Donald Robertson – Modern Stoicism Part 2

December 16, 2020

This week on Acta Non Verba I’m continuing my conversation with Donald Robertson as he dives deeper into Stoicism and shares simple strategies for applying its principles to your daily life. In this episode Donald and I also discuss how he has embraced Adversity, using the lessons of global and personal history to transform how he thinks about his career and his life.

Donald Robertson is a cognitive-behavioral psychotherapist, trainer, and writer. He was born in Ayrshire, Scotland, and after living in England and working in London for many years, he emigrated to Canada where he now lives.

Robertson has been researching Stoicism and applying it in his work for twenty years. He is one of the founding members of the non-profit organization Modern Stoicism.

Donald is the author of How to Think Like a Roman Emperor.

Connect with Donald via his website: https://donaldrobertson.name/


Episode Transcript:

00:26
In this episode of Acta Non Verba, we hear part two of my interview with Donald Robertson, a cognitive behavioral psychotherapist, trainer, and author of the bestselling book, How to Think Like a Roman Emperor.

00:55
He has been researching Stoicism and applying it in his work for over 20 years. He is also one of the founding members of the nonprofit organization, Modern Stoicism. In part one, we talked about Stoicism, the difference between Stoicism with the big and little S, and a little bit about Donald’s journey that brought him here today. He also talks about why Stoicism is an effective part of psychotherapy. You can hear part one of episode 21 on OctoNomberba. In part two, Donald talks about Stoicism and some pragmatic ways that you can apply its principles in your life.

01:25
He also talks about some of the challenges that have shaped his career and thinking along the way. You can find out more about Donald on his website and get your copies of his incredible book, How to Think Like a Roman Emperor at dona Here’s the second part of my conversation with Donald Robertson. I was going to ask you, because you talked about your father before losing him earlier. There are so many people that I know that are mentally resilient, mushy, strong, but most of those people that I know have gone through some sort of hardship to force them to elevate to that level.

01:56
Could you tell us about a university that you went through in your life that at the time seemed like it was the end or you just kind of give up and all of a sudden, once you got through it on the other side, you can see the gift and the opportunity presented. Because at the time it never feels like it when you’re going through that. It’s strange when you look back on life. I often reflect on how different things were for me in the past. I feel like, you know, when I was a young guy before the internet and things like that, it feels like I lived in a different universe or like a different.

02:23
era looking back on it now, man, it’s a different world. But there was a time when I was a young guy and I remember really just feeling that I had no future. And so I can understand when people are disillusioned today, you know, I worked with young offenders for a while and it puzzles me when people can’t sympathize with people that vandalize things or they get into crime or they lash out and stuff. I can understand why they would do it. You know, they think the world is against them and there’s no point in anything.

02:52
You know, they’re angry and they feel disrespected and you know, they don’t value society because their experience as society has been grinding them down and, you know, taking things away from them. So of course they’re going to rebel against that. It’s hard for them to think clearly and see something positive. The world seems like a dark, treacherous place to them. So I can completely, I can empathize with that. I think later in life, there were times when I’ve had to start my life again from scratch.

03:20
a few times. And I think that’s a combination of bad luck, bad planning, and maybe a little bit of me that kind of wanted the adventure of scrapping everything and starting again. So I suppose when I immigrated to Canada, what was it about, seven years ago now, I think it was, and I ran into some difficulties doing that. To cut a long story short, I was quite successful as a psychotherapist in the UK.

03:48
And I, for various reasons, to my surprise, through some bad luck, I turned out that I wasn’t able to get licensed to practice in Canada. So my career was short and I thought I would, you know, I’d invested quite a lot of money and doing, taking various steps to make sure that I’d be able to practice in Canada. Come on, Stray Shot, that fell through, right? We don’t need to go into the details for your lessons, but to my surprise, I discovered that I’m not going to be able to practice like in…

04:17
in Canada, my career is gone, like I’ve spent most of my life building up this career. I wrote books about it, I spoke at conferences, I trained other therapists. Now I can’t practice anymore, I don’t have a license. So I thought I need to find something else to do, and that was what kind of pushed me, I already had written some books, but it pushed me more into working online and social media, running online courses and becoming more and more of a writer.

04:43
And there was a little part of me though that relished the opportunity. The question I asked myself was whether I would want to on my deathbed, look back over my life and think that I’d only done one thing. Would I want to only have one career? And I felt that even if it was kind of risky to start again from scratch, there was also a part of me that saw it as an opportunity. And I’d rather feel that I’d done several things.

