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Virtue without power is benign, but power without virtue tears lives and civilizations apart.
So it’s a pity good people often don’t understand how power works, and what people holding the levers of power are up to. Part of wisdom is understanding that ignorance of reality leaves us susceptible to manipulation by those who lack scruples, and less effective in doing good.
If the United States broke any ground with its constitution, it was in assuming saints wouldn’t be elected — that politicians would in fact possess numerous vices. Alexander Hamilton correctly intuited that counterbalancing vice with vice would keep America on the rails while planning on angels showing up would lead to catastrophe.
Hamilton and the founding fathers had an unusually high degree of power literacy, probably because they’d read Plutarch and studied classical history. For instance, John Adams was a vocal fan of Machiavelli, the famous political realist.
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On the other hand, most communist governments were built with starry-eyed optimism about the type of people who’d live in and lead them. The results are predictably lackluster.
Power literacy for the wise and the just isn’t about manipulation, and is largely defensive and preventative in nature. Someone with high power literacy will:
* Be able to spot the power games played around them and respond appropriately.
* Understand that power is amoral, but its execution always has moral implications.
* Understand human nature and how it’s manipulated.
Power Literacy at Home:
Most of us don’t design governments, but power literacy helps us act appropriately in the local arenas we find ourselves in.
If you’re a good person, you may not realize the extent to which an entire class of people sees our world through a zero-sum lens, and views relationships and institutions as vehicles for personal gain. The world throws around clinical terms like sociopath and psychopath, but many are simply power-literate people who lack a strong moral foundation and introspection. When backed into a corner, they pull the puppet strings they intuit will help them get their way. Good people often have strings that are very easy to tug on.
Isn’t it yourself you should reproach—for not anticipating that they’d act this way?—It was you who did wrong by assuming that someone with those traits deserved your trust.” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 9.42
It’s only when we understand the power games they use so successfully — in the home, in petty work disputes, and at the highest levels of government — that we can protect ourselves and effectively pursue worthwhile goals. A significant part of humanity won’t play by the rules, and good people need to act like it. Any community built without power literacy degrades over time because bad actors take advantage of it. You’re probably part of such a group right now.
A Classic Manipulation
There are countless power games, but a basic two-step manipulation looks something like this:
* Disorient a person and knock them off balance. Using a person’s emotional responses against them is a strategy as old as time. Fear is the classic tool, but other emotions, such as greed and anger, are also viable. If a manipulator can make you fear for your life, your family, your livelihood, or your reputation, for instance, they’ll often have you. And people goaded into anger become stupid, stop thinking clearly, and make mistakes. If you’re disoriented and reeling, you’re going to be easier to manipulate.
* Apply external pressure. Disorienting people with anger, fear, or other strong emotions may be enough. If it isn’t, external pressure may cause them to dance to someone else’s tune. Can a friend be turned against them? Can they be blackmailed or make you look bad in front of their boss? Where might some adroitly-planted gossip turn the screws?
Resisting Manipulation:
Some people are hard to knock off balance with emotional manipulation. They might also stand up to external threats with unusual resilience. Why?
Power literacy helps us keep our balance when someone is playing a game with us because we see what they’re doing. If you’ve inculcated an understanding of how politicians manipulate people with fear and anger, and look for instances of them doing it, you probably won’t be tricked next time “your side,” points out something worthy of scorn.
But there’s no better way to resist manipulation than a philosophic practice. The two-step manipulation above threatens externals that Stoics discount. If you care more about doing the right thing (virtue) than reputation, wealth, or anything else, you become very hard to manipulate.
Virtuous people with power literacy tend to get left alone by sociopathic types. If initial probing fails to make you dance, bad actors often look for easier targets unless you pose an existential threat to them or their power base.
Increasing Power Literacy:
Experience may be the most effective way to understand power and its abuses. If you spot manipulation in progress or retrospectively retrace how you were manipulated, you’ll probably never be fooled in the same way again.
But books are safe and provide far more examples than you’ll come across yourself.
Plutarch’s Lives
Plutarch was incredibly popular in Colonial America. His mini-biographical pairings of one prominent Greek and one prominent Roman show leaders possessing virtues and vices in equal measure. Plutarch details some of the successful manipulations used by his subjects.
An in-depth study of business tycoons and politicians from other eras may yield similar insights and help you to see people for what they are.
Machiavelli's The Prince
Machiavelli suggests leaders try to be effective rather than good. Drawing on examples from antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the early Renaissance, he shows how this can be done. Don’t study The Prince to learn how to manipulate, but rather to understand how power games are played by those without scruples.
Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power
What if Machiavelli had access to far more information from which to draw conclusions? Perhaps he would have ended up with something like this book. Some of the laws contradict each other, but that’s not really the point. Greene shows us the levers by which humans are manipulated, and the psychological landscape of the worst of us.
Perspective
“That to expect bad people not to injure others is crazy. It's to ask the impossible. And to let them behave like that to other people but expect them to exempt you is arrogant—the act of a tyrant.”
―Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 11.18
We must understand what’s in our power and what isn’t. It’s foolish to think sociopathic types can be kept from positions of influence and power, or that we’ll “defeat” them.
Nero and other despotic Roman emperors were surrounded by depraved courtiers mirroring imperial vices, ancient historians tell us. And yet Emperor Marcus Aurelius complained of people pretending to be philosophers because his interest in Stoicism made the topic en vogue. Vice “was out,” and virtue was “in,” and yet sociopaths appear to be prominent in both types of courts. The morally flexible will discover what it takes to have influence and contort themselves into the required shape, regardless of how good the person at the top is.
As Marcus would put it, don’t expect Plato’s Republic, or even Plato’s softball team.
Yet remaining ignorant of the way the game is played leaves you naive and open for manipulation. Neither is virtuous, and a wise person learns how power works.
