Yes It’s Radical (Even A Little Crazy) | The MOST Important Stoic Lesson For Crazy Times

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0:56Yes, it's radical and even a little crazy. It's perfectly natural. It's logical. It is the definition of self-interest that we would want to take care of ourselves first and then next favor people who are related to us or could do something for us next. And so this debate about who society owes obligations to, who it should prioritize when it comes to charity and social programs is a timeless one. But it's also one that has become timely with Vice President J.D. Vance invoking the idea of Ordo Amoris, a Catholic doctrine about the order of our affections, to support the Trump administration's plan to deport large numbers of immigrants of various legal and illegal statuses among the changes to a bunch of different government priorities and programs and funding.

1:48And although the Pope ultimately pushed back on Vance's interpretations of the ideas of Augustine and Aquinas, as did many Catholic charities who work with refugees, Vance is correct to say that we naturally care about ourselves and our own interests first. In fact, the Stoics believed we were born that way, fighting in our earliest days solely for our own survival. But, and this is the important part, they did not believe we should stay that way. One of the most important Stoic ethical thinkers was a man named Hierocles, and Hierocles ordered the universe in a series of concentric circles. In the middle, he said, was us, the individual.

2:30And surrounding each individual was family and friends and fellow citizens, members of an empire, then humanity as a whole. And beyond these circles, there were the people not yet born. There were animals. We might even add to this the environment. And this was the natural primal order, he conceded. But Stoicism is and never has been a philosophy of just giving in to our baser assumptions and feelings. and neither, it should be said, is Christianity. The work of philosophy, Hierocles argued, was to pull these outer rings towards us. This was radical, even a little crazy, he again conceded, but it was a beautiful madness, he believed.

3:13The person who sacrifices themselves to save a drowning stranger, the person who voluntarily saves and sends some of their money to help people in a foreign land. A figure like Regulus, a story I tell in Right Thing Right Now, who trades his own freedom to preserve the principle of diplomatic trust so that Rome's word would be valued in the future. A society that makes room for refugees or gives criminals a second chance. All these things shake up the ordo amoris, as the Stoics tried to, as Christ himself modeled. It's crazy, yes, It's not always in our best short-term interest, but it's beautiful.

3:51It's complicated and can be hard to strike the right balance, sure. But we have to try. We have to push ourselves outside our comfort. We have to give and give and give. Because it is right. Because it is the embodiment of justice. Thanks to Toyota Trucks for sponsoring this episode. When I bought my ranch in 2015 out here in Bastro County, I drove my car about halfway down the dirt road that we live on, thought this isn't going to work, stopped, parked it, walked the rest of the way home, borrowed my wife's car, drove in Austin and bought a truck. What I bought was a Toyota Tacoma. And this truck wasn't just transportation getting me to and from my house.

4:36It unlocked a whole different style of living for us, not just on the ranch, but in our little Texas towns. There were places I could go now that I couldn't go before, especially out here in the piney forests, through the fields, and on the unpaved roads like the one that I lived in. We got to go deep into the hill country's wild beauty. We've driven all the way out to East Texas. We've driven across the country. And by we, I mean not just my wife, but both my kids who I drove home from the hospital in that truck. Toyota trucks are built for those who understand that the best adventures happen when you're willing to veer off course, because you never know when you'll end up on a Toyota adventure detour.

5:20And of course, this is stoicism, too, because every detour, every obstacle is an opportunity. But it's helpful if you can handle the difficulty inherent in that. If you've got the resilience and the right companion to make it wherever the road takes you. Discover your uncharted territory. Learn more at toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours. Obviously, that's what the Justice book is about. But I talked about this and this political issue actually a little bit back when I was in Ireland when I gave my talks. Let me I'm going to run this little chunk because I think this is a really important stoic lesson that we can't lose sight on.

5:58So I'm going to extend today's episode another five minutes or so. So here, let me run this clip here. To me, the key challenge of our time is the ability to not let the craziness of the world around us make us crazy, to be able to focus on what we need to focus on and tune out the rest. And I don't mean to say you become disengaged. You don't contribute. You just focus on your own stuff. That's the opposite, right? The key Stoic virtue, to me, the most important of all the virtues is justice. and it's clear that justice is the most important virtue because of what happens when you remove it from the other virtues.