05:11
or at least tried to do several things over the course of my life, then just done one thing and become successful at it. People don’t tell young people this, and maybe if you told them it would kind of go in one ear and out the other, it just, maybe it sounds kind of trite. I think often the best advice in life actually sounds kind of banal, you know, like people’s greatest strengths are their greatest weaknesses. That sounds kind of trivial, but you know, maybe it’s true. But one of the main pieces of advice I would give to people is that when you are successful…

05:40
in life at your chosen career. Often, once the novelty wears off, you kind of think, what next? And once you’re successful, it gets, not always, but often it gets easier. You know, because you’ve cloud your way to the top, you know, and now you’re just kind of coasting and life gets kind of boring and you get kind of, you potentially get kind of lazy and stuff. So you start to miss the challenge.

06:04
And sometimes people, young people find that hard to imagine because they’re trying so hard to kind of claw their way. You know, potentially it reaches a point where you think, I kind of miss clawing my way out of the pit was the good part. Like, now it’s just done it. You know, what do I do now? Just kind of like sitting here. So you don’t appreciate the things that are happening to you at the time. You don’t appreciate life’s challenges. You just want to get them over as quickly as possible. But without those challenges, life is pretty dull.

06:34
There used to be a TV series in the UK called Dead Ernest. And there’s a bit of this guy that died and gone to heaven. And I remember one of the things was he was kind of getting his orientation to life in heaven. And they said, well, there’s a guy that you can get, he’ll come around with a bag of soot and put the soot in your chimney to clog it up for you, just so that you can sweep it and get it cleaned again. Cause life in heaven is really boring, like nothing ever happened. It’s like, Hey, it’s like, Hey, it’s dull. Yeah.

07:04
It reminds me of this anecdote, Epictetus, you know, the big stoic mythological hero is Hercules. That might surprise some people, you know, we may be thinking of Disney Cartoon and stuff, but for the stoics, Hercules was this kind of exemplar of wisdom and virtue. And for the cynics as well, he was a big iconic hero. Epictetus is the most famous stoic teacher in Roman history. He’s the most famous teacher of philosophy in the whole of Roman history, I would say. But Epictetus turns to his young students and says to them,

07:34
you guys all kind of want to figure out ways to make your life easier, right? He said, but look at Hercules. If Hercules had just laying in bed under the covers, lie and done nothing, he said, he wouldn’t even be worthy of the name Hercules. You wouldn’t admire him or consider him a hero. There’s this basic, actually, this is a good point to get onto, right? The reason, the real underlying reason for this is that there’s a kind of blind spot that we all have. There’s a reason why.

08:01
throughout the centuries, over the course of thousands of years, people keep falling into the same mistakes over and over again. We’re really good at evaluating other people’s character and behavior, but we find it really hard to get a perspective on our own, right? Aesop has a fable about that. He says everyone’s born with two bags hanging around their neck, and in front of your neck you have this huge sack full of everybody else’s flaws.

08:25
and you can see it right in front of you everywhere you go. He said, and then you’ve got this little bag hanging behind the back of your neck that you just can’t kind of get an angle on, but everyone else can see it, and that contains all of your flaws, right? So we call this the double standard strategy in modern cognitive therapy. Socrates used to do this quite a bit. So he would ask people about the qualities that they admire in other people and get them to kind of reflect on that. And then he’d ask them, you know, how many of those qualities do you actually possess yourself?

08:55
I think this is one way of understanding stoicism. Stoicism is about learning how to methodologically train yourself to become more like the sort of person that you admire. Not how to become happy, how to get peace of mind, or any of those kind of things, but to become more like the sort of person that you could see in the mirror and think, I actually like that guy, I respect that guy. Kind of like self-pride, but genuinely.

09:22
of yourself like grounded in some genuine admiration of the things that you’ve achieved. And that’s precisely what Epictetus is saying that Hercules would never have had if he’d just lay in bed all day. He said to his students, you’d know that you wouldn’t care one jot for him if he hadn’t done anything heroic and faced all these challenges. The very thing that you admire about him requires facing monsters.

09:51
getting out of his comfort zone. And yet you guys all want to avoid facing monsters like the plague. Why, you know, you do anything to kind of avoid any challenges in life. But if you want to become heroes in your own eyes, why, you’re gonna have to go out there. Why, you know, get out of your comfort zone and face up to some challenges, take some risks. This is the thing, you know, we forget, like how can we ever admire ourselves? How can we ever take pride in ourselves if we don’t face challenges?

