who built the railroads, people who escaped via the underground railroad, people who responded to the blows of fate in life with dignity and poise and creativity and perseverance. Now, is this literally true?

9:22Does he know for a fact about the railroads or the underground railroads? No. But we choose what tradition we hail from. We choose whose child we want to be by the example that we follow, by the heroes we give ourselves in our mind. And that's what today's entry is about. And I hope you take a minute to think about whose footsteps you're following in and what example you are setting so that perhaps someday someone else might choose to be adopted by you.

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