The Daily Stoic - It’s Not About The Words. It’s About This.
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Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to The Daily Stoic early and ad free right now.
Just join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcast. and wisdom, everyday life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2000 year old philosophy
that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us
dailysteelit.com.
It's not about the words. It's about deeds. Today, the United States celebrates Juneteenth, the commemoration
of the emancipation of slaves in America. A hundred and fifty seven years ago, two years
after President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, and nearly 90 years after the
signing of the Declaration of Independence, U.S. Army troops deployed to Texas, the only state of the Confederacy
still with institutional slavery. The people of Texas are informed,
ordered a Union General. In accordance with a proclamation from the executive
of the United States, all slaves are free. There's no question
that that military order deserves celebration. It asserted
absolute equality and began the
liberation of hundreds of thousands of human beings. And Marcus Aurelius would
write in meditations that his stoic role models taught him to conceive of a
society of equal laws governed by equality of statute and speech and of
rulers who respect the liberty of their subjects above all else.
It's as beautiful a sentence as any written by Thomas Jefferson,
but of course, a long way from Epictetus's personal experience.
This kind of freedom that Marcus was talking about would have been something inconceivable
to the early Stoics who themselves lived in a slave society and tragically did very little to stop it.
Like Jefferson's writings, Marcus Aurelius's passage was just that, an idea, not a reality.
In 1910, Theodore Roosevelt would remind his fellow citizens of the critical distinction between words and deeds. In name we had the Declaration of Independence in 1776, he said, but we gave the lie by our
acts to the words of the Declaration of Independence until 1865.
And he said, words count for nothing except insofar as they represent acts.
This is true everywhere.
Or as the Latin expression goes, acta non verba, deeds not words.
It's wonderful to celebrate these principles
from the Stoics and the founders.
It's wonderful to note the moments
of historical progress like Juneteenth.
But we have to remember that beautiful language
pales in comparison to beautiful acts.
We have to turn these words, these ideas into deeds.
Can't just talk about them. We have to turn these words, these ideas into deeds. We can't just talk about them.
We have to be about them.
And not living up to them or doing something about them, as was the case with slavery in
Rome and America, is ugly.
Marcus knew this but fell short, damning himself with his own words in meditations that you
can commit an injustice by doing nothing also.
We must make sure today that we are not guilty of the same.
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