Rev Left Radio - Philosophy Series: Stoicism for Revolutionaries

Episode Date: February 27, 2025

Breht listens to, reflects on, and critically engages with a public lecture by the late philosopher Michael Sugrue titled Marcus Aurelius' Meditations: The Stoic Ideal. He discusses the philosophy of Stoicism, its insights as well as its limitations, its commodification and bastardization under late capitalism, the dialectical inversion of the philosophy of a Roman Emperor for proletarian revolutionaries, Virtue Ethics, Mahayana Buddhism and The Four Brahmaviharas, the importance of courage and discipline and responsibility, Momento Mori, the Cardinal Virtues, equipping ourselves mentally and emotionally for a lifetime of class struggle, seeking the balance of the Middle Path, Marxist Dialectics, and much more!  Professor Sugrue passed away last year, and Breht has always found his free, public lectures on philosophy to be helpful and really well done. In the spirit of free and open access to education, Breht offers his knowledge of philosophy alongside this offering by Professor Sugrue. The use of this lecture series falls under the protections of the Fair Use doctrine.  Outro Music: "Lilac Wine" by Nina Simone SUPPORT SOCIALIST NIGHT SCHOOL HERE Check out all our other Philosophy Series episodes HERE ----------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow RLR on IG HERE Learn more about Rev Left HERE

History does not bend toward justice on its own. It is not some cosmic force that, given enough time, will inevitably deliver us from the jaws of capitalism, imperialism, and exploitation. It is our hands, our minds, our collective struggle that shapes the world. And that struggle is not for the weak-willed, not for those who flinch at adversity or crumble when the weight of history presses down upon them. It demands discipline, it demands endurance, it demands a revolutionary mindset forged in the fires of hardship. Now Marcus Aurelius, writing in the darkest hours of empire, understood much of this, not because he was a revolutionary. He was, after all, an emperor, a ruler of the old world, but rather because he saw clearly what we must see now. We control nothing except how we respond to the.

conditions before us. The capitalist state will throw everything it has at us, repression, propaganda, empty distraction, and endless division. The question is not whether we will face hardship, but whether we will stand firm in our principles, unshaken, focused, disciplined, and resolute. The enemy wants us angry but unfocused, demoralized, reactionary. But anger alone does not build a revolution. Frustration alone does not dismantle an empire. We must take that fire and forge it into something unbreakable. The Stoics taught that adversity is not an obstacle, but it is the way forward. When they push us down, we rise stronger. When they try to break us, we become more disciplined. When they crush one movement, a thousand more emerge. Our task is not to

seek comfort. It is not to wait for some perfect moment to act. It is to step into the storm willingly with clear eyes and steady hands to fight for what is right, not because we expect to be rewarded, not because we believe we will personally see victory, but because it's our duty. The revolutionary does not fight for glory. We do not fight for personal recognition. We fight because we have to because we live under capitalism and to live under capitalism without resistance is to be complicit in its cruelty so when doubt creeps in when exhaustion sets in when the forces of reactions seem overwhelming remember this we are part of something greater than ourselves we are the living expression of centuries of struggle and we owe it to those who came

before us and those who will come after to press forward to organize to educate to struggle to be the disciplined principled unwavering force that history demands of us we do not fear hardship we do not fear suffering and we don't even fear death because we know that we are on the right side of history and we will never stop until the world is free now when you hear Stoicism, you probably hear or think of a lot of different things. I think mostly we think about how stoicism is presented to us today through pop culture and YouTube and the algorithms. Modern pop culture and YouTube have gutted Stoicism's radical core, reducing it to yet another toothless self-help product, perfectly tailored for the alienated, overworked, and demoralized subject of late capitalism.

Instead of a philosophy of discipline, duty, and resilience in the fight for justice, Stoicism is repackaged as a personal coping mechanism, a way to stay calm while enduring the misery of wage slavery, the atomization of neoliberal society, and the existential and spiritual emptiness of a world commodified beyond recognition. The millennia-long philosophy of warriors and philosophers has been sanitized into a series of motivational, sound bites, marketed mostly to young men looking for an edge in finance or the dating

market, stripped of any notion of collective struggle or ethical responsibility. Instead of fortifying the revolutionary, modern stoicism is sold as a comforting sedative, a way to passively endure oppression rather than fight to overthrow it. The real Stoics, those who embodied their philosophy, did not preach passive acceptance of injustice. They believed in acting in accordance with reason, virtue, and justice, regardless of personal cost. But today, YouTube Grifters, tech CEOs, and self-help influencers, petal stoicism has nothing more than a means to maximize productivity, suppress emotions, and resign oneself to capitalist drudgery. Another tool in the ideological arsenal of the ruling class.

designed to pacify rather than empower. What I want to do here today, not only experiment with this new slightly overwrought intro, but also to dialectically invert the modern dominant notion of what stoicism is, the pop culture self-help salve that it's presented as, to dialectically invert that into something that can be inspiring for revolutionaries. And also to dialectically invert the wisdom of a ruler. Marcus Aurelius was the emperor of Rome.

One of their better emperors for sure, but still an emperor in the slave mode of production. Can we invert the wisdom of a ruler and turn it into a tool of those of us interested in overthrowing rulers? That's what I'm going to try to do today. so this is the third episode in our series our philosophy series we've covered i think we've done two already one on nietzsche and one on marks and people have really taken to those and thought that they were cool so i'm experimenting a little bit with a with a rousing intro and i wanted to move in a different direction we're going to cover marcus arrelius today and all of the contradictions that immediately emerge right stoicism the way it's sold to it

us today the way capitalism has co-opted it like it has things like meditation and mindfulness and anything else that that could in some context be used as a radical tool against it it is an expert at co-opting and turning these things into salves to for people who are operating under the drudgery of the system salves to alienation opiates for the masses and so i want to take philosophy and in this case stoicism and marcus aurelius away from that see if i can turn it into something useful for those of us interested in revolutionary transformation and um and hopefully learn some stuff along the way because at the end of the day these philosophy um series episodes are about engaging with philosophy the western philosophical tradition through the lectures of

the late michael sugru and learning about philosophy for its own sake um but always with an eye towards what we're aiming to do, which is the radical transformation of society. So today we're going to get into that. We're going to learn about them. And I will do as I usually do, which is interject to add context, to add examples, to add depth, and to add a revolutionary vision to what we're talking about. Some people have had a mild critique of the philosophy episodes saying that I pop in too much, that it's hard for them to get momentum with the actual lecture before I pop.

in to say, you know, my little two cents. So I'm going to try my hardest in this episode to refrain from doing that as much as possible, to break in less and to say more when I do so that there can be some momentum in the back and forth between the lecture and my interjections. And really quick, before we get into it, if you like what we do here at Rev Left, it means so much to us. If you can support the show, there's two ways to do that, signing up to be a monthly member on Patreon, and for $5 a month you get access to hundreds of back catalog. bonus exclusive episodes as well as new bonus episodes every single month. In fact, right now on the Patreon, I am participating in a local organizing effort towards political education.

And I've been tasked with doing two lectures, one on an intro to historical materialism and one on the history of socialist revolutions. And I'm actually working in community with my Patreon listeners to kind of refine the drafts, create as good of a final draft as possible, get their feedback, et cetera. So in that way, kind of communally engaged with my patrons to help support a community organizing project we're doing here in Omaha. And then the final product of that refining process, I'll put out publicly as a political education tool that other organizations and other cities can use for their own political education initiatives. And then I also say that the one place where I can still respond to every comment is in the comment section on Patreon. I can't answer

DMs. I can't answer every email, but I've set that one place aside, the comment section of every Patreon post where I post not only Patreon exclusives, but every public episode as well. I've set that aside to be the one place. I make sure I respond as best I can to every single comment. So if you're interested in that level of engagement, you can support us on Patreon. If you don't want to subscribe to Patreon, you don't want to do a monthly model, you have criticisms of Patreon or anything like that we also have a one-time donation link at buymea coffee.com forward slash rev left radio a link to it in the show notes it helps so much um this this the support you give for the show is how me and david support our families um you know both of us have multiple children both of us

have thousands and thousands of dollars of medical debt that we are trying to wrestle with and grapple with and um you know we live paycheck to paycheck like most of you um and i understand not everybody has disposable income, but for those that do, that do support the show, we're 100% listener funded. We could not do this if it wasn't for our listeners and our supporters. And so you can either support us on Patreon monthly or you can give us a one-time donation. And either way, it means the absolute world to us. And again, keeps this show going. We will never have advertisements on this show ever, just on principle, but also we're a radical revolutionary show. And so a lot of corporations aren't lining up and beaten down the door to advertise on our show anyway.

which is totally expected and good. So, yeah, the show is a 100% listener funded. It's because of you. We've been able to do this for now eight years. This February marks eight years on the air. And we're deeply, deeply appreciative to everybody who not only supports us with their hard-earned money, but anybody that shares the show, spreads it around, leaves positive reviews, you know, follows us on YouTube or on Instagram to get the numbers

up and goose the algorithm to get in front of more eyes. Anybody that does any of that is genuinely helping. You know, this project continue on and advance. So we deeply, deeply appreciate it. Love and solidarity. Let's get into the lecture. After the death of Socrates and the breakup of Greek culture that resulted from the Peloponnesian War, Socratic philosophy went into a decline and fragmented into several pieces,

and the fragments of Socratic philosophy make up the body of Hellenistic philosophy. What I mean by Hellenistic philosophy is the subsequent developments of Greek philosophy, which take their cue from the Socratic approach to philosophy. Yet, they don't have all the component parts of Socratic philosophy. They usually lack the wit. They almost always lack the poetry. Occasionally, they absorb some of the ethical doctrines or epistemological doctrines, but the ones who come after Socrates never really live up to the Socratic ideal.

The three main fragments that Socratic philosophy breaks into are called Stoicism, Epicureanism, and skepticism. And these are the most important Hellenistic outgrowths from Socratic philosophy. And since Rome, the Roman Empire in particular, is the political entity, which ultimately dominates the Mediterranean basin and absorbs and inherits the tradition of Greek philosophy, most of the Hellenistic branches of philosophy are developed in connection or with reference to either politically or intellectually with Roman culture. And the first of these developments is hedonism or Epicureanism, named after a guy named Epicurus. And what Epicureanism says is that pleasure is the only good, and that the happy man is the one that has a great many pleasures, but no corresponding pains.

And there is potentially a way of deriving that from Socratic philosophy. If you would take the idea of Socratic prudence, the man who drinks a little bit in order to get a certain degree of pleasure, but then not so much. as he will cause himself a hangover or cause himself some corresponding pain, he's being prudently Socratic, picking and choosing his pleasures in such a way that he does not generate any corresponding pains. You can see possibly how people who were not entirely committed to the Socratic conception of the soul and of virtue might want to derive that sort of justification for the pursuit of pleasure from the Socratic Dialogues.

