The Daily Stoic - Daily Stoic Sundays: This Is Why You Have to Care

Episode Date: June 7, 2020

In today’s episode, Ryan reads his latest article, discussing the unfair advantage that privilege gives to certain of us because of the color of our skin, and how it is incumbent on us to fight back against it.This episode is also brought to you by Leesa, the online mattress company. Each of their mattresses is made to order and shipped for free right to your door. All mattresses come with a 100-night trial and a 10-year warranty, so you can feel confident in your investment in a good night’s sleep. And Leesa's hybrid mattress has been rated the best overall mattress by sites like Business Insider, Wirecutter, and Mattress Advisor. Daily Stoic listeners get 15% off their entire order with the code STOIC. Just visit Leesa.com and get your mattress todayRead the original article here: https://ryanholiday.net/this-is-why-you-have-to-care/***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/ryanholidayInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryanholiday/Facebook: http://facebook.com/ryanholidayYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoic, something that can help you live up to those four stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And here, on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview stoic philosophers, we reflect, we prepare. We think deeply about the challenging issues of our time. And we work through this philosophy in a way that's more

possible here when we're not rushing to worker to get the kids to school when we have the time to think to go for a walk to sit with our journals and to prepare for what the future will bring. Is this thing all? Check one, two, one, two. Hey y'all, I'm Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, a singer, an entrepreneur, and a Virgo. I'm just the name of you.

Now I've held so many occupations over the years that my fans lovingly nicknamed me Kiki Kiki Pabag Palmer. And trust me, I keep a bad love. But if you ask me, I'm just getting started. And there's so much I still want to do. So I decided I want to be a podcast host. I'm proud to introduce you to the Baby Mrs. Kiki Palmer podcast. I'm putting my friends, family, and some of the dopest experts in the hot seat to ask

them the questions that have been burning in my mind. What will former child stars be if they weren't actors? What happened to sitcoms? It's only fans, only bad. I want to know. So I asked my mom about it. These are the questions that keep me up at night, but I'm taking these questions out of my head and I'm bringing them to you.

Because on Baby This Is Kiki Palmer, no topping is off limits. Follow Baby This Is Kiki Palmer, whatever you get your podcast. Hey, prime members, you can listen early and app free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Then, as now, there was a lot of noise.

There were people who had their own agendas, people who wanted to compromise, people who wanted to explain it away, people who thought there were bigger problems. One of the most powerful scenes in the history of cinema captures all of this coming to a head. Daniel De Lewis, as Lincoln, is surrounded by a grousin and squabbling cabinet as he pushes for the passage of the 13th Amendment. He slams his open face, hand down on the table. It buys him a second of silence. Now, now, now, he says, we are stepped out on the world stage. The fate of human dignity is in our hands. See what is before you, he says to them,

see the here and now, that's the hardest thing, the only thing that accounts. I think of this scene often, but especially lately, because there are many people who seem to be unable to do that, who think that the situation we are in follows along the same partisan lines as the rest of the ongoing culture war. There seem to be many people who think there is something to argue about here that it can be explained a way that this is just some extension of that discussion we've been having as a society for some time about privilege.

No. The fact that my publisher sends me early copies of books before they can be released, that's a privilege, something I didn't earn, something that can disappear, something that I enjoy, but I'm not entitled to. Not being gunned down in the street by hillbilly vigilantes, not having the life slowly squeezed out of me on suspicion of some minor crime, that's not a privilege. That's a constitutional right. Actually, privilege. That's a constitutional right. Actually, it's more than a constitutional right. According to the Founding Fathers and

many philosophers before and since, the rights to life and liberty and property are beyond constitutional. They are inalienable. The right not to be murdered, not to be harassed by people with guns, to not be targeted, exploited, or incarcerated unfairly. Speak your mind to pursue your religion for your home to be a safe haven. These are not things that governments give their people. These are things that God or generations of evolutions and progress have endowed us with at birth

and we in turn give governments the power to protect. All of us. What you are seeing in the video where a police officer kneels on the neck of a black man crying for air and his mother, what is happening in a video where a black man is strangled to death over selling cigarettes on the street.

What has been occurring in my county where Latinos are targeted with tic-tac traffic violations so they can be detained and then deported? This is a betrayal of that compact. are targeted with tic-y-tac traffic violations so they can be detained and then deported. This is a betrayal of that compact. It is a heinous violation of their rights as human beings right here within your borders, filmed for you to watch on your television or your phone.

