They Will Shove This In Your Face

Moral compromise is never a single act. It creates a precedent…and then another, and another. 📚 Books Mentioned: Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/dying-every-day-seneca-at-the-court-of-nero Plato and the Tyrant https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/plato-and-the-tyrant-the-fall-of-greeces-greatest-dynasty-and-the-making-of-a-philosophic-masterpiece?_pos=2&_sid=dced56267&_ss=rHow To Die https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/how-to-die-an-ancient-guide-to-the-end-of-life?_pos=4&_sid=dced56267&_ss=rHow To Give https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/how-to-give-an-ancient-guide-to-giving-and-receiving-ancient-wisdom-for-modern-readers?_pos=7&_sid=dced56267&_ss=r 🎙️ Check out the full episode: James Romm on The Daily Stoic Podcast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlLuSmSK7M8 | Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/when-good-people-lose-themselves-to-tyrants-james-romm-pt-1/id1430315931?i=1000721772928, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/0OwAF7hkhE7eg8FyuFZg15, YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlLuSmSK7M8 🎟️ DAILY STOIC LIVE https://www.dailystoiclive.com/| Ryan Holiday is coming to a city near you https://www.dailystoiclive.com/! Grab tickets here https://www.dailystoiclive.com/ | https://www.dailystoiclive.com/ 🎙️ AD-FREE https://dailystoic.supercast.com/| Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing to The Daily Stoic Premium https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content: https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ 🎥 VIDEO EPISODES https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos| Watch the video episodes on The Daily Stoic YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos: https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos ✉️ FREE STOIC WISDOM https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail | Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:00Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

• 0:15Ryan Holiday?

  They will shove this in your face. He had to compromise from the start. Seneca had no love for emperors, but Nero was his way back from exile, his chance to be at the center of things once again, having been unjustly exiled by Claudius in 41 AD. So Seneca swallowed some of his true feelings to advise and to teach Nero. And how did the emperor reward him for this commitment? By shoving the moral compromise in Seneca's face constantly. Seneca had to watch as Nero fixed the Olympics so he could award himself the prize. He had to help Nero give a speech after Nero killed his own mother. He stood aside as members of the ruling class were forced onto the stage,

• 0:59Ryan Holiday?

  humiliated in performance, even sent into the arena to fight wild beasts. It's a problem as old as time. Just ask Plato, who found himself in the same position with the tyrant in his time. Those that first ask us to bend our principles a little will ultimately return to ask for more and more. They will ultimately require us to contort ourselves into utterly unrecognizable positions. We think we're being pragmatic. In actuality, we're being humiliated. Moral compromise is never a single act. Creates a precedent, then another, and another. As James Rahm shows in Dying Every Day, Seneca at the court of Nero, we have some signed copies at the Painted Porch,

• 1:44Ryan Holiday?

  and in Plato and the Tyrant, and in his interviews on The Daily Stoic, this is how good men and women end up being trapped. Not all at once, but step by step. And actually, James Rahm's book on Seneca was a book that changed my life. I read it during the sort of fall of American Apparel and it opened my eyes to some of my own moral compromises and it changed me. I've thought about his book many times in the years since. Fascinated by the example of Seneca. He's been on the podcast a couple of times. It was actually just here in Austin not that long ago. And I asked him about precisely this and we talked about it.

• 2:25Ryan Holiday?

  I'm going to bring you a chunk of that episode here for the rest of today's episode. James Rahm is great. Do read Plato and the Tyrant and Dying Every Day and check out his fuller episodes on the Daily Stoic Podcast.

• 2:48Ryan Holiday?

  Philosophers shouldn't be just writers, they should be doers. And maybe this is what leads Seneca astray too, is he wants to be in the room where it happens and loses his bearings as to when one should leave the room where it's happening.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  Yes, I know that you have the two books there.

• 3:08Ryan Holiday?

  You can see I took a few notes on this one.

• 3:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're very parallel stories.

• 3:13Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, and it's a fine line, I guess, between wanting to be a doer and not just a talker. And then when is your ego leading you into a bad place?

• 3:24Speaker 01

  That's right. And when do things get so messy that you have to extricate yourself? Seneca tried to extricate himself but failed.

• 3:33Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 3:33Speaker 01

  And Plato succeeded, but then had to answer all kinds of questions about what went wrong, why did he bail? And the disaster that he left behind became much worse after his departure. So yeah, things got very sticky.

• 3:48Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I have this quote that I think it strikes me as maybe the through line of both your books, but I had this on my desk. I don't know when or why I wrote it down, but Pompey's last words, where he quotes Sophocles, he says, whoever makes his journey to a tyrant's court becomes his slave, although he went there a free man. And so you think you're going to do good work for a flawed person or that you're going to be above the industry that you're working in? Right, because most of us aren't going to go work for actual emperors or kings. But you think you can go into that place and not get your hands dirty.

• 4:25Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 4:26Ryan Holiday?

  But you can't.

• 4:27Speaker 01

  Right, exactly. The philosopher has ideal notions of what politics is about as a republic. I mean, the republic enshrines those ideals in the highest way. And then when you hit the ground, hit the ground splattering, as it were, things don't work out so neatly.

• 4:49Ryan Holiday?

