The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish - #126 Nancy Sherman: Soldiers and Stoics

Episode Date: December 14, 2021

What can we learn from the intersection between the fundamental tenets of Stoicism and military heroism? Author and professor Nancy Sherman uses her extensive experience in both subjects to discuss why there’s much to gain from examining ancient Greek and Roman philosophies and how to use their teachings today. On this episode Sherman explores how to gain control of your emotions, Stoic techniques for decision making, building resilience, the difference between honor and virtue, and much more. Sherman is a Distinguished University Professor and Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University, and she is also the inaugural Distinguished Chair in Ethics at the United States Naval Academy. She has written extensively during her career on the Stoics, and her most recent book is Stoic Wisdom: Ancient Lessons for Modern Resilience. -- Want even more? Members get early access, hand-edited transcripts, member-only episodes, and so much more. Learn more here: https://fs.blog/membership/ Every Sunday our Brain Food newsletter shares timeless insights and ideas that you can use at work and home. Add it to your inbox: https://fs.blog/newsletter/ Follow Shane on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It is very hard in a world driven by how many likes you have on a Facebook page or how many followers you have to remember that, you know, these metrics are not really your measure of your worth. It's not that. It's what's inside. And that's your virtue. And it will have its own kind of honor. It's the honor befitting virtue. And that really is, that's an incredibly important lesson right now. Welcome to the Knowledge Project. I'm your host, Shane Parrish. This podcast sharpens your mind by helping you master the best what other people have already figured out. If you're listening to this,

You're missing out. If you'd like special member-only episodes, access before anyone else, transcripts, and other member-only content, you can join at fs.blog slash membership. Check out the show notes for a link. Nancy Sherman is here today. Nancy is a professor of philosophy at Georgetown University with a focus on ancient Greek and Roman philosophy. Her most recent book is Stoic Warriors, the ancient philosophy behind the military mind. I wanted to talk to Nancy to continue my exploration of stoicism and get a more academic and military perspective around it. We talk about emotions and how we can regain control of them, stoic techniques for making good decisions, building resilience, dealing with reality, and so much more. It's time to listen and learn.

I'm curious as to what's your journey to follow? philosophy. Oh, that begins a long time ago. So I think I probably was in high school and I found myself thinking about going to college, which was extremely exciting for me. And I thought, what am I going to study? Well, what I really want to do is learn about human beings. What makes a human being? I get to Brinmar and lo and behold, the course I think that's going to do it is anthropology, but anthropology is physical anthropology. That means the professor rolled in with bones and fossils. And then I took a psychology course, and I was sort of almost on my way to becoming a psychology major. But we were very influenced at the time by behaviorism and by essentially

running rats. And I had a very lovely one, whom I named Absalom. I was reading Fox. at the time. And, you know, I learned a lot about pressing levers and getting the pleasure center excited with pellets of food and whatnot. Essentially stimulus and reinforcement, Skinner was really in v.F. Skinner. And I thought, this is really not what I signed up for. But I ended up in philosophy, and, you know, I haven't turned back since. So that's, it was a sort of a process of elimination. And there you have it. One thing led to another. And you've ended up focusing on a very specific sort of angle, too, which is the connection between stoicism and military. How did that happen? Yeah, that's a rather interesting story. Sometime, several decades ago,

I found myself being called up by the Naval Academy and essentially the superintendent and the commandant there in Annapolis. I don't live too far from Annapolis, Maryland. And, And they had this massive cheating scandal. I mean, these happen every so often, but this one was a big compromise of what was called an electrical engineering, double E exam. And they, you know, were under the glare of Washington, D.C. And it was a tough time for the Navy to begin with. So they called me and said, do you ever teach ethics? Well, I've been teaching ethics for a long time.

Well, do you think you could put together an ethics course for us in a week, which is what I did. And I ended up staying there for almost three years, essentially on secondment from Georgetown. And it was very fascinating. I found myself teaching midshipmen, which is essentially Navy cadets. Yeah. And officers, many of whom were my age. They had fought in Vietnam. And they also knew about stoicism, their own version.

They knew about what they called, suck it up and truck on, or less elegant, embrace the suck. And this was stoicism for them. And it could have a small S or a big S, but it essentially was deal with deprivation. And one of their own, whom I came to interview several times in connection with my was a guy named Jim Stockdale or James Bond Stockdale. And he was the senior POW in the Hanoi Hilton or the North Vietnamese prisoner of war camp that held American service member prisoners. John McCain was there with him.

Stockdale had happened, stumbled on this little book by Epictetus called The Handbook that he was, Stockdale was given. He memorized it on those long nights that you're on a carrier, his case, the USS Ticonderoga. And then the moment happened in 1965. He shot down. And he says as he's parachuting very famously, five years down there at least, I'm leaving the world of technology behind and entering the world of Epictetus. So this memorized pithy wisdom, very accessible pithy wisdom about control, really was

his command, self-command, you might say, for all those years. And I interviewed Stockdale very late in his life, you know, and he could kind of still memorize this little booklet by heart. It was quite remarkable to me. He really had internalized it. So all this resonated with me. And I had to think, which Stoic Lessons are really the ones I want to endorse or promote? And that resulted in a book, Stoic Warriors. And it was essentially the blessings and curses of being stoic. I wanted to promote a gentler stoicism than one I was seeing in the military. Fast forward, 20 years later, we're in two, at the time were endless wars.