A second alternative, again a minor alternative fragment of Socratic philosophy is called skepticism. Socrates throughout most of the dialogues, I would emphasize the word most rather than all, says that he doesn't know anything. Part of the Socratic irony is this posture of acting as if he's really an ignorant man when in fact he is wise in saying that he knows nothing and thus never trying to teach people by directly making declarative sentences. For the most part, Socrates teaches by question and answer. Socrates helps people to articulate and to realize what's already buried within their soul. When Socrates does that, when he's in that skeptical mode, he says, I myself know nothing,

all I do is inquire into things. I'm the eternal acquieter. I'm the patron saint of rational inquiry. And it's possible to see, particularly within the context of the Roman Empire, how skepticism might develop from that Socratic stance of knowing nothing. Remember that the Roman Empire is a heterogeneous mix of peoples and culturedism. and religions and philosophical positions, and after being forced to encounter one cosmogonic myth after another, one theory of religion after another, one theory of morals after

another, sophisticated Romans, sophisticated Hellenistic thinkers might well come to the conclusion that Lucian the skeptic did, which is that no one really knows the right path, no one even knows if there is a right path. The best we can do is say that the pretensions made by the various schools of philosophy are just that pretensions. Skepticism, while it may be rather negative, is at least right. We can be certain about what we do not know. And it's possible to see how someone, especially someone that was terribly frustrated

with the attempt to obtain final absolute knowledge, might resort to skepticism as a kind of easy way out, a way of avoiding the burden of Socratic inquiry. The third and most important development in Hellenistic philosophy is called Stoicism. And Stoicism is probably the greatest and most interesting achievement of the Hellenistic philosophers. And while it never achieves the poetic and intellectual grandeur of the Socratic synthesis of the Platonic overarching system, which makes statements about the entire human condition, Stoicism is, in fact, a noble philosophy, an excellent philosophy for silver men, for those spirited men in the Republic who are going to be our guardians.

It's an excellent philosophy for military men. It's an excellent philosophy for people that are going to be practical politicians if they intend to be virtuous, if they intend to pursue the public good. And stoicism is characterized by a rejection of pleasure as the standard of human happiness and human felicity. Stoicism takes the position that the wise man, the good man, the philosopher, is a man who lives in accordance with nature. He fears only abdicating his own.

moral responsibility. He is not afraid of pain. He is not afraid of death. He is not afraid of poverty. He is not afraid of any of the vicissitudes of the human condition. He fears only that he should let himself down, and then he should be less than a complete human being. According to the Stoics, and there are a number of Stoics, two or three or four or five, that actually develop the doctrine, but all the doctrines are quite similar. The only matter of concern to a wise and philosophic individual is the things completely under your control. You can't control the movements of the sun and the planets. You can't control whether a leaky ship sinks or makes it to port. You can't control the weather. You can't control other people.

You can't control the society around you. There's only one thing and one thing only that you are in control of, and that is you. Your will, your intentions, yourself. In other words, the wise man, the truly philosophical man, is the man who is entirely in control of his own soul, who takes utter and complete moral responsibility for his actions, and is indifferent to everything else, not because he doesn't care about other people, not because he doesn't care about the felicity of the entire human species, but because it's not under his control. There's no use wondering or worrying about what tomorrow will bring since tomorrow isn't under your control. Do what's right today and let tomorrow take care of itself.

all right so right there we can see and i'm i'm framing all of these in terms of virtues and insights that can be used by revolutionary organizers and those of us interested in radical transformation and i've always argued on this podcast that outward struggle is essential nothing can happen without it we need organization we need the development of a vanguard party we need class struggle we need to fight right but we also at the same time have a responsibility to try to be the best versions of ourself in that context so that our personal foibles, our limitations, our egos, those ways in which we fail morally don't limit our ability to organize and transform society. So this is the dialectical balance between inward transformation

and outward transformation. If you're just interested in internal transformation, you become a hippie, new age person, meditate in a cave, turn away from politics because it's gross and messy. We all know those types. If you only focus on outward transformation, then you will find, as I have found organizing for many, many, many years and being in the, in the, you know, revolutionary left milieu that there is, that problems again and again arise when people are underdeveloped morally, when they are narcissistic, when they let their petty ego dominate organizing forms and methodologies. And over and over and over again, I've seen it so many times personally and standing from afar from organizations where interpersonal conflict

gets framed as principled ideological struggle. It creates splits, it destroys organizations, And instead of being able to look themselves in the mirror or to even be able to navigate conflict in the way that Mao taught us how to do in a non-liberal open way, right, the inability to do that often creates conflict between people who don't know how to navigate it properly, who aren't aware or capable to look at themselves and see the ways that their own ego is contributing to the problem and who retreat from taking personal responsibility, by framing it as ideological principle differences. Not to say that there aren't ideological principle differences that are relevant and that can destroy organizations for the better. Some organizations need to be destroyed because of their lack of ideological coherency or whatever, but that it can often be a problem that limits organizations,

that caps organizations, that dissolves organizations. And so if we're really interested in organizing toward a better world, we have to take seriously that side of the equation. And what is he saying here? control what you can, accept what you cannot. Okay? We don't control the time we're born, the epoch that we're born into. We don't control the society we're born into, the language we speak, the ideological confusion of those around us, the power of capitalism, right? We don't control any of that. What we do control is how are we going to react to it? How are we going to pick

up the mantle of responsibility and duty to ourselves, to our neighbors, to our community, to our futures to the whole human species and how are we going to react to the conditions we cannot control and being very clear about that not only in the revolutionary context but in your own personal life is incredibly helpful immediately looking at any problem that you face and saying what aspect of this is within my control and what aspect is not the aspect that is not in my control set it aside okay can't change it that's what i have to deal with is that a health problem Is that an organizational obstacle? Is that an interpersonal difficulty?

You know, is that a structural societal problem you're facing? Whatever it is, if you can't immediately change that, be very clear about what you can't change, set that aside and focused wholly on what you can. How can I respond? With my guidance being my values, my principles, the sort of person I want to be, how can I respond to this difficulty, to this obstacle, to this challenge in a way that pushes me forward, that is edifying, has the best chance of solving the problem without getting tangled up in the anxiety and the fear and the worry about the things you can't control. It's an incredibly clarifying question to ask in any sort of any sort of personal challenge that you face in your life. And suffering, this can feed into the Buddhist aspect of it, suffering comes when we try to control the uncontrollable.

As many of you know, I struggle with obsessive compulsive disorder and have my entire life. What is obsessive compulsive disorder if not trying to have certainty and control where you can't possibly have it. It is my young brain faced with certain childhood traumas where uncertainty and a lack of control were the main problems, trying to devise a way to regain control and certainty in a context I literally can't have it in and producing a certain form of neuroticism or disordered thinking that creates a lot of suffering for myself. You know, and part of my ability to slowly recover as I hopefully fingers crossed am doing with OCD and I eventually if and when I succeed at recovery I will put out an entire episode sort of helping people learn what I've found

helpful what I haven't etc but if I am able to recover it's going to have to come through this radical acceptance of there are lots of things in my life that I am uncertain about almost everything I do not have control over be very clear about that except the uncertainty, radically accept what you don't have control over, and then work and be very clear about where those arenas, where you can still influence are and operate in those arenas exclusively. Right. So I'm uncertain about when I'm going to die or whether my health problems will blossom into something existential or terminal, right, all the things that OCD wants to obsess about and fixate on. But I can influence what I put in my body. I can influence how I live my

daily life. I can influence whether I am a fit person or not. And those things can go on to not control the uncontrollable, but be factors that I can influence. And instead of wasting my mental energy focusing on all the things I am not certain about and can't control, I'll focus on those things and let the chips fall where they may. In a revolutionary context, we have to struggle without concern about the outcome of that struggle. Will we win or will we succeed? Is it even worth doing? Should I even fucking be wasting my time organizing? Look how shittily developed my local organizing milieu is. Is it even worth it? You know, what if I spend my whole life trying to change the world and it doesn't happen? Okay, you can't control any of that. Be very clear about that.

We're engaged in revolutionary organizing education and being a revolutionary in whatever ways we can, regardless of the outcome because it is our duty. It is our responsibility. We know enough to know better. We can see where this society, if left to its own devices, it's heading, and it's heading off a fucking cliff. And so we have a responsibility not to our own careers or our own validation or our own quote-unquote legacy or impact, but to other people to try to put our efforts not towards making more money and becoming an influencer and getting famous and getting more status. so our Instagram can be even cooler but we have a responsibility to live our lives in a way

that aligns with our deepest values and that tries to push the world in a better direction those are our responsibilities those are things we can control we can't control the world we're born into we can control how we live our lives inside of that world and what we dedicate our time and our energy toward and in fact we have a duty

to think deeply about what that is and to align our behavior with the sort of people we want to be and the sort of values we hold most dear and underneath all politics is a set of deep core values right you get behind all the differences and ideologies and I believe this and that person believes that here's a libertarian

here's an anarcho-capitalist don't make me puke here's a Marxist here's an anarchist blah blah underneath that if you dig deep enough is a set of values about the world, about what's important, about what matters. Getting down to that and aligning not only your politics but your personal life with those deepest values is one of our responsibilities. Or we can sit back on the couch and spend seven hours flitting through Instagram and

pursuing our empty desire after desire and trying to make people think that we're cooler than we are or manage our image to others and operate from this pathetic, egoic cycle of samsaric delusion where we are just the perfect neoliberal subject

confused, scattered, driven by impulses we don't understand consuming things as a way of expressing ourselves and filling the void

within ourselves we can live that life lots of people do it leads to the grave and emptiness and a deathbed where you look back over your life and see nothing

but a black screaming howling void where meaning should be You could do that, but we have a responsibility to do something different. The stoic philosopher is the man who has liberated himself from fear. He's not afraid of death. He's not afraid of pain. He's not afraid of other people's dismissal as a fool. The only thing he cares about is that he should meet his moral obligations.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said that greatness is the perception that virtue is enough, which is an elegant and beautiful line and he might well have stolen that from one of the Stoics because all of the Stoics basically believe that. Virtue, moral virtue, an organized soul which pursues rationally the ends which are good for all human beings that's the Stoic conception of virtue.

They finally understand their greatness consists in the fact that they perceive that virtue is enough. We do not need wealth. We do not need sexual gratification. We do not need life itself. If moral virtue tells us that we must die in the pursuit of some good end, the protection of our family, the protection of our home, the protection of the innocent,

in the doing of right, nothing should be spared, not even our lives. What a power that is, to wrestle with your own mortality, to radically accept that you are going to fucking die one day, and to let that cast a shadow back across your life that urges you on to meaningful action, to living your life the way you want to live it if you repress that fear of mortality if you look away from it if you try to distract yourself from it

you will live in some sense a half-lived life right we just had the Sufi episode where we talked about dying before you die right of overcoming your fear of death of dying to the ego that is trembling and fearful of death of its own personal obliteration so that something new and more robust and beautiful can emerge and in Buddhism

they talk about no birth no death death, that when you are aligned with an identified awareness that is beyond mere ego, you realize, and I can't argue you into this position, it's a visceral experience you can have, that death is nothing to be scared of at all. And think about the great revolutionaries. Think about Malcolm X. Think about Rosa Luxembourg. Think about Fred Hampton.