The Wooden Beam In Your Eye
“Why do you notice the splinter in your brother's eye, but do not perceive the wooden beam in your own?”
The biggest risk in power literacy acquisition is distraction from our own faults. We may even manipulate others in a half-aware fashion, engaging in small vices while pointing fingers at others.
“You yourself have many faults and are no different from them,” Marcus Aurelius reminded himself. “…You are not even sure that they are doing wrong. Many things are done as part of a larger plan, and generally one needs to know a great deal before one can pronounce with certainty on another's actions.”
So yes, acquire an understanding of human nature and power, but don’t forget that we mostly need to pay attention on ourselves and the few things that are totally within our power.
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Early in his career, the famous actor Sir Michael Caine struggled with an errant chair disrupting a scene. It blocked the doorway he was supposed to enter through, and his teacher gave him a piece of advice that stuck with him:
“Use the difficulty,” Caine said. “If it’s a comedy, fall over (the chair). If it’s a drama, pick it up and smash it…Now I took that and I used it in my own life...There’s never anything so bad that you cannot use that difficulty. If you can use it a quarter of one percent to your advantage, you’re ahead.”
1,800 years ago, the Roman Emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius used the same strategy to rule an empire and himself — he turned obstacles into assets.
“Our actions may be impeded…” Marcus wrote, “but there can be no impeding our intentions or dispositions. Because we can accommodate and adapt. The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle to our acting. The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”
Marcus explains: “If you accept the obstacle and work with what you’re given, an alternative will present itself—another piece of what you’re trying to assemble. Action by action.”
Any obstacle can be a whetstone to sharpen our character. If we embrace impediments they leave us better people: better able to endure in the face of setbacks, to offer kindness in the face of hostility, to be disciplined in the face of distraction.
Artists have long found that channeling creativity within the hard limits of a self-imposed medium or style makes them more creative. The constraints force them to reach deeper and find something transcendent.
So too do hard limits and setbacks make us great because in reaching past them and using them to our advantage we find what is truly great in ourselves.
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No one expected the toads to be killers.
Or rather the Australians assumed the amphibians would stick to slaughter of the convenient and beneficial sort, a staggering failure of imagination.
Rhinella marina, a giant neotropical toad better known as the cane toad, was imported to deal with beetles ravaging Australia’s sugar cane industry in 1935. They devoured New World pests in the Americas, so why not give them a shot in Australia?
Unfortunately, the imported toads rarely ate the voracious beetles munching on Australia’s sugar cane. But more worrying was what they did eat — virtually everything else. The toads hoovered up honey bees, ants, termites, small cats and dogs, crickets, snails, frogs, snakes, and much else that slithered, swam, or walked.
As toad numbers exploded, Australian predator species moved in for a feast. And then they died. The toads are highly poisonous, but native predators have no avoidance instinct for them and can’t survive their toxins. So many of northern Australia’s predators have gone extinct or become extremely rare.
Cane toads destroyed much of northern Australia’s ecosystem over a few decades. They spread further every year.
How did this catastrophe happen?
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First-Order Thinking.
First-order thinking looks no further than the obvious or expected consequence of an action and ignores most of what’s downstream. It’s quick and easy and we do it all the time.
The Australian agricultural scientists looked at their problem this way:
We have inconvenient beetles -> Cane toads eat beetles > Therefore, imported cane toads will eat our beetles. Let’s do it.
Second-order thinking is rarer, more deliberate, and requires imagination, but is also more powerful and predictive.
At its heart lies a simple question: and then what?
Cane toads might eat our beetles. But then what?
Third-order thinking asks you to ask that question again, using your imagination and understanding of the world to predict consequences even further in the future.
What will happen when I quit my job to travel the world? And then what? And then what?
What if I ask her to marry me? And then what? And then what?
What if I choose marathons over weightlifting? And then what? And then what?
Premeditatio Malorum
The ancient Stoics had a form of second-order thinking called premeditatio Malorum, or the premeditation of evil things. It asks us to predict what might go wrong, both so we’ll keep calm when things don’t pan out, and so we have a response ready if they don’t.
When you wake up and start your day, review your schedule and decide where delays, stubbornness, incompetence, or unforseen consequences may hinder you. Having considered this, decide if you need to change your plans. Even if you don’t, plan a response for if things go sideways.
More Second-Order Thinking Questions:
* Knowing many interventions cause more harm than good, how can I approach this situation like Hippocrates with a, “first, do no harm,” principle?
* How will my friends, family, employees, and competitors react to this? What would my mental mentor say?
* How will this be playing out in a month? In a year? When I’m in retirement?
* Am I confusing action with outcomes?
* Is this problem actually a nail, or does it only look that way because I’ve only got a hammer?
Second-Order Thinking about Second-Order Thinking
People rarely get praised or receive raises for mistakes they don’t commit.
If an Australian agricultural scientist predicted the disastrous consequences of the cane toad plan, it’s unlikely they’d be promoted to agency chief.
But much of what’s good in life is unpleasant up front and good downstream, and second-order thinking helps us realize it. Saying yes to a $2,000 vacation when you’re 20 probably seems harmless if the money to pay for it is in the bank.
But if we explore saying no to it, and then ask “and then what?” and assume we invest the money in the stock market at 7% interest until we’re 75, we’d be able to consider if a future $82,631 is worth more to us than the trip.
This sort of long-horizon thinking takes work, but it can give us a leg up in almost any endeavor.
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Can we be cheerful when life sucks?
Training yourself to be is a focus for Stoics. Seneca talks about the ideal Stoic sage we’re supposed to be aiming for:
“And if you come across a man who is never alarmed by dangers, never affected by cravings, happy in adversity, calm in the midst of storm, viewing mankind from a higher level and the gods from their own, is it not likely that a feeling will find its way into you of veneration for him? …Into that body there has descended a divine power.”