My students at Georgetown are returning from war. Many Marines getting their first degrees. And I ended up being consulted a lot by the Pentagon and by, pretty senior military officers. And I ended up sitting on some suicide review boards as an observer, but very high-level Pentagon events, bringing the whole world into one room about suicides on their watch. And I just thought the last thing I really want to be promoting is suck it up and truck on. I've often worked on the emotions, and I really wanted to destigmatize mental health for the military. That was what I was being asked to do. So the stone,

I often think about, really rooted in text, because my background's in ancient philosophy, is what kinds of lessons can the Stoics give us that aren't the ones often characterized, like go-it-alone grit, self-reliance, do it solo, it's all about you and self-help, everything is in your control, and if it isn't, just let it go. and especially the kind of resistance of reaching out beyond yourself. You're sort of the Marlboro Man, man, man it up, tough it out. That wasn't a solution for the military. I mean, after all, a military is a cadre.

And it wasn't in all of the texts. In fact, a very, very prominent theme in stoicism is that we are coordinated, we're connected, and we live in a cosmos that makes us cosmopolitan, citizens of the universe, a global world. So what does being Stoic mean? Because, I mean, at a high level, it does appear to be embrace the suck. So what does it mean? How does it differentiate from that?

How do we go deeper? So Stoicism came to have a little S in a way that really you don't see with many philosophies. I don't know. We don't talk about Aristotle with a little S or maybe Platonic. So with Stoic, the one that has come to us is kind of almost through the British, stiff upper lip, passionless. Maybe the monarchy best reflects it. You saw it in all the British tabloids when Prince Philip died, was the Queen Stoic enough.

That kind of is one strand of stoicism, which is try to manage your debilitating emotions. But it's not the only, because if you really read more deeply, the Stoics with a big S have the most sophisticated emotion theory there is in the ancient world. There are three levels at least of emotions. What are those three levels? They have emotional skin in the game, as I say, in these three ways. One is that you have these pre-emotions or proto-emotions. You know, you shape, starts and startles. You hear a loud sound and your body jumps a little bit.

Or Seneca gives these great examples. If you're general, you could be the bravest, most stoic general, but your knees knock a little bit when you hear the clarion call to start marching. Or you turn green if you're in a shipwreck, you know, even if you're a sage. Your body's talking. Maybe not your mind. It's your body talking. And you can feel all those, and they're probably very adaptive.

Someone like Joseph Ledoux, who's a neurobiologist at NYU and studies all the different levels of the brain, you know, refers to that as the sort of the low-road emotions, the eygdala, the limbic system, flight, fight, we sometimes say, or autonomic arousals. They have so many descriptions of them. They're really prescient in this regard. They're very forward-thinking. The next step are ones that can get you into trouble. This is the second layer.

And these are the ones many of us. feel. So we, the way Seneca puts it, so he's now, we're talking now a Roman statesman and writer and spin doctor, speech writer for Nero. He essentially says that you can overstep reason a little bit. You can, once started, these are hard to stop. And so they're the, as if they're the proto emotions that you give a scent to. That's their word. You endorse them. Is that like anger and fear. Yeah, anger and fear. Full-throated anger and fear and resentment and revenge. And also grief that won't go away. You know, sort of the depression, we might call it chronic grief these days. We might call it chronic grief syndromes that just won't go away. So you endorse those

first fleeting impulses that have come in from the body talking. And you, you, you endorse those first fleeting impulses, And you run with them, and you run with them in a way where you can't stop, fear, desire, pleasure, distress. And under those four, everything falls, essentially. And they get the body going as well as the mind. And they're essentially belief theorists about emotion, so they're cognitiveists, which means it's not only an impulse that you give rise to you, but it's a kind of belief. That guy was out to hurt me. and I'm going to be angry at him.

And your response to that ego bruise is, I'm going to fight back in some way. So these are all the emotions that if you let him run amok, they can derail you. Now, the stoics are developmentalists. So in this regard, again, they're really forward thinking. They're into moral development of the emotions. because that's where they think you really can, if you recalibrate your values,

it has to be also with your emotions lining up to what you believe to be the right values. So they think you should start trying to cultivate a good kind of fear. And they actually have a name for it, which is cautiousness. They think you should start cultivating a good kind of desire and they give it a name. And this is the third layer. We're into the third layer. Absolutely, Shane. In this third layer is a kind of rational desire. So you're not going after something with sticky acquisitiveness or kind of sticky attachment. So your reasoning, you're not reacting. You're reacting a bit, but your reaction is filtered through your reason. And it's slowed down a little bit. You've had a chance to sort of press the pause button a bit. I mean, you may not get fully there.

This is in some ideal way, but this is what you're after. You're kind of trying to slow down the response so that what you now come to think is the right way to react and the right way to see that thing outside that so bruised your ego before isn't necessarily as an insult. You know, maybe the person was deluded. Maybe move on. Don't get pissed off by it or something of that sort. I think of it as you're not stuck on the object of anger. You're not stuck on the object of desire. You're not stuck on the threat out there.

