The Daily Stoic - It Takes a Guide To ‘Get’ It | 9 Core Stoic Beliefs

Episode Date: August 26, 2026

Wisdom doesn’t come from first impressions and it does not come easy. It’s hard work…and the only way to speed up the process is with the help of a great teacher.💡 We designed our How To Read Epictetus (A Daily Stoic Guide) as a personal field guide —part book club, part masterclass, part daily practice. It’s designed to help you not just read the words of Epictetus, but live them—to turn his timeless wisdom into real change in your own life and the lives of those around you.And if you get the guide before August 26th, you’ll receive a private invitation to an exclusive LIVE Q&A with Ryan Holiday, where he’ll go deep on all things Epictetus, Stoicism, and how to apply these ideas right now, in today’s world. Head to dailystoic.com/epictetuscourse to learn more and get your book, guide, and bundle today!👉 Get How To Read Epictetus (A Daily Stoic Guide) & all other Daily Stoic courses for FREE when you join Daily Stoic Life | dailystoic.com/lifeRead the article here | https://dailystoic.com/9-core-stoic-beliefs/📔 Pick up your own leather bound signed edition of The Daily Stoic! Check it out at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/🎟️ DAILY STOIC LIVE | Ryan Holiday is coming to a city near you! Grab tickets here |  https://www.dailystoiclive.com/🎙️ AD-FREE | Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing to The Daily Stoic Premium - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content: https://dailystoic.supercast.com/✉️ FREE STOIC WISDOM | Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemailSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. It takes a guide to get it. Marcus Aurelius had many advantages in life. He was born a man in a male-dominated society. He was born to a good family. And then, in an unbelievable stroke of good luck, he was chosen to be the most powerful man in the world. But the luckiest break that Marcus Aurelius got came in the form of Rousticus,

his philosophy teacher. Just as reading and writing require a master, Marcus wrote in meditations, still more so was life. Rusticus was that master. He taught Marcus how to think, he taught him how to live. He is also the one who gave his young student a copy of Epictetus, which Marcus tells us he supplied me out of his own library. Rousticus almost certainly attended Epictetus's lectures in person and was an ideal teacher to help make sure that Marcus Aurelius got more than just the gist that he came to understand it on a sole level. Flash forward 18 centuries later and history repeated itself. In 1962, Commander James Stockdale began studying philosophy under Professor Philip Rhinelander at Stanford University.

In addition to the assigned reading, Stockdale would spend about an hour each week in Rhinelander's home, talking about philosophy and wrestling with questions about good and evil, human nature, suffering, and how one ought to live. As their time together came to a close, Reinlander, knowing that Stockdale was likely to head off to combat, handed Stockdale a copy of the teachings of Epicetus. Marcus had Rousticus, Stockdale had Rhinelander. Sure, they might have both stumbled into into or threw Epictetus on their own, but it wouldn't have been the same. Marcus didn't read Epictetus once and move on. You can see his influence throughout meditations and how Marcus thought about anger,

how he dealt with difficult people, how he approached duty, handled adversity, and how he chose to react to the things outside his control. And this came from his repeated reading and diligent study of the text. Stockdale carried Epictetus's in Caridian Witton, and keeping it on his bedside table aboard the USS Taekonda Roga, as we've talked about recently. He read and reread the teachings of Epictetus. Both Marcus and Stockdale committed many of Epictetus's passages to memory. They return to those lessons and to their teachers because they understood that wisdom doesn't come from first impressions, and it does not come easy.

It's hard work, and the only way to speed up that process is with the help of a great teacher. And that's what we've been doing all month and are doing for the rest of the month here during Epictetus Month, Daily Stoic. We're doing a deep dive into this slave-turned teacher whose ideas shaped Marcus Aurelius

and Stockdale and whom the Stoics have returned to for nearly 2,000 years. If you haven't read Epictetus, I think you would like it. You can grab a copy in the painted porch and will also include an awesome guide that walks you through

not just what Epic Titus said, but how you apply it. And we're going to be doing a deep dive Q&A into Epictetus on the 27th, which I'd love to have you join us. You're just got to sign up by it the 26th. And you can even throw in a copy of meditations in there for an extra $10 if you want. You can grab all that at DailyStoke.com slash Epicetus, and I'll see you in there. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to the Daily Stoke podcast.

