Ryan Holiday on America’s missing Statue of Responsibility

“​​THE STATUE OF LIBERTY was a gift from France to America, commemorating the two nations’ friendship and shared love of freedom. Completed in 1886, it marked one of the world’s first, successful crowdfunding projects. The famous poem “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus, mounted in bronze inside the pedestal (“Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…”), was written for the campaign. Over $100,000 was raised from more than 120,000 donors, including schoolchildren who collected pennies.”On today’s episode of the podcast, Ryan reads his recent article about the missing statue of responsibility as proposed by the author of Man’s Search For Meaning Viktor Frankl, explains why it was such an honor for him to write, and talks about where the Stoic’s responsibility to society lies. Read the article: https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2021/08/16/ryan-holiday-on-americas-missing-statue-of-responsibility GiveWell is the best site for figuring out how and where to donate your money to have the greatest impact. If you’ve never donated to GiveWell’s recommended charities before, you can have your donation matched up to $1,000 before the end of June or as long as matching funds last. Just go to GiveWell.org/STOIC and pick podcast and The Daily Stoic at checkout. Athletic Greens is a custom formulation of 75 vitamins, minerals, and other whole-food sourced ingredients that make it easier for you to maintain nutrition in just a single scoop. Visit athleticgreens.com/stoic to get a FREE year supply of Liquid Vitamin D + 5 FREE Travel Packs with subscription. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee 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.

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the weekend edition of The Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal,

• 0:46Ryan Holiday?

  and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another weekend episode of The Daily Stoic. I'm just gearing up now for the publicity of my new book, Courage is Calling, which, as you know, you can check out and preorder at dailystoic.com/preorder. But anyways, as part of it, what happens is your publisher sends out sort of letters and pitches to all these different people. And we heard back from a guy named Kenneth Kukier at The Economist. And he was like, hey, I'm interested in having you write something for The Economist, but I want to talk to you first. What's this?

• 1:31Ryan Holiday?

  So anyways, we get on the phone, and crazy story. Ken and I had actually interacted like 10 years ago. I was in Amsterdam giving a talk about, trust me, I'm lying. And I was talking about a lot of the problems in journalism. And Ken, I'll just say, he hated my talk. We ended up getting in a bit of an argument about it. He came up to me after and he said, how could you say these things? How could you do these things? And we were just in different parts of the planet as far as how we were going on. But anyways, that, and I totally forgot who he was, and I assumed he never thought of me again. We ended up, he was like, I wanted to talk to you because, he said, I felt bad about it. I felt like we didn't communicate right.

• 2:12Ryan Holiday?

  Also, you know, some of the stuff of the book ended up sadly turning out to be true. But he's like, I thought we could collaborate. I could edit you for a piece. For The Economist, we have this section called "By Invitation." He said, do you? And I said, I would love that. Absolutely no hard feelings. Clearly, you're a much bigger man than me to even have thought of collaborating after our little disagreement. And so I was so excited. So he said, did I have any ideas? And I did have an idea, as I was thinking about it. It's basically a section where you put forth sort of a big idea, a modest proposal, if you will, about something that you feel like the world should be talking about. And The Economist is such a prestigious, you

• 2:53Ryan Holiday?

  know, sort of influential or influential for the influencers of the thought leaders of the world. You know, what should these people be thinking about? And so I told him about this idea and he loved it. And we collaborated on the piece. I did a bunch of drafts. The piece I wrote was like 3,000 words. He very expertly whittled it down to about 1,000 words. And here we are, we have the piece. And it just came out a couple of days ago. And I thought I would do an episode about it, riff on a little bit. And I hope you enjoy it. The headline is Ryan Holiday on America's Missing Statue of Responsibility. And here we go. The Statue of Liberty was a gift from France to America, commemorating

• 3:38Ryan Holiday?

  the two nations' friendship and a shared love of freedom. Completed in 1886, it marked one of the world's first and most successful crowdfunding projects. The famous poem, The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus, is mounted in bronze inside the pedestal. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. This was actually written for the campaign. Over $100,000 was raised from more than 120,000 donors, including schoolchildren who collected pennies. And the end result has towered not just over New York Harbor and the millions of immigrants who pass by, but also over Americans' view of themselves. It is a symbolic representation of the country's foremost ideal, individual

• 4:21Ryan Holiday?

  liberty. That value of freedom undergirds every newspaper article, every church sermon, every street demonstration. And it is also invoked whenever someone refuses to wear a face mask during a pandemic or accept a vaccine. And yet, what most people don't know is that around 75 years after the statue was inaugurated, another statue was proposed, its twin, so to speak, to be erected on the other side of the country in San Francisco Bay. Called the Statue of Responsibility, it was meant to symbolize the flip side of America's prized virtue, the inherent obligations that come with a free society. The idea was the brainchild of Viktor Frankl. In 1942, at the age of 37,

• 5:05Ryan Holiday?