You have a kind of healthy aversion to threat. You have a healthy approach to things that you want. And you have a healthy, well, they also give you one for joy, a healthy pleasure that's maybe, you know, this is their word rational exuberance, but you get the idea. It's actually our word for charity. The Greek word is chara and CH, and it turns into charity. So it's a kind of charitable disposition of pleasurableness that comes along with doing things. So they're all calm, equable, serene kinds of emotions. Do we get there? Most of us, not fully. Should we aspire to get there? Yeah. And so that third layer is the one that you kind of want to keep in mind as you try to

stem some of the more debilitating emotions that are hard to manage. How do we how do we do that though? So a lot of that sounds like that moment of pause between the second and third layer between feeling anger and then how do you teach yourself not to reason, but to give yourself a pause so that you can reason. right? And now your reason can take control of your emotions. Like, how do we regain control of that? So the way they think about it is pretty graphic. They're thinking that you have some time. Now, we know we don't always have time, but they're reconstructing it as if you have time. So you get this charged impulse that comes in. He's insulting me, you know, and then you get hot and heavy. I'm going to get

pissed off. I'm going to get angry. So they think that you can monitor your impression. We call it an observing ego. You watch yourself a little bit. You watch how you're reacting or responding to the impulse or to that affront. And they even have ways of doing it. They're not going to sit you down in a therapist's office. Right. But they are going to tell you at the end of the day to do some journaling. Yeah. This is what Seneca says. You know, the night is, the night's quiet.

My wife is asleep. She knows my habits. That's exactly what he says. And he says, you know, I got a little bit too angry at the dormant at the building who didn't recognize me and didn't give, let me in. Very pedestrian kind of response. I wasn't seated at the head table at the banquet where all the dignitaries were. I thought I should be.

Well, maybe I'm a little too puffed up about that. So the pause is sometimes built in in reflective moments. And, you know, that is what psychotherapy is about. And they called themselves therapists of the psyche. The Greek word is therapya, therapy, of the soul or the psyche. But it's themselves with themselves, whether in letter writing or these meditations.

They're called meditations. They're very discursive. It's not like Eastern meditation. So what does that work? Why does writing, why is writing so effective? I mean, my hypothesis is sort of like it helps us reflect. It helps us clarify our thinking. It helps us see our thinking.

It puts a visual to it. But not only that, it sort of like makes sense of our experience to ourselves. It's that process for us. If you put words on your thought and you actually articulate them a bit and you drill that articulation into your head, they have actual practices. You know, they're not just meditate at the end of the day, but think in advance, pre-rehears some of the bad things that could happen to you at the end, you know, during this day. And that will get you set up for it. So they're very much about emotions get their power by having words attached to them, by being discursive, by being thought that is articulated.

We know there's a gap between what you think and say and what you actually do. There's not a perfect go-to there at all. And, you know, some of my more radical colleagues in philosophy might say, You know, we need moral enhancement drugs, you know, and they'll go in for bioenhancement that closes the gap between cold cognition and hot emotion so that we can really bring in line what it means to kill that many people with that drone strike. You may be able to say it in your head, but do you really know what that feels like? So we have to visualize and imagine in order to give meaning to the emotional empowerment. And sometimes it's not really just discourse, I think,

or just words. They're the beginning psychotherapist, as I say. They're in the tradition of any kind of Freudian or whoever follows Freud. Words, chatting, putting words to your thought helps to do some chimney sweeping. But we may also just have to calm ourselves down, right? We know that. We know that some of the sped-up emotions really result from are ticking too fast, and we need to cool down the autonomic system a little bit. And are there ways to do that that we can use? I think there are. I mean, two things come to mind. One is stoic and then one isn't. One of the stoic ideas is you press the pause button or you insert some space between the initial input and the reaction. And so they give you some time, they think. You can buy yourself

some time between, say, well, you know, all the biases we carry in our head that lead to pretty unreflective responses, whether we're talking about police brutality or sectarian violence, or they think that if you can kind of slow down the initial impulse a little bit, you buy yourself a little bit of time. Now, you may have to have some of those responses stored up from another time, you know, and that would be when your journaling comes in. The other side of this is to turn to Eastern practices, which really are not about chatting away in your head,

but rather the opposite, not chatting in your head, kind of emptying it. So various kinds of mindful practices where you, you know, a mantra may be the thing that allows you to empty your head. That's not particularly ancient Greco-Roman. That's much more in the Eastern tradition. But I think a combination of them is not a bad idea. I'm not at all for thinking about bio-enhancers to get us into a better moral place.

But I think we've got some tools that are in front of us already. What are some of the techniques that we can learn from philosophy and not specifically related to Stoicism, but what are some of the techniques? techniques we can learn to help us make better decisions. First I'll start with just some stoic ones because I think they're very good at that. So one of them is this notion that you anticipate pretty visually some of the dangers that could befall you, that you're dreading. So they call it pre-rehears the ills.