10:20
That’s in a sense what the Stoics want to teach us. It’s so true. And the thing is we all want to be stronger, but we don’t want to have to do the work as requisite to gain that strength. So we are only as strong as the adversity we have come. And again, we can be philosophical about somebody else’s hardship, but when it’s our own, we want to be the exception, magically. And that’s the beautiful thing about philosophy, especially still it shows, listen, you are not the exception. We are all part of the same endeavor. And if we want to learn more about ourselves.

10:49
As you mentioned in the book, you know, if we want to be understood, we have to first seek to understand others and to have that empathy and that capacity and that presence. Because if we, just like with the double standard, we cannot expect from someone else if we’re not willing to do it. And before we were speaking earlier, we were talking about anger and how that can be the road to self-improvement. Yet so many people want to shut it off entirely or avoid it. This is a good example of another blind spot. So in therapy, we often say very simply, sometimes clients will…

11:18
find it hard to put their feelings into words. So one way we have of helping them is to say, look, you know, let’s say there are three main categories of negative emotion. There’s anger, fear and sadness. And most of your feelings are kind of some variation of those or some combination of them, right? Those are the three big ones, anger, fear and sadness. Well, people with fear and sadness or AKA anxiety and depression tend to come to therapy. But people with anger don’t usually self-refer for therapy.

11:48
Sometimes someone with depression may come to therapy. It turns out they’ve got some anger on the side, but it’s rare that someone would come to therapy mainly because they have an anger issue, unless their wife has sent them, or their husband has sent them, or they’re in a school or a prison, and the authorities have said, you’ve got an anger problem, buddy, you need to go and see the therapist. So it’s usually at someone else’s behest that angry people seek therapy.

12:15
because anger is an externalizing emotion. Like someone who’s angry thinks that everyone else needs therapy. Like, it’s everyone else’s fault. Yeah, you guys need therapy, not me. Yeah, it’s you guys, I’m fine. And so there’s a huge obvious blind spot there. Like, you know, people who have anger aren’t really typically seeking help for it. And everyone, there’s this whole self-help industry out there, but very little of the self-help industry is focused on helping people to overcome anger.

12:43
But I think that’s a mistake, because I think in many ways anger is actually the most urgent emotion to address, because in some regards it causes the most societal and interpersonal harm, it leads to domestic violence, it leads to riots in the street. You know, it’s exacerbated by the internet, by trolling and things on social media and flame-eater. The internet is like a big rage machine.

13:09
It’s virtually designed to fuel anger because of the very way that the interaction functions, right? And I think it’s also one of the easiest emotions to work on. That might surprise people, I would say that, for a couple of reasons. First of all, because it’s most neglected, there’s most opportunity to begin working on it in easy ways. But also because it’s an emotion that’s interpersonal. Like when people have very depressive beliefs or very anxious beliefs,

13:38
They tend not to share them or bounce them off other people or get that much feedback on them. And that’s limiting. It makes it harder for them to get another perspective, to be objective about their depression or their anxiety because they keep it to themselves until they go and speak to a therapist. But anger tends to come out more. And for that reason, you know, like you’ll see how other people respond to your anger and what they have to say about it. And that is…

14:05
your greatest strength and your greatest weakness. It’s a problem because you might alienate other people. So it’s a benefit because you’re gonna see how they respond and that might be a wake up call. And if you learn to overcome it, you’re gonna start seeing how other people respond differently. So, you know, one of the most powerful tools in any kind of training, and psychotherapy, I view from a skills training perspective, it’s about learning to change your behavior, your patterns of thinking. Now, the most powerful tool is feedback.

14:31
Right? So you can make all the changes you want, but if you never test anything out and you don’t get any kind of feedback, you know, it’s hard for you to fine-tune things, you don’t really know whether you’re succeeding or not or moving in the right direction. It’s a problem of how will I know when this is working? People say, well, with anger, it’s relatively easy to know when it’s working, right? Because if you interact with people that normally get on your go and it doesn’t turn into a huge

14:59
and other people will say, you know, listen Marcus, I’ve noticed a difference in you these past few months. Like still you’ll get feedback. It’s an interpersonal emotion. And so for these several reasons, I really think it’s the opportunity that we’re all missing. And if we just gently nudged more people to talk about anger, to think about it, and the many, many things that the stoics have to say about it, you know, we could not only get some easy wins in terms of self-improvement.