  Frankl, a psychologist, was deported from Vienna to the first of four concentration camps, where his father died of pneumonia, his mother and brother were gassed, and his wife died of typhus. He ended up in Auschwitz. Within months of his liberation, over a nine-day period, he wrote the book that became Man: Search for Meaning. And in it, he tried to make sense of the evil he had experienced, and he articulated the importance of having a goal to live for. In 1962, when he revised the book for an American edition and with the passage of time, he reflected more on the experience. And he wrote, "Freedom, however, is not the last word. Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth. Freedom

• 5:47Ryan Holiday?

  is the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon, whose positive aspect is responsibleness. In fact, freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. And that is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast." Since then, his vision has been taken up by two nonprofit groups, the Responsibility Foundation and the Statue of Responsibility Foundation, both with the blessing of his second wife, Ellie Franklin. Among the latter group's backers was the late Stephen Covey, a business professor and author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Covey commissioned a sculptor, Gary Lee Price, who designed a 300-foot statue of two arms

• 6:32Ryan Holiday?

  clasping each other by the wrist, a bond among individuals unshakably gripped together. Several locations have been suggested. One is Alcatraz Island, which, as a former maximum-security prison, probably provides the wrong symbolism. A more inspiring choice is Angel Island, which sits around four miles off of San Francisco and served as an immigration processing center for more than half a million new residents between 1910 and 1940. So far, both projects have stalled. Ms. Frankel, at 95 and living in Vienna, notes that her husband's idea for the statue was meant as a thought experiment. He was surprised and flattered when he heard of the project.

• 7:13Ryan Holiday?

  "I don't think he ever expected to be taken literally," she said in an interview conducted through Alex Vesely, their grandson and a board director of the Viktor Frankl Institute. "Many people talk for hours and say very little," she said, "but he had this gift of speaking the truth with a few simple words." He coined this phrase to make a point. What makes Viktor Frankl's idea so appropriate is that, as he understood, liberty begets responsibility, and that with freedom comes the need for self-control and an obligation to think of others, not just oneself. And that is what Frankl alluded to when he wrote that "freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth."

• 7:55Ryan Holiday?

  The pandemic, with its ludicrous protests against face masks and vaccines in the name of freedom, has been a painful illustration of the cost to society when people fail to understand liberty's flipside. We don't have a liberty problem, we have a responsibility problem. What does it mean to be responsible? It means understanding yourself as belonging to something larger than yourself, accepting a duty to do right regardless of the costs. To the Stoics, the branch of classical Greek and Roman philosophy that I study, "our responsibility was to our character and to the common good," a dual loyalty, much in the way that Frankl wanted two statues to commemorate two concomitant values.

• 8:39Ryan Holiday?

  Statues are totems to our values. We erect them not just to honor the past, but to remind the present. The great Athenian orator Demosthenes once reminded an audience that "previous generations did not put up monuments to recognize their own achievements, but to spur people to greater deeds in the future." And yet, sometimes, the past and the present collide. Around the world, people have begun to look uneasily at the statues in their cities, parks, and campuses. In Belgium, some monuments to Leopold II, the colonizer king, have been removed. In Britain, a heavy bronze statue of Edward Colston, the merchant, philanthropist, and slave trader, was pulled down and pushed into Bristol Harbor. I was

• 9:21Ryan Holiday?

  in New Orleans when enormous cranes removed the statue of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee, which stood near the entrance to the French Quarter. And I spent considerable time and money to remove a loathsome, century-old Confederate monument celebrating our noble, white-souled "Southland" from the lawn of a county courthouse in the small Texas town where I live. Although many of us can agree that statues of colonizers, murderers, and traders should go, it has long struck me as peculiar that we have little sense of what should be there instead. America in particular has struggled to put up statues of late. It took more than 20 years to plan and erect the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial, a set of bronzes in Washington, DC. The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in a park

• 10:06Ryan Holiday?

  next to the National Mall is not even 10 years old, yet plans for it began shortly after his assassination in 1968. Likewise, when it comes to a statue of responsibility, somehow no one is willing to be responsible. It is preposterous. There are more than enough tech entrepreneurs on a single block in downtown San Francisco capable of funding such a project. What is needed is a sense of urgency and a sense of responsibility to do this for future generations, and for this one as well. As the French writer Andre Melro is said to have remarked, "You can judge a society by the monuments it puts up." Reading to my four-year-old the wonderful children's book about the Statue of Liberty: Her Right

• 10:50Ryan Holiday?

