The Daily Stoic - We Have To Help Each Other | Honesty As Our Default

Episode Date: October 11, 2024

There are so many things outside our control. We can’t stop a hurricane, or prevent an earthquake. But we can help our fellow citizens and fellow human beings in the midst of one.You can support those affected by Hurricanes Helene and Milton by donating to Habitat for Humanity’s Hurricane Recovery fund: https://www.habitat.org/donate/?link=1614📓 Grab your own leather bound signed edition of The Daily Stoic! | https://store.dailystoic.com/📕 Pick up a signed copy of Right Thing, Right Now by Ryan Holiday | https://store.dailystoic.com/🎟 Ryan Holiday is going on tour! Grab tickets at ryanholiday.net/tour✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us:  Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to the daily Stoic early and ad free right now. Just join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. We've got a bit of a commute now with the kids and their new school. And so one of the things we've been doing as a family is listening to audiobooks in the car. Instead of having that be dead time, we want to use it to have a live time. We really want to help their imagination soar. And listening to Audible helps you do precisely that. Whether you listen to short stories,

self-development, fantasy, expert advice, really any genre that you love, maybe you're into stoicism. And there's some books there that I might recommend by this one guy named Ryan. Audible has the best selection of audio books without exception and exclusive Audible originals all in one easy app.

And as an Audible member, you choose one title a month to keep from their entire catalog. By the way, you can grab Right Thing Right Now on Audible. You can sign up right now for a free 30 day Audible trial and try your first audiobook for free. You'll get Right Thing Right Now totally for free. Visit audible.ca to sign up. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Friday, we do

double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the Daily Stoic, my book, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance in the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful collaborator, translator, and literary agent, Stephen Hanselman. So today, we'll give you a quick meditation from the Stoics with some analysis from me, and then we'll give you a quick meditation from the Stoics with some analysis from me,

and then we'll send you out into the world to turn these words into works. We have to help each other. If there's anything redeeming about tragedies and disasters, it's the way they bring out the best in us. Whether it's volunteers like the Cajun Navy rushing into flooded streets, they're headed to Florida right now to provide hurricane relief, and you can actually donate to their Amazon wish list of supplies. Or it's firefighters charging into burning buildings. These terrible events remind us how in our darkest moments, we can still rise to take care of each other.

That courage isn't dead yet. This spirit of mutual aid was found in ancient times too. In 64 AD during Nero's reign, a fire ravaged the city of Rome. In response, a city in Gaul sent a generous sum to aid the victims. Just a year later, tragedy struck that same city, a devastating fire consuming it. Nero, in a striking gesture of reciprocity, sent an equal sum to support the recovery of its citizens. Seneca wrote to a friend reflecting on these

events, noting some of the bitter irony of it, that one city extended help to another only to be struck by a similar disaster soon after. To the Stoics, such moments were a chance to live out their philosophy. When calamity befalls someone, it's our duty, if we can, to offer support. But we should also take these moments as a reminder. There but for the grace of God go I. There but for the grace of God go the people we cherish. Goes our stuff, our homes. We must recognize how easily, how inevitably, fate can in turn place us on the receiving end of misfortune. Being unexpected adds to the weight of a disaster, Seneca wrote, and being a surprise has never failed to increase a

person's pain. For that reason, nothing should ever be unexpected by us. There are so many things outside of our control. We can't stop a hurricane or prevent an earthquake, but we can help our neighbor in the midst of one. We can take care of our own because we are all one. We are all part of that same sympatheia, as the Stoics called it, an interconnected cosmos. We are all our own part of the same large whole.

We are all cut from the same cloth and breathe and think and live the same. No matter what superficial differences or geographic distances may exist between us, every one of the four Stoic virtues teaches us this and demands we act accordingly. I've always been a big fan of Habitat for Humanity and you can support those affected by Hurricane Helene

and Milton by donating to Habitat for Humanity's Hurricane Recovery Fund, following the immediate response after everyone's health and safety is taken care of. This organization is dedicated to long-term recovery and building initiatives in communities like the ones that have been affected by these. You can donate today.

I'll link to that in today's show notes. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I can't believe it is October 11th already. It's just absolutely insane to me. Today's entry in the Daily Stoic, I am holding a cloth-bound edition here in my hands, 366 Meditation on Wisdom, Perseverance,

and the Art of Living. Got a cool leather-bound edition if you want one. Got a nice big chunk from Meditations 11.5 here, one of my favorite passages from Marcus. It says, how rotten and fraudulent when people say they intend to give it to you straight. What are you up to, dear friend? It shouldn't need your announcement,

but it should be readily seen as if written on your forehead, heard in the ring of your voice, a flash in your eyes, just as the beloved sees it all in the lover's glance. In short, the straightforward and good person should be like a smelly goat. You know when they are in the room with you." You know, it's funny, I actually use this passage

in Right Thing Right Now in the Tell the Truth chapter. I make this important distinction. A lot of whistleblowers actually don't like that term. They're like, I'm not a whistleblower. I'm telling the truth. That's my job. Let me give you a chunk of that. Ernie Fitzgerald, who exposed cost overruns and $500 hammers and $7,000 coffee makers in his civilian role at the Pentagon, saw it this way. He didn't like the label whistleblower, preferring instead to be called a truth teller. He preferred to see it as what he was paid to do as an employee and expected to do as

a citizen. His wife, Nell, agreed. On the night before he was to testify before Congress with his bosses pressuring him to play dumb, she told him, I don't really think I could live with a man I didn't respect, and if he went over there and lied, I'd have no respect for him.