15:27
but it would benefit society as a whole and also people’s domestic relationships. I think also if people improve in one area of their life, one of the things we find is this phenomenon we sometimes call generalization of gain. So if somebody has multiple phobias and they say they’ve got a phobia of dogs and cats and spiders and elevators, but if they overcome one of those phobias successfully, they really nail it, they’re probably gonna improve at least to some extent.

15:56
in the other areas as well for a bunch of reasons I won’t go into but it tends to be to generalize. Well if there is an area that people are overlooking and where they can easily get feedback and where they haven’t even started to work so there’s a lot of opportunity for progress, working in anger quite possibly could help people benefit more generally in terms of their depression and their anxiety or the other emotional problems that they have.

16:26
If you have multiple problems, as most people do, you have to pick somewhere to begin. So if you pick somewhere that’s potentially easy to work on and that you’ve neglected in the past, this is your royal road, maybe to self-improvement for many people. So I think the Stoics knew that. They talk about anger. Seneca wrote a whole book on anger. Marcus Aurelius’ The Meditations in some regards is a book about anger. It’s one of the main themes of the book. The opening sentence.

16:55
of the meditations is that from my grandfather, Verus, I learned from his nobility of character and his freedom from anger. That’s the beginning of the meditations, that he learned freedom from anger from his grandfather. And then throughout the meditations, he returns to the theme of anger many, many times. He tells us also that he struggled with anger. He mentions a couple of times that he was grateful that circumstances never led him to lose his temper and do something that he regretted.

17:25
as a young man because he was struggling to control his temper. So there’s no surprise then that there are many references to strategies for coping with anger. So, you know, I think we should be taking that stuff out of the meditations, make it more accessible to people, kind of highlighting it more, especially young people, you’ve got their lives ahead of them. Society has gone in the opposite direction. You know, at the moment, the machinery of society seems to fuel.

17:50
Anger and division, we need to do something to turn that around. Stoicism is the perfect thing to turn that around. It was one of the main projects undertaken by the ancient Stoics was to try and produce a remedy for anger. Absolutely. And there are so many people that we have seen that have been offspring or children that were raised in an environment that may have been abusive or they may have been alcoholism or drug abuse or some sort of other abuse. And it seems like some people follow down that path because that’s what the impression was. That’s what they’re…

18:20
upbringing was, for other people, they pivot and that is the indication that they don’t want to do that. What is it that separates these two people and is that intent specifically, is that something that they do with their own volition? How does that work? I think you need another role model, even if it comes from, and you know what, it could come even from fiction. You need an example, you need a light at the end of the tunnel, you need hope, right? So the problem is if you are in

18:50
and it’s the only way forward that you can see is for it to get worse, right? Then you experience hopelessness and that’s a real kind of spiral into despair, right? But if you can look around you and you can see somebody else that’s maybe managed to rise above it and it could be a family member, it could be a friend, it can be a teacher, it doesn’t even have to be, you know, it could be someone you’ve read a book about, like this is the power of books, right?

19:20
They can introduce exemplars or role models from history or even from fiction. Hercules wasn’t a real guy, right? Some of the ancient Greeks believed he might be, but let’s assume Hercules wasn’t a real guy. He’s a mythological hero. Still, like, he could be used for inspiration because it allows people to think, yeah, maybe this just illustrates a different way of facing adversity. Maybe you don’t have to, like, tear your eyes out, like, in anguish, like Oedipus in the Greek tragedies.

19:49
Yeah, where people, the Stoics and Socrates said, look, the Greek tragedies are full of examples of people handling misfortune really badly. And the Stoics said, listen, if you think about it, like all of these characters are actually the authors of their own misfortune. So bad things happen to them that really test them and they freak out, like, and make it much worse for themselves.

20:15
But a wise person, Socrates in Plato’s Republic says, you know, like a wise person responding to these situations, it would be a very boring story. Why? Because they would just be like, meh, whatever. Why? And then the rest of the story wouldn’t happen. Like, Oedipus accidentally sleeps with his own mother. He doesn’t realize who she is. So he falls in love with this woman. He was abandoned as a child. And then he finds out that this woman actually is his mother. He goes crazy because of the spiritual contamination, like the sin.

