We Are All In This Together

“One of the strangest pejoratives that has come up in this new divisive political era is the idea of calling someone a “globalist.” It’s particularly popular in far right circles. If someone believes in NATO, if someone can see the obvious self-interest that the United States has in basing troops on the Korean Peninsula, or if they like doing trade deals with other countries, then they are clearly a World Bank-loving globalist who is betraying their own country in favor of some traitorous preference for everyone else in the world.”Ryan explains that we are all part of a larger whole, and why we must work together, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow Daily Stoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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  Welcome to The Daily Stoic, where each day we read a short passage designed to help you cultivate the strength, insight, wisdom necessary for living a good 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 at dailystoic.com. We are all in this together. One of the strangest pejoratives that has come out of this new divisive political era is the idea of calling someone a globalist. It's particularly popular in far-right circles. If someone believes in NATO, if they can see the obvious self-interest that the United

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  States has in basing troops on the Korean Peninsula, or if they like doing trade deals with other countries, they are clearly a World Bank-loving globalist who is betraying their own country in favor of some traitorous preference for everyone else in the world. Of course, this is all nonsense, if only because most of the so-called globalist interests have been very good for America and the rest of the world over the last 80 years. It's also interesting when you consider, at least in Stoicism, there is not really a contradiction between nationalism, or even empires, and internationalism. Epictetus said that "each

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  of us is a citizen in our own land, but also a member of the great city of gods and men." Marcus Aurelius, the head of an enormous empire, reminded himself daily to love the world as much as he loved his native city. You can be a good neighbor and a good parent at the same time, just like you can be a successful businessman, without engaging in anti-competitive behavior. The truth is, it's easier to myopically focus on your own interests. It's easy to put yourself in one category and everything else in another, barbarians, we used to call them. When we think this way, the world becomes zero-sum, and violent, and scary. But when we can zoom out a

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  And see how arbitrary most borders and boundaries are, how much things have been and remain in flux, how similar we all are, how most of us all want the same things, then collaboration and concerted action become possible, and far more gets done when we work together than when we fight each other. Like us, the Romans weren't perfect. They didn't live up to their own rhetoric. They fought wars of conquest and committed atrocities. Seneca lived in a society built on slavery, yet he was ahead of his time enough to urge his fellow Romans to remember that he whom you call your slave sprang from the same

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  stock, is smiled upon by the same skies, and on equal terms with yourself, breathes, lives, and dies. We should remember that today and always. Don't let broken, or angry, or racist people poison your mind. Don't let them tear down the principles that have not only brought billions of citizens of this planet out of poverty, and prevent millions of people just like you from dying in needless conflicts. Sympathia. We are all part of a larger whole. We are in this together. If you live on this planet, you're a globalist. You have to be, and that's not a bad thing.

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  Again, I carry this Sympathia medallion from the Stoics in my pocket. It's something we make at the Daily Stoic Stoic. You can check it out. Look, this idea that we are a part of this larger whole, that we're in this together, I think is very important. That we are put on this planet to work together, to make things together, to make everyone better, is an idea that is too easily lost. And I think having this physical reminder has been really important for me, whether I'm working on something for the site, whether I'm getting pissed off in traffic. It's just a great reminder. I hope you'll check it out and go to dailystoic.com/store.