You're familiar with Stephen Hanselman, I imagine. Stephen Hanselman is the translator on all the ancient translations in the Daily Stoic and in the Daily Stoic Journal. He's also been my book agent since I sold my first book back in 2011. Trust me, I'm lying. And he's just been a wonderful collaborator and friend. And I would say not just a fellow student of the Stoics, but a teacher of the Stoics. To me, Steve went to Harvard Divinity School. He speaks Greek and Latin.

and we worked on lives of the Stoics together. I have learned so much collaborating with. Steve is my go-to expert on Stoics, and that's why I'm bringing you this article today. Steve put together something for the Daily Stoic Site, nine core Stoic beliefs. There is no sort of 10 Stoic commandments, but there are some core beliefs of Stoicism

that we see, whether we're talking about Zeno or Clanthes or Aristo or Marcos Rios or Seneca. They didn't agree on everything, but they had some core basic assumptions about life, and that's what I'm bringing you in today's episode. This was read by Michael Reed, who does a lot of voiceover work for the Daily Stoke. It was written by Stephen Hanselman.

I'll link to the article in today's show notes, but in the meantime, I'll let you sit back and listen. The nine core Stoic Beliefs by Stephen Hanselman. If you want a smooth flow of life, live according to nature. At the core of the Stoic teaching is, the founder Zeno's idea that a smooth flow of life, Uroa Bayou, comes from living in agreement with nature. It was the second leader of the Stoics, Zeno's student, Cleanthes, who added the last part with nature, to Fusci, or according to, Katafucin. The Stoics saw an entirely material universe

that was shot through with reason and purpose, a great world city of human beings that were connected to it and to each other as both rational and social creatures. Zeno was the first philosopher to treat duty, Cathacon, as a central concern, our obligation to act appropriately in our given roles in family and society, and it was no accident that as a consequence, he taught that we were obligated to participate in public life until we are unable. Zeno divided the stoic curriculum them into three parts that were meant not only to be studied, but practiced. Physics, logic, and ethics. The Stoics saw physics as the fertile field, logic as a protective fence that kept out corruptions,

and ethics as the fruit produced by the integration of these three areas of study in our actions. Zeno had challenged his students to get to the place where everything they did was in harmonious accord with each man's guiding spirit in the will of the one who governs the universe. The Stoic God was not transcendent and above nature, but instead was synonymous with it. Their pantheism, God in all things, held that each of us shared in the divine fire. Like other Greek thinkers who preceded him, Zeno believed that each of us has a daimon, an inner genius or purpose, that connects us to the universal nature. Those who live by keeping the individual and universal natures in harmony are happy,

and those who don't are not. The disjunction of these two natures is a root source of human misery and not how we are meant to live. So, how do we avoid this disjunction? Happiness isn't found in things, but in virtue alone. It's all about what we value and the choices we make. The early Stoics often disagreed about many particulars, but they all agreed that for human beings, the happy life was to be found only in the pursuit of virtue, arati or human excellence, a pursuit that involved tempering our desires, aversions, and impulses,

so that they aligned better with the four cardinal virtues of temperance, sophrosony, courage, Andrea, justice, dikayosune, and practice, Practical wisdom, phrenesis. Simply put, for human beings, virtue happens to be the best operating system for making our way through the world. It's the program we are all meant to be following. These four main virtues and the many sub-virtues that relate to them are where our focus needs to be, and they are a package deal, inseparable and complete. Oryas Didimus, who served as one of two close Stoic advisors to the first Roman emperor Augustus, gave us the most complete list we have of the Stoic virtues. His very straightforward definitions present them as essential types of practical knowledge for living. Wisdom, phrenesis, is the knowledge of what things must be done and what must not be done,

and what is neither, and leads us to appropriate acts. kate-cunta. Within wisdom, we'll find virtuous qualities like soundness of judgment, circumspection, shrewdness, sensibleness, soundness of aim, and ingenuity. Self-control, sophrosony, is the knowledge of what things are worth choosing and what are worth avoiding and what is neither. Contained within this virtue are things like orderliness, propriety, modesty, and self-mastery. Justice, Dikaiosune, is the knowledge of apportioning each person and situation what is due. Under this banner, Stoics placed piety, giving gods their due, kindness, good fellowship,