6:35Courage in pursuit of an unjust cause, discipline to the pursuit of selfishness. This isn't admirable. I'm sure Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nephew of John F. Kennedy, thinks he's speaking truth to power, being courageous or whatever. The problem is like a worm ate his brain and he spews nonsense. you can take a courageous stand but if the cause is bad it's not so great that's what Lord Byron said tis the cause makes all that hallows or degrades courage in its fall yeah you're marching to the beat of your own drummer risking people judging you when you stand up and say the world is flat but that's not the courage we're talking about right it has to be directed at things that have a social good, a social component.

7:24That's what Stoicism is. More than 80 times in meditations, Mark Sturulus talks about the common good, our obligation to each other. Stoics talk a lot about what's our concern and what's not our concern. They didn't just mean like some things are in our control and some things are not in our control. He's saying, Hierocles, one of the great middle Stoics, talks about how we all exist as a series of concentric circles. Yeah, we're at the center, but there's people we love, people that live near us, our fellow citizens, allied nations. There's animals. There's people that live far away from us. There's people we've never met.

7:59There's people who've never even been born. He says the work of philosophy is to expand our circles or to pull the outer circles inward, to care about the common good, to care about, genuinely love and do good for people far away from us, people not like us, people that we know nothing about because they are fellow human beings. So John F. Kennedy's father, Joseph Kennedy, was the ambassador to the UK from 38 to 40. And he was basically a Nazi appeaser. He sort of falls in love with the idea of Hitler. He thinks that it's a war the world can't possibly win, that Hitler's unstoppable. And so he's constantly sending back these sort of messages of not getting involved, downplaying what's happening.

8:45And, you know, this is a moral stain on him and the family. So it's, I think it's both ironic and perfectly understandable that JFK would be responsible for a couple of famous misquotations. He says, he believes he's quoting Edmund Burke, that the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. He says, or he He thinks he says that Dante said that the harshest circle of hell is reserved for those who stay neutral in moments of moral crisis. Neither of them said anything really on close to that wording. But it's kind of Freudian that he would think that, given his father's terrible decision.

9:29Sometimes I get pushback from people when I talk about anything political with Daily Stoic. They go, why pick a side? You're going to piss off half your audience. It's very American that they assume 100 % of the audience is American and that 50 % of the audience is Republican, which it's definitely not, thank you. But the reason you pick a side is because you have to pick a side. That's what justice is about. Seneca said that the key distinction between the Stoics and the Epicureans is that the Epicureans only got involved in politics and public life if they had to. And he says a stoic gets involved unless something prevents you.

10:08In meditation, Mark Surrealist reminds himself, he lists all the injustices we all commit and things we do that are wrong that we shouldn't do. And he says, but it's important to remember that you can commit an injustice by doing nothing also. And given the state of the world, given the state of the country that I reside in, given the trends that are on the march all over the world, the idea that you get to be neutral, that you don't have to pick a side, that you just focus on what your own little life. This is what he's talking about when he talks about injustice. Sure, the election probably won't change my life one way or another.

10:43I have options. I have money. I live in the middle of nowhere. But it's gonna affect other people's lives. And you have to care about that as if it affects your own life. That's what the Stoics are saying. That's what pulling these outer rings inwards is about. People are openly talking in America about a plan to deport north of 10 million human beings. The logistical horror of that, what that would actually mean and be and cost and inflict on people is almost incomprehensible, which is the point they're not even thinking about it at all because they don't know these people. These people aren't really even people to them.

11:25That's what demagogues do. They dehumanize so they can allow things to happen. Voltaire said, he who can get you to believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. So first, this is the playbook of Trump and Vance to first say that there's 20 million illegal immigrants in America, which there objectively is not. So then when they say we're going to deport 10 million of them, a moral abomination, a project that I would assume involved loading people onto trains, putting them in camps. You know, there's only a couple ways to do something like this. But the point is to get you to imagine, wrap your head around an absurdity then allows you to turn off your moral compass towards an atrocity.

12:13So this idea that stoicism is about not caring is in fact the opposite of what it's about. You have to care. You have to care about other people. You have to care about people who are not like you. Because if you don't, who does that make you? It's not just that it degrades you. The Stoics would say that allowing cruelty and evil to exist in the world, it most of all degrades you. So look, there are huge, enormous injustices and problems in the world. And each of us as individuals only have so much say over them, we can stop them in some way. But what a Stoic does, what a Stoic would focus on is where we do have impact.

12:49Voting, of course, as part of this, but mostly they would say, how can you do good for someone, right? What is the smallest thing you can do? How can you be a small light in a dark room, as they say? So look, this is what we have to be working on. We can't lose sight of this. We can't lose track of what's right.

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