"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
"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
"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
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.
"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
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.
"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
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.
"[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
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.
"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
"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.
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.
"Someone despises me. That's their problem. Mine: not to do or say anything despicable. Someone hates me. Their problem. Mine: to be patient and cheerful with everyone, including them." - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
"You can generally be sure, whenever ideologues speak of true or serious freedom, that it will be at the expense of actual, ordinary freedom. And when the rhetoric is transcendental, the reality will probably be miserable." - Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible
What’s troubling to me is the extent to which the rest of the country has just accepted that we live under the rule of theocrats in robes and there’s nothing we can do about it. Establishment politicians, media figures, and even non-theocratic judges just kind of shrug and pretend that scripture is a reasonable basis for judicial pronouncements in a free society. If these judges and justices were establishing any religion other than fundamentalist Christianity, people would lose their minds. If an Alabama court ruled that Trump had to be kicked off the ballot because he lies so much he lacks satya, and rested their opinion in quotes from the Vedas, there would be riots. The ruling would be overturned and the judges, probably, impeached.
"Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value." - Albert Einstein
Via The Quotable Einstein edited by Alice Calaprice
I hear often people saying there is too much free stuff given away by the government. Almost always this ire is directed towards people on the lower end of the economic spectrum, and that this is how people have their votes purchased. What I very rarely hear spoken against, however, is the much vaster sum of money that is given to the already rich and powerful; corporations and the super-rich - people who have vastly more political influence than people who receive some form of social welfare. This is why I consider Free Lunch and Perfectly Legal by David Cay Johnston to be such important books. They detail how our economic system has been rigged across decades to transfer the nation's wealth from the many to the few, flowing money upwards like Niagra Falls in reverse, and how the wealthy benefit extensively from taxpayer subsidies.
So today I come across this: a detailed article about how corporate tax breaks are leading to the defunding of education across the nation. Read it and weep for the future: "Students lose out as cities and states give billions in property tax breaks to businesses − draining school budgets and especially hurting the poorest students."
What exactly Atlanta and other cities and states are accomplishing with tax abatement programs is hard to discern. Fewer than a quarter of companies that receive breaks in the U.S. needed an incentive to invest, according to a 2018 study by the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, a nonprofit research organization.
This means that at least 75% of companies received tax abatements when they’re not needed – with communities paying a heavy price for economic development that sometimes provides little benefit.
"I believe in the equality of man, and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy." - Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason (1794)
Via Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope by Sarah Bakewell
It's still difficult for me to wrap my mind around how someone could express this kind of sentiment and end up so despised (only 6 people saw fit to attend Paine's funeral, despite him having played a significant part in the birth of the United States and generally lived as an avatar for democracy.)
People are fickle and take it personally when their beliefs are criticized; and many were inclined to see his criticism of superstition and organized religion to be corrosive to organized society. But Paine believed that "[i]nfidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what [one] does not believe."
"There is nothing so beautiful and legitimate as to play the man well and properly, no knowledge so hard to acquire as the knowledge of how to live this life well and naturally; and the most barbarous of our maladies is to despise our being." - Montaigne
Via Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope by Sarah Bakewell
This quote compliments and extends the previously quoted quote of the day from him (and Bakewell) about living a life well.
"The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies ... A picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment. " - George Eliot, "The Natural History of German Life" (1856)
Via Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope by Sarah Bakewell
"Concedo nulli"
According to Sarah Bakewell in Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope this was "the emblem and motto of Terminus, Roman god of boundaries and limits." Sixteenth century Christian humanist Erasmus adopted this phrase as his personal motto and his friends had it inscribed on a memorial plaque when he died. It translates to "I yield to no one."
"[T]o be happy is to be good." - Aristotle, eulogy for Plato
Via Aristotle's Children: How Christians, Muslims, and Jews Rediscovered Ancient Wisdom and Illuminated the Middle Ages by Richard RubensteinFrom Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
What their minds are like. What they work at. What evokes their love and admiration.
Imagine their souls stripped bare. And their vanity. To suppose that their disdain could harm anyone - or their praise help them.
There is just something so human about seeing someone who lived almost two thousand years ago struggling (recall that this is an entry in his personal journal) with dealing with toxic people in his life and reminding himself that their opinion doesn't matter.
He has another passage that compliments this one well: "It never ceases to amaze me: we all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinions than our own.""Become who you are." - Nietzsche
Via Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are by John Kaag
"[The] man who insults me ... becomes my training partner; he trains me in patience, in abstaining from anger, in remaining gentle." - Epictetus, Discourses 3.20
"Do external things distract you? Then make time for yourself to learn something worthwhile; stop letting yourself be pulled in all directions." - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
And he didn't even live in the age of social media, where everything is designed by social psychologists to deliberately shorten a person's attention span.