and fair dealing. Bravery, Andrea, is the knowledge of what is terrible and what isn't and what is neither. This included perseverance, intrepidness, great-heartedness, stout-heartedness, and industriousness. To approach life in this way involves a complete revolution in our thinking and attitudes. We must stop believing that happiness consists in things and realize instead that it consists alone in virtuous living. When we put external things ahead of virtue, we separate our individual nature from the universal one, that connects us all together. Toxic emotions arise,

along with anxiety and isolation. Contrary to popular opinion, good and evil don't reside in the things we desire or wish to avoid, but only in our thinking and beliefs and the decisions and actions we take because of them. Epictetus, the great philosopher and former slave, urged his students to focus only on their reasoned choice,

prohiruses, our ability to use our reason to choose how we categorize, respond, and reorient ourselves to external things and events. These external things from a moral perspective are indifferent, neither good or bad in themselves. Only the value we ascribe to things, and how we exercise our reason and choices around them, makes anything good or bad. Left unchecked, our desires and diversions when governed by false beliefs give rise to toxic emotions that cause us great unsteadiness and suffering in life. How we put virtue to work in each case should be our sole focus. Epictetus summarized it this way. The essence of good is a certain kind of reasoned choice, just as the essence of evil is another kind. What about externals then?

They are only the raw materials for our reason choice, which finds its own good or evil in working with them. How will it find good? Not by marveling at the material. For if judgments about the material are straight, that makes our choices good. But if those judgments are twisted, our choices turn bad. We don't control external events. We only control our thoughts, opinions, decisions, and duties. When we keep externals in the proper perspective, we gain a steadiness, Eustathia, that helps us a long life's way.

In the real world, we all have things we need and duties and obligations that arise from our family, relationships, and vocations. Zeno was the first to divide these externals into what he called preferred and dispreferred indifference. What he meant is that while they don't have intrinsic moral value, they form a kind of second class of value that is an important part of our lives. Things like health and wealth are preferred over sickness and poverty, and if we are lucky enough to have them, they can be a benefit to us and others as we pursue a virtuous life. But like many things in life, health and wealth are often fleeting, and much of what happens is beyond our control and, as Epictetus put it, is not up to us.

Ta Ok F. Hemman. We must always remember that the only things that are up to us, Ta F. Hemman, are how we exercise our reason, form opinions about the worth and truth of things, along with the decisions and actions we take in trying to do the appropriate things, Catea Conta. No turn of fortune, however difficult, can keep us from virtue. and the steadiness and happiness it can bring. Antipater, the fifth head of the Stoic school, worked hard to bring this practice into everyday life.

His formula for virtue was, in choosing continually and unswervingly, the things which are according to nature, in rejecting those contrary to nature. For Antipater, it was all about making sure our self-interest wouldn't override our moral compass. He was the first to eminent, emphasize the importance of marriage and family, to stress the importance of ethical dealing

in business, and to highlight how these choices form the basis of a strong society, how working together for the common good is a primary duty both at home and in public life. This practical everyday ethics would gain further definition by Antipater's successor, Panatius, who would develop an extensive role ethics and share it with Roman elites through his relationship with the great general and statesman C. Penaultius expanded Zeno's rule that we should be involved in public life by writing what Cicero would later call the greatest work written on duties, a kind of manual for the rising young leaders in Roman society. Like Antipater, whom he would succeed as the head of the Stoic school, Panatius emphasized our

duty to act for the common good and not just personal gain. He believed we all had an innate desire for leadership, and, while we can't all be the brave CPO in the battlefield, we can each strive for a greatness of soul, megalopsukia, that endeavors to bring benefit to others in whatever capacity we serve. It was a timely message in a corrupt society that was becoming overrun by self-interest and the use of military and public office for personal enrichment, and it was a timely message in a corrupt society, and it was a timely message in a corrupt society that was becoming overrun by self-interest and the use of military and public office for personal enrichment, and it was a an ethical model that gave stoicism influence at the highest levels of Roman society for the next 300 years. We've each been given all the inner resources we need to thrive. One of the biggest mistakes about stoicism is to miss its positivity and joy. The stoics weren't bereft of emotion. They just wanted to eliminate toxic emotions and replace them with good emotions, Eupathiae, which included rational wishing, bolisis as opposed to blind hope, rational caution,