It is essential that you see it this way because when you do, you realize that this affects you. It affects everyone directly, urgently. Black, white, rich, poor, young, old, Republican, Democrat, socialist idiot. If it's threatened for one person, for one community, it's threatened for all people. I'll say it again, not being extra judicially murdered

is not a privilege. It's not an exception. It's more than a tragedy. To try to categorize it as those things is to woefully fail to describe the injustice that is being done in modern America and elsewhere. Calus indifference to suffering by the authorities towards minorities or the poor or the voiceless is not just a lamentable fact of modern life. It's an active crime.

In real life, Lincoln said that a slavery is not wrong than nothing is wrong. If kneeling on an unarmed, compliant man's neck for nine minutes is not wrong, nothing is wrong. If chasing down someone you think was maybe breaking into a house, not your house even, then blowing them apart with a shotgun and broad daylight is not wrong, nothing is wrong. If putting children in cages is not wrong, nothing is wrong. And even if those were the only examples ever, that would be important. That in and of itself would suffice as a major issue that would need to be addressed before it got worse. But of course, sadly, they are not the only examples. The moral imperative to do something about this is ancient.

Marcus Aurelius wrote 2,000 years ago that you can also commit an injustice by doing nothing. The Stoics believed that to harm one was to harm all. Martin Luther King Jr. explained this idea of sympathy beautifully. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, he said, we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny, whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. And look, I understand this might not be what you want to hear from me. I write about self-improvement, I write about philosophy, I write about history.

That's true. What do you think the point of the study of those three things is? It's not so you can make a little more money. It's not so you can live in your own bubble or have interesting dinner conversations. It's so you can be better. So you can do the right thing when it counts. You have to realize that if the state can find ways to deprive someone of their rights, then they can find ways to deprive you of yours. In fact, this is an inexorable law of power, whether it's held by segregationists or Stalin, bureaucrats following orders or malevolent dictators. When you give power and insh it takes another.

When you allow evil to happen because you are not its victim, it will inevitably find its way to you. Or if not to you to someone you love, or to your great grandchildren. That's what Martin Nimmoler's famous poem, First They Came, is about, perhaps you know it. It goes, first they came for the socialist, and I did not speak out, because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me. Nimola's words were not theoretical. He tolerated even complied with policies he didn't agree with. He rationalized them, assuming his Christian church would be protected for a while it was, but then he found himself in Dachau where he nearly died.

Someone later asked him how he could have been so self-absorbed, so silent when it mattered. I am paying for that mistake now, he said, and not me alone, but thousands of other people like me. Well, here we are, stepped out on the world's stage again. Can you see that? Can you see that everyone is watching? Can you grasp the here and now? Can you feel what is in your hands? It's the hardest thing, but it's the only thing that counts. Everything else is noise. Everything else is wrong. Now, now, now. And look, I sent this to my email list earlier in the weekend.

The vast majority of the responses were amazing. And you might think, look, everyone gets this. This is a no-brainer. But it's not. And the reason I sent it, and the reason I'm recording it now, is that a significant percentage of the responses did not get it. They immediately, instinctually, looked for ways

to rationalize, to explain someone sent me a very angry note, how dare I call someone a hillbilly. If when you hear a vivid account of someone being murdered in cold blood in the street, and your reaction to that is to take a fence that someone else called the person who murdered the other person a hillbilly, you're missing the point. If you want to argue about how big or little this trend is, you're missing the point. If you want to, again, extend this on partisan lines, if you find yourself intuitively, implicitly, taking the side of the people you always agree with on issues, here, again, you're missing the point you're refusing to wake up and see what is before you.

You're refusing to see this opportunity, this crisis. I'm not saying I've been perfect at it in my own life. I'm saying quite the opposite. I've turned my eye to things. I've fallen prey to seductive logic or rationalizations or excuses before, but that's not what we're doing here. That's not what the stoves would want us to do. That's not what this philosophy is about. That's not why I put these examples together.

We have to do something, we have to open our eyes. It has to truly, deeply bother you when you see these things. You cannot turn away from what you know is wrong. You have to face it. You have to do something about it. You have to be part of the solution and not part of the problem.

And that's what we're talking about here. So be well, have a good weekend. We'll talk soon. If you like the podcast that we do here and you want to get it via email every morning, you can sign up at daily Stoic Early and Add Free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts. Raising kids can be one of the greatest rewards of a parent's life.

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