"When people injure you, ask yourself what good or harm they thought would come of it. If you understand that, you'll feel sympathy rather than outrage or anger." - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
It's important to remember when seeing quotes from Meditations that it is written for an audience of one: he is saying this to himself. He is telling himself to make an active, conscience effort not to bear ill will towards anyone, for any reason. Putting this into practice, "you will have no enemies," Epictetus taught.
The less inclined we are to categorize people as "enemy" the better: it tends to tap into the part of human nature that wants to hate without limit.
"I am not in the right place - I am not a painter." - Michelangelo, Letter To Giovanni Da Pistoia When the Author Was Painting the Vault of the Sistine Chapel 1509 (Gail Mazur translation)
There is just something so humanistic about an artist over 500 years ago feeling perhaps not up to a task chosen outside of his comfort zone (Michelangelo considered himself a sculptor primarily) and second guessing himself even while creating one of the greatest artistic achievements in human history.
"'My brother shouldn't have treated me in this way.' Indeed, he shouldn't, but it's for him to see to that. For my part, however he treats me, I should conduct myself towards him as I ought. For that is my business, and the rest is not my concern. In this no one can hinder me, while everything else is subject to hindrance." - Epictetus, Discourses 3.10
This is something I attempt to put into practice but sometimes have difficulty with. I find that ego and pride can get in the way. What's ironic is that often when we feel wronged by someone we retaliate in such a way that we become like the person we feel wronged by. It's why Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote in his journal that the best revenge is to be unlike the person who wronged you. This is quite a remarkable sentiment considering how many other Emperors were perfectly content to use their power to take the more traditional vindictive and violent revenge.
Once one can get past the ego and follow this advice, a new kind of tranquility arises. What we commonly feel to be the slight at being "treated in this way" is what Epictetus calls being hindered because you're trying to control what is not in your power to control; but if you can learn to recognize what's not in your control and let go, peace of mind can be found.
"Take away thy opinion, and then there is taken away the complaint, 'I have been harmed.' Take away the complaint, 'I have been harmed,' and the harm is taken away." - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (circa 171- 175 CE)
There are various translations of Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius's journal in which he practiced his Stoicism but the gist of what he is saying here is that it is not events in themself that cause us harm, but the judgements and opinions we form that cause the harm. If you can let go of the feeling that something harms you or has happened to you, and see it instead as just something that has happened, then, as Epictetus put it "you will not be harmed."* This seems like such an obvious truth but is often easier to say than do, which is why Marcus wrote this note to himself, he is reminding himself to put this psychological technique into practice.** And, more broadly, is why Meditations is such a remarkable text: it is the personal journal of someone who at the time was one of the most powerful people on the planet, and it reveals that what he was most concerned with was not riches, fame, power, or revenge, but training himself to be a better, kinder, wiser and more just person.
*This is no coincidence. Aurelius was heavily influenced by the teachings of Epictetus.
**He reminds himself again later in the journal: "It is in our power to have no opinion about a thing, and not to be disturbed in our soul, for things themselves have no natural power to form our judgements."
"Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom." - Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosophers from Ptahhotep to Sartre
"Through doubting we question, and through questioning we perceive the truth." - Peter Abelard
Via The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization by Arthur Herman
So if you want to be beautiful for your own part, you should strive to achieve this, the excellence that characterizes a human being.
'But what is it?'
Consider who it is that you praise when you praise people dispassionately: is it those who are just, or unjust? - 'Those who are just.' - The temperate or the intemperate? - 'The temperate.' - The self-controlled or the dissolute? - 'The self-controlled.' - You should know, then, that if you make yourself a person of that kind, you'll be making yourself beautiful; but if you neglect these virtues, you're bound to be ugly, whatever techniques you adopt to make yourself appear beautiful.
- Epictetus, Discourses 3.1
"[Zeno] said that well-being is attained little by little, yet it is no little thing itself. Some attribute this saying to Socrates." - Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers (3rd century CE)
Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.
The things in our control are by nature free, unrestrained, unhindered; but those not in our control are weak, slavish, restrained, belonging to others. Remember, then, that if you suppose that things which are slavish by nature are also free, and that what belongs to others is your own, then you will be hindered. You will lament, you will be disturbed, and you will find fault both with gods and men. But if you suppose that only to be your own which is your own, and what belongs to others such as it really is, then no one will ever compel you or restrain you. Further, you will find fault with no one or accuse no one. You will do nothing against your will. No one will hurt you, you will have no enemies, and you will not be harmed.