Yolabia, as opposed to blind fear, and positive emotions like gratitude, Eucharistia, joy, chara, and love for others, Philistorgia. The bedrock of Stoic philosophy is an optimistic view of the human personality. We aren't born in sin or hopelessly corrupt and without any means in the battle of life. On the contrary, Cleanthes held that we are each born with the resources, a formi. We need to thrive in our life's journey. He wrote that we all had the seeds of virtue in us, that we were like half-completed poems and our job in life was to work to make a complete and beautiful poem. We may face bad environments and obstacles along the way, he wrote,

but it's no different than how the confining rules of poetry give the art its beauty, or how the compression of air by a trumpet's pipes creates a beautiful sound. Panatius also stressed these inborn resources as he urged young leaders to overcome the temptations and barbs of Roman public life. Human beings are given these instincts toward virtue by nature, and we can thrive and live nobly if we learn to live consistently with our own nature and our duties, while making the most of the resources we have been given. Aulus Jelius tells us that Panetius like to remind his young charges of the pancreatist, a form of Greek boxing more like today's UFC fighting.

Yes, we will encounter unexpected blows in life, but like a great athlete, we will prepare not only to meet them, but to overcome. Arias Didimus would also write about these inborn resources. We each have our own implanted gifts that can lead us to a virtuous life. Our personalities suit us differently to different paths of ethical development. We all have different launching points, but these inborn tools together with hard effort will get us to where we want to go. We must focus on the task at hand and waste not a moment on the tasks that are

are not ours. We must have courage. We must be fair. We must check our emotions. We must, above all, be wise. Epictetus would later write about many different facets of these inborn resources, which he believed included our senses, our reason, and above all, our power of choice. but he also spoke of the many moral preconceptions, prolepsies, that can guide us. He felt that the primary purpose of education was to clarify these moral preconceptions and keep them, echoing Panatius's pancreatist,

like polished weapons. Marcus too would give thanks for these inborn resources and say, the art of living was more like wrestling than dancing, a struggle for which these students, Stoics encourage us, we are amply matched. I know I got a bunch of talks coming up. I got a bunch of travel coming up.

I got a bunch of videos I'm going to do. So I was starting to think about what I'm going to wear. And so I was shopping for some basics from Quince. I've been wearing a bunch. You've almost certainly seen me in their stuff. Their clothes are built to last, made with premium materials. And they're the kind of stuff you reach for every day. Quince specializes in everyday staples that work harder.

ultra-soft organic cotton teas, Mongolian cashmere sweaters, everything in between. Everything that Quince has is priced 50 to 80% less than what you'd find from similar brands. Quince works directly with ethical factories, cuts out the middleman so you're getting premium materials without the markup. If you're still hanging on to the same worn-out basics, Quince makes it easy to upgrade. And if you want to upgrade your everyday, download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com slash stoic to get free shipping on your or order and 365-day returns, now available in Canada and the UK.

That's Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash stoic. One of the things I think the Internet has shown us is that you've got to directly connect with the people that you're trying to reach. You want as few intermediaries and as few sort of artificial blocks between you and what you're trying to do or what you're trying to say or who you're trying to reach as possible, right? You want those one-on-one interactions. And I don't know if you've seen this app What Not, but it's live shopping.

So sellers have direct access to their customers in real time, where people are seeing your face and not a website, not a logo. What Not is the largest dedicated live shopping platform beauty, collectibles, electronics, luxury, fashion, even cookies. People who sell those things are building real thriving businesses on Whatnot. Anyone can sell, whether your business is big or small, just starting. And people selling on What Not sell 10 times more than on other major marketplaces. Because you're not just listing products. You're building a real direct connection with buyers. Across What Not, the number of sellers making over $1 million a year has doubled.