Think about Martin Luther King Jr. Think about Che Guevara. Think about Thomas Sankara. What did they all have in common? They were murdered because of their revolutionary activity. Patrice Lamumba, go down the line. We could say so many names right here. They were murdered and killed by the enemies of progress,

and they were willing to accept that. When the executioner, CIA-backed executioner pointed the gun at Che Guevara, what did he say? Shoot, coward. You're only going to kill. kill a man. What did Fred Hampton say? When I die, I'm not going to die because I slip on ice or I get in a plane crash. I'm going to die because I'm a threat to the system because I'm fighting for the people. Malcolm X in his last weeks, he knew he was dead. He knew he was a dead man

walking. Did he cower? Did he run away? Did he fly to another country and change his name? No, he looked straight in the face and said, when it comes, it comes. Until then, I'm standing up and doing what the fuck I got to do. What's in my heart, what's burning through my soul. Rosa Luxembourg, brutalized by the Freikor, the preliminary formation that would eventually become the Nazis. Right? Brutalized, beaten, tortured, assassinated,

her body unceremoniously dumped in a canal to be washed up months later as a bloated, rotting corpse. Did she run from that? She could have left Germany when things were getting if. she could have ran away she didn't consciously she made the decision to stay come what may

and I guarantee when she was taken into custody by the fricor she looked him dead in the eyes and she had the courage of a thousand men facing her own death unmoved she didn't cower she didn't beg for her life

because she'd already come to terms with her mortality so out of stoicism out of revolutionary history, out of Buddhism, out of anything that is deep and meaningful, there is always this exhortation to face your own death, bring it out of the subconscious, into the conscious awareness, live with it, right? Buddhist meditators, they used to go out into graveyards and dig up corpses and sit in front of it and meditate in front of the corpse.

Stoics and Buddhists alike have had times or figures in the same. their history where they've set a human skull on their desk or some came up with some other way to remind themselves day in and day out that this too shall pass you too shall face extinction you can run from that you can squiggle and worm out of it you can go oh god that's an uncomfortable feeling let me pull up instagram and start scrolling i don't want to feel that feeling you can do that most people do or you can face it and accept it at the deepest level and become a more courageous human being because of it. Momental Maury.

The Stoic Wise Man is a man who has trained his soul, trained his mind, so that he is not afraid of apparent evils. He is only afraid of real evil. He is afraid of losing control of his soul. He is afraid

of being a slave to lust, to desire, to emotion. The Stoic man is the honorable philosopher, the man who stands at his duty and is steadfast. and serious-minded. In living according to nature, what the Stoic philosopher does

is examine the nature of the human condition and the nature of the world around us. He discerns his position in nature, he discerns the kind of creature that he is, and he lives in such a way as not to disgrace himself, as not to be less than what he truly could be. He won't live the swinish life that we found with Aristophanes.

He wants to be, if not a god, certainly not less than human, He won't be an animal either. He will live up to the fullest potentials that human being has to offer. Now, among the Roman Stoics, two are especially noteworthy. One is Epictetus, and one is Marcus Aurelius. And one of the wonderful ironies about the history of philosophy is that Epictetus was a slave and Marcus Aurelius was an emperor.

And philosophy is the great equalizer. Both the slave and the emperor can equally well participate. participate in a philosophy that is accessible to all human beings as human beings. There is nothing less conscious of social status than philosophy. A wise man, a man who is disciplined in control of his motions, and follows the way of nature, can be a good man no matter what his position in a social structure is. He is not responsible for the social structure, and it is not his problem. If the gods or nature or whatever is controlling the world makes you a slave, then be a good slave.

If God or nature or whatever is controlling the world makes you an emperor, then be a good one. Your job is not to disgrace yourself and live up to the highest potentials of human being. So obviously we have disagreements there. That's fine. Part of this philosophy series is engaging with philosophers who are not at all Marxists,

who are not interested in our program and seeing if we can pull out aspects of it that are useful to us while also understanding philosophy in and of itself. And importantly, another thing that they said there was to control your emotions, But the prerequisite to, quote-unquote, controlling your emotions, which even that is a crude statement, is to become aware of them, to not repress them, to not hide from them, to not run from them, and escape them, or try to quiet them through alcohol and drug addiction or other forms of distraction, eating our feelings, our emotions, but to have the courage to face our emotions, to give them our awareness and our time, to sit with them, and especially the most uncomfortable. comfortable ones, anxiety, fear, jealousy, hate, rage, right, as well as the good ones.

And to become aware of them and create space within ourselves where they can be and they can go, they can come and go, that they can be processed, they can be honored, and they can move on through you without the sticky, you know, repression of trying to control them in the negative way or run from them or hide from them. Anything you repress comes out in an unhealthier form. Anything you run from doesn't go away. It gnaws at you or your subconscious until you give it the attention that it's asking for. And in Buddhism, for example, it's all about being with what is, even when what is is is incredibly uncomfortable.

So whenever I, for instance, get a flood of anxiety into the system, it used to destroy me. I remember my first ever panic attack, literally jumped in my... car and like I was trying to outrun it drove away pacing in my room what is happening what is happening it fucking completely overwhelmed me I had no tools I didn't even know what it really was I thought I was dying you know I've I've been many years ago ran to the ER thinking I was having a heart attack when I was having a panic attack didn't even know what the fuck was going on literally convinced myself I was dying so many times now through repeated exposure and through an increase in my understanding. When anxiety comes, I get excited. Because what I think immediately, my first instinct

now, because of meditation, because of years and years of spiritual practice, what an opportunity. Anxiety's here. Let's watch it. I'm not trying to push it away. I'm not trying to escape it. I know I've had anxiety a million times. It's never killed me, right? I might have thought I was going to die. I wasn't. It's just your nervous system a little ramped up, redlining a little bit. Okay. Awesome. let me be with it. It's not comfortable, right? But I have through spiritual practice in particular gotten to the point where my first instinct, especially in the face of anxiety, and there's still other emotions that are less frequent that I still have to get better at this and even sometimes anxiety can catch me off guard. But more times than not, whoa, awesome, here's an opportunity. What does it feel like?

Where in my body is anxiety happening? How bad is it really? It's just sensations in the body. where are those sensations and how bad is it really let me just sit here and feel my body wants to be anxious for a little bit okay you can be anxious that's not repressing that's not running away from that's not distracting yourself it does take courage especially initially to stay in the pocket while a very uncomfortable complex of sensations and emotions are are rattling your cage but once you do it a couple times your courage goes up the fear goes way down you get really really really comfortable with it, and you start saying it as an opportunity to be with what is, which is a way of actually building up your courage. We all want to be courageous. None of us want

to be cowards. It's easy to want to be courageous, much harder to be courageous. But if you can sit when you're having anxiety and not run, think about all the other things in your life that are not as hard as that, where you can stay calm, stay present, be with what is without getting knocked off your balance, right? And then tell me that that's not applicable to organizing and all the challenges we face as organizers and educators towards revolution in a society that is hostile to us at every level. Would that not be a crucial tool in the toolbox of a revolutionary to have to not be the victim of whatever emotion happens to boil up and not needing to control it? I don't dictate when an emotion comes.

Motions just come and go. Thoughts just come and go. And I can be courageous, and I can observe it, I can become aware of it, I can sit with it. I don't need to run from it. And that makes you a more resilient human being overall. The most interesting of the Stoics is Marcus Aurelius. Lord Acton, the great English philosopher and historian,

once said that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. And that's generally speaking true. The difficulty with that generalization is Marcus Aurelius. Marcus Aurelius was an absolute ruler. He was a ruler of the Roman Empire. He was an emperor. He had absolute power of life and death over everyone in the known world.

I don't mean everyone in the world as we know it today, but everyone in the world as the Romans would have known it. They don't know about China or have a very attenuated conception of the Eskimos. For them, the world is the Mediterranean basin, and Rome owns it. And Marcus Aurelius owns Rome, essentially. His word is law. Now, for almost all the Roman emperors, they lived scandalous lives, and they disgraced themselves. They were much more concerned with indulging their sensual appetites,

satisfying their passions, flying into rages. Marcus Aurelius is the standing exception to that, and the exception to Lord Acton's generalization. In his case, power didn't corrupt. Absolute power did not corrupt, absolutely. instead absolute power allowed us to see what the man underneath the body is really like it allowed us to find out what marcus aurelius's soul is like imagine a man for whom all the restraints of law and custom and political order are taken away he can have whatever he wants if a man under those circumstances behaves well you know something about the soul underneath

because no external constraint is making him do what he is doing and marcus aurelius is the one example of an absolute ruler who behaves himself in such a way as not to disgrace himself it's an amazing temptation imagine what it's like stop and put yourself in that place for a second Marcus Aureas takes the throne in 161 AD and he dies in 180 AD 19 years controlling the entire world he can have all the money in the world that's not an exaggeration all the money in the world if he wants it he can just collect it all he can have sex with anyone he wants whenever he wants under any circumstances

If he wants to get drunk, he can have wine brought in by the boatload, infinitely, forever. He can go on a drunk now and stay drunk for the next 19 years until he dies. Imagine anything that the bronze, desiring, emotional, irrational parts of your souls want. And now imagine that you can have it. Now, under those circumstances, imagine that you are forced to bear with this human condition for 19 long years. Now, ask yourself, and you didn't give a show of hands, but stop and think about it for a minute. How many of you would fail to disgrace yourselves? To tell you the truth, I don't think that I could meet the challenge.

If you're honest about it and you stop and think about what kind of a man it takes to bear up under those circumstances, I think you'll have to admit, or at least I'll have to admit, that he's a better man than I am. And that in its respect, over the centuries, Marcus Aurelia serves as a standing reproach to our self-indulgence. a standing reproach to the idea that we are unable to deal with the circumstances of human life if you can deal with temptation at that level I cannot imagine what is outside the human potential and for the stoics we must remember that any virtue which is accessible to any

human being is in principle accessible to all of us we all have a rational nature which allows us to control our feelings control our behavior control our connection to other people compared to Marcus Aureliu, we have tiny little temptations. We're tempted to steal a little thing. We're tempted to cheat on our income taxes. We're tempted to cheat on our spouses.

Marcus Aurelius has that sort of temptation magnified a thousandfold. And he consistently does good stuff. Stop and think about this for a minute. This is no common man. This is not like the rest of us. And I don't know how he did it. Maybe he did it through philosophy. But, well, it remains to be seen.

Marcus is the last of the good emperors. He's the last of the Antonine emperors, and the emperors that come before him are, generally speaking, okay. They're not as bad as the ones that come after. But Marcus is perhaps the greatest of the Romans, the noblest of the Romans, when old-fashioned writers...

All right there, really quick, and just take that in. I think, you know, the lecturer Michael Suger, does such a great job of highlighting why Marcus Aurelius is as important. Why would we working class revolutionaries, toppling dictators, haters of emperors and empires, why would we have anything to learn from this asshole who was a Roman emperor for 19 fucking years? Isn't that

antithetical to everything? Well, it's precisely because he was given so much leeway in what he could do, not morally bound, not legally bound, there's no checks and balances. He could have every desire every temptation fulfilled at any moment every sexual desire every food desire every desire for total power over anybody the ability to squash any enemy anybody that looked at them wrong could be eliminated

and nobody would bat a fucking eye and you know it's easy to be more moral when you are so radically constrained by what you can even do but when those restraints are totally taken off could you do it if i gave you total dictatorial powers in the 21st century over the whole world yeah right now you're fancying yourself a good person eh you know i would eliminate capitalism i would crush israel in the united states i would end all colonial projects i would

redistribute wealth to the global south you know blah blah blah and i'm sure we you and i would do those things but in the background you could also have any desire you want and met how would you behave well maybe for the first couple a week should be fine maybe you'd last a couple months to a couple years like the best people i could go years with all this temptation any second i could have anything i want i still am refusing to engage in that because i want to be a model and a leader of the people after a decade you're not going to once get bored and want to try something you can do anything nobody's going to stop you in fact the whole world thinks it's your right to do it that is a profound development of virtue no restraints and still was marcus are really as perfect

no as the emperor of a fucking empire does that not come with killing and you know armies and battles and taking terror of course but we know infamously How Caligula and Nero and all these other assholes throughout Roman history abuse their power because they could. We know in our own time. How corrupt politicians abuse their power, insider trade, amass wealth, hurt other people, take advantage of other people because they simply can. And no politician on earth. They do have the technological and updated modern luxuries to indulgent, but they didn't even have the power of, of, of, a Marcus Aurelius, right? Of a Nero, of a Caligula, of these Roman emperors who could literally do

anything. And they're corrupt sons of bitches. So that's what makes Marcus Aurelius this fascinating inflection point for thinking about virtue and being the sort of person that you should be and aligning yourself with your deepest values, despite being able to have whatever you, any temptation or desire you want meant. There's a Buddhist component with desire, not giving into it you know the ego desires desires desires and people who follow their desires and sometimes get what they most desire often find themselves feeling very empty because the desiring doesn't go away you just desire new things if you desire money for 20 years and you work super hard and you build up money and money and all of a sudden you really you know so you're

only focus fuck family fuck community i'm just trying to get as rich as possible you get as rich as possible you think now i'll finally be happy nope Oh, you thought amassing a bunch of money was going to make you happy. That's funny. That's funny. Oh, you thought meeting all your desires was going to end your need to desire? Oh, the desires just get inflamed. You just desire more and more and more.