But there isn’t much surviving Stoic literature on generating the emotion of happiness, much less doing it under less-than-ideal circumstances. I’d classify Stoic therapeutics as focused on relieving suffering, though some elements, such as gratitude, generate positive emotions if done well.
So I assumed happiness in the face of adversity was just theoretical — just like the Stoic sage — until I spent time with Buddhist monks while living in Asia years ago.
They simply didn’t conceive of happiness as transactional, as we often do. It wasn’t, “I’ll be happy if/when,” or, “There’s a lot on my plate so I can’t yet be happy,” but rather, “I should remember to be happy today.”
They used their mind to make themselves experience the feeling of happiness regardless of what life was throwing at them.
The monks had various meditations to achieve this state, but you don’t need to meditate to get the same result.
If you’re in a “neutral,” or better emotional state, you can skip to the main technique below.
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Clearing The Decks:
If you’re in emotional pain/stress/anxiety, etc, or just have a “busy mind,” that will distract you, sorting that out first will help. There’s no one “best” way to do this, but some Stoic options include:
* Journaling in the 2nd/3rd person.
* Focusing on Death
* Gaining perspective on your circumstances
* Practicing the art of being relaxed and dedicated.
* Assorted fixes.
These practices can relieve some of the immediacy of the negative thoughts running through your head, and give you space for what’s next.
The Main Technique:
This is incredibly quick and easy but powerful. Do it right now if you can.
Find a quiet spot where you won’t be bothered. Close your eyes. Smile like you mean it, then mentally say “I’m happy!” also like you mean it. Say this at least a dozen times in your head with intention while you continue to smile. Don’t just go through the motions.
Be honest — do you feel happier?
Tell me in the comments below if this affects your mood.
You don’t even need to close your eyes. You can do this on a walk. As you become practiced at generating happiness, you can smile and do a few mental “I’m happy,” repetitions while working at your computer, or virtually anywhere else.
I find the effect of this simple intervention to be incredible. Rarely does so little achieve so much.
Caveats:
This always works for me, but the degree to which it works is modulated by several factors:
* Have I sorted out what’s on my mind and, as Socrates suggested, examined my life? If not, the links above— or other Stoic therapeutic techniques — are very helpful. A tumultuous mind/emotional state gets in the way of anything you’re trying to do, but it can’t completely block the effect of this technique if you decide you want to be happy despite what’s going on.
* I’ve underslept or slept poorly.
* My circadian rhythm/other hormonal factors have been thrown off by a lack of sun/bright light exposure.
But even in the face of negative headwinds such as these, I’m able to be happier when I practice this simple technique.
I’m no Stoic Sage, but doing this has been a wonderful lesson. I now think circumstances don’t matter as much as we’re led to believe. Maybe I wouldn’t be happy, “on the rack,” as the Stoic sage is supposed to be, but I know from experience that I can be happy in the midst of quite a bit of unpleasantness.
So, smile and tell yourself you’re happy. I promise you’re not gaslighting yourself.
Let me know how it goes!
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Our Universe isn’t known for leniency.
Gravity will not be dismissed. The laws of thermodynamics aren’t fungible. Entropy stalks us in the night.
Try to live in defiance of the universe’s underlying principles and you’ll quickly find out how unforgiving they are.
Yet an all-star cast of ancient philosophers — and not a few modern scientists and engineers — suggest there are other universal principles we’re ignoring, and our inattention is costing us.
Love is at the top of the list.
The Socratic Universe:
Socrates tells us (through the pen of Plato) the entire universe is “held together by communion and friendship, by orderliness, temperance, and justice; and that is the reason…why they call the whole of this world by the name of order, not of disorder or dissoluteness.”
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Imagine Socrates listing recognized scientific laws: Kepler's laws of planetary motion, gravitation, and Einstein's theory of relativity. Then he tacks on unexpected additions — reason, civility, moderation. He’s daft. These are two different categories of things, Socrates!
Yet Socrates dresses down the brilliant but immoral sophist Gorgias similarly to how we’d warn a child to beware gravity because stumbles lead to scraped knees.
“(You) have failed to observe the great power of geometrical equality,” Socrates tells him, “…you hold that self-advantage is what one ought to practice, because you neglect geometry.”
Many modern readers will balk at the idea that ethical or moral guidelines are hardcoded into the universe, or can be extrapolated from how it’s set up. They believe modern science has unveiled a random and chaotic universe. While recognizing certain scientific laws, they insist the universe is not ordered in a way that infers values.
But such assumptions were once taken for granted.
The Faltering Stoic Universe
The ancient Stoics took Socrates’s ideas and systematized them into a practical philosophy whose precepts require an ordered, rational, and providential universe that can be studied and understood.
They thought our universe was divine. Not as modern religions imagine god — that analogy leaves the wrong impression.
The Stoic universe doesn’t intervene in human affairs, but its values and principles flow through nature. Everything is part of it, including us, which makes us divine too.
Cicero has the Stoic philosopher Balbus summarize his school’s view: “we can assume that the universe must possess wisdom and that the element which holds together all that exists excels in perfect reason. From this we see that the universe is in fact God and that the vital force of the universe is held together by this divine nature.”
Indeed, according to classical scholar A.A. Long, Stoics think the universe is “amenable to rational explanation” because it is “rationally organized.”
Humans are endowed with rationality, the Stoics say, so we’re capable of understanding and participating in the natural order of the universe. We’re not reliant on ancient texts, prophets, or philosophers — science, observation, and reason tell us what we need to know.
More critically, Stoics think we benefit from understanding the universe and aligning ourselves with it. Mountain climbers ignorant of gravity won’t last long, and those who don’t understand the moral implications of the universe will suffer too, but perhaps in less obvious ways.