You dwell a little bit in the future. And they graduate it. and I do this sometimes from breaking a piece of pottery in your kitchen to getting really annoyed at yourself or your spouse who did it, to think about that in advance so that you're not upended if it happens. Third one, now the stakes get pretty high. Death. You may not want to think about death. You may not want to think about the death of your beloved. And here's a pretty caustic practice, which my undergraduates think I'm crazy when I mention, if your child should die or when you kiss your child goodbye in the morning, say to yourself, I always knew

she was a mortal, a mere mortal, meaning we don't live forever. So prepare yourself for your death or the death of your loved ones. Now, again, it comes off in the worst, you know, small as stoic, like harsh, austere, far too stern as a way to control your emotion of uncontrolled grief. But my mother was turning 97 and hadn't yet mentioned death. And I thought this was a problem as the person in charge of her health care. She was still very with it. She read two or three novels a week. But, you know, the subject of death never came up, nor did it ever come up at her dining room table, which had three other women similarly senior. They complained about the food. They complained about this, but never talked shop about death. So I thought I was going to have

to really figure out how we were going to broach this touchy subject, difficult subject. So I said to her. Mom, just remind me, when we signed you up for this home, did we sign you up for the immortality plan? Because if we did, it's going to be really expensive. Now, my mother knew nickels and dimes, you know, she grew up in the Depression. I knew I had her attention. And this became our little dance, our joke. And so like anything in a relationship where you're negotiating hard subjects and you're coming at it from different sides, finding the synchrony or the dance is critical. And I really do think that helped. So now I'm not suggesting the Stoics themselves give you these little tips for rapport building. But I think when you're

thinking about how to deal with some of the most frightening things in our life, losing, you know, losing a business or losing loved ones, a relationship ending, not being blindsided is what the Stoics try to offer you. And they try to give you ways of not being blindsided. And they actually use the phrase dwell in the future. Are there non-stoic ones that come to mind that you think are super useful for making better decisions, maybe Eastern or different branch? So Aristotle really thinks that you, I mean, he's going to call a spade as spade. One of the ways in which he thinks that you have to level with yourself is when you're weak-willed, whether it's refraining from something you know is unhealthy or getting out of an abusive relationship. And so he actually

asks you to think about the ways in which you're picturing that moment when you're confronted with how you're going to see a situation, which will hinge on that plan you have to get out of the relationship. Do you see the person then and there as their former selves with all the attractive parts that you had thought about? Or can you keep up front in the front of your screen, essentially, the idea of what is so abusive about this relationship or what is so hurtful. And he actually says you have two perceptions at that moment. And they compete with each other. One perception is, you know, it's great. It's fantastic. Another one is it's deleterious to my health. And it's about keeping one forward and the other one behind. I think a lot of it is that you

have to have a fuller story about why the one that you think is really the better representation of the situation should Trump. So it's not just, we often think about strength of desire, and I think that's wrong. You know, my desire for that next drink is much stronger than my desire for refraining. But it's not simply the strength. It has to do with the whole picture.

What else hangs in that picture that has to do with how you're representing it? So philosophers are pretty good at thinking about not just one-off moments, but, you know, the whole picture. And, you know, much modern philosophy has really been about not just the slice at that moment, but all the different ends that go into making up the appeal of a certain moment for you. And I think that's what sometimes you have to keep in mind. We tend to just sort of think impulse, fast, strong input. And what's the reaction to the fast, strong input.

I think the best of philosophy suggests that when you are seeing the world, it has so many facets, and you have to keep a pretty complex picture in your head. We are bad at keeping complex pictures in our head. And I don't think media these days helps us either. I'm curious as to how we can use philosophy to reduce stress. Philosophy to reduce stress. So the philosophies are really about. reducing perturbation, that's their word, or disturbance.

And so they, let me give you two possibilities. They have a radical idea, and that is you should just really hold on to your good character and build it, because virtue is sufficient for flourishing and for happiness. And they'll give you all different ways in which you can describe the things that are outside your virtue, your relationships, your health, your wealth, your political regime, all of that, as things that matter, they're to be preferred, but they shouldn't make or break your happiness because the only thing that really matters is virtue. That's pretty stringent. It has something really valuable in it, and that is we should hold on to our goodness

and realize that we're at peril when we sell it. Right. It comes at high costs, obviously, and some of us are better at sticking to our guns, you might say, than others. But it's certainly a goal, and I think it's totally cheapened these days, in most of our walks, because, you know, we're driven by popularity, fans, money. So that's one thing that I think really matters to remember. remember, goodness matters, and it matters in the public sphere, it matters in the private

sphere. I often think we're modeling. I model in the classroom all the time. I model in my family all the time. I try to model online if I'm interacting in social media. And by modeling, I don't mean theatrics or performance. I'm trying to express in an outward way what really matters. to me and try to convey it well with knowing that it's easy to have character cheapened and it's easy also to fall prey to false gods and false glory. Talk to me about virtue and goodness because you seem to use them interchangeably there. Are they the same thing? Is there a difference between them?

That's a great question. So the ancient Greeks and Romans really thought of virtue. That's a Roman, Latin word, Wirtuse, as excellence. The Greek word is aratee, and it means excellence. And another word for it is excellence of your character is really goodness of your character. So we think of goods more broadly as goods such as health, goods like wealth, goods such as shelter, food, means of living, etc. The Stoics following Socrates made this critical move, and they essentially said, I'm going to define goods as very narrow, and they're going to be just the state of your character, the goodness of your character, which essentially is your virtuous or excellent character. Those other things that are colloquially called goods and that maybe Aristotle or Plato, the predecessors, also called goods, I'm going to give them a different word. I won't even use the word external goods as opposed to inner or psychic goods. I'll call them indifference. Well, that's an awful word because it immediately to an English speaker's ear, it sounds like indifference, which sounds like apathy.

but it isn't. For them it means, yeah, you should prefer them and some are going to be much more according to nature than others and they're going to be much more natural like health over disease, having your friends versus losing your friends in an untimely way,

peace rather than war. But still, because those kinds of goods aren't always good, because sometimes war is just. They're situationally good. They're situationally situated, exactly right, whereas virtue is never situationally good. It is always good. And they want to draw that stripe brightly.