20:45
the shame of it and stuff. But he could have, Seneca would have him think, well, you know, so what, it was an accident? Like, I didn’t do it on purpose. Like, you know, it’s kind of neither here nor there. So there would be no tragedy of Oedipus, like, if he just viewed it differently, if he viewed it as an indifferent, you know, like, this is, this weird thing has happened. You know, what matters now, you know, is what I do next, how I respond to it, like, to respond to it wisely.

21:12
Why, or did I just freak out completely about it? All of the Greek tragedies pretty much are about people freaking out over things. And so Socrates said, like a wise person responds very differently in the Republic. Glaucon, Plato’s brother, is speaking to him at the time and he says, what do you mean Socrates? And Socrates says, well, there are four things that a wise person would do differently when they’re faced with misfortune, the opposite of the tragedies. Glaucon says, well, what are they? And Socrates says, well, number one,

21:41
They remind themselves that there are many reversals of fortune in life, like we were talking about earlier. You know, so what seems like a complete disaster, it might turn out in the long run, you know, to be an opportunity. So you shouldn’t jump the gun and jump to conclusions about it. You should kind of suspend judgment and say, I don’t really know how this is going to turn out in the long run, especially as I may be able to turn it into a positive situation if I respond to it, you know, wisely and appropriately.

22:09
So, you know, we don’t know how this is going to turn out in the long run, so we should suspend judgment about it. Glocken says, well, what’s the second thing Socrates? And Socrates says, well, the wise person says to themselves, there’s no point freaking out about this, because that would be taking the existing misfortune or suffering or pain, making it even worse than it is already, just kind of pouring petrol on the fire. Like if we freak out and we complain and we get upset, it’s like we’re adding another whole layer.

22:39
of suffering that’s unnecessary. It was bad enough already. You know, and now like if we’re freaking out and panicking, we’ll make it twice as bad. And Glaucon says, well, what’s the third thing Socrates and Socrates says? Well, the wise man tells himself that nothing is all important in the grand scheme of things because there’s always a bigger story. Like the view from above we call in Stoicism. You know, any individual setback that you experience is always part of a longer life story. Like it’s always part of a bigger picture.

23:08
And when we view it in that way, we go, this might be dark or bad, but there’s also spots of light and positive things that surround it going on in other parts of the world or in other areas of my life. It’s just one small moment and a much longer story. And so then we have a more complex, more balanced emotional reaction to it. No individual event is all important. And we have to look at the bigger picture for that. And so, Glalkin says, well, it’s the fourth thing. So you said there were four things.

23:36
Socrates said, well, the fourth thing is the most important thing, actually. He said, when we freak out and grieve excessively, complain excessively over misfortune, we prevent ourselves, he says, from doing the very thing that’s most required in the face of a crisis. And Glaucon says, well, what’s that? And Socrates says, it’s to think clearly and rationally and solve the problem. Because if you’re freaking out and panicking and complaining, ruminating,

24:06
anger, temporary madness, and so is grief, like you can’t think straight. Why, and he says that the more serious the misfortune is, the more you need to clear your mind because you can’t problem solve, especially you can’t problem solve complex social problems if you’re angry or upset or freaking out. Why, you need a clear head in order to deal with a crisis. And so those are the four reasons Socrates said that a philosopher would never be the star of a tragedy. It makes sense.

24:35
I love all these examples and it’s so true emotions assassinate the truth and if we’re able to keep our head within those capacities that helps us the most. Donald, I know that you have a time frame here so I want to be respectful of that. I’d like to ask you one question that my listeners send in and it’s very modern, it’s very current and they asked if Marcus Aurelius was a citizen in the United States right now, who would he have voted for? Who would he have voted for?

25:03
Oh man, that’s a good question actually in the US election. I wouldn’t like to say, because I’d like to leave it open that people might have different views about it. I’ll tell you one thing I’ll say about that though. I’m always a bit wary about commenting on US politics because I’m not American. But you can say whatever you want because you’re not American. Nobody’s going to be mad at you. So first thing, a little bit outside of my chair. You wouldn’t think it, yeah. It doesn’t quite pan out like that. You’d think I’d get a free pass. I’ll tell you what I would say.

25:32
Maybe I can say this and remain reasonably bipartisan. There are more Republicans who are interested in Stoicism than Democrats. There are Democrats in politics that are interested in Stoicism, but there is, over the years, I’ve seen more interest from people on the Republican side. And Pat McGeehan, for example, wrote a book called Stoicism in the State House. There’s obviously General Mattis. There was in Congress a study group.