Stoics align with nature by acting, thinking, and speaking virtuously. This means striving to be wise, just, courageous, and disciplined. They think doing so leads to eudaimonia: a background layer of flourishing and contentment beyond the normal ups and downs of daily emotion.
Conversely, Stoics think vice backfires, even if it gets people what they want — money, leisure, power, prestige, or whatever. There’s something about pushing against the organizing principle of the universe that erodes human flourishing.
Although Stoicism was built to be inseparable from these ideas, most attempts to present the philosophy to modern audiences, such as Lawrence Becker’s 1999 classic, “A New Stoicism,” dismiss any suggestion that virtue echoes something deeper about reality. Many modern works suggest the Logos, or divine reason, is out of step with science and a bit embarrassing for an educated person.
But perhaps the issue is that when we imagine a universe that’s ordered and conscious, we imagine a human mind with all its contradictions.
But the universe is not the human psyche writ large.
Science’s Thinking Universe
The universe thinks.
Hold on. Hear me out.
I’d like to discuss and expand on some of the research put forward by tech ethicistNell Watson.
Let’s start by asking ourselves what the minimum viable computing modality that counts as intelligence looks like. How much does the scale of it matter? What’s your litmus test?
I don’t know about you, but it blows my mind that a bucket of water can function as a perceptron, which sorts numbers into different classes based on attributes (pattern matching). With the Marangoni effect, liquids find the optimal path out of a maze.
Water isn’t traditionally something I’d ascribe even the most rudimentary intelligence to, but this field of inquiry gave rise to liquid-state machine computers, which some researchers think explain how brains work.
Computing is also present in tiny unicellular organisms. Euplotes eurystomus, for instance, conducts computations to figure out how to walk over submerged detritus and vegetation with its fourteen appendages.
Matter doesn’t need silicon microchips or human brains to compute. Configure a wide range of physical matter in the right way and you can scale it into a neural network.
What is a human but billions of little cells corralled into cooperation for the good of the whole? What is human society but this sort of network scaled up? It’s not just that humans use their brains to cooperate. It’s that human brains literally network with each other. Our grey matter somehow syncs when we socialize. This is associated with feelings of connectedness, cooperation, and “self-other merging.””
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This undermines the long-standing view that human consciousness is a walled-off, first-person affair. Consciousness may be more of a shared experience than we realize.
Other earthbound examples of this scaling of consciousness include the “wood wide web” of Pando, 40,000 interconnected trees strung out across 106 acres in Utah, and a fungi colony spanning 2,200 acres in Oregon.
But many researchers argue this scaling and coordination goes far beyond earth and individual species, and that we see coordination across the universe on a massive scale.
One paper concludes, “Our results suggest that the scale invariance observed in many physical and biological systems might be due to some kind of learning dynamics and support the claim that the universe might be a neural network.”
Science’s Anti-Entropic Universe
So what? Even if there’s an approximation of consciousness at various scales in the natural world, we don’t have to assume nature has underlying moral values.
It’s a dog-eat-dog world, right? Malthus has the last laugh. If wolves form a pack to take down an elk, we shouldn’t assume the wolves are good or evil.
But this picture is incomplete. Yes, entropy destroys things and creates disorder. It makes hot things go cold. It’s inexorable.
But localized systems push back and hold the line. They put up increasingly strong resistance to entropy, building order, complexity, and heat in pockets of negentropy.
Dr. Eric Chaisson, a Harvard astrophysicist who’s spent more than 50 years studying cosmic evolution, describes this in terms of energy.
He considers energy rate density a “single, unambiguous, quantitative measure of complexity—that helped to control entropy within increasingly ordered, localized systems evolving amidst increasingly disordered, wider environments, indeed that arguably governed the emergence and maturity of our galaxy, our Sun, our Earth, and ourselves.”
Chaisson believes the universe is evolving towards greater energy density, complexity, and negentropy.
And we could consider this a reasonable conception of nature’s guiding principle — fight entropy. It’s in the implications of this idea where things start to get interesting.
Science’s Cooperative Universe
If the universe is about fighting dissolution and building order and complexity, what does that look like on a practical level?
Harvard researcher A. D. Wissner-Gross believes there’s a “deep connection” between intelligence and entropy, suggesting agents act within their systems to “maximize the overall diversity of accessible future paths of their worlds…Such behavior would then ensure their uniform aptitude for adaptiveness to future change due to interactions with the environment, conferring a potential survival advantage, to the extent permitted by their strength …and their ability to anticipate the future…”
Optionality building and preservation confer a survival advantage. It’s considered a key to antifragility by philosopher Nassim Taleb in his book, Antifragile.
“Options, any options, by allowing you more upside than downside, are vectors of antifragility,” Taleb writes. “If you “have optionality,” you don’t have much need for what is commonly called intelligence, knowledge, insight, skills, and these complicated things that take place in our brain cells. For you don’t have to be right that often. All you need is the wisdom to not do unintelligent things to hurt yourself…and recognize favorable outcomes when they occur.”
We can war, pillage, steal, and capture all kinds of loot. The upsides of vice are tempting and immediate. But zero-sum actions destroy optionality, which impoverishes our future selves. A city you’ve looted and burnt generates no goods you can trade for, ideas and technologies you can use, nor does it provide sanctuary if your home is attacked.
Tech ethicist Nell Watson draws on this body of research to suggest we may be able to arrive at a definition of “good,” a “self-evident, evolutionary epiphany,” that once seen, can’t be unseen.
She suggests that “good” may look like:
* Maximizing optionality by opposing entropy or maximizing negative entropy and collective benefit .
* Doing so without coercion or cooption, and with mutual benefit in mind.
“We may even,” Watson writes, “define love in the same way. M. Scott Peck defined love as “The will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing our own or another’s spiritual growth.”