So brightly, they will actually say, your virtue as the good is the only one that matters for happiness. The other things are play supporting roles or, you know, they're a supporting cast, and they'll give you a complicated story about how that works. And actually they even say, I don't think it's radical, but it sounds radical to some years. Being good or being virtuous really is a matter of just being wise. It's knowing how to make the wise choices in the world, especially when the demands are really tough,

or as I was saying before, when weakness of will might push you in this way or the desire for glory or, you know, the Greeks are very worried. about honor and glory, you know, all the accolades that come with it. When that can, all those decorations can get you or think of fan mail can really be the be all and end, all your popularity. Did they tie honor and glory to virtue or did they like, because I'm trying to map that to today's world. It seems like society sort of maps glory, if you will, to sort of like status,

wealth, where you are on this hierarchy, whereas that seems like a, an unhealthy sort of way to do it, especially if you're not virtuous. If you achieve these things and you've achieved them in a way that is non-virtuous, you've lived a life that is not meaningful then, right? Like you've been mutually exclusive from developing long-term relationships with people that are meaningful. You've been mutually exclusive from being a good person, being exemplar for other people. Absolutely. So the traditional ragbag of goods in a Greek world would be honor, pleasure, wisdom, virtue. And then someone like Aristotle will say, well, which one really is it? And he'll go with virtue and wisdom. And he'll say, you know, honor depends

on other people. And they may give it to you on false grounds. You may not have earned it. Same with glory. It's, again, situational. It depends on other people. And it may not be rooted in the right kinds of grounds. So even if true, Traditionally, and remember, the Greeks are coming out of the world of Homer, where your valor and your honor is everything. He'll say, no, those that archaic story about honor and glory got it wrong. It's really not how many, the Greek word for honor is the same word is prize. It's not how many prizes you have or how thick the band of stripes is and metals is on your breastplate, if you're an officer, and it's very conspicuous. You can see it across a room,

and you just read status right off of how many epaulets or how many stripes the person has. It's not that. It's what's inside, and that's your virtue. And it will have its own kind of honor. It's the honor befitting virtue. And that really is, you know, that's an incredible. incredibly important lesson right now. It is very hard in a world driven by how many likes you have on a Facebook page or how many followers you have if you're a social media person to remember that, you know, these metrics are not really a measure of your worth. Your worth has to do with something much different. So the story really is that goodness is virtue or virtue is wisdom and that something like honor, glory are very derivative. In the best case, they follow

on your virtue, you know, like your virtue is honorable, you might say. That's an honorable person and an old, but that's a kind of old fashioned meaning of honorable. Often it means, oh, that person has a lot of rank. That person got a lot of medals. Right. Which is really interesting because at some level, like in biology, we're wired with a hierarchy. instinct, right? We see it in animals. We see it in tribes. We see it in how we organize organizations. And then how we curb or direct that instinct becomes sort of like culture or philosophy or religion, which is saying that, you know, to achieve in the hierarchy, you need to be a good person. You need to do one to others as you would have them do unto you. You have to. And so we're

directing behavior through culture, I think, which is really interesting. And so we're taking these human instincts that we have, and we're directing how we accomplish those things. Because if left to our own devices, I imagine, we would accomplish those things through any means possible. Well, yeah. So you go back to the idea that we do live in social worlds. And, you know, the early Greek Roman philosophers were very keen on that. Think of Plato's Republic. Think of Aristotle's idea that we're social animals. And we have all these roles or personae that we wear. And many of those roles do involve status. And many of those roles that involve status involve power. And many of the roles that involve status that involve power, involve authority over other people.

Rightly so or not. And that gets abused very, very quickly. It means there are inside groups and outside groups. It means that there are wealth divisions that come with power and authority. There are divides across gender. There divides across race, ethnicity. And it's magnified in the military, right? The military thrives on hierarchy. You can't have a military organization without rank because you don't know who to follow. And the rank is conspicuous. Because as I say it's it's magnified on a uniform. In fact, I was just saying I was at the Naval Academy and I forgot how to read all the stripes. You know, I forgot, oh, this one's an ensign and this one is a captain and the guy was, you know, a Navy captain which translates into a marine colonel and he was

moreover a seal and I didn't read that. I didn't pick up all the signs and insignias. And that was sort of a major foie on my part. You know, you're supposed to be able to read really fast, almost across a room where you stand relative to that person, because after all, that person could lead you in battle. So it has its place. It gets abused so quickly. And it also becomes deferential. You know, we have bad notions of deference to whom we need to defer authority. And also sometimes we raise the wrong persons. It's not just clear because I'm now a woman speaking, that you should defer to me on all matters that have to do with my gender, nor if I were black, you know, you should defer to me on all matters because I'm the

person of color in the room. We really don't know how I think to sometimes be wise about the roles we wear and sometimes that we wear in very, very deep. For some people, not easily changeable ways, you know, some of them are, but some of them aren't. Are there philosophical techniques that you haven't mentioned so far that we can sort of use to build resilient? Yeah. And I'm going to draw on the stoics for this, for a moment, because I think they're pretty brilliant in this regard. So resilience is a word that really means to sort of bounce a bit, to not break, to not break under pressure. And so we think about it psychologically as being adaptive, not being brittle or not being rigid.

Being like water, right? Like taking the shape of whatever's happening. Being able to adapt to your circumstances, but not adapt where you're just a blob that has no spine and quite the, you know, doesn't have any backbone. You want to hold on to your character or backbone, but you still want to be able to take in the inflow of information in a way that is wise and prudential. So the Stoics, they're very ancient in this regard. They're not modern. So think of Descartes as modern. So Descartesian doubt. He's a skeptic. And so we're fallible. Is this a ball of wax in front

of me? I don't know. Can I trust my sense? I don't really know. What would it take to confirm now. The Stoics think you should think about infallibilism because they've got us in a world with the gods and humans, all interspersed. We're all in the same cosmos. And the gods are infallible. So we should try to be infallible. So what does that mean in terms of resilience? Well, it means that if you're really, really resilient and you're really adaptive, then you have this kind of what they call mental reservation. You would say, I'm going to go for a sale today if it doesn't rain. Now, you don't know if it's going to rain or not. You know, we're not listening to the weatherman's report, but you're going to be able to pivot on a dime if it does, and you're

going to pull back on your plans. So you're going to be really nimble or agile. You know, you're not going to be a market timer, but you're going to realize that, you know, past performance doesn't predict future performance. So you're going to be able to, I think of it as refresh your screen really fast. You're going to be able to get input quickly and make use of it quickly. I sometimes think of it on the model of, you know, I know drone pilots and I know the Intel officers that give them information. And they've got to constantly update these millions of screens in order to get the autopilots getting the right information quickly. And the Stoics sort of have this idea that you put this little if clause. We're going to do it unless or if it

doesn't. And you're going to be really responsive to what the conditions are in that clause such that if things change, you're going to change your intention. That's pretty resilient because back to our earlier conversation, it means you're not going to get stuck on an attachment to a certain object of desire or pleasure or object of loss in the case of... And that object can also be an outcome, right? Like being attached to a particular outcome. Absolutely, a consequence that you really want to happen.

Absolutely. And so the idea here is that you're going to take in informational inflow and you're going to know what to do with it. I mean, it's a high demand, but isn't that after all what we do and, well, we've been doing it during the pandemic? We are trying to take in the best data we can get from science and constantly update our communication about what we have to do, given what we know about science, is the virus, is the vaccine, is the vaccine, degrading, at what point does it degrade? We might have said the mass didn't work then, but we now know better. We are constantly updating information so that we can be resilient in the face of new input. I think that's very stoic. How do we do that, right? Like, how do we have an opinion, even if we're detached from it, and then not seek confirming evidence and be

able to see the world for sort of like more reality or remove our blind spots, if you will, or to get closer to that reality. Whereas when we, the minute we have an opinion, the minute we have an outcome that we're trying to achieve, and we all have these outcomes, right? At work, you're trying to achieve an outcome. At home, you're trying to achieve an outcome. How do you have that and then not get, not let that put blinders on you to the point where you're getting blind spots, right? Because if you think of the source of all bad decisions, the source of of anything that we're deciding or choosing is that we don't know something, right? We're blind to something because if we knew we would choose something else.

There's that old saying in sort of clinical psychology that says, you know, show me how somebody sees the world and I'll show you how they behave and it's the same thing. But what we're trying to do is get closer to reality. And then we have all these filters, you know, you can think of cognitive biases as one sort of like lens into that. But another lens is sort of like we're trying to achieve an outcome, right? Another thing that gets in the way of seeing the world or seeing reality, if you will, is, you know, we're in a rush.

We're operating in an unfamiliar environment. We're stressed. We're trying to do too much. We haven't slept, right? There's physical sort of constraints on our brain. Now we're trying to achieve that outcome and we have all this other stuff going on. What can we do to better understand reality, better see reality, better understand the full perspective? Well, one thing is you're right.

cognitive bias or confirming evidence is certainly one tendency that we have. And that we, I think being aware of the fact that we tend to look for confirming evidence rather than refutation, you might say, in an old Karl Paparian way, is critically important. The second is that we shouldn't rely on the testimony just of ourselves or of our siloed echo chamber thinking, which is particularly pernicious these days, I think. We need to rely on groups of experts. I can't really do philosophy unless I understand a little bit about biology on occasion or other areas that go beyond my area of expertise. But I can't easily get into those other areas of expertise unless I'm willing to have pretty decent, substantive

conversations, much like you're having, with people that are in areas other than their own. And that may involve going to speak to a neurobiologist. And the neurobiologist has to be able to talk to me in a language that isn't one that they would speak to in their lab or to someone who can read an fMRI, a functional magnetic resonance imaging. So communication skills are requisite if you're going to get outside the silo. And any knowledge is collective, cooperative, not simply built in your area of expertise. And the more narrow the areas of expertise and the more siloed the mediums for distributing that information, the more stuck we are in bias.

