What You Propose, Fate Will Dispose | Respect The Past, But Be Open To The Future

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• 0:03Speaker 00

  Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Thursdays, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the book, The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful co-author and collaborator, Stephen Hanselman. And so today, we'll give you a quick meditation from one of the Stoics, from Epictetus Marcus Aurelius Seneca, then some analysis from me, and then we send you out into the world to do your best to turn these words into works.

• 0:52Speaker 00

  What you propose, fate will dispose. We've talked here before about the toughest part of Marcus Aurelius's legacy. How can a man so committed to justice and moderation have allowed his unstable son, Commodus, to succeed him? It's inexplicable. It's a major failing. But what if it was more complicated than that? Marcus Aurelius had 13 children, six of them boys, and therefore eligible to be heirs. In 166 A.D., when Commodus was five and his other son, Marcus Anias Varus, was just three, Marcus actually named them both Caesar, hoping they could both be raised to be great

• 1:34Speaker 00

  co-emperors, and that each boy would balance out and help the other. But Varus would die tragically just three years later, in complications from routine surgery. Of Marcus's six boys, five of them would die before Marcus did. Imagine that, one terrible blow after another. There were plans that Lucius Varus, Marcus's co-emperor, would have an heir that would co-rule with Commodus, but that too was foiled. Marcus proposed a plan, but as the expression goes, "God disposed of it." It's not as if... As is the case with so many rulers, that Marcus simply planned to live forever and could not even consider the idea of someone ruling after him.

• 2:18Speaker 00

  It's not as if Marcus was blind to the faults of his children or the pressures of the throne. He was in fact, well aware of all of this and worked incredibly hard to come up with a solution, but fate kept knocking them down. This is life, isn't it? So much of it is outside of our control. Exactly when we need to be cut a break, we get another bad break. That's no excuse for Commodus, of course. It doesn't explain whatever was wrong with him, nor does it exonerate Marcus Aurelius as a parent or as an emperor. But it is important context. We propose, fate disposes. We mice and men lay down our plans and they are dashed to pieces. That's life, that's history. Let's have a little humility about it.

• 3:07Speaker 00

  Respect the past, but be open to the future. This is today's entry, August 25th, in the Daily Stoic. Won't you be walking in your predecessors' footsteps? I surely will use the older path, but if I find a shorter and smoother way, I'll blaze a trail there. The ones who pioneered these paths aren't our masters but our guides. Truth stands open to everyone, and it hasn't been monopolized. That's Seneca's Moral Letters 33. Traditions are often time-tested best practices for doing something. But remember that today's conservative ideas were once controversial, cutting-edge and innovative.

• 3:49Speaker 00

  That's why we can't be afraid to experiment with new ideas. In Seneca's case, he might be embracing some new philosophical insight that improves on the writings of Zeno or Cleanthes. In our case, perhaps a breakthrough in psychology improves upon the writing of Seneca or Marcus Aurelius, or perhaps we have a breakthrough of our own. If these ideas are truer and better, embrace them, use them. You don't need to be a prisoner of a dead old man who stopped learning 2,000 years ago.

• 4:19Speaker 00

  People often ask me, you know, what would the Stoics think about this or that? Would a Stoic go to therapy? Therapy being one I've talked about a lot of times. Of course, they would. You have to understand that the Stoics are frozen in time in a way by no fault of their own, right? When I say that Seneca stopped learning 2,000 years ago, it's not his fault. I mean, he died, right? He didn't get to read Darwin. He didn't get to read Montaigne. He didn't, he missed out on the Enlightenment, right? He missed out on the Renaissance. He missed out on the Industrial Revolution. