Baleful quote of the day

"The truth is that Donald Trump undermined faith in our elections in his false bid to retain the presidency. He sparked an insurrection intended to overthrow our government and keep himself in power. No president in our history has done worse." - Cleveland Plain Dealer, "Our Trump reporting upsets some readers, but there aren't two sides to facts: Letter from the Editor"

Quote of the day

 "The first promise of real philosophy is a feeling of fellowship, sympathy, and community with others." - Seneca (4 BCE - 65 CE)

Via Breakfast with Seneca: A Stoic Guide to the Art of Living by David Fideler

Quote of the day

 "Is this what you've been anxious to learn: how to be delivered from grief, disturbance, and humiliation, and be free? Haven't you heard, then, that there is only a single path that leads to that end: to give up things that lie outside the sphere of choice, and turn away from them, and acknowledge that they're not your own. The opinion that someone else holds about you, then, what kind of a thing is that? - 'Something that lies outside the sphere of choice.' - So isn't it nothing to you? - 'Nothing at all.' - So while you continue to be disturbed and nettled by the opinion of others, do you suppose that you're properly convinced about what is good and bad?" - Epictetus, Discourses 4.6

Quote of the day

 "It takes very little to spoil and upset everything: just some slight deviation from reason ... Pay careful attention, then, to your impressions; watch over them unceasingly. For it is not something of little importance that you're trying to preserve, but self-respect, fidelity, impassibility, freedom from distress, fear, and anxiety, and, in a word, freedom. At what price will you sell that? Consider how much it is worth." - Epictetus, Discourses 4.3

Quote of the day

From Meditations by Marcus Aurelius 

As those who try to stand in thy way when thou art proceeding according to right reason, will not be able to turn thee aside from thy proper action, so neither let them drive thee from thy benevolent feelings towards them, but be on thy guard equally in both matters, not only in the matter of steady judgement and action, but also in the matter of gentleness towards those who try to hinder or otherwise trouble thee. For this is also a weakness, to be vexed at them, as well as to be diverted from thy course of action and to give way through fear; for both are equally deserters from their post, the man who does it through fear, and the man who is alienated from him who is by nature a kinsman and a friend.

To me this is so profoundly remarkable to find this sentiment in the personal journal of a Roman emperor. The notion of seeing anger towards people who are negative or unfriendly or who attempt to hinder us as a weakness; and gentleness and kindness in response as a strength. I know from experience that whenever I let someone's negativity towards me divert me from the goal of being friendly towards everyone I always in the end felt like I had failed myself and the person, no matter how justified I may have felt in the moment of being angry or vexed. I always end up feeling like I had behaved as a person I do not want to be - and that it is a weakness to let negative emotions rule your conduct. Plus, it's unhealthy. If you're angry or troubled you're by definition not happy. Why would you do that to yourself? No one can hurt you or make you unhappy - it's your judgments and thoughts about things that do so.

Quote of the day

 "Don't you know that someone who is virtuous and good never acts for the sake of appearances, but only for the sake of having acted rightly?" - Epictetus, Discourses 3.24

Quote of the day

"Solitude is a torment which is not threatened in hell itself." - John Donne, Meditation V (1625)

Quote of the day

From Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

If you can cut yourself - your mind - free of what other people do and say, of what you've said or done, of the things that you're afraid will happen, the impositions of the body that contain you and the breath within, and what the whirling chaos sweeps in from outside, so that the mind is freed from fate, brought to clarity, and lives life on its own recognizance - doing what's right, accepting what happens, and speaking the truth -

If you can cut free of impressions that cling to the mind, free of the future and the past - can make yourself, as Empedocles says, "a sphere rejoicing in its perfect stillness," and concentrate on living what can be lived (which means the present) ... then you can spend the time you have left in tranquility. And in kindness. And at peace with the spirit within you.

Quote of the day

 "Surveillance capitalism found shelter in the neoliberal zeitgeist that equated government regulation of business with tyranny. This 'paranoid style' favored self-management regimes that imposed few limits on corporate practices." - Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power

What price do you set upon your soul?

The Stoics - particularly Roman Stoics - trained themselves to believe that maintaining the quality of their character, leading a life dedicated to virtue is of the highest value and nothing was worth compromising one's integrity. It's why Roman senator Cato committed suicide as a last act of protest rather than allow himself be captured by Julius Caesar and used as propaganda (See the excellent Rome's Last Citizen: The Life and Legacy of Cato, Mortal Enemy of Caesar for more on his life and conduct.) Cato was an inspiration to the founders of the United States, who attempted to emulate him in living a life of virtue. 

I found myself thinking of the Stoics and their dedication to right conduct/character as the highest good as I read and finished Thank You for Your Servitude: Donald Trump's Washington and the Price of Submission by Mark Leibovich. The rise and empowerment of Donald Trump was made possible by person after person who did not value their character and integrity highly. It was people who valued access to power, prestige, a high ranking job etc  more than doing the right thing or standing up to someone they knew was a horrible, corrupt person. Lindsey Graham particularly stands out for setting apparently no value whatsoever on his personal integrity. 

I believe what we're now seeing and facing is the reality that a democracy can't work if a substantial amount of citizens do not believe in the principles of democracy and do not set a high value upon being citizens of virtue. 

Quote of the day

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

This quote has a similar effect on me as the Anne Frank one I cited previously; if Dr. Frankl could find in a concentration camp - while his friends and family (and wife) died around him - a way to give his life meaning and purpose despite any amount of suffering he encountered, then we all can do it - or at least try. Few of us have suffered anything as nightmarish as what he went through. And yet through his suffering he found a way to help millions of other people cope with theirs. 

Quote of the day

"I do not believe anyone can be perfectly well, who has a brain and a heart." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, letter to Charles Sumner

Feeling this.

Quote of the day

 "[C]onsider how much more pain is brought on us by the anger and vexation caused by such acts than by the acts themselves, at which we are angry and vexed." - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Quote of the day

From The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff:

There are differences among various incarnations of "personalizations" and "assistance" offered by the tech giants, but these are trivial compared with the collective urge toward total knowledge - about your inner states, real-world context, and specific daily life activities - all in the service of successfully training the machines that they might better target market operations to each moment of life.

Quote of the day

 "Tell yourself first of all what kind of person you want to be, and then act accordingly in all that you do." - Epictetus, Discourses 3.23

Quote of the day

"His morality is lofty and unworldly; in a situation in which man's main duty is to resist tyrannical power, it would be difficult to find anything more helpful." - Bertrand Russell, describing the philosophy of Epictetus in The History of Western Philosophy

Quote of the day

 "There was a time when you searched Google, but now Google searches you." - Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power

This is a book with profound importance, detailing the ways that our lives and inner selves are being gobbled up by corporations to further manipulate our behavior and make money doing so. As the Guardian review linked puts it

It describes how global tech companies such as Google and Facebook persuaded us to give up our privacy for the sake of convenience; how personal information (“data”) gathered by these companies has been used by others not only to predict our behaviour but also to influence and modify it; and how this has had disastrous consequences for democracy and freedom. This is the “surveillance capitalism” of the title, which Zuboff defines as a “new economic order” and “an expropriation of critical human rights that is best understood as a coup from above”.

But, unfortunately, the material has to be read carefully and digested to appreciate how insidious this age of surveillance capitalism is. And we have a generation of young adults for whom the norm is having their entire lives available on-line for data tracking, without seeing any problem with it or even realizing it's happening.  (The extent to which these companies gather information about our lives is vaster than almost anyone imagines, and I'm certainly not exempting myself, as I didn't realize it, either, until reading this book.)

Our right to our inner selves is one of the most fundamental, necessary rights for living a fully realized human existence. And this is now being threatened by the almost entirely unregulated behemoth that is surveillance capitalism, which has annexed all human behavior/experience as substrate for predictative models of our lives. This is not right.

The end of America

 It's surreal to me seeing someone who has lived his life as a narcissistic criminal and all around just horrible, indecent, unkind person still being described as "running for president." He is not running for president, because that would entail agreeing to abide by the election process. He has made clear that the only acceptable result of an election is for him to be the victor, no matter what the actual vote count is. So he isn't running for president: he is trying to install himself as Supreme Ruler of America, someone who is held accountable to no law but his own fiat. He is currently arguing that he is immune from all legal liability while President and asserts that every court case against him ever are by definition illegitimate. He attempted to stop the previous election, calling for an end to vote counting and declaring himself winner. He is on tape asking the Georgia Secretary of State to "find" i.e. fabricate the exact number of votes he would have needed to win the state. He refused to acknowledge his loss, resulting in the first siege of the US capitol since the War of 1812. The Confederate flag, a symbol of sedition, slavery and white supremacy was waved inside the Senate for the first time ever. These extremists, in devotion to their leader, attempted to stop the peaceful transition of the power of the Chief Executive officer of the United States for the first time in US history. A disgrace beyond description.

I feel like we're living through the Aesop fable where the frogs get bored when Zeus sends them the Rule of Law to be their king, so they ask him to send them a more exciting King, and in return he sends them a water snake. Which eats them. End of story. As Paul Woodruff put it in First Democracy: The Challenge of an Ancient Idea 

And so it was - and still is - when people are frustrated with the law's stupidities or delays or inconveniences. If they wish for a ruler who will rise above the law, they are offering themselves to be devoured.  

Aesop commented elsewhere: 

Chance shows us two roads in life; one is the road of freedom, which has a rough beginning that is hard to walk, but an ending that is smooth and even; the other is the road of servitude, which has a level beginning, but an ending that is hard and dangerous.