So those are two things. The third is that we really ought to know that emotions aren't always our enemy, but often our friend. Oh, tell me more about that. You get involved in something because you have interest or you're passionate about it or you make a commitment and a commitment is an investment and an investment means I'm going to go the extra mile. You know, I'm going to do the hard work or diligence that it takes, the due diligence it takes to get me to sort of understand that. Now, I mean, I face this regularly in the classroom, if I'm really, really boring and I'm trying to teach cons ethics, which can be very hard, or even some aspects of stoicism, which can be terribly dry, I'm not going to get anywhere unless I try to reach the undergraduates at their level and the graduate students at their level. I'm just constantly trying to communicate. So, you know, we're all trying to be decent communicators in order to be able to get people's interest sparked.

And if their interest is sparked, they get to be creative. And if they're creative, that leads to other avenues where they start building on that knowledge base. And it becomes a part of their world. And you can't have that without emotions. I mean, the world that maybe we got. somewhere at the turn of the set for, you know, that the Greeks or Romans gave us, or maybe came with the enlightenment that there's the faculty of reason and there's the faculty of emotion and the twain shall never meet. That is so wrong. We know emotions are

cognitively loaded. We know that cognition is flat unless it's charged or sparked or You know, an intellectual commitment is just that. The commitment carries a lot of juice. And so you can't easily, I think, break down some of these prejudices or biases or narrow-mindedness with regard to intellectual endeavors unless you spark some interest on the other side. I think another one simply is cooperative endeavor of all different kinds. And that just may involve listening more than talking. It's very hard to listen because we want to be a player in the game.

We know this in relationships. You know, we're ready to bud in. And so maybe we do sometimes have to curb our emotions. But we need to hear the other side of the story in order to see if there's something that resonates with us or some affront or even some aspect of a cognitive picture that we were really occluded to before. I mean, if I, for example, say, I can't really talk to brain scientists because I don't think the mind reduces to the brain. Well, I've lost a lot of really important information about how processing works, how what we were talking about before,

fast emotions versus slower emotions work, if I'm unwilling to sort of see, well, maybe there are different tracks in the brain. Maybe, you know, stuff that happens up on the cortex is rather different from stuff that happens in the limbic area. And maybe that explains something about why we have such fast track emotions and slower, more mediated emotions. So, you know, I'm saying essentially there's the ways of getting out of just confirming evidence or or cognitive bias is by going backwards, listening to others, breaking down siloed walls of expertise, whether it's in the academy and academic disciplines

or it's in the public space, and infusing some of the conversation with all the juice that goes into getting excited about areas that maybe aren't your own. I like that. I think it's a little bit deeper than sort of just listening. You have to be open to the other perspective, right? Right? Like you have to sort of want to see the world through the other person's eyes and disassociate that from I have to agree with how they see the world.

Right. Like I want to, like when we do interviews and, you know, I want to see the world through the eyes of my guess. I don't want to, you know, disagree with them in sort of principle. We're not here to have a debate. I want to see how you see the world. And I want to smell what you smell. I want to see what you see. Because if I can do that, then I understand a bit better about a different perspective. and I'm open to that understanding. And I think that that's key to being open to it. Like so often we know we should listen to a different perspective. So we listen, but we're not really listening, right? Like we're just like, okay, I checked that box.

I'm not going to change my behavior. I did what I was supposed to do. I heard your argument. And now, you know, I'm going to do what I was going to do anyway. What's your reaction to that? Well, I think you're absolutely right. That is the way to both learn and also even. and pivot and be resilient, as we're saying, be adapted to new information that comes in

so that you're not just stuck on old ways. There's a few things that you have to get over, though. And one is, some of us approach the world as skeptics. Show me the evidence. Prove it to me. I can give you some counterfactuals. That would be the hard cases for that claim that you're making. And even if you're not combative in tone, the way your mind works because of training or culture, all different kinds of background conditions, is I won't believe it until you remove sufficient degrees of doubt. That's the way some people's minds work, especially in academia. But then you never end up doing that, right? Like, we think we're scientific and we're Bainzian sort of like thinkers.

But the reality is, like, very few of us can actually do that on a regular basis. It's a defense. It's definitely a defense. It's definitely a defense. It's hard to knock down that person's defense unless they do it themselves, right? Because that's yet another, that's another level of argument that you're going to get into. So that's therapy. Yeah.

absolutely but I'm just saying that is the way in many worlds the conversations go show me prove it to me I won't believe it to you until you have knocked down evidence right and in some cases that makes that that makes sense right like to actually have that that view yeah you know if you're defending if you're defending a dissertation that's probably the way to go yeah um another one is very hard to bring different groups together you know we we belong to self-confirming groups and our demographics of late are confirming that even more. The maps show it that we tend to live in places where people think more like us than don't.

And we tend to associate in those groups. And whether you're on the coasts, rather in my country, you know, rather than parts of the South. And those groups also tend to align with even more practices and views. that exclude the other. So the partisan politics, which is a massive version of the problem you're talking about, is very, very hard to adjust because then you're back in a story we were having before, which is about glory, ambition, money, and power.