Perhaps, Watson suggests, “that loving sentiment is more applicable than we knew, expressing “the will of the universe” at all scales and across all time.”
She and collaborator Roshawn Terrell refer to this as Entropic Ethics Theory.
Stoics in an Entropic Universe
Ancient Stoics would balk at how entropic ethics theory affects elements of their cosmology. But they’d object far more to modern attempts to strip away the cosmology entirely. I imagine ancient Stoics wouldn’t find entropic ethics unreasonable if the underlying observations hold. That’s a big if; many of these ideas require scrutiny.
But I find it interesting that acting in accord with nature under either conception of it requires virtue in the Stoic sense.
Aligning with virtue seems likely to build pockets of negentropy and optionality, and promote love. Vice, on the other hand, ratchets entropy into high gear.
Classical virtue ethic systems are not justified by outcomes, of course. Virtue is not a means to an end. A Stoic isn’t virtuous to beat back entropy, or to achieve any virtuous goal. Stoics are virtuous because of virtue’s effects on character, but this only makes sense if it’s a reflection of the underlying structure of the universe. Modern takes on Stoicism impoverish the philosophy by stripping this away and simply do some hand-waving to justify how virtue is still the only good.
When the cosmos is in place as a backdrop, we can see what the result is. The Stoic emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius — who is sometimes dismissed as cerebral and dour — uses the term love 26 times in his journal, Meditations, a result of his focus on justice.
He is in perfect alignment with entropic ethics when he suggests that “What’s bad for the hive cannot be good for the bee.”
If the “universe’s will,” is the interconnection of things for mutual negentropy promotion, we cannot embrace vice. Most forms of it erode the fragile negentropic systems built painstakingly across centuries. Hurting the hive hurts us, even if we seem to be the better for it.
“We can only follow the example of Socrates,” the Stoic philosopher Epictetus said, “and if someone asks where we’re from, never say ‘I’m an Athenian’ or ‘I’m a Corinthian,’ but ‘I’m a citizen of the universe.”
So Socrates was right to chastise Gorgias and insist his self-interest and vice showed he didn’t know how the universe worked.
We’re adrift in fragile negentropic lifeboats, floating in the void. Men like Gorgias go around punching holes in the hull, or cannibalize parts to make shiny baubles. People with morals spend their lives expanding the boat into something bigger and sturdier, even if they’re only trying to be just, courageous, moderate, and wise.
There will always be free riders and madmen, and Stoics argue we have no control of what others do and should instead focus on what we can do — be virtuous.
Whether or not entropy ethics holds up, I think it’s important for modern Stoics to consider how they can align their philosophy with the nature of the universe they inhabit, and reflect its values.
Updates may be necessary.
But as the Stoic philosopher Seneca wrote, “I will indeed use the ancient road — but if I find another route that is more direct and has fewer ups and downs, I will stake out that one. Those who advanced these doctrines before us are not our masters but our guides.”
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Self-love has to end somewhere, right?
Only if we insist on a very limited definition of self-love.
I suspect Marcus Aurelius was right to instruct himself to, “be tolerant with others and strict with yourself.”
I consider being strict with myself to be one of the greatest forms of self-love. It's only when I consistently adhere to my values that I thrive.
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My natural inclination is to let myself off the hook far too easily when I stray from what I’ve decided is important. Often, my mind blanks and pretends nothing untoward is going on until it's too late to change course. It’s easy to avoid thinking about my vices and mistakes this way — I simply don’t think at all.
I used to be obese and used Stoicism to help me lose weight and maintain that weight loss. I’ve also discussed using a certain kind of journaling to externalize philosophical or spiritual ideas and feed them back to myself using a 2nd or 3rd person perspective.
After reading these articles, a reader asked for tips about holding themself accountable without straying out of self-love and into beating themselves up vis-à-vis poor food choices.
I replied that I wasn’t sure where self-love slides into lack of accountability, nor when accountability becomes the vice of beating yourself up. But that they probably do.
Those prone to negative self-talk don’t need to externalize a mean-spirited moral paragon to beat them up. But externalizing some version of a hard-nosed advocate for you and your ideals is powerful, and it doesn’t have to look like self-flagellation.
Here’s how I approach the subject.
The Increasingly Noisy Teacher:
I can polish off a serving of food that more than meets my nutritional and caloric needs without feeling satiated. I can address this with the strategies mentioned in my article, but sometimes I’m in a rush or distracted and I don’t use those techniques.
Almost without conscious thought, I’ll line up for a second serving even though I’m not even sure I’m still hungry. The food is on my plate before I’ve made a decision to eat more, or even considered whether I should eat more.
It’s at this point that I have a last chance to turn off autopilot and take back control before it's too late.
I’ve tried many things over the years. But being harsh is often the most effective strategy. Harshness is obnoxious enough to get my attention, so it’s useful.
I start by imagining a mental mentor figure, which is usually an amalgamation of philosophers I’ve enjoyed reading and an imagined better version of myself.
This is an old trick the Stoics have been using for more than a thousand years. “Let everything you do be done as if watched by someone,” Seneca wrote. “Solitude encourages every fault in us.”
And what does this externalized figure say to reach me on the precipice of a mistake?
Usually, he starts by gently suggesting I consider how my current actions line up with my values. This rarely works. The voice isn’t discordant enough to break through the trance.
So what’s the escalation?
I turn to Socrates, Epictetus, and Crates for examples of teachers ratcheting things up when their students aren’t swayed by gentle logic.
* Socrates is never mean-spirited in his philosophical discussions, even when his interlocutors get testy. But when someone is purposefully being obtuse, he sometimes turns to biting sarcasm to drive home how ridiculous and disingenuous they’re being.
* Epictetus is crotchety and doesn’t suffer fools gladly. He’d be canceled if he was teaching at a public university today. Yet he was often right to roast the pompous youths and misguided rich tourists who came to see him. Epictetus demonstrates that bluntly pointing out stupidity can get through to someone if they’re genuinely trying to improve.
* Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, was taught by the Cynic Crates. Zeno was ashamed to eat low-class lentils in public, so Crates insisted he carry a bowl of lentil soup around the agora, which was unusual. When Zeno tried to hide the bowl under his cloak, Crates broke it with his staff, sending the soup flowing down Zeno’s legs. Now even more embarrassed, Zeno fled. “Why run away, my little Phoenician?”, Crates called after him. “Nothing terrible has befallen you!” Crates resorts to embarrassment to point out that there’s nothing to be embarrassed about at all.
In the about-to-overeat situation mentioned above, my externalized teacher, who has a keen understanding of what buttons to push to get my attention, usually relies on sarcasm and mockery to reach me. After all, he’s a personification of an idea, but he’s also me, and so knows my weaknesses and what I can take.
The mockery I might project, in the tone of an adult talking to a small child, is something along the lines of “Oh, does your little tongue want to taste more yummy food? Isn’t that so cute.”
It's biting enough to get my attention, and usually sufficient for me to turn off autopilot and abort the second helping of food. The externalized guru has made his point. I’m acting like a little child with no moderation, more interested in experiencing pleasure than doing what I believe is right.
There’s nothing wrong with enjoying food. But at some point you’ve had enough. If you can’t even think clearly enough to consider if you’ve reached that point, a bit of mockery isn’t a bad way to snap you back to reality.
Striking the Balance
Virtue demands that we use the right tool for the job.
Three of the Stoic virtues are dikaiosunê (justice), sôphrosunê (moderation/discipline), and phronêsis (wisdom). Any attempt at teaching or self-improvement must be triangulated by these virtues.
So your imagined externalized teacher, or an actual philosopher engaged in teaching, wouldn’t be harsher than is helpful. Harshness is a tool to use when the normal vehicles of teaching aren’t working, and someone is trying to give themselves a free pass. If someone is already overly critical of themselves, it’s not just, wise, or moderate to hand out more of the same. They already know they’re failing.
A good teacher scales back the message to the minimum effective dose of hard-nosed reality to get the job done. Sometimes, the job calls for soft words and encouragement in the face of failure. The simple fact that you’re paying enough attention to be angry/sad about your failing might deserve praise. The Stoic philosopher Hecaton of Rhodes said, “Do you ask what progress I have made? I have begun to be a friend to myself.”
This suggests the process of bringing our thoughts, words, and deeds in line with virtue is a form of self-love. Part of this is holding yourself accountable, sure. But another is threading the needle between calling yourself on your BS and encouraging yourself when you’re floundering. Virtue demands a correctly powered teaching method.
I think it’s great that we can exercise virtue even in how we talk to ourselves after we’ve failed to live virtuously!
This is no less an important step on the path of eudaimonia than whatever big-picture thing we consider of great importance. Sometimes w’re going to fail. How we deal with that failure is as much a test of virtue as the test we think we’ve failed.
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Maybe you’ve felt it when you look at the stars at night, or see a picture of earth from space.
It’s what French philosopher and Stoic scholar Pierre Hadot called that “oceanic feeling,” which overcomes us when we zoom out our awareness and notice our insignificance against the vast scope of the earth, our universe, or time itself.
In one sense it’s humbling. We might feel adrift when we realize how little our lives and personal concerns matter in the grand scheme of things. Why try when what you do has little significance?
But it can also be elevating. When we look beyond our personal focus we notice that we belong to something far larger and greater.
As the philosopher Seneca said, “We are members of one great body, planted by nature … We must consider that we were born for the good of the whole.” Letters 95.52
That take can make the difference between nihilism and purpose.
Because once we see our connection, we recognize, as Marcus Aurelius did, that “What brings no benefit to the hive brings none to the bee.” (Meditations 6.54)
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Surging floodwaters nearly killed me in 2015, and swept away almost everything I owned.
In the shocked aftermath, as I gathered up the mud-smeared detritus of my life, I remembered the words of Seneca — Omnia mea mecum sunt: All that is mine I carry with me.
Seneca thought our most valuable possessions couldn’t be taken from us — our character, our freedom to choose, our knowledge and logic.
Peace of mind and integrity are far more valuable than wealth, things, and reputation. Therefore, we should never trade this internal wealth for anything external.
I’ve spent several years of my life on the road, carrying everything with me in one or two bags. Surprisingly, no matter how little I had, it was always enough. I was never unhappy for having little, but ample possessions have often weighed me down. In a society that urges us to have more, it’s an important lesson to learn.
Things will never be the most important thing.
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“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines,” Ralph Waldo Emerson famously mused in his essay, Self Reliance.
He recognized that new evidence often renders previous stances untenable, so an insistence on consistency often leaves us misaligned with our reason and our moral character over time.
A devoted Democrat or Republican in 2003 would find themselves supporting a party with considerably different values in 2023. Only a thorough reexamination would reveal whether support is still warranted.
That’s why labeling ourselves is so dangerous. We can’t think clearly about anything we let into our identity, so we need to stick with working hypotheses that we’re constantly reexamining and testing and don’t fully buy into.
When in doubt, remember the conclusion of the philosopher and Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius: “You always own the option of having no opinion.” (Meditations 6.52)
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The hospital and public library of Brattleboro Vermont were shocked to receive their largest donations ever in 2015 — a $5 million bequest from Ronald Read, a former janitor and widower who drove a second-hand beater, chopped his own firewood, and wore worn-out clothes.
His riches resulted not from a large income, but from frugality and steady investment in blue-chip stocks.
Read would perhaps agree with Seneca that “Nature demands but little, and the wise man suits his needs to nature.”
