Daily Stoic Sundays: This Is Why You Have to Care

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. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Ryan Holiday?

  Bienvenidos a la edición de fin de semana del Día Stoic. Cada viernes, te traemos una meditación inspirada por los antiguos estoicos, algo que puede ayudarte a vivir los cuatro virtudes estoicas de coraje, justicia, sabiduría y temperance. Y aquí, en el fin de semana, nos sumamos a un profundismo en esos mismos temas. entrevistamos filósofos estoicos, nos reflejamos, nos preparamos, pensamos profundamente sobre los problemas desafiantes de nuestro tiempo y trabajamos en esta filosofía de una manera que es más posible aquí cuando no estamos ruidosos de trabajar o de llevar a los niños a la escuela, cuando tenemos el tiempo para pensar, para ir de un caminato, para sentarnos con nuestros diarios

• 0:48Ryan Holiday?

  y para prepararnos para lo que traerá el futuro.

• 0:54Ryan Holiday?

  Entonces, como ahora, había mucho ruido. Había personas que tenían sus propias agendas, personas que querían comprometerse, personas que querían explicarlo de alguna manera, personas que pensaban que había problemas mayores. Una de las escenas más poderosas en la historia del cine captura todo esto llegando a una cabeza. Daniel Day Lewis, como Lincoln, está rodeado de un escritorio de ruido y escabullido mientras empuja por el paso de la Tercera Enmienda. Lanzó su mano abierto en el tablete. Le compraba un segundo de silencio. "Ahora, ahora, ahora", dice, "estamos saliendo del escenario del mundo. La suerte de la dignidad humana está en nuestras manos.

• 1:36Ryan Holiday?

  "Ve lo que te está por delante", dice a ellos, "ve lo aquí y ahora. Eso es lo más difícil, lo único que cuenta". Pienso en esta escena muchas veces, pero especialmente últimamente, porque hay muchas personas que parecen no ser capaces de hacer eso, que piensan que la situación en la que estamos sigue las mismas líneas partidarias como el resto de la guerra cultural en curso. Parecen haber muchas personas que piensan que hay algo para discutir aquí, que se puede explicar de alguna manera, que esto es solo una extensión de esa discusión que hemos estado teniendo como sociedad durante algún tiempo. About privilege? No. The fact that my publisher sends me early copies of books before they can be released, that's a privilege.

• 2:18Ryan Holiday?

  Something I didn't earn, something that can disappear, something that I enjoy but am 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, 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, to speak your mind, to pursue your religion, for your

• 3:01Ryan Holiday?

  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 ticky tack 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

• 3:45Ryan Holiday?

  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 extrajudicially 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 dis- The injustice that is being done in modern America and elsewhere, callous indifference to suffering by the authorities towards minorities or the poor

• 4:29Ryan Holiday?

  or the voiceless is not just a lamentable fact of modern life. It's an active crime. In real life, Lincoln said that if slavery is not wrong, then 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 in 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.

• 5:11Ryan Holiday?

  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 sympathya 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.

• 5:54Ryan Holiday?

  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 an inch, it takes another. When you allow ...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.

• 6:39Ryan Holiday?

  That's what Martin Nimoyler's famous poem "First They Came" is about. Perhaps you know it. It goes, "First they came for the socialists, 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 Jew. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me." Nimoyler'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 Daqiao, where he nearly died.

• 7:22Ryan Holiday?

  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.

• 8:07Ryan Holiday?

  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 offense 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 minds, if you find yourself intuitively,

• 8:49Ryan Holiday?

  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 Stoics 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.

• 9:34Ryan Holiday?

  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, and 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 dailystoic.com/email.