  For Seneca, it's fascinating to me because obviously Nero doesn't start out as a tyrant.

• 4:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 4:56Ryan Holiday?

  Right, his mother is obviously flawed, and maybe you could have said he could have seen it coming. But with Seneca, it seems much more like a frog in a pot. The heat is slowly being turned up. And then he is in that space where they say it's very hard to see something that your salary depends on you not seeing. And he can't, he can't get out.

• 5:21Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. Yeah, Nero started off a relatively good path. The first five years of his reign were later referred to as the Quinquenum. Neronus, the best time of the Roman Empire. It wasn't until he became a 20 or he approached his 20s and had the, actually, no, he was well into his 20s after five years and more gumption, more autonomy, and took the reins into his own hands more. And then things started to really crash.

• 5:52Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, and is it mental illness? Or is it what power? Is it that power is itself kind of a mental illness?

• 5:59Speaker 01

  In his case, very much so. The freedom to do anything, to have whatever pleasures he wanted, to kill his mother or whoever else he wanted, have the Praetorian Guard at his beck and call. Those would drive many human beings into delusions and insanity. And in his case, he was already a little shaky to begin with. So it just sort of exaggerated his natural flaws.

• 6:30Ryan Holiday?

  It's this tension between access and

• 6:33Speaker 01

  Integrity.

• 6:34Ryan Holiday?

  And integrity, yes. And I got to preserve my access.

• 6:37Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 6:38Ryan Holiday?

  Even though I'm slowly compromising my integrity.

• 6:41Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 6:41Ryan Holiday?

  That's the tension.

• 6:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:43Ryan Holiday?

  And obviously, they they all fail that test at some level.

• 6:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course, what's missing from our society, which is present in both Greek and Roman picture is that a philosopher who's widely respected, as both Plato and Seneca were, has automatic access because the ruler needs that legitimacy. He needs

• 7:06Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 7:06Speaker 01

  a philosopher, an esteemed philosopher at his court.

• 7:11Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  In order to appear to be an enlightened person.

• 7:14Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 7:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, we have lost that.

• 7:17Ryan Holiday?

  Also, like, for them, politely declining is not so much an option, right? The specter of death and real danger, you know, now it's I don't want to lose my access. It's like, OK, so you don't get reelected and then you go make millions of dollars as a lobbyist or a consultant. Like, you're not actually, the downside is so much lower in today's political environment.

• 7:39Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 7:40Ryan Holiday?

  And so it is much, it's even more about ego than than this sort of calculated, you know, balance between all the different factors.

• 7:50Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 7:50Ryan Holiday?

  I think that's the timelessness of of the the seduction, which is like, over here, I'm saying and showing you this.

• 7:58Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 7:59Ryan Holiday?

  And then over here, I'm saying something different. And the human capacity to hear which one of those we want to hear.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, and for Plato to have gone back to the court of Dionysus a second, a second time.

• 8:17Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 8:17Speaker 01

  Five years after departing in a terrible debacle the first time and having caused a rift in the royal family that resulted in his protege Dion getting exiled. That is really, it's another stunning example of self deception.

• 8:36Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, the mental gymnastics that humans are capable of

• 8:39Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 8:40Ryan Holiday?

  will never cease to surprise you.

• 8:42Speaker 01

  That's right. And Plato says that he devised a test, you know, this is really a testament to his naivete. He devised a test to see whether Dionysius was a suitable student, that he was going to tell him exactly how hard it was going to be to become a philosopher.

• 9:02Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 9:03Speaker 01

  And probably he had in mind years and years of study, starting with geometry and astronomy and higher math and going up to dialectic. And he was going to see whether, how he would react. So he lands in Syracuse for the second time, well, the third time, but the second time under Dionysius the Younger and presents him with this scenario. And Dionysius says, oh, well, I already know all this stuff because other people have told it to me. And at that point Plato is sort of done.

• 9:34Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 9:34Speaker 01

  But the fact that after having lived with him five years earlier for months and months and seeing exactly what kind of person he was, you know, a drunk, a libertine, unstable emotional figure, that he still thought, well, you know, maybe he'll pass the test and I'll have a true student on my hands.

• 9:55Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, I imagine Seneca, you know, he's, he's somewhere in one of his villas and the messenger rushes in, you know, we have news that Nero's tried to kill his mother. And, and Seneca's grabbing his toga, you know, and rushing over to the palace. I'm going to tell him this time, you know, it's, this has to end. You can't do this. Like, I'm really going to confront him. This is it, you know, it's like, we're going to have the come to Jesus conversation, which maybe he literally could have, he could have used that expression.

• 10:25Speaker 01

  No.

• 10:26Ryan Holiday?

  Jesus having overlapped with Seneca, but, but, you know, we're going to have it. And he's walking there, I'm going to confront him. I'm laying on the line, I'm giving him the ultimatum. And then by the end of it. You know Nero has talked himself out of it. Right? And then soon enough, he does kill his mother and does crosses the next red line and crosses the next red line. And the real skill of the Nero's of the of the tyrants of the Trumps, et cetera, is their ability to read those people and to know what they have to say to them and what their levers are and how to manipulate them. That at some level, they see through them and they they know how to get them in their

• 11:11Ryan Holiday?

  pocket.