26:00
of Republicans that were reading stoic texts at one point. So I think, loosely speaking, overall so far, I think there’s been more interest among the Republican side. Now, on the other hand, I would say maybe that’s because the Republican party is kind of divided and feels that it’s lost touch with some of its previous values. And it strikes me that some Republicans don’t like the shape that they see the party in at the moment. And they see stoicism as a way of returning.

26:30
to virtue ethic and a more principled approach to politics that they’re kind of craving a return to something that they believe that was more part of Republican politics in the past. That’s as far as I think I can go in terms of commenting on US politics. But what I would say, I think the Stoics, Marcus would have a lot to say about the state of American politics in general. And really the big problem is

26:59
the divisiveness and the anger. And let me put it this way, if people can’t speak to their opponents rationally, then we’re really in trouble, right? And that’s exactly it. It’s almost inconceivable. Who would ever have dreamt, I never dreamt as a young man that the US would get to the point where it becomes almost inconceivable for a Republican and a Democrat to sit down and have a rational conversation, right?

27:24
I mean, honestly, maybe this is as an outsider, it seems to me, I never see this anymore. Like, immediately, you know, things seem to escalate. 20, 30 years ago, I would never have imagined that things would degenerate that badly. And so how can you have politics? What I want to say in a sense is you can’t even have politics in the sense of a genuine rational philosophical debate about political values. You’re not even doing politics in the authentic, the genuine sense of the word.

27:54
Why, you know, you’re not caring for the police, the state. If you can’t talk rationally about things, and both sides are guilty about that. We might as well say they’re equally guilty. Sometimes I watched a thing, actually. I do occasionally, I watch both Fox and CNN, and I’ll think, you know, just to remind myself how bad they are. Like, there was a thing on CNN, and they were complaining about someone in the Trump administration.

28:21
had said something that just sounded very scathing about Democrats insulting towards them. Right, and I was like, I’m on board with it. Right, that’s terrible. Like talking about people like that, as if they’re evil and they’re the enemy and stuff like that. That’s incredibly divisive. It just feels anger, it’s really unhelpful. And then the host concluded by saying, this is a cancer that’s spreading these Republican saying stuff like this. And I thought, well, now you’re doing the very thing.

28:48
But you’re complaining about the other guy doing. How did you manage to get from, quite rightly, saying this kind of divisive rhetoric is a bad idea to then using divisive rhetoric in response to it? And that reinforced my idea that they’re basically as bad as each other in that respect. I thought the real deeper problem is nobody’s able to sit down and have a reasonable conversation. And we need to fix that. Stoicism can help with that. There needs to be a whole change in our.

29:17
frame of reference or perspective so that we can bypass the anger and learn to talk to other people as human beings, no matter where they are on the political spectrum. There’s way too much stereotyping, stigmatizing, demonizing that’s going on in politics at the moment. It’s always been a thing, but at the moment it’s definitely worse than it was in the past. Certainly, and I think that that’s why your graphic novel that you’re working on is going to be fantastic as a tool to help people see past all this and look from a higher view.

29:44
Everyone’s going to freak out when they see this graphic novel because for several reasons, like many reasons. So one of them is that a lot of people think we don’t know anything about Marcus Aurelius. So there are people that read the meditations and assume we don’t know anything about the guy but we know lots of things about his life and there’s way too much story. So they’re going to be looking at it thinking these are all things that he actually did during his lifetime and they’ll think it’s all made up and the things that they’re most likely to think are made up.

30:13
are the things that are drawn directly from the Roman histories, by the way. So I’m kind of looking forward to seeing what they say about that. And also during the plague, the Antimion Plague, I think they’re going to be surprised how many of the things that happen foreshadow the current pandemic. I think that should be a wake-up call to people. You know, anyone that studied history will think pandemics, they’re not all the same, but they all have similarities. Like, you know, it’s not unusual for them to get worse in the winter.

30:42
Like, it’s not unusual for people to riot. Like, typical things that happen throughout history, like when a virus spreads, and these things happened during Marcus’ early issues, right? It’s 2000 years ago, we never learned anything. You know, we went into this one thinking, oh, like, you know, it’s this, I’ve never thought about the possibility that there could be a pandemic for society, might be tested, but it might damage the economy and stuff like that.

