How To Be Free

Ruby Doris Smith died at age 25 of cancer. It was an unfair death, concluding a short, unfair life. For two and half decades on this earth – from 1942 to 1967 – she experienced the brutal day-to-day realities of Jim Crow segregation. Yet her tombstone laments none of this. Instead, it codifies into stone one of the most basic principles of the SNCC, the civil rights organization she had been so dedicated and active in during her short life. “IF YOU THINK FREE,” it reads, “YOU ARE FREE.”✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow 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.

• 0:03Speaker 00

  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.

• 0:29Speaker 00

  How to be Free. Ruby Doris Smith died at age 25 of cancer. It was an unfair death concluding a short unfair life. For two and a half decades on this earth, from 1942 to 1967, Ruby Doris Smith experienced the brutal day-to-day realities of Jim Crow segregation. Yet, her tombstone laments none of this. Instead, it codifies into stone one of the most basic principles of the SNCC, the civil rights organization that she had been so dedicated and active in in her short life.

• 1:10Speaker 00

  "If you think free," it reads, "you are free." The epigram had a profound double meaning. It means first that the young radical activists of the civil rights movement had decided quite simply that they would refuse to be segregated any longer. Rejecting the laws of the day as illegitimate, they sat where they wanted for lunch, they rode buses as they wanted, they organized and marched and lived as they wanted. And with time, under unrelenting pressure, these laws fell one by one. But the other meaning of the quote is even more important. Despite all the injustice and the violence and the hatred that surrounded them, these activists strove to embrace the most freeing force there was.

• 1:55Speaker 00

  Love, resentment, reprisal, bitterness, those would have been perfectly understandable emotions for someone like Ruby Doris Smith to have. They also would have been their own form of slavery. Epictetus, who experienced great cruelty and tyranny during his life in Rome, came to the same understanding. He realized that freedom wasn't about legal status, although that was important. Instead, freedom was a state of mind. It was a choice. What did it matter if he broke free from his master if he was still ruled by his passions? What good was power if one relinquished the power of the most basic things in life? Thoughts, desires, opinions? He understood that he had to free himself first

• 2:40Speaker 00

  if his eventual manumission was going to mean something. And that that was the chief task in life, he would famously say, to do that, to choose to be free, to think he was free. And so it goes for us. This is our chief task. To, however dark the circumstances, we must free ourselves, to think free just as Ruby Doris Smith and Epictetus did. Because if you do, you are. And honestly, that's the fundamental idea of discipline is destiny. Self-discipline is the idea of freeing yourself first, freeing yourself from urges and desires, from emotions, and all the things that enslave you, whether you're powerful or powerless.

• 3:24Speaker 00

  It's about seizing control of what Seneca calls "the greatest empire ourselves." What I say in The Girl Who Would Be Free, my kids' book, seizing the empire between your ears. That's what self-discipline is about. That's what I think is so inspiring and amazing about the civil rights movement. It wasn't just the courage, as I was saying recently. It was the self-discipline that allowed them to transform that courage into actionable political change. And we could learn so much from that. It's been an honor to write about it. I write about him in Courage is Calling. And also in Discipline is Destiny, my argument is that it's the three virtues,

• 4:04Speaker 00

  courage, discipline, wisdom, that allow one to bring that fourth virtue, justice, into the world. And I do hope you check out the books. And happy Black History Month. So many recommendations I have on this topic. You can check them out at The Painted Porch, or just look at the bibliography on discipline and courage. Be well, everyone.