Whistleblowing is an aggressive form of truth-telling, speaking up with a twist of personal and professional risk. It becomes necessary when one has discovered a lie or a fraud, when one has witnessed or been a victim of some foul deed that the world does not know about. You'd think that this kind of courage would be appreciated, but it isn't. While we can sometimes come to respect

and admire whistleblowers long after the fact, more often than not, they are doubted, pressured, criticized, and attacked. Their motives are impugned. Their personal lives are scrutinized. Even with considerable legal protections for whistleblowers, which in the United States date back to 1778, this act of public service is not an easy one. Ernie Fitzgerald's reward for committing his act of truth, he became the most hated man in the Air Force.

Secret recordings caught Nixon telling his aides to get rid of that son of a bitch, and then he had him fired. It's a reminder that for all the lip service we pay to the truth, in fact, honesty is often a radical, even dangerous act. It may well be one of the rarest things in the world. How many truly honest people

do you know? People who tell the truth when it's inconvenient, who make it clear where they stand, who don't equivocate? Could you honestly put yourself in that category? Marcus Aurelius, later emperor himself, came to despise those who could not be honest as a policy, particularly grating to him were the people who would begin a remark by claiming that they were gonna give it to him straight, implying as we all so casually do that most of the time we're not doing that. Honesty should not need a preface.

An honest person should be like a smelly goat in the room, Marcus Aurelius would say. You know when they're there. An honest person keeps their word. They don't hide behind jargon. They don't sneak around. If there's gonna be a delay or a problem, they'll tell you. If they have concerns, they'll voice them.

They won't nod their head only to say, I told you so later. They won't fool themselves with wishful thinking or the desire to be well-received. They accept that like Cassandra or the messengers in Antony and Cleopatra, that they won't always be appreciated or believed. Not that they're a jerk about it. There's a distinction between telling the truth and attacking people, between saying what you think and giving people your unsolicited opinions about how they should live or look

or act. Speak the truth as you see it, Marcus Aurelius reminded himself, but with kindness, with humility, without hypocrisy. The truth hurts enough by itself. You don't have to try to be hurtful. Which brings us back to the whistleblowers. Often they are accused of seeking attention or trying to make themselves famous.

This is laughable because they have almost always attempted to first politely, privately address what they have discovered. They have exhausted every internal and official and unofficial channel, sometimes over the course of years. They have given their boss all due respect. They tried to keep the laundry in-house, trying to clean it instead of washing it in public. It was only after this failed, after every good faith effort was rejected, that they sought the attention of the media or the law. But ultimately they did what they had to do.

They didn't shy away from that either because they knew it was right. They followed the timeless advice that the poet Juvenal gave a Roman politician named Ponticus back in the second century AD. Be a good soldier, he said, a good guardian, an incorruptible judge, if summoned as a witness in some dubious and uncertain case, even if the tyrant Phalaris himself should command you to life. And bringing up his bull to dictate the perjury he would have you tell, count it an abomination to prefer life to honor and to lose for the sake of living, the reason to live.

In matters big or small, public or private, convenient or inconvenient, whether it will be rewarded or punished, tell the truth. Be a bastion of truth in a time of lies, say not through me. It's not just the right thing to do, it is your job as an accountant,

as an officer, as a receptionist job as an accountant, as an officer, as a receptionist, as a spouse, as a human being. Look, we've all used that language before, right? I'm going to be straightforward with you here. I'll be honest, no disrespect. But empty expressions or not, they do prompt the question, if you have to preface your remarks by saying you're being honest in this case, what does that say about all the other times that you didn't say that? Instead, we should cultivate a life and a reputation in which

honesty is as bankable as a note from the US Treasury, as emphatic and explicit as a contract, as permanent as a tattoo. It will save you from needing these pointless reassurances and it will also make you a better person. You can grab The Daily Stoic anywhere books are sold, of course. And right thing right now, good character, good values, good deeds is available everywhere books are sold. What you just heard was a chunk of the audio book,

which I recorded here at The Daily Stoic studios. And I'm really proud of that book. I hope you like it. Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoke podcast. If you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day. Check it out at DailyStoke.com slash email. If you like The Daily Stoic and thanks for listening, you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music.

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