31:08
This happens throughout history, periodically when these things happen. But the thing I wanted to come back to, talking about politics and relationship with other people, maybe this is a good place to end, to say the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius is an unusual book for many reasons. One of them is that in the first chapter he says a lot about historical individuals in his life, which is great if you’re a biographer. And then throughout the rest of it, he says very little about concrete historical events in his life.

31:38
So meditation is 2.1, you get to the end of book one, the start of the next book is the most widely quoted passage. It says every morning when you wake up, tell yourself that you’ll meet troublesome, treacherous, meddling, deceitful people, and so on and so forth. People read that and they think, who are these people? That sounds like my mother-in-law. Like, that sounds like that guy that works across from me in the office. Right? And we can all project ourselves into the things that he’s saying, because he leaves it artfully vague, right?

32:07
Now, if you reverse that, you take the things he’s saying and you imagine that he’s in Curnitum in Austria and he’s surrounded by, along the Danube frontier, 140,000 legionaries, auxiliaries, Roman navy, everything that’s huge, war machine. He’s surrounded by the people, the Romans we call barbarians also, many different tribes, his auxiliary units.

32:34
would all be barbarians that be recruited into the Roman army to fight alongside them. The people in the provinces that he lived in, Pannonia and Austria, Germanic descent. The foreign chiefs that he’s dealing with negotiating day in day out are strange, like Germanic or

32:59
And so when he’s writing these things in the meditation, those are the people he’s hanging out with and is surrounded by. And I tell you, I think it should strike people as odd that nowhere in the meditations, he mentions being a Roman citizen, I think, once, but he says a great deal about not being alienated from other people, seeing himself as part of a cosmic city, having natural affection towards other people and viewing them as his kin. But in no point does he say, “‘Yeah, but I’m only talking about Roman citizens,’ obviously, he doesn’t say that.

33:29
He says, everybody. This is a guy who’s surrounded by his enemies in the middle of a war that on and off raged for the best part of 13 or 14 years. And so he’s talking about the people he’s fighting, for sure. And yeah, so it’s really, it’s stunning if you put it in situ and imagine that the things he’s saying are being said in the heart, in the middle, right in the middle of this huge conflict.

33:57
and that the guy that he just spoke to five minutes ago was the chieftain of a Germanic tribe that had previously invaded and slaughtered an entire legion or something, right? Why, he’s not talking about somebody shortchanging him at the corner shop. Like, he’s talking about these huge, wealth, historic betrayals. He faced a civil war. Why, you know, he’s, it’s much more dramatic, and it becomes more real in a way when you just imagine that the guy is writing this stuff in curmintum.

34:27
and that he’s surrounded by all of the stuff going on around him. And so then if he can do that, if Marcus Aurelius can train himself to view the Quadi and the Marcomani chieftains as his brothers and to view them as co-citizens in the cosmic city, then I would thought it should be a walk in the park for Democrats and Republicans in the US to do the same thing. You would think so.

34:57
Donald, thank you so much. Thank you for the time. You have given so much gold that people can apply in every aspect of their life. It’s very specific, very pragmatic, especially in the time that we’re going through. How to think like a Roman Emperor, go get multiple copies, listen to it. His voice is incredible. Get the regular books, and you can actually write down things within it. And then I cannot wait for not only the graphic novel, but there’s another book that you were talking about real quickly. I know that you’ve got to go.

35:23
I’m doing an ancient biography of Marcus Aurelius for Yale University Press. So we’re going to, this is going to be a tough one because I said, I try and answer some of the difficult questions that people ask that aren’t answered in the other biographies. Like what was Marcus’s attitude towards slavery and things like that. I think those questions are answerable at least to some extent. So I’m going to have a crack at doing it in this new biography. I can’t wait to read it. Thank you so much again for your time. Thank you for all the work that you’re doing.

35:49
I look forward to all your future projects and you stay safe over there. Enjoy Athens while you’re there. Is there anything to do in Athens? Yeah, Athens. Is there anything to look at? Well, I’m pretty busy. The thing is during the pandemic, we were in quite a strict lockdown, but you can still walk up a hill and look at the Acropolis and things like that. So I’m very lucky to be here. Absolutely. More fun tonight. I’ll talk to you soon. Thank you very much. Thank you. It’s been a pleasure. Cheers. Thank you for listening to this episode of Acta Non Verba.

Episode Details

Donald Robertson – Modern Stoicism Part 2
Episode Number: 22

About the Host

Marcus Aurelius Anderson

Mindset Coach, Author, International Keynote Speaker