They Can’t Make You Like Them

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

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom, designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom in everyday life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us, dailystoic.com.

• 0:30Ryan Holiday?

  "They can't make you like them." They can break the rules, they can bury you in paperwork, they can lie, they can abuse their power, they can hurt people. They can do all this with impunity. It's not just that they can, it's that they almost certainly will. Injustice is not an aberration in this world, it's practically the norm. Anyone who has tried to bring about change, who has tried to do the right thing, who has tried to follow virtue to its natural conclusions, has found this out. But you know what they can't do? They can't make you be like them. This is what Marcus Aurelius reminds himself of at the beginning of Meditations. "No one can implicate me in ugliness," he writes. Later in Meditations, he observes that he can never truly be harmed by an outside force,

• 1:13Ryan Holiday?

  because outside forces have no sway over his soul, over his character. "Yes, the powers that be can stymie us, but they can't force us to like them or be like them. That's a choice that we make. That's something that's in our power. That's something that we can and must resist." They're gonna do what they're gonna do: cheat, abuse, hurt, act with injustice. But we're not. We're gonna stay at it. We're gonna keep going back, as we've talked about. We're going to be and do good. This is obviously what I'm thinking a lot about for the new book, Right Thing Right Now, all about how we live with and act with this key Stoic virtue. It's doing the Four Virtues series, so I did Courage, I did Discipline, and the next one is gonna be all about justice. So that's what I'm thinking about.

• 1:57Ryan Holiday?

  I'll link to it in today's show notes, but you can grab it anywhere books are sold. Right Thing Right Now.