Right? So Buddhists and Stoics, and I think revolutionaries, can take this into account as well. There's something to be learned here about the nature of desire and extricating yourself from desire and aligning yourself rather with deeper values. And actually we can look at socialist leaders and see them put this into practice You can look at a Lenin, you can look at a Castro You can look at people with real power

But one person stands out to me And that is Thomas Sankara As he, when he was the leader of Bikina Faso refused to drive fancy cars Refused to wear fancy clothes Refused to live in huge mansions He had a couple of personal items Like his guitar

Drove around in a regular-ass car war, regular-ass military fatigues, refused to indulge because he wanted to be an example of his virtue. He wanted to exemplify in his daily personal life, his political values. And that was not self-aggrandizement. That was not endless consumption. That was not wielding your power over others to get your petty, petulant, egoic desires met. That was abstaining from all of those things, even in the face of being able to have many of them. Because you are aligned with something greater than yourself. And Marcus Aurelius' insane situation

makes him particularly interesting with regards to the cultivation and development of such virtues. For those of us regular Joe Smogh, like you and I, right? That if he could do it with no constraints, certainly us with many constraints, we can do it too. and I think there's something wonderful about that and then also there's a brief gesture here towards the egalitarian nature of stoicism

the egalitarian nature of spiritual practices we're egalitarians we don't believe in this class stratified world the stupidities and brutalities of class society from ancient Rome through medieval Europe to today's techno-dispopian late capitalism they're insane they're not a product of some people being better than others

They're a product of chance, of luck, of nepotism, of connections, of being born into certain circumstances. And then those unfair, unequal starting places can dictate whether somebody like Trump, who inherits a real estate empire from his father can go on to become the president of the United States or Musk, somebody whose father was incredibly rich and who he bought businesses and then pretends he invented him, gets so much money he can buy himself into the presidency of a so-called democracy. and then we're told that these people are actually rich and powerful because they worked harder than us, they have better character than us, they hold back their short-term desires for long-term outcomes more than us. It's a fucking joke. It's a sick, sad joke. Who believes that?

We know that's not true. These people have some of the least amount of virtue, and yet they're the most rich and the most powerful people on earth. They're the most susceptible to giving into their base desires. and their petty, petulant, egoic needs and temptations. And we're supposed to believe that they're somehow merit-based demi-gods? It's a joke. And so our whole fucking political project is to overthrow the spectacle of nonsense.

Overthrow this carousel of suffering. And the ideological superstructure that tells us this is natural, this is just, they're rich because they worked hard, you're struggling to afford your medical care because you're a lazy piece of shit. we spit in the face of anybody who says that and so that's why this stoic ideal seemingly so far removed from us and our revolutionary goals still has something to say to us and that's my job here is to take that

and show us what revolutionaries can make of a philosophy like this not the only philosophy but as a toolkit in our toolbag and really as an urge to live in a different way to live in a deeper, more mature way as Marcus Aurelius did, as Thomas Sankara did, as you and I can do. Talk about Roman virtue.

What they have in mind is Marcus Aurelius, a man who does what he ought to do regardless of circumstance. Tough Roman virtue. He's not afraid of being dead. He's not afraid of being in pain. He's not afraid to have a people laugh at him. He's only afraid of doing what's wrong.

He's only afraid of making chaos of his soul. Why? Because his soul is the only thing he's completely in control of. It's the only thing he's responsible for. And the rest of it is a matter of indifference to him. He'll certainly try and perform his function as emperor in the best way he possibly can. But there are Germans at the border, and should they succeed in winning this war, he did the best he could. He has no reason to feel guilty. He has no reason to feel that this is a difficulty.

If for some reason he gets sick, well, sickness is part of human life. You accept it as it is. You deal with it the best you can, and then you move on. In other words, Marcus Aurelius intends to live a life in which he will not have to feel guilty about anything. And he succeeded in doing that under the most trying possible circumstances. Again, put yourself in a position where you could have anything you want, and no one can stop you. No matter how evil, no matter how depraved, no one can stop you because your word is law. Marcus Aurelius behaved himself for 19 years under those circumstances.

It's a standing reproach to our self-indulgence. The kind of things that Marcus Aurelius writes are not meant for publication. Let's think about this a little further. Marcus wrote this manuscript without intending to have it published. After his death, he wanted to have it burned. Some philosophically inclined, I guess, bookkeeper, librarian, aide de camp, or whoever it is that pick this up, said, no, we just can't throw this out. We cannot lose the memory of such a great man. and we can't lose the sort of meditations that he created.

He wrote a book called Meditations, and it's a book to himself that's not intended to be published. It's sort of a man writes a book to himself. What sense does that make? Think about it. The nature of a book is communicating something, and we would think we would communicate it to some reader. But this is not going to be published. It's written to himself.

What makes a man write a book to himself? And there's a very deep answer, I think, here. Marcus Aurelius writes a book to himself because he's the loneliest man in the world. He has no friends because he has no equals. Think about a man breaking himself on the rock of an impossible virtue. He has no equals. Everyone he talks to wants something from him. He is the emperor of everything in the world.

He owns it all. Everything he says immediately gets done. He has absolute life and death power over everyone. So any time he's in the throne room, he's having an audience, someone comes in from some part of the empire, they're always here for some reason, and they're always here because they want something from him. And all Marcus wants to do is live a philosophical life, but he happens to have had the misfortune to be born the Emperor of Rome. What a pity. So he has to deal with these self-centered swinish people all the time, and it is responsibility to do good for them, to give them justice, to give them both examples of virtue and virtue of the people. laws and virtuous decisions, and the weariness of it gets to him after a while. The book

that he's written, the meditations, is shot through with a kind of philosophical melancholy that is extremely moving despite the stoic content of what he's saying. In other words, oddly enough, there are very few books in the world which generate more pathos, which create more of a sense of pity for a person reading this than this book. He's writing a book to himself because he has no one else to talk to. And what kind of things does he write in the book? Moral maxims. And he has two or three ideas.

It's about 100 odd pages. But he says essentially the same thing again and again and again. Why? He has nobody to talk to, so that limits the scope of his conversations. And he's constantly trying to remind himself that, look, although the people you're dealing with are corrupt, evil, and deprave, it's your job not to get angry with them, but to try and teach them and morally improve them.

If you can't morally improve them, at least put up with them. Because the gods have created us social animals. And it is part of the mark, or it is the mark of a philosophical man, that he should return benefits for harm, because those that would harm other people do not live the philosophical life. Those that don't want the ultimate good for themselves and for society do so because they don't know any better. Marcus has not only political power, but wisdom. And in that respect, he's the only example in the Western tradition of any ruler who even remotely approximates Plato's philosopher king.

And he has some of the qualities that Plato thought the philosopher king would have. Before we get into the philosopher king, very quickly, the idea of like, you know, these people that are coming up to him asking for stuff, wanting stuff, very difficult people, self-centered people, people below him jostling for power to be in his inner circle or to be in his influence or whatever it may be, right? He has to deal with difficult people, self-serving people, opportunists, right? All these different sorts of people. And it reminds me of the Huey P. Newton whose birthday was yesterday. My birthday is today, actually. Not the day you're listening to this, but the day is recorded. And Huey P. Newton said, and I think this is what this whole thing speaks to,

quote, I dissuade party members from putting down people who do not understand. Even people who are unenlighted and seemingly bourgeois should be answered in a polite way. I try to be cordial, because that way you win people over. You cannot win them over by drawing the line of demarcation, saying you are on this side and I am on the other. That shows a lack of consciousness. After the Black Panther Party was formed, I nearly fell into this error. I could not understand why people were blind to what I saw so clearly. Then I realized that their understanding simply had to be developed.

And that's a relatively obvious but profound point. We can see people across the left and even in our own selves that can sometimes get frustrated, sometimes are, you know, predisposed to want to lash out, to shit on people who can't see, you're dumb, you know, you're blind, your puppet, your tool, you know, blah, blah. And the job of the revolutionary is Huey P. Newton so gently and lovingly reminds us, patience, right? It took you a while to learn this stuff. Think of the society you're born into.

Think of all the conditioning that you're bombarded with. Think about how much it takes to rise, yourself above that through study and dedication and can you be that for somebody else somebody comes up to you and says i don't think socialism is in our human nature you know isn't it capitalism is our human nature we buy it you know right away there's a party it's like jesus fucking christ you don't get it i mean what this is so far down the the the hierarchy of knowledge that i just kind of want to dismiss this person from my presence it takes a lot more from somebody to be like okay how can i meet this person where they are. How can I try my best? It might not succeed. Again, you do stuff

without knowing the consequences. You do stuff regardless of whether or not it tends to work out in the end. You don't know that. You can't control that how that person responds. You can control how you respond. And then what happens when you are dismissive in an asshole and tell that person to fuck off and call them dumb? Well, they're not any closer to being sympathetic to your ideas. Fuck this asshole, right? Why would I, socialism definitely sucks. I'm going to be a reactionary. Let me go look at Jordan Peterson fucking interviews or whatever the fuck. But what happens if you meet them as a human being? I understand what you're saying. And yeah, it can be confusing. And, you know, I used to think

this, this and this, but I had this experience and that opened my eyes up to this. You know, what do you do for a living? Okay, yeah, you know how when you're doing that in your daily job and your boss who only comes in once a month to check on everybody, talks down to you, and your boss doesn't even know the day-to-day grind that makes this business work? but he wants to come in and talk down his nose to you like isn't that undignified you know whatever to find the kernel of a human relationship and try to use that to educate we have to be ceaseless in exhaustible educators we have to never quit educating ourselves and educating others which is a constant process of humbling our own intellect in front of the vast cosmic mountain of things we still don't know

and humbling ourselves as an educator to others. And you only are an effective educator if that person feels like you give a fuck about them. That you're in a conversation not to be right, not to win, not to be a debate, bro, prick, but to understand and communicate and relate. Right? And even if they walk away, not fully convinced,

they'll walk away saying, hey, that was a decent fucking person. I don't necessarily agree with them, but their heart's in the right place. How many times have I heard that in my life? From friends and family and people who don't agree with me, who I was not able to convince in one conversation, they say, listen, I don't agree with what Brett said.

He's a little too radical for me. But his heart's in the right place. He's a good dude. Right there, that opens up the door to future conversations. That shuts down the dehumanization process of socialist and communists who were taught to hate and fear. Hey, I know Brett. He's a decent guy.