  Foot by Dave Edgers, I was struck by his insight that Lady Liberty is depicted in motion, taking a step forward. Like him, I had seen the statue hundreds of times, but never noticed that her feet are not stationary but striding. Liberty is on the move. She uses her freedom. There is no time for standing still. She's got work to do. So too the Statue of Liberty should be active, symbolizing what we ought to do individually and collectively, to act cooperatively on the major challenges of our time. We are humans, given a heart and a brain, and this makes us responsible, says Ms. Frankel. There are tasks waiting for us. Amid COVID-19, some people ran away from their responsibilities while others ran toward

• 11:34Ryan Holiday?

  them, selflessly, courageously. Millions did their duty quietly and without complaint and never ended up in the news. We should celebrate and immortalize the values that create a responsible society. We should bind it to our cultural consciousness as we did liberty. Those who proclaim their freedom but ignore their responsibility aren't being heroic, but self-centered and irresponsible. They are misusing the gift they have been given. And this is what lies behind Viktor Frankl's observation that freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. Imagine how different the response to the pandemic might have been, the value that Americans

• 12:17Ryan Holiday?

  looked up to wasn't just liberty for themselves, but responsibility for each other. So that's the piece. I hope you like it. The real honor for me was not just getting published in The Economist, but being able to interview Dr. Frankl's wife and to be able to, to touch someone who's connected to him is incredible and it makes you realize how recent some of these events are, but also how quickly they're receding into the past. But to be able even to write about Man's Search for Meaning, which I was given, I was given a copy of this. Actually, I have my copy, I just pulled it off the shelf here. It's inscribed, "June 2005," which is when I graduated from high school, and there's a note here from my Aunt Tracy.

• 13:00Ryan Holiday?

  She says, "Ryan, this is one of my mom's favorite books. I find there is great value between these covers. I wanted to pass on a part of your grandmother to you on your graduation. Congratulations on your life path. We are all so proud of you. Love, Aunt Tracy." And I, I have here where I marked His thing about the Statue of Responsibility. This piece was such an honor for me. I hope you like it, but most of all, I hope it spurs you to think a little bit today about this really important Stoic idea, which is not just what are we free to do? Stoicism isn't just about becoming more autonomous for its own sake.

• 13:41Ryan Holiday?

  Stoicism is ultimately about freeing yourself so then you can free other people, so you can contribute to the common good. As Marx really says, "The fruit of this life is good character and acts for the common good." You know, the Stoics, yes, it was about mastering your temper. It was about enduring pain. It was about the pursuit of wisdom, but it was also about the eradication of injustice. It was about acting with justice. It was about contributing to the moving forward of humanity. It was about doing good. It was about being good. It was about responsibility, being responsible not just for yourself, but for the things that happen around you.

• 14:22Ryan Holiday?

  And that's why I decided to get involved here with this Confederate statue thing. That's why I've decided to write about these issues. It would be easier for me. I would, it would be more profitable for me. I would get less angry emails if I never spoke about political issues, if I only talked about self-improvement and self-development. But that's not what Stoicism is, right? Marx really says, "You can commit injustice by doing nothing, by neglecting your responsibility, by failing to act responsibly." You are complicit. You are violating the core and key precepts of Stoicism. That's what I wanted to talk about today. This pandemic we've been through has challenged us in so many ways, but it should make you more connected to other people.

• 15:05Ryan Holiday?

  It should be aware, it should wake you up, as I said, to the cost of not caring about other people, of not caring about how our actions impact other people and being ignorant of how other people's actions impact us and our own families. That's what today's piece is about. You can check it out. I'll share the link in the, in the show notes. Please do spread it around if you can. We want to get things like this out in the world, not misinformation. And I hope you check out the new book Courage is Calling. You can get, you can pick it up anywhere books are sold. We have a bunch of awesome preorder bonuses at dailystoic.com/preorder. It comes out September 28th, which is urgently approaching. So now is our window. Check out the book. Check out the article.

• 15:49Ryan Holiday?

  Be responsible, be well. We don't have a freedom problem. You've got plenty of freedom. What matters is your responsibility and obligations and duty, which the Stoics talk so much about. So please do it. Hey, it's Ryan. If you want to take your study of Stoicism to the next level, I want to invite you to join us over at Daily Stoic Life. We have daily conversations about the podcast episodes, about the daily email. We actually do a special weekend set of emails for everyone. You get all our daily Stoic courses and challenges totally for free. That's hundreds of dollars of value every single year, including our New Year, New You Challenge, which we're going to launch in January. You get a special cloth-bound edition of the best of meditations that we've

• 16:30Ryan Holiday?

  done. You get a bunch of cool stuff. It's an awesome community. I've loved being a part of it. I've loved getting to meet everyone who's trying to take their study of Stoicism to the next level. Love to have you join us. Check us out at DailyStoicLife.com. We'd love to have you and join us on this digital stoia that we've staked out together and get better every day.