But frugality also gives you something else — the flexibility to give back and exercise the virtue of justice. After dying at age 92, Read left money to his stepchildren, caregivers, and two institutions he cared about — the library and hospital.
Seneca suggested the virtuous try to give some of their resources “either to the good or those to whom he will be able to make good.”
What that means is entirely up to you.
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Stoics try to be prepared for life. To best way to prepare is to train yourself a react to everything with equanimity or indifference while seeking to respond with virtue.
* Imagine different “disasters” that might befall you today or in the future as if they’re happening. Imagine your initial reaction (probably overblown), and see yourself pull back from it so you can take a more critical look.
* Practice removing value judgments from your “disasters”, looking at them as simple facts, and realizing that they’re not good or bad in and of themselves — “It is what it is.”
* As you imagine these “disasters”, ask yourself, what would be totally up to me at this point in terms of my response? What would be not up to me? Practice refocusing on the things that you have total control over. Make sure your responses are in line with the virtues of wisdom, justice, courage, and moderation.
* Imagine how an experienced religious figure, philosopher, or another person you admire would react to the “disasters” you’re imagining. What would they do differently?
“What is quite unlooked for is more crushing in its effect, and unexpectedness adds to the weight of a disaster,” Seneca says. “This is a reason for ensuring that nothing ever takes us by surprise. We should project our thoughts ahead of us at every turn and have in mind every possible eventuality instead of only the usual course of events…”
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Practicing philosophy and living by our values can leave us looking strange and out of touch.
The Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau thought we should embrace this. “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer,” he wrote in Walden, “Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”
But your out-of-step marching may well attract attention, which we have to steel ourselves for.
“If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid with regard to external things,” Epictetus told his students. “Don’t wish to be thought to know anything; and even if you appear to be somebody important to others, distrust yourself. For, it is difficult to both keep your faculty of choice in a state conformable to nature, and at the same time acquire external things. But while you are careful about the one, you must of necessity neglect the other (Enchiridion 13).
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It seems like a paradox— Stoics want to be relaxed and at peace, and yet dedicated to achieving things.
How can we be serious about justice or reaching a business or personal goal if we have to also be relaxed about it? A serious drive to achieve anything seems to sabotage peace of mind.
The answer is simple but not easy — as Epictetus says, “Make the best use of what is in your power, and take the rest as it happens.”
So we dedicate ourselves to doing what we have control over while writing off the results as unimportant. Nothing can impede our intentions and goals, but the external outcomes are ultimately out of our hands.
You can be relaxed and dedicated.
Just because you worry more, doesn't mean you care more.
So relax, and set your mind on what’s under your complete control. The rest will take care of itself.
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As artillery shells exploded on the beach around him, Theodore Roosevelt Jr. knew he had a problem.
The vanguard of the allied attack against Nazi Germany, which Roosevelt was leading, had come ashore far from its target. His soldiers were pinned under heavy fire and panicking.
The 56-year-old son of President Teddy Roosevelt was the oldest man on Utah Beach that day. He walked with a cane and was battling a heart condition. Yet he calmly ignored the bullets and shrapnel, drew his pistol, and limped off to find his target.
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He returned to his panicking troops soon after and calmly explained that everything would be fine. He’d located the causeway that was their target and devised a plan.
"We'll start the war from right here!" he cheerfully told them.
Each regiment coming ashore was welcomed by a barrage of enemy artillery and a calm, smiling Roosevelt, who recited bits of poetry, cracked jokes, and directed them on their way.
It’s an approach to life that the Stoic philosopher and emperor Marcus Aurelius would have appreciated.
“The cucumber is bitter? Then cast it aside,” he wrote. “There are brambles in the path? Step out of the way. That will suffice, and you need not ask in addition, ‘Why did such things ever come into the world?” (Meditations 8.50)
Have you washed up broken and battered, far from your original goal? Do you lack the required expertise, or feel like your years weighing you down?
That’s ok. We can only, as Roosevelt knew, start from where we are.
Wherever you’ve washed up, take a moment to get your bearings, check to see what’s in line with your values, and then launch the war you need to wage from right there.
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Journaling is, on its surface, pretty easy: Get a notebook. Get a pen. Write about your life. Done.
But not all journaling is created equal. One of the most powerful journaling techniques is simply talking to yourself the right way — like a philosopher.
What does a person gain from practicing philosophy? Antisthenes, one of Socrates’s students, had a strange answer to this question. He said he gained, “The ability to converse,” with himself.
Why would we want to talk to ourselves? Isn’t that the domain of crazy people and eccentric cranks?
Talking to ourselves, particularly through a certain kind of journaling, can make us wiser, calmer, more at peace with our lives, and better at conflict navigation — exactly what philosophers try to achieve.
That’s not only my conclusion from journaling this way for many years, but that of a lot of psychological research.
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Illeism and Perspective
The kind of journaling that stands out is ‘Illeism’, which simply means that you’re taking on the detached perspective of an outsider and referring to yourself with second or third-person pronouns.
So I’d write ‘Andrew ate dinner”, or — my personal preference — “you ate dinner”, instead of “I ate dinner.”
That sounds like a minor change, but it creates enough distance between us and our egos that we can assess situations more objectively and look at our emotions rationally rather than letting them cloud our thinking.
This technique isn’t new. In fact, some of the wisest men and women in history have used it gain perspective on their lives.
Marcus Aurelius’s Journal
Perhaps the best surviving example of ancient illeism is “Meditations,” the journal of the Roman Emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius.
If you read the book, you’ll notice that he uses the second-person pronouns “you” and “your” most frequently.
“…it is not the thing itself that troubles you,” he writes, “but your own judgement about it. And this you have the power to eliminate.” (Meditations 8.47)
And “The things you think about determine the quality of your mind. Your soul takes on the color of your thoughts.” (Meditations 5.16)
And on another occasion, “Just that you do the right thing. The rest doesn’t matter.” (Meditations 6.2)
Clearer Thinking Through Illeism
Modern researchers have found that Marcus’s way of journaling changes how we think.