A little crazy with some of his thoughts, but I see where he's coming from, right? He's a good dude. He treats everybody with respect and decency. And even if he disagrees with you, he's never going to shit on you. You never walk away from a conversation with Brett feeling belittled and dismissed. You feel heard and seen. And not just me, anybody. I'm just using that as an example.

But that's what we should be striving for. He's totally disdainful of wealth. Why he owns everything. What would it be like to own everything from England to Egypt? Well, the idea of accumulating more stuff becomes less and less interesting, if you stop and think about it. And if you can have sex with, say, a million people, the million at first has very limited attraction.

And at that point, he stops to think, and he says, I will do my best to constantly do what I ought to do. And there is a sort of whistling in the graveyard tone to this book. He is, in some respects, an enormously lonely man, and in some respects an enormously sad man. There's a melancholyte in this that's terrifically moving. And yet, we ought not to pity Marcus Aurelius because if he looked at our lives, he would pity us.

Pathetic creatures that we are, we don't even meet his standard of virtue, and we're pity him. Think about the irony of that. He said, well, I'd pity you back if I didn't think that was disrespectful. Think about what it takes to be something like Marcus Aurelius. We shall not see his like again. In the book itself, he has all kinds of intriguing and caustic, if you will, moral maxims. He says things like this, soon you will have forgotten all things, and soon all things will have forgotten you.

In other words, don't get overwrought. You're angry with this guy just because he didn't do what he was supposed to do? Ask yourself how many of the people that are working for you are doing what they're supposed to do. Soon, you'll have forgotten all this because you'll be dead. And soon, all the people who know you, they're going to be dead, too, and they'll have forgotten you. And so, what's the point of being mean to people? Now, imagine the kind of philosophical self-restraint we're talking about here. This is a guy who can chop everyone's head off if he gets sufficiently angry, so he never does.

Remarkable, remarkable. So Marcus Aurelius is a man who constantly, in his book, is writing short one-and-two-line epigrams that essentially say things like, don't lose your temper with these people, Marcus. You know how they are. Marcus, it's not your fault that they're stupid. You tried to teach them, and you can keep on trying to teach them, but if Socrates was a good man and they killed him, what do you expect them to do to you? On the other hand, Marcus Aurelius is willing to rule the Roman Empire

for the same reason that the Platonic philosopher king is. If he gives up, somebody worse is going to take the job, and you know what happens then, right? He'd much rather just go home and read his books. He doesn't want to listen to this stuff. But he says, well, the gods put me here. I didn't ask for this job, but I can't very well give it up. I'd be abdicating my responsibility to other people. Imagine the bad laws and bad emperors we're going to get after me.

Well, should I give the job up now or stand here until the gods are good enough to relieve me of my post? In fact, that's the metaphor he uses all the time. The gods have put you on guard over the Roman Empire. Everyone else is sleeping. Stay where you are and stay awake. Elsewise, God knows what's going to happen. Marcus Aureus is constantly whistling his way through the graveyard, trying to tell him that this is a very happy life,

that he loves being a philosopher, and he particularly loves the particular portion of reality that gods have assigned to him. Now, I think that everyone believes this except the people that read this book, which perhaps is why it wasn't supposed to be published, because when you look at this, you see a terrifically lonely man, a man of immense moral heroism, who has no shoulder to cry on, who disdains crying because what's the point of crying? We must live in accordance with nature. Now here's the natural condition of human beings.

They get born. All kinds of stuff happens to them, and they die. maxims with reference to that are a stop complaining there's nothing to complain about because there's only two kinds of things there are the kinds of things you can control and they're the kinds of things you can't if you can't control it complaining about it is stupid and a waste of time and I don't want to hear any more about it because you can control it so what's the point of talking about this or you have the other kind of thing the kind of thing you can control like your intentions like your

behavior like your actions and since you can control them who do you expect to help you out except yourself stop complaining about that too so whether it's the kind of thing you can control or it's the kind of thing you can control, Marcus Aurelius does not want to hear any complaints, and he does not want to hear any excuses because there are no excuses to give. Now, that's easy enough to say, and a lot of people think that other people should be this way. Right? Have you noticed it? Like, you can't help but admire this guy. Like, every one of us I bet in this audience, it's like, wow, what a great guy. I wish I knew him personally. No, you don't. Think of what do you think of what do you think

of you? You really don't want to know this guy. Imagine working for him? Oh, please. No, this guy is never going to be satisfied. And if he is satisfied, he's not like he's going to give you applause. He's going to say, well, you're doing what you ought to do. No compliments for you. You're doing what you ought to do. You don't need any reward beyond that. You're living like a philosophical man, which is a reward in itself.

Virtue is its own reward. You're virtuous. What do you want for me? Back to work. And that's our job as revolutionaries. Put in the fucking work. Nobody's patting you on the back. Things are fucking hard.

You got your own personal situation to operate through. You can give up. You can recoil into your personal life or you can do your fucking job. And that doesn't mean we need to be cruel or heavy-handed or harsh with each other. Of course not. We should be loving and gentle and vulnerable with one another. And there's a difference between communicating and working through something and being honest with your loved ones about, hey, you feel in simply complaining and venting. And there's something that I've been having to learn over the last year or so, especially in, you know, this has been made explicit to me in my OCD recovery, which is there's this constant urge to complain, to bitch and moan.

about this or that, not even just OCD, but, you know, you know, bills and the unfairness of the system, all true. It fucking sucks. But what is it, what good does it do to give an ear beating to your spouse about that? What good does it do to go around complaining and, you know, bitching and moaning and venting, getting things off your chest just for the sake of doing it, this tiny little catharsis we get? Is there something more dignified and, yes, understanding when you need to communicate your feelings and vulnerabilities and having people in your life where you can be honest about your struggles and your fears and the stress that you're dealing with. There's a place for that. But there's also an indignity to venting and complaining for the

sake of it, of putting your burdens, your inner burdens on somebody else needlessly. It's a fine line to walk. Because if you don't ever open up, then you, you know, this sort of bastardized view of Stoicism, which is just a stiff upper lip, shut up, don't, you know, quit complaining, nose to the grindstone. And that could easily be hustle culture, grindset, fucking nonsense, if you do that too far. Or on the other path, you become this whiny little asshole, putting, you know, putting ear beatings on everybody around you like fucking Eeyore, bitching and moaning about everything.

You don't want to fall on either side of that, of that balanced beam, right? You want the middle path, as the Buddha might say, of being, of being. able to openly and honestly and vulnerably communicate your feelings and your struggles and your concerns with the people that love you in the right context and at the right time while still having the dignity of understanding what is just mere complaining and venting and moaning about stuff that you know without doing anything about it we all know somebody like that who moans and bitches and complains who makes themselves the victim of life but never takes any actions to make anything different always wants to blame somebody else for their situation

whether that's true or not. You know, I've often said, for example, the victim mentality is not good even if you are a victim, right? Even in those instances where you were legitimately a victim of various things and are personal, structural, whatever it may be, but to refuse the victim mentality that internalizes your sense of self as merely a victim, as a passive plaything of forces beyond your control,

know take account of what you can and can't control that first stoic division set aside the things you can't stop bitching and complaining about them they're just they just are and then look towards the things that you can and get to work that is the middle path here that's the way to try to be in and that's a struggle because there is a catharsis in just bitching you know there is a sense of pleasure we take in being the victim and convincing somebody else we're trying to truly the victim. It's a little, if you notice, if you, if you're really aware, it feels kind of good, right? And what do we want somebody to pat us on the back and say, oh man, you really have it tough? I'm sorry, man. Sometimes, yeah, sometimes we need that, just to be seen and heard and loved

and held. But a lot of times we really don't need to be doing it that way, right? And so again, this idea of the middle path in Buddhism, of the moderate path, of not falling over into the extremes of either of either side of these sorts of conflicts, I think is really important. And yeah, you can make it too harsh or you can overindulge. And that's really the balance beam. Do I become too harsh, which just necessitates repression and I'm too harsh and cruel and hard and cold with other people and myself? Right? You need self-compassion. You need elements of self-love. So you don't want to fall into that and you don't want to fall into the self-indulgent pity party. You know, I'm just a victim, I'm E.O.

And, of course, if you're not virtuous, you are pretty much what he expects human beings to be, you swine. And what's unnerving about this is that there's not the slightest taint of hypocrisy in it. He not only says this stuff, he acts this stuff. He not only talks the talk, he walks the walk, he does it. And he does it under worse, more difficult circumstances than you. fail to do it. And yet he still likes us. In other words, he still go out of his way to help us out.

If he were the judge in a court of law, he would still give us justice, even though we have done nothing to deserve it. As a matter of fact, what is it that, what's the line from Hamlet? If we gave every man his desserts, who would escape a whipping? Marcus Aurelius would. That's part of the problem with Marcus Aurelius. There's nothing quite like this guy in the whole history of the world. Marcus Aurelius says things in his book, like

human beings are social animals either teach them or put up with them the kind of thing that a man has to remind himself of I imagine or Marcus says in another passage are you weary of enduring the bad men of the world the gods aren't and they made them are you really weary of enduring the bad men of the world

especially given that you're one of them dreadful powerful, caustic ruthless analysis of himself and others. He pulls no punches. He is an honest man, and how many honest politicians are there in the world? I mean, it's been some time since we had one leave us literary remains, and here we certainly do have one. The Stoics put together an important and I think worthwhile idea, particularly in this day of international politics. And that's the idea of a cosmopolitan political philosophy. There's few people.

people as cosmopolitan, as lacking in provincial qualities as Marcus Aurelius. The stoic wise man has made his life consistent with nature, and nature is universal and everywhere. It exists in every place, and every time. So the stoic man is never any place but home. His polis is the cosmos. That is what makes him cosmopolitan. In ancient Greek political theory, you were a citizen of one political polis, of one particular polis, one particular city state. You were an Athenian or you were a Spartan. The Stoic wise man is cosmopolitan. Wherever he is, he lives in accordance with nature. Whatever he does, he does what he knows to be right. What difference does it make whether he's in a jail cell or in a palace? As Marcus Aurelius put it in a beautiful epigram in the book,

even in a palace it is possible to live well. No excuses. Don't tell me that it's because of temptation. That won't go over. No excuses go with Marcus. The idea of a cosmopolitan political philosophy is one of the great achievements of Roman stoicism, and if you stop and think about it, it's an excellent and unnecessary idea when you're running something as big and heterogeneous as the Roman Empire. This tremendously complicated mix of religions and cultures and peoples and all kinds of heterogeneous ideas means that this is going to be a big patchwork, a big quilt. It's not going to be one culturally unified area.

But Marcus would be just as happy being a slave as he is being an emperor. He would just as happy being a Gaul or an Egyptian as a Roman. As long as there is a nature there and there is a human spirit, which can be made in accordance with nature, any of the external facts of life don't matter. And now for the first time we can perhaps see why the Roman Stoics have a reputation to some extent deserved of being kind of harsh, cold, unfeeling men, because there's nothing to worry about. And it's hard for them to sympathize with the fact that other people are worried about things that they regard as trivial or not worth worrying about it all. Many of us worry about sickness.

Well, Marcus Aurelius will point out that all people get sick. And once you get sick, since you're a rational human being, you want to go to the doctor, do what he prescribes, and fix your body. There's no point in complaining any place along the line because you know what you're supposed to do. Go do it. Stop asking for somebody else to help you. If you don't help yourself, how can you expect anybody else to help you? which is a fair criticism. It would be much less persuasive

and much less impressive if this were a sort of hypocritical philosophy where Marcus Aurelius indulged himself and told everyone else to be stoical. What really makes this spring to life, what makes this persuasive and moving and important, is that he lives the life. So he doesn't complain when he gets sick.