That means it's not just a side hustle, but a real path to building something that lasts. Just search What Not, W-H-A-T-N-O-T in the App Store, download it, and you can start. selling and buying right away. We must eliminate toxic emotions, why hope, fear, and anger are always the worst strategies. If we neglect these inborn resources and fail to remove our false beliefs

and the destructive emotions that arise from them, we will find ourselves mired in anxiety, anger, fear, envy, and a host of toxic and counterproductive states. A result of this failure is that our duties to family and our roles as leaders will suffer no matter the endeavor. We often hear today that hope is not a strategy. It's a nice knock on the lack of planning, but that kind of vague projection onto future events is really itself a toxic emotion. The Stoics reminded us that fear was just the flip side of hope.

hope and fear are nothing more than letting our thoughts and beliefs project into the future concerning positive or negative outcomes we do not control. Seneca would repeat a saying he learned from the stoic teacher, Hakato of Rhodes, that when we cease to hope, we will cease to fear. Seneca was constantly reminding us that instead of borrowing that kind of trouble and the anxiety that comes with it, we will always do better if we focus in instead on the present circumstances where we can actually make a difference. Similarly, anger is an emotion that most of the Stoics spent a lot of time on.

Athena Doris Canonites, the other Stoic advisor to the Emperor Augustus, taught him a practice he found invaluable. Whenever you feel yourself getting angry, Caesar, he instructed, don't say or do anything until you've repeated the 24 letters of the alphabet to yourself. Time and distance are the best remedy to anger, which usually creates far more trouble than the circumstances that triggered it, as Seneca wrote. While in exile on the island of Corsica for eight long years, Seneca wrote a whole book on anger that he dedicated to his brother, who was busy serving Claudius, the emperor who had exiled Seneca in a fit of anger.

We live in angry times, and much of what we experience is little more than anger biting itself, as Seneca put it. Marcus Aurelius wrote that gentleness and civility are a manlier and more human response to upsetting circumstances, and that the further we are from anger, the stronger we will be. We are and must remain a unified self. We can't complain or blame anyone else. best to deal with our own demons. The Stoics believed in a unified rational self. They took responsibility for maintaining that unity

and would never support such thinking as the devil made me do it, or any other form of laying the blame or responsibility elsewhere. The notable exception among the Stoics was the towering genius Posidonius, who changed Stoic psychology to give what he thought thought was a better account of the irrational forces he saw, tearing great leaders like Pompeii apart during his own time.

One must design one's life, Posidonius said, to live contemplating the truth and order of the universe and promoting it as much as possible, being led in no respect by the irrational part of the soul. Yet, he was still arguing the main point of the Stoics that we can't be divided against. against ourselves. This goes back to Zeno's harmony of the individual and universal natures, as well as the Stoic belief which they took from Heraclitus, that character is fate. The original phrase, Ethos Anthropos daimon, is actually better translated as one's character is a personal god. What this means is that if we let our character turn bad, we will then have a

tyrant exercising a reign of terror over our lives. The real demon in life is a bad character. Epictetus put it best when he said, These things don't go together. We must be a unified human being, either good or bad. We must diligently work on our own reasoning or on things out of our control. Take great care with the inside and not what's outside, which is to say. say, stand with the philosopher, or else with the mob. That's easier said than done, which is why we'd rather complain about external sources or find another culprit to blame. But here, Epictetus is equally tough. Nothing outside of my reason choice can hinder or harm it. My reason choice alone can do this

to itself. If we would lean this way whenever we fail and would blame only our ourselves and remember that nothing but opinion is the cause of a troubled mind and uneasiness, then by God, I swear we would be making progress. No man is an island, the Stoic Golden Rule. At the time of Epictetus's death, there was another Stoic studying and teaching in Athens named Heracles. He wrote a large work called On Appropriate Acts, Periton Cathiconton, from which a number of Fragments have been preserved, including a substantial book on the elements of ethics,

Ethique Stoic aosis, a systematic primer intended for classroom use, along with a number of other fragments filled with precepts aimed at a broader audience. Like Antipater and Musonius before him, the topics treated in these popular fragments include advice on marriage, family, and household management. The element of ethics stands out among Stoic ethical writing in the Roman period for its rigorously systematic approach to defining ethical principles. Building on the work of Chrysippus, who had talked about the role of what is fitting or appropriate, Oakeos, in our development as human beings, as well as on Antipater's work in connecting our personal interests to the interests of our fellow human beings, Heracles created something remarkable.