In this study of the “Distanced-Self-Reflection Diary Method,” researchers asked 555 participants to reflect on their daily struggles in a month-long diary. Half were told to use the third person, which the researchers called distanced self-reflection. The other half wrote in the first person. In a second study, participants were given no specific instructions about how to write, and served as a kind of control for the other two.
All the assessed forms of wise reasoning, such as intellectual humility, open-mindedness about how situations can unfold, and consideration for diverse viewpoints were improved among all the participants who journaled. But they improved most in the third-person group.
“Utilizing the ancient practice of distanced self-reflection, we demonstrated that referring to oneself in the third person during repeated reflections on daily events affords a more expansive self-focus, which in turn facilitates wiser reasoning,” the researchers wrote. “The results from two field studies suggest that training people in distanced self-reflection can bolster wise reasoning in everyday life.”
Several dozen other studies have found similar improvements to a wide range of psychological issues when switching to the second or third person, including social anxiety and post-event worry,
So simply writing about your life and stressful events in the second or third person is likely to make you psychologically healthier, but there’s a way we can take this a step further.
What Would Rusticus Do?
We might ask why Marcus journaled in the second person to begin with. Yes, it was a longstanding philosophical tradition.
But in, “How to Think Like a Roman Emperor,” author Donald Robertson suggests “Meditations” may have started as an attempt by Marcus to replace the counsel of his philosophy teacher, Junicus Rusticus, who’d recently died.
Well into adulthood, Marcus relied on Rusticus’s perspective. He’d tell his old mentor what he was struggling with, and Rusticus replied with sound advice grounded in philosophy.
When Rusticus’s died, Marcus needed to become his own teacher. He already knew the precepts of Stoic philosophy, but externalizing that knowledge and passing it back to himself as though through another person made a big difference.
If you study a religion or philosophy, or simply have someone you look up to and admire, you can start any journaling session by asking yourself what advice or perspective your exemplar would give you. You likely already know what their more expansive view entails, so pass the advice back to your conscious mind to help clear the fog.
If you’re looking for powerful topics to use this technique with, death and fate are two good options.
Until next time, keep journaling.
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If we don’t know what we value, how can we know how to live?
One of Socrates’s aims was to clarify what was actually good and truly important so he could live up to those values.
Therapist and author Donald Robertson suggests one surprising way to find our values: Look for what we despise.
If you dislike a politician because they’re a hypocrite, it implies you value integrity. “You’re projecting your values left, right, and center,” Robertson says.
Once we see this connection, we should ask if we’re living out the opposite of what we despise.
How well did you live up to your values this week on a 1-10 scale? If you score low, ask yourself how you can take one step up the ladder in a single value over the next week.
More integrity is just one action away.
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“This is not the body your mother gave birth to,” the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote in a seemingly strange entry in his journal.
But wasn’t he right? Our cells are constantly being replaced. The childhood you, physically and psychologically, is, in a sense, dead. Today’s you will be gone before long. You’re not the person you were yesterday.
It’s as the philosopher Heraclitus said: “No man steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man.”
If we’re always dying and being reborn, and never truly do the same thing twice, there’s only sane one response: don’t miss a moment of it.
This may be your last time to experience this as you are, so don’t let it slip away while you’re distracted. Live well while you have life.
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If you opened this article, it implies you care about finding passion and a meaningful path forward. Congratulations! You now have at least one thing you know you care about. Until something else lights a fire under you, I suggest you organize your life around the goal of gaining further clarity about what’s really important to you.
* If you want passion and purpose, ask yourself what you’re trying to avoid by seeking them. Why do you want to avoid these end states? Be persistent and dig deep.
* Consider people you admire and dislike. What traits and values do the best and worst of them have? This week, can you take one step toward living up to the values of those you admire, and one step away from those you dislike?
* Most of us abhor contradictions, and can’t stand them when they find them. Look for contradictions between your thinking and your actions and begin to remove them. What you find will imply values you can build a life around.
* If you’re not spending at least a few minutes a day probing why you don’t have passion and what might help you find it, you’re probably not giving the question the attention it deserves. There are a lot of distractions in our world. Don’t let them keep you from what matters most.
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The Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius put his training as an orator to good use, crafting beautiful turns of phrase to express timeless wisdom in his journal.
“The universe is change and life is opinion,” goes one of his most memorable lines.
Marcus penned short, memorable epigrams like this to recall whenever he faltered in life, often linking together important lessons.
This one was a mashup between the chief ideas of two philosophers Marcus respected: the Stoic Epictetus and the presocratic Heraclitus.
Heraclius emphasized that impermanence was the only constant. “No man steps into the same river twice,” he said.
Epictetus insisted no external thing could be good or bad; our thoughts make the world what it is.
Equipped with this mashup, Marcus remained steady at the helm of the Roman State as the world threw disaster after disaster his way.
Based on his record, it seems to have kept him grounded. How many epigrams do you have in your toolbox?
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Stoic author and therapist Donald Robertson talks about his personal Stoic practice, whether or not venting is psychologically helpful, how Society acts as a kind of negative therapy, and much more.
0:24 Is venting valuable or harmful to psychological health? 7:41 Venting vs externalizing a thought to better grasp it. 12:39 Objectivity creeping into vented subjects 17:34 How society and culture give us "negative therapy." 21:31 No one would watch logical, emotionally mature characters 22:55 Are we shielding people from needed exposure to stressful situations? 29:13 Donald's personal Stoic practice 35:07 Marcus living inside Andrew's brain 37:20 Why did so many emperors adopt Marcus Aurelius's Name?51:27 Was philosophy hip because it was what the emperor was into?
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