He doesn't complain when he meets military reverses. He doesn't complain about anything. Who would we complain to? The buck does stop with Marcus Aureus. If you think of the chain of command of the Roman Empire, he doesn't get to complain to anyone else. Everyone complains to him, and he's constantly listened to complaints and difficulties and problems. And he's watching people become unglued, and they're watching them get all upset, and watching them be greedy and avaricious and swinish and lustful, and all the things he's not.

So he is rather harsh in his criticism, and I think that that's a fair observation about him. But he's not hypocritical, and he's not unfair. And that's one of the cosmopolitan, universal elements in this political philosophy and in this moral philosophy, because the moral and political philosophy for Marcus Aurelius are going to be connected. In the same way that in Plato's Republic, politics was ethics writ large and what was good for the individual soul, the gold, silver, and bronze, that ordering of the soul between reason, spirit, and desire, what's good for the soul is the same thing that's good for the

city, to have rational people running the government, like Marcus Aurelius, doing their best to follow the philosophical life, you'll want bravery and fortitude and courage among your soldiers, the silver virtues, and among the rest of the people, you expect the bronze virtues. They want to eat and drink and make merry. It would be nice if we could make philosophers of all of them, but if we can't, well, the best thing we can do is to take care of them and prevent misfortunes from befalling them, in some respects to try and save them from themselves. Now, Marcus Aurelius is the only example of this in Roman culture. There's not a great deal of things that we can compare him to.

All right, before we move forward, obviously the political philosophy is that of the Roman slave mode of production, right? Like, there's plenty of things there to be discarded, updated, or set aside altogether. But there is something here that he mentioned. He's like there's this fair notion within stoicism, and there's a fair critique of it as this sort of overly, not hypocritical, right? because a lot of these figures lived up to their own ideals, sometimes impossible ideals, seemingly impossible ideals. But there's an asceticism to it, a harshness to it, a coldness to it. And of course, this is fodder for the exact sort of one-dimensional type of shit that you get in like this,

you know, the manosphere notions of stoicism and how to utilize it. And there's a fairness in that critique. And I think that there's a limitation within stoicism of that. But there's the solution. You know, and it comes, in my opinion out of Mahayana Buddhism, the notion, as I always talk about the Bodhisattva. You know, I kind of forged or amplified or gave voice to this archetype or this concept in my dialectics and liberation speech.

You can go back and find it in our back catalog where I kind of intermingled the dialectics of Marxism and Buddhism to create this figure of the revolutionary Bodhisattva. And you can go there and listen to that if you're interested in that at all. but the Bodhisattva is this being who, and there's different ways of understanding this, but basically refuses to go all the way to Nirvana until he can, or she can save every other being. So there's a very otherness orientation,

especially in Mahayana Buddhism and in the figure of the Bodhisattva that wasn't always there in Theravada Buddhism, which was much more singular and about your own salvation, and isn't there in Stoicism. You know, Stoicism has these virtues that demand high moral engagement with the world and how you treat other people, but it comes from this sort of ossified idea of virtue, right? Like, I have to live up to this ideal of virtue that I have,

and that means I need to treat people with justice, with dignity, you know, with decency, and, you know, basically treat people how I want to be treated. But there's a deeper form that that can take in Buddhism, and that's known in the awakened heart or Bodhita or it's fully contained within the figure of the Bodhisattva or another way to think about it is through the four Brahma Vihara, which are these four sort of attributes or the abodes of Brahma and is a series of four Buddhist virtues, if you will, and the meditation practices that you can engage in to cultivate them, and they're known as the four immeasurables or the four infinite minds,

are the Brahma Vahara. And they are loving kindness, active goodwill, and love to all beings, right, which is a natural product of seeing yourself not as separate from everything else, but as one with everything else. All of these Brahma Viharas are actually the outcomes of spiritual transformation by which you overcome and transcend your ego. And out of that deconstruction of separateness comes a oneness with all that naturally. That naturally, naturally gives rise to these virtues. And this, again, is something to cultivate, to balance out and to counteract the tendencies towards harshness, coldness, over asceticism within stoicism.

So loving kindness, act of goodwill towards all beings. Compassion, identifying the suffering of others as your own. And we all feel this, especially if you're listening to a show like this, looking at just a timely topic of the destruction and ongoing genocide of the Palestinians. When you look out at those total strangers, speaking a language you don't speak, in a region you've never been to, from a culture you don't come from, and your heart breaks fucking open, and you weep in the face of their suffering, you are awakening your heart. You are subtly, even if you're not doing meditation practice and all this stuff, you're deconstructing the distance between you and them, self and other, dissolving the boundaries between you and the world. And you feel in your gut, it's not intellectual, you feel in your gut, the suffering of others. And what comes behind it, this impossible desire and urge to stop it?

You know you can't, right? You're so far away. You're only one person. We can organize and we should and all those things are absolutely essential. But just on an individual, psychological, and emotional level, you know you can't, but you want nothing more in the world in that moment than to save them, them, stop their slaughter, protect those babies, protect those families, heal that weeping mother's broken heart, that's real compassion. That's not sympathy, certainly not pity.

It's not empathy, mere empathy. It is radical compassion. Identifying the suffering of others as one's own. And again, these are not things you just intellectualize and try to live up to. These are things that burst forth from your motherfucking heart when you engage in these sort of practices out of Mahayana Buddhism, but we can talk about Sufism, divine love, go listen to that episode, Christian mysticism, right? All these religious traditions have these mystical paths. And this is what you get from those mystical paths. These things flow out of you. They move your ego aside and they spill out of you. So we have loving kindness. We have compassion. The third is sympathetic joy, the feeling of joy because others are happy, even if you did not contribute to it. What does the

ego, say when one of your friends does really well, succeeds, does something that you've never been able to do or can't do. The ego gets jealous. The ego gets envious. It tries to repress that. It doesn't want to come across as an asshole. It'll send a nice comic, congrats, you're killing it. Right? But there's that little twinge. I'm like, God damn it, why couldn't that be me? What do they have that I don't? Oh, I feel actually, I'm, I kind of feel lowered because they were able to do this thing that I haven't been able to do. There's a part of me that feels less then so i'll send the nice thing but i'll do it through gritted teeth right obliterate that through these practices and what you feel instead is genuine fucking love and joy for that person sympathetic joy

that their success their happiness their development their achievement is not in any way related to you and how it makes you feel but is in its own way a beautiful blossoming that you take genuine sincere joy in seeing somebody else happy somebody else achieve something do something good just feel good about themselves there's no you to to bounce that off of and i have my own feelings about that but good for them i guess no you're out of the way that's ego instead you feel nothing but genuine happiness and joy and you can practice this right when a close friend of yours does something good and they share it with you, fucking practice being completely lovingly, joyfully excited for them.

And notice with awareness that part of you, if it does it all, that cringes, that winges, that feels belittled by it, that feels kind of defensive, a little envious, it can be very subtle, but you can bring that up from your subconscious and make that conscious, it loses its power. And when you do that over and over again, sympathetic joy is the natural result. So that's loving kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity, even-mindedness and serenity, treating everybody impartially. I don't care who it is, what job they hold in society, where they fall in the class hierarchy. And you can practice this too without, you know, reaching enlightenment or anything like that. This is a virtue you can cultivate of treating

every human being you come across, regardless of how they relate to you, above you, below you, you at your level whatever better job than you less money than you you know they're doing a service for you or you're doing a service for them can you treat everybody impartially now of course you know when it comes to imperialist and exploiting bosses and we this can get you know different when it comes to revolutionary politics but i'm talking as the cultivation of virtues within yourself and your daily life to go out and give love and respect to every human being you meet which doesn't always have to be a of your spiritual practice, it can be a way you practice it. I'm a believer in virtue ethics, which is a strain in ethical philosophy that more

or less says, instead of having some diagram, Kantian categorical imperative or a utilitarian math equation to try to figure out what's the right thing to do in any given circumstances, instead actively cultivate the virtues that you value in yourself through daily practice. Generosity. We all want to be more generous people. We don't want to be greedy assholes. In fact, we want to fight against the world of greed. So how can we be greedy and want to fight against the world where people are fucking greedy? And they amass way more and they hoard wealth and all that shit. So you want to fight that on the political

level and you also want to root it out of yourself. How do you do that? By practicing generosity. By giving things away, especially things that you don't want to give away. And I always tell this story when it comes to my kids and parents you'll relate you're having a snack a treat a dessert a meal right and you really fucking want it and you love it and you're like i this is not even enough i wish i had more of this it's so fucking good and then your little three-year-old comes up and says can i have a bite can i have that last whatever chocolate covered strawberry and in that moment you're like no no this is daddy's this is mine okay you've already had yours this is mine no that's maybe even fair.

But in that moment is an opportunity to practice generosity. To look at that, whatever, I'm just going to use this as an example, because these are in my fridge at the moment, chocolate-covered strawberry, to look it in the eyes, to look your own desire for it in the eyes, and to give it to your baby, and watch, and then do the sympathetic joy thing. You know how that tastes, and you know that is like a firework going off on their palate. You know that's bringing them a moment of happiness and joy. So then not only did you just practice generosity by giving you.

giving away something you wanted, but now you can also practice sympathetic joy and knowing exactly how that tastes and how that is lighting up their brain chemistry and their dopamine system and giving them a really good feeling that floods through their body. You can now understand that and take pleasure in that. And that's just a tiny little way that we can practice generosity, you know, or those little things in life where you could do something selfish and nobody would know, right? You could take a little bit more for yourself and nobody would know, especially in those moments to give, to not do the wrong thing, to do the thing you know is morally right, even though you know nobody would know if you did it wrong. And by doing it

right, you'll never get praised, nobody will ever pat you on the back or even be aware that you did the right thing. In those moments especially, you can actively and consciously cultivate virtue by doing the right thing regardless. I could have this. Nobody would know. Or I could give it away, nobody will pat me on the back. I'm doing the right thing because it's the right thing. That's virtue ethics. You are actively practicing the sort of person you want to be and you're actively cultivating the sort of virtues you want to have because we all want to be virtuous. We all want to be generous and kind and courageous and wise and just and all those things and temperate, right? It's a lot easier to want to be those things and then daily life in these

tiny little ways that we can easily rationalize a way as not mattering. We practice the exact opposite. It's especially in those moments where we can rationalize it away as not really important. Nobody's really getting hurt here. You know, this really is mine. It's exactly in those moments that we can really do this practice. And once you start doing it, you realize you have opportunities dozens of times a day to be a better person and to cultivate these virtues. No pat on the back, no validation, just because you know it's right. And that does something to your whole fucking character. Try it out. But balanced stoicism with the virtues of Mahayana Buddhism and look up the Brahma Vajaras and see if you can actively cultivate those, because those are really

gorgeous, gorgeous virtues. If we had to say that there was someone to compare it to, it would be Epictetus, the slave. And Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius could meet at a level of equality, even though the social distinctions between them are enormous and grave, the reason why they would meet at a level of equality because they could share mutual respect, because they both understand that to have an orderly soul is the key thing in human life. And that's what makes life worth living. And whether you happen to be a slave or an emperor doesn't make any difference. Whether you happen to be sick or healthy doesn't make any difference. Whether you happen to be just born and have a hundred years ahead of you or whether you're on your deathbed doesn't make any