And those aren't necessarily about search for the truth or try to eliminate cognitive bias. It's just dig your heels in in order to continue to perpetuate the power position you had in the past. So it's very hard to disentangle the genuine engagement that really, really makes a difference socially, and not just in your family or in your relationships and your immediate community, given other larger structures that are in place that hamper the conversation. You know, I often so wish the classroom were a place that I could just broadcast more broadly. You know, and these kinds of conversations you and I are having do that. But it's not often what we hear in the public fora.

And that's, you know, that's a sad fact that we've got. a place that we've got ourselves into. I'm hopeful, and I have to be hopeful, but I do find that we're, we get stuck in certain kinds of memes and certain kinds of sloganeering that just cut off conversation between groups. What stoic practices have been the most effective in your own life? So one is, as I was mentioning this pre-rehearsing ills and how to get my mother to talk about death. And that wasn't just think about it in advance mom. It was me realizing that we got to do it together and make a bit of and go light. Stoics are very much about, you know, motions can dig in. And so you have to sometimes go light and not be too

strenuous in your approach. And so that's really one. I often try to realize You know, I want to control a lot more than I can control. Now, I am not the kind of stoic that says except an acquiesce, by any means. I think that's pernicious. I'm very much about exerting my agency and will to change the world as much as I can. But when it comes to those that are near and dear to me and have their own spheres of agency, I have to know when to back off. This is children, spouses.

And that's hard, and I sometimes just have to give myself a little stoic talking to. I'm in charge of me, and I have to give some space to others who have equal autonomy as much as I'd like them to follow my dictum. Exactly. You're trying to control the controllables, right? Absolutely. So I do think of that in stoic lingo. The third thing I use a lot is a visualization practice that's a lesser-known Stoic

has this notion that you're at the center of a whole series of concentric circles. And your role is to visualize with commitment and zeal the outer circle and bring it to the inner circle so that the outer group is part of the inner group. It's a way of making them, us. And this is a part of cosmopolitanism. If you're going to see yourself as a cooperative member of the universe, of the cosmos, a global citizen, then it's not just about you projecting your ego outward, but it's about understanding what the others have to bring to you. And that, you know, the way the Stoics put it is, think of the most distant tribe is still close to you and close to your kiff and kin. That's a very powerful idea.

We're really helped ourselves by media, photojournalism, broadcast journalism, immersed journalist. We get to see the world up close in a way that, of course, the ancients couldn't. They depended on stories coming back, but a reading about other cultures so different from one's own, historical epochs or different areas of the world. That's a very stoic technique of cosmopolitanism. Visualize it, imagine it, and try to get the emotions that would go with that, which could be a kind of a form of empathy, essentially. And then another, I often turn to the tragedies, the Greek and Roman tragedies, but one of them, the people don't typically read, is Seneca's Hercules Rages. And I think of this in terms of asking others for help. So the idea is this.

Hercules, now he's the go-it-alone guy. He's strong in all ways, 12 labors. He has to break through Hades and get to this world after his late. and it's a homecoming. He's ready to see his family. But his stepmother, Juno, has played this terribly dirty trick on him. And the trick is that he's going, he's going to kill his loved ones. He kills his family in a blind rage. And when he comes to, he sees, quote, the hordes of ghosts. And he can't believe it was his hand that did it. Now, he needs to be comforted, but he needs to be comforted by opening himself up to someone else. And it's a role of

his father and his best friend. And here you have Hercules, this, you know, it's the model in all of mythology of the strongest, toughest guy who has to accept, first what his father says. He says, the deed was not yours. The guilt is not yours. It was your stepmothers. And then his friend says, Use your heroic courage to show yourself mercy. And it's essentially, he's got a, the stoic lesson here is that he's got to take on the perspective of someone else to become his own friend to find self-compassion. So again, this is listening to another person and it's really hard to hear that other person because all you want to do is be enraged at yourself. survivor's guilt essentially why should I live I killed all these other people I mean he's suicidal but he has to be comforted by taking on the perspective of someone else so he can see himself through someone else's eyes is what he's got to learn that is so hard to see yourself in the moment of self rage and shame and guilt through a more compassionate I think of this a lot in, you know, my years of working with military men and women coming home and having seen horrible things, and they just don't want to let up on their guilt, and it's excruciating.

And sometimes it's the gaze of a loved one or a close, close buddy who is the best person situated to be able to hold up a mirror to them and say, you wouldn't accuse. me, I'm not accusing you now. And, you know, in some ways, that's really the role of a very benevolent psychotherapist to be able to allow you to see yourself in a way that you can't see yourself at this moment, because the story you're telling is the only one you can tell yourself, but there are other stories that you can listen to, but you can't find the voice yet, you can't find the gaze yet. So there's that moment in a stoic teaching. And I often think of that play when I sort of am really hard on myself or feeling particularly ashamed of something that happened or, you know, egg on my face a bit and trying to be a little gentler

to myself. I think that's a great place to end this. Thank you so much, Nancy. Thank you. It's my pleasure, Shane. It was a great delight. The Knowledge Project is produced by the team at Farnham Street. I'd love to get your advice on how to make the best.

this the most valuable podcast you listen to, email me at shane at fs.blog. You can learn more about the show and find past episodes at fs.blog slash podcast. To get a transcript of this episode, go to fs.blog slash tribe or check out the show notes. Can you do me a small favor? Go online right now and share this episode with one friend who you think would love it. Thanks for listening and learning with us. Till next time. Thank you.