This Is The Most Dangerous Vice

“The pretense of knowledge is our most dangerous vice, because it prevents us from getting any better.”Over 10,000 readers have highlighted that passage in the Kindle edition of Ego is the Enemy. The reason it resonates is that the Stoics have been riffing on that very idea for thousands of years.✉️ 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.

• 0:30Speaker 00

  This is the most dangerous vice. The pretense of knowledge is our most dangerous vice because it prevents us from getting any better. It's pretty crazy. 10,000 people have highlighted that sentence in the Kindle edition of Ego is the Enemy, almost enough to puff up my ego a little bit. But that's not what this message is about. Today, we're talking about why that resonates. And I think that idea resonates because the Stoics have been riffing on this very idea for thousands of years. That's why Marcus was thanking people in meditations who pointed out when he was incorrect because they were allowing him to get better. It's Seneca reading like a spy quoting

• 1:15Speaker 00

  the rival philosopher Epicurus more than anyone else. It's Epictetus's famous line, inspired by his hero Socrates, that it's impossible to learn that which you think you already know. And it's Cato the Elder's great maxim, "Be careful not to rashly refuse to learn from others." We must always keep our minds open. We must not be prideful at how far we have come. They say in physics that as our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of ignorance. We must be humbled by the distance that looms before us. We must never think that we have arrived. We must embrace the fact that the more you know, the more there is to know.

• 1:56Speaker 00

  "You should keep learning," Seneca wrote, "to the end of your life." It's funny, now even as I reread Ego is the Enemy, I feel like there's so many things I would have written differently or done better, but it's been amazing to see that book take on a life of its own since I published it. And you can grab a signed copy at store.dailystoic.com or pick them up here at the Painted Porch in Bastrop, Texas.