difference. Marcus says with regard to death, because many people are afraid of death. And he He has no understanding. He doesn't really understand what everybody else's problem is. He says, look, everyone dies. So you're going to die. So what's the point of complaining about it? I can understand trying to avoid it. I mean, health is a good thing, but when you're going to die, you're going to die. Don't give in to fear. Don't give into irrational musings. Don't let your imagination run wild. Control your feelings. Control your emotions. Control that part of you, which is you. The meat, your body, not so important. The other stuff around you in the world, a matter of indifference to you. As long as you follow the way of nature, as long as you act in a rational fashion, as long as you live up to the best potentials in the human soul, then you are a good man and you need worry about nothing else. Some people worry about the gods, that the gods will cause you misfortunes, that the gods have a Hades or a hell or an afterlife where people will be tortured and have bad things done to them. Marcus adopts exactly the same position that Socrates did. He says, look, Marcus, or Marcus says, I'm not certain if there are

gods. In the book itself, he says, I'm not aware of any rational proof that there exist gods, and I'm not aware of any rational proof that there are no gods. In other words, he's agnostic in that respect. But he takes a position rather like that of Blaise Pascal, and he says, let's think about what the implications are if God exists, and let's think about what the implications are if he doesn't exist, and let's see if we can find one way of acting that will satisfy both contingencies. Logical guy. And he says, well, if the gods don't exist and the world is just atoms and the void, if you think back to Professor Staloff's lecture about early primitive physical theories, well, we have atoms in the void, homogeneous stuff called matter, and then the space

that it moves around in. Well, if there are no gods and there is no moral order to the world, and we're just atoms in the void, well, then what difference does it make what happens to you or anybody else? So you come into being, you go out of being. So what? You get healthy, you get sick, so what? There's nothing you get excited about because well it's just atoms in the void. Don't be afraid of it. It is what it is. There's nothing to be afraid of. You could say that Roman Stoicism is a way of telling people there's nothing to be

afraid of. Nothing can happen to you in nature that is not a part of nature and nature contains nothing fearful for the rational soul. And you're not separate from nature. You are nature. The ego feels itself to be separate. But go back to all the episodes

on mysticism, on Sufism, on Buddhism, etc. do they all say over and over and over again when you identify with pure and awareness when you identify with something bigger than the ego all fear dissipates there is no fear because there is no separation you are not a little me inside this bag of skin looking out of these two eyeballs at a world that is not you that whole illusion collapses you are the whole thing consciousness never goes away how could you so there's a there's a there's a profundity and there's a real experiential, visceral overcoming of fear of your own mortality

that you can touch with these spiritual practices and every single person from Jesus to Rumi to Buddha himself and all the other saints and mystics of history they time and time and time again converge on that same conclusion so there is something true there but to walk that path requires you to face that fear you'll never be able to overcome a fear without facing it really facing it.

And that's not comfortable. So people would rather not face it at all, and they never overcome it. Food for thought. The other half of the Pascalian alternative, let's consider the proposition that there are gods or a god. It doesn't matter whether it's monotheistic or polytheistic. If there are gods, then they must be rather like the gods of Socrates.

They are all good. They're all wise. They're all completely moral and completely virtuous and completely knowing and completely excellent. Would creatures like this do anything bad to you? Well, maybe they would. Maybe if you've been doing bad stuff, maybe there is something actually in store for you later on. They may well be a Hades.

Gods like that may want to create moral order in the world and dish out to the bad people of the world just what they have coming to them. But suppose hypothetically you lived according to reason and according to nature and according to the universal law of the logos. Would the gods hurt a man like that or would a man like that be a friend of the gods? And if a man like that would be dealt with fairly by the gods,

justly by the gods, and well by the gods, the gods will do you no harm. So there are two possibilities. Either the world is atoms and the void. The world is just stuff, in which case there's nothing to be afraid of because you're just part of that stuff, and you might as well go along with the flow. Relax.

Enjoy the ride. Nothing to be scared of, nothing to get excited about. On the other hand, and this, I suspect, deep down in Marcus is what he really believes. I mean, when you just read between the lines and find out what the man himself is like, he does basically believe in the gods. Even though he doesn't know if he had to place a wager either way,

same way as Pascal, but perhaps not for the same reasons, he would say, yes, I believe in the gods. And if the gods exist, then they create moral order, and they are perfectly moral themselves, and they are perfectly just and good and righteous themselves, and they will do you no harm. So if there is an afterlife and you behave well, the gods will do you no harm because you deserve no harm done to you. If there is an afterlife and you behave badly, you have no one to blame but yourself. In every case, the only thing that a man is in control of is the individual ego himself. the Cogito, what Descartes will later on call the Cogito, the self. If you are in control of that, if you have an orderly soul, then you have a divine soul, a good soul, and your life is worth living.

The gods will not penalize you for that. It occurs to me that there's something important, you know, with all this talk of Buddhism and overcoming the self and no self. There's something really important about building up a healthy self, right, and then overcoming it. And it always appeals to me that certain of these philosophies, including Stoicism, a psychoanalysis, talk therapy, all of these other things that are helpful are helpful in the sense that they make a healthier self. And then ultimately, what do we want to do with like Buddhism or Sufism or mysticism or all these other categories of spiritual engagement is to then overcome the self?

But to overcome that in a proper way sometimes necessitates, or at least it helps. the process by having a healthy, integrated sense of self. And there are historical examples of Buddhist masters, for example, that had these deep character flaws and people talk sometimes about having deep unresolved trauma that Buddhist enlightenment or these spiritual paths can't fully solve for. So you can have real experiences of awakening or enlightenment, but still be radically limited by these unaddressed aspects of yourself, these unaddressed aspects of yourself, these these unexamined or undelt with earliest traumas or deep character flaws. And, for example, there's been people of Buddhist teachers who have gotten up to power

and misused that power and abused that power, right? Created a spiritual community around themselves for their own self-errichment or these horror stories of gurus taking advantage sexually of their followers. And in some of these cases, they're complete charlatans. In other cases, they're genuinely, partially at least realized practitioners. And so, you know, I think that these things have to go together. You're never going to meditate yourself out of all your fucking problems. And if you can, while you're working on those spiritual paths, while you're chipping away at the ego, you're seeing the limitations of the ego, you're

working to transcend the ego. You're also at the same time trying to build up an integrated self with high moral character, with genuine virtue cultivation, and doing these things simultaneously. And then using all of that to go out and change the world, right? To be a better human being to go out and organize and educate and fight your ass off for a better world that is also a crucial element to serve the people serve others right by doing this sort of outward political social work that is absolutely essential all these pieces need to come together and there's something to be said about only doing one and neglecting the other two or only you know one dimensional form of being and you're leaving these other dimensions of being to rot on the vine there's something to be said about

avoiding that error. And that's what I'm trying to do with these, with an episode like this and what I always try to be doing with, with Rev. Left, even though sometimes, why is Brett talking about Sufism? Why does Brett bring up fucking ego so much and Buddhism so much? Isn't this about Marxist revolutionary politics? Yes, it is precisely about that. And that's why I'm talking about this stuff. So what's it to worry about? Don't worry. Be happy. Either the world is Adams in the void. Nothing to worry about. If the gods are there, we'll lend the gods. Certainly aren't going to hurt you. Either way, don't worry, be happy. Do what you know you ought to do. Meet your moral obligations. In some respect, and I think that this is worth taking notes on if you happen to be

here at the Kant lecture next week, or two weeks from now, is that the stoic conception of virtue is an anticipation of what I will call the Kantian conception of virtue. Those of you were familiar with the works of Emmanuel Kant can recognize the single-minded and ruthless acquirement of virtue as being the Kantian conception of moral action or good moral behavior and the stoic conception as well. Both Kant and Marcus Aurelius have achieved the greatness that comes from being aware that virtue is sufficient in itself. The single-minded pursuit of rationality, of justice, of temperance, of fortitude is what this book is all about. And in some respects, I feel a little bit like a voyeur in opening up a manuscript that

never meant to be, that Marcus never meant to publish. And doubtless, he would be nothing except embarrassed if he knew that people were reading this book, because he wouldn't want to show that crack in the stoic face, right? He doesn't want to give people the idea that he ever worries or ever gets upset at all. In other words, doubtless, if he's in heaven, he regrets every line he ever wrote. Not because he doesn't think it might benefit us, but because it shows the sort of weakness not entirely consistent with stoic virtue. Perhaps there are other stoics who suffered more pain, who had greater difficulties and never wrote a line. In Marcus Aurelius' view, those men would be greater than he. And whether there

exists such people or not, Marcus Aurelius is a sort of standing reproach to our weakness, to our self-indulgence, to our willingness to give in to what we want, to our inclination to make excuses about things that were entirely up to us, and to try and act as if we are not responsible for our behavior. One might want to say that Marcus Aurelius is an important step in the construction of the Western conception of the self or the ego. You are the part of you, not the meat, but the will, the soul, the internal stuff. That's what you're responsible for.

That's what the gods will judge you on the base. of. Apart from that, don't worry about it. All of the things are matters of indifference to you. Connect yourself to nature, do what's right, and let the devil take the hindmost. It's not your problem. Stoicism is an appropriate philosophy, I would say, for serious, ruthless, introspective people that want real answers and are willing to take no nonsense. In that respect, it's a kind of moral philosophy I would be inclined to teach it, say, West Point. If I were teaching people that are going to be under terrible danger and terrible fearful conditions. I would teach them to do what they know they ought to do and to discipline and organize their emotions in such a way as they behave themselves

in a way that is not disgraceful. To avoid that is the epitome of stoic virtue. And it may not have all the attractive elements of Socratic philosophy. It lacks the poetic element of Platonism. It lacks the comprehensive intellectual drive of Socrates. But it still contains elements of Socratic nobility that neither skepticism nor Epicureanism offer us. And in that respect, I think it's the true air of Socratic philosophy. The key idea behind Marcus Aurelius, something like this, that it's just the human condition for us to have troubles and worries and anxieties and problems. Don't torture yourself by worrying about things that aren't.

aren't in your control. Leave that in the hands of God. Leave that in the hands of nature. Do your best to control the things that you do have control over, yourself, your behavior, your intentions, and your actions. If you do that, you will live a blessed and happy and virtuous and wise life. You will be a real human being. If you fail to do that, gradually the inclination towards debauchery, evil, vice, sin, to put it in theological terms, will become greater and greater, and unless you arrest this slide towards self-indulgence, you will harm yourself and you will harm the people around you. No rational being wishes to harm themselves, no rational being wishes to harm the people around them. Because of that, if we were to be

rational, it is the same thing as making us good, and that is the same thing as making us free. Not free in the sense of political freedom, being a slave or a free man, but free in the sense of being autonomous, making our own decisions, making laws for ourselves, free in the sense of no longer being the slave of our passions, being pushed about by our feelings, being a toy that gets messed with by arbitrary things that are really beneath the human condition, that are mere emotion. If we want to be fully human, we must be fully free, and that means fully rational, and that means fully good. except no substitutes is what Marcus Aurelius says. He did that himself, and he hopes that other people will do it. He did the best he could, and you can't help but feel it at the end of his life. He must have felt relieved that the terrible crushing burden of this loneliness, a man that has no equals and has no friends,

a man that has nothing but philosophy to guide him, death must have been a great release. It's like getting the evening off after you've done. put in your turn guarding the camp. And instead of becoming an obscure and unimportant figure, he's become a symbol in the history of Western philosophy of the practical, concrete, immediate virtues, the sort of virtues which are accessible to us, not because we have profound intellectual ability, not because we're a Newton or a Kant, but simply because we have problems and we're everyday rational

human beings. The Stoic man says that a virtue that is possible for one man is accessible to all of us. There is no excuse for us not being that good. If we provide such excuses for ourselves, we harm ourselves and we harm others by preventing us from recognizing our true moral obligations.