Beginning with an individual's capacity for self-perception and its related drive for self-preservation, Heracles moves to connect that personal sphere of interest to the social sphere, the interests of other people. Heracles turns the previous stoic discussion of what is fitting or appropriate into a challenge to see and practice in ethics that connects the two poles of Oekeosis, the personal and the social. Our individual interests are bound up because of our fundamental, rational and social nature, with the interests and concerns of others. He pictures these spheres of concern as a series of circles, radiating out from our own self or mind. Try as we might to live in a world dominated by our own interests,

we will suffer and fail to realize our humanity unless we are constantly working to connect our sphere of concern with the concerns of others. Heracles offers a simple solution based on his ingenious model. We should try always to bring our outer circles closer to ourselves, that is, to treat family like you would yourself, to treat a friend as you would family, to treat a fellow citizen as you would a friend, to treat a countryman as a fellow citizen, and finally, to treat a foreigner as you would your own countrymen. In all that we do, we should try to bring these circles closer to ourselves. No man is an island, and none untouchable.

The stoic oecoces is no longer simply appropriating for the self what its constitution requires for physical survival, but now includes the radical concept of making the unfapeutic, familiar concern of others familiar. From Chrysippus's no shoving rule to Antipater's emphasis on being just to others, the Stoics were building up

an ethical system based on interconnectedness, sympathy, and mutual cooperation. Heracles provided a simple map for trying to live this virtue in a practical way. It's the Stoic golden rule and it's desperately

needed in our world today. Our personal development is bound up in cooperation with others. Because of the work done by Chrysippus, Antipater, and Heracles to build an ethical system that turned on an unbreakable connection between our self-interest and the interests of others, the Stoics were always positively focused on active social engagement with an eye toward cooperation.

Seneca would write a whole book, his longest, on being a benefit to others, constantly on the lookout for ways of being useful to others, he sought out moral exemplars who did the same, and, even in his forced retirement from the court of Nero, Seneca hoped that the leisure time of his final years focused on writing would serve the same purpose. Those works, including his moral letters and essays, have stood the test of time and helped countless people.

No Stoic reflected this orientation in his writing, more than the emperor Marcus Aurelius. There are more than 80 references in the meditations to the common good, a phrase that appears on nearly every page of the work. Marcus wrote that every morning he would wake up and think of all the troublesome people he would encounter that day, and then sternly remind himself that, because he knew the beauty of good and the ugliness of evil,

he would focus instead on how they were really his family, and that we are all made for cooperation. Elsewhere, he would write, whenever you have trouble getting up in the morning, remind yourself that you've been made by nature for the purpose of working with others. That's a powerful mantra to carry us through each day. Persist and resist.

It's all about progress, not perfection. The Stoics saw the art of living as a process of continuous improvement. They believed in progress, not perfection. No matter our roles and duties, no matter the obstacles and difficulties we face, they reminded us that there is always a deeper work going on. The Stoics saw us as both artisans and artifacts. While we work on the things of everyday life,

we are doing a deeper work on ourselves. As we make progress in our various endeavors and encounter setbacks, we are constantly improving ourselves, thinking through things better, learning to anticipate trouble, primatacio malorum, choosing to act in a more virtuous way, and eliminating toxic emotions. While we never get there fully, our progress brings peace and stability to our lives and benefits to everyone around us. In this activity, we learn to turn words into works, crisis into character, and challenges into opportunities to do and be good. As Marcus said, the fruit of this life is a good character and acts for the common good.

This is the key focus of Stoic philosophy and what's set to depart from all other types of philosophy, which tend to focus on argumentation and verbal one-upsmanship. Philosophy, Seneca wrote, isn't for pointing out the faults in others, it's for scraping off our own faults. Aulos Gelius records a beautiful passage from Epictetus when he was asked to sum up his philosophy. If anyone would take these two words to heart and use them for his own guidance and regulation,

he will be almost without sin and will lead a very peaceful life. These two words, he said, Anikau, persist, and Apakow. Resist. Persist and resist. The courage and perseverance to keep moving toward what is good and the self-control and awareness to resist what is bad. These are the ingredients of freedom, whatever one's condition.