Marcus Aurelius lets us know that all people suffer, but that not all people pity themselves. Marcus Aurelius lets us know that all men die but that not all men die whining

something to think about take home with you and mull it over beautiful rest in peace Michael Sugru the dude does these lectures with no notes now your boy needs notes I can't I can't just I mean come on something to look at something to remind me

the pace of things he just goes up and freestyles these lectures and I think I'm sure he has some idea going into it but it's always just fascinating to me and deeply impressive how somebody you have to have deep knowledge of the subject you're talking about to get up and do a lecture, you know, freely like that. And he does so many lectures on so many different thinkers. It's just so clear that he really has a deep grasp of philosophy and really puts a human twist on it. So I really appreciate him. And he passed away in the last year or two. I present these lectures in the spirit of education and in the spirit of

carrying on, you know, his work and the fact that he made these for free publicly, I'm just passing that along to you and adding my two cents for what it's worth. A couple of closing notes here. One is that never in any of this stuff do I want to present myself as a Buddhist master or a stoic sage or a Ph.D. level philosopher. I'm just a guy, all right? I'm a student on the path of all of these things helping other students on the path or trying to encourage people to get on these paths.

These have been the things that have been helpful for me in my life. And these are the things that I'm fascinated with, and it just is inherently pleasurable for me to share these things with others. And I know that some of you listen to this and genuinely get inspired. You know, you listen to an episode on Buddhism. You want to start meditating. You listen to an episode on Stoicism. You want to start cultivating virtue, right?

And you listen to an episode on Marxism. You want to get out there and organize. That's what I want people to. to do is like all of these philosophies that I talk about have something in common. They're not just theoretical. They urge you to be. They urge you to do. They urge you to take action, right? Understanding Buddhism is nothing without practice. Understanding Marxism is nothing without practice. Understanding stoicism is nothing without practicing the virtues, cultivating these things within you. And so in everything that I teach, there's a theoretical component and there's

a practical one. But I am, again, just a student among students encouraging students, right? I am not an expert in anything. I'm not a wise old man. I'm not I'm not anything other than just a dude from Nebraska doing my best and trying to help and inspire others. The other thing I wanted to say is just a quick reminder of the four cardinal virtues of stoicism as something just to kind of concretely take home. Wisdom, it's about understanding what is good, what is virtuous, right? If you're ignorant, if you're lost in ideology, if you're confused about things, You can't put the pieces together and make positive action. So wisdom is an important virtue and stoicism.

Courage. Acting rightly despite fear. Acting in a way that aligns with your values despite temptation, despite desire, despite what mood you're in, despite how scared you are, doing what is right because it is right. That's real courage. Justice, treating others fairly.

And in politics, we're fighting for a more just world. It's not just enough for us to treat other people interpersonally with justice and fairness. We demand that the world treats everybody with dignity and justice. We demand it. And that's non-compromisable for us. And so justice speaks not only to our interpersonal relationships, but to our political goals, which are centered around real fucking justice for everybody. The Pledge of Allegiance says freedom and justice for all.

We actually mean it. And then the last one is temperance, self-control, moderation, walking the middle path, not going to extremes, not falling into either side of a duality and into error, but to try to find that balance beam, that middle path in all things. And I think that's just a good personal virtue to have as well as a good political virtue to have as well. And it's this anti-desire, anti-self-indulgence, anti-temptation mechanism within us that can make us lead more dignified and focused lives. Not for productivity gains or to be some fucking silly virtue idea of masculine or whatever,

but to be a better presence in the world and to help change the world to be a better place. That's what all this stuff is about, for me at least. You can read meditations. Like he said, it's Marcus Aurelius' book to himself, which makes it very fascinating. It's him trying to remind himself of these things. intending it to be published. It's only 100 pages or so. I'm sure you can find it free online. It's been around for thousands of years. And it's just an interesting thing to engage with, to read, and to learn from. And so if you want to go a little deeper, you want to take the next step.

Some of this stuff sounds particularly interesting. Reading meditations is the way. It's accessible. It's easy. It's something that you can immediately connect with, read. You don't need any philosophy background to do it, et cetera. So jump into that. And then finally, let's just quickly go through. take out some general themes of stoicism and apply them to Marxism, these are some of the things that I came up with. Duty and commitment to the greater good, right? Just as Marcus Aurelius saw his duty as emperor to uphold justice, revolutionaries must act in accordance with historical materialism, organizing and fighting for socialism, regardless of external validation or obstacles. Number two, endurance and resilience and struggle. Lenin, Mao, Che, they all embodied

this particular Stoic virtue of endurance, facing exile, war, and struggle without succumbing to despair or self-pity. The dialectical method teaches us that struggle is natural and inevitable. Stoicism helps revolutionaries weather contradictions without losing focus. Three, overcoming fear in the illusion of death.

Revolutionaries throughout history from the Paris Commune to the Black Panthers have faced persecution, assassination, and war. Stoicism provides a mental framework to accept that life is finite, but struggle continues beyond the individual. It's not that we want to die, right? It's not that we want to be hurt or anything like that, but it's that we look at dead in the eyes,

we understand its inevitability, and we pursue our goals regardless, right? And that gives us courage, meaning, and purpose. Four, maintaining focus on the present task. Instead of feeling paralyzed by the vastness of capitalist oppression, imperialist oppression, all the injustice in the world, a revolutionary must focus on practical action what can be done today what can i contribute to community and to organizing in my community what small steps advances the movement and importantly how do i stay present with the things that matter in a world of distraction of dopamine machines

of being able to look at a screen and get away from any moment of boredom to get away from any uncomfortable feeling how can i maintain my focus keep my attention where it needs to be and not allow myself to be scattered by all of these devices and all of these corporate platforms vying for my attention in the attention economy to use me and my data for advertisements and selling away that data so that they can make profit at the end of the day that's what all these social media things are all about not saying that there's no place for those things they're a tool we can use them but we just can't be used by them we can't become their tool that's so important i find that as a daily struggle in my own life and i'm sure it's a daily

struggle in yours. Rejecting ego and remaining humble. Revolutionaries need to avoid opportunism, arrogance, personal vanity, personal career ambitions, all of that shit comes from the ego. How can I use this to benefit me? How can I use revolutionary struggle to give myself an identity, to make myself look cool or smart to other people? Dead all that shit, right? That is egoic nonsense. true revolutionaries are servants of the people not self-aggrandizing leaders seeking praise and validation fuck your ego serve others doesn't mean don't take care of yourself take care of yourself take care of your personal responsibilities right have compassion for yourself but get away from your ego it's not about you revolutionary politics are not a vehicle for your own self-aggrandizement

they are a vehicle for the dismantling of your individual ego and the service to the people to community and to the human species. We can never lose sight of that. And to notice when that ego pops up in you. Just become the first step in dismantling your ego identification and being overwhelmed by your ego is recognizing it and being honest about it when it pops up. Oh, this is a very egoic response to this situation, right? Just first step, become aware of how the ego distorts things, makes everything about you, puts you at the center of the universe. Notice that. Six. seeking adversity as an opportunity for growth, as I was talking about earlier, anxiety comes. I immediately see it as an opportunity to be with what is and to build my ability to be with what is, right?

And dialectical materialism teaches that contradictions drive history. Crises and repression often signal that the ruling class is desperate and that revolutionary conditions are maturing. So the adversity of today, of seeing things go in such terrible ways, seeing the genocide of the Palestinians, seeing this, you know, this Trump administration, and all the things. it's doing, unleashing the oligarchy, making life harder for regular people, overturning the couple things that we have that are positive for working people, instead of being awash in despair and seeing that as, oh God, we're fucked, I'm a doomer now, see that as a crumbling of a system that presents amazing opportunities.

A healthy system does not act like this. Healthy systems are not this desperate, right? It's precisely in their desperation that we can find their weakness. and then look through history. The setbacks faced by the Russian, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions, to name just a few, ultimately strengthen their movements. It's through hardship that we become more capable human beings. If life was nothing but comfort and everything going our way all the time, we would be the people in Wali, right? Just seeking comfort and distraction and entertainment all the time. We have to suffer. We have to face hardships in our

personal life and our political life in order to build up the capacity to do what we want to do in the world. So see that suffering and set back and hardship, not as I'm a victim, I'm destroyed, nothing matters, everything sucks, but as opportunities to become more resilient. Truly, that's a beautiful mindset to adapt. Seven, overcoming anger and resentment. Revolutionaries fight to overthrow the system, not just to punish individuals, right? We can't get lost and this or that bad guy and this or that asshole and be like, all my politics is about like like killing this person or punishing these people. We have to understand this is a system that gives rise to this disease, and we have to

overcome the system, not just take our anger out on individuals, although there is a place for that at times for sure. Just ask a Luigi. Mao's concept of unity, struggle unity, mirrors this idea, right? Treating contradictions among the people differently than contradictions with the enemy, being clear about that. That's all really important. Eight, acting without expectation of reward, something I've touched on many times.

already, but most of revolutionaries never lived to see victory. I'm not saying we will or we won't, but we're not in control of that, right? Me and you as individuals can't dictate whether socialist revolution happens, how we want it to happen, or where we want it to happen, or when we want it to happen. We just put in our work. We contribute to this long, beautiful, gorgeous tradition of trying to build a better world, and no matter what happens, we know we did our duty. And we laid the groundwork possibly for future generations, or we strike it big and we do get revolution in our life. time who knows every every possibility is open but it doesn't matter we still got to do the work and keeping your eyes focused on that is really important and again the fight for socialism is

not about personal reward it's about collective liberation it's not that's not to say neglect yourself we need you in the struggle we need you resilient strong energized moisturized hydrated you know we need all that shit but it's ultimately about making a better world for everybody not about advancing your own personal ambitions. So in all of these ways, these are ways in which stoicism can help inform revolutionaries and give us these virtues to cultivate in this way of thinking and being in the world that can only help us in our cause, but it's not limited to our individual selves. It is always in the service in the Marxist sense to revolutionary struggle in the Bodhisattva sense,

to building a better world and helping others. and that's what has to be kept in mind. And that pushes back against so much of the bullshit stoicism we see on YouTube and in the Manosphere that's shoveling this productivity grindset bullshit and turning stoicism into something that like dudes in the gym that fucking, you know, we don't care that the girl broke up with us, bro, just live that way. Like that's just stupid, self-indulgent, low- IQ nonsense. And so we can take a philosophy that's not even really about,

anything that we care about is Marxist like Stoicism, and we can derive its value, discard the way it's bastardized and reduced to one-dimensionality, be critical of the ways it manifests in popular culture, but don't throw out the baby with the bathwater, right? Still find the things within it that are helpful and that we can use as tools for our ends. And that's what's important. So it would be a real shame if you threw something away like meditation because Amazon has the meditation booths. or you threw something away like fucking stoicism because whatever Andrew Tate has an episode

on how everybody needs to be a stoic right critical disregard that nonsense learn about it yourself take what's valuable and put it towards our goals that's what it's all about all right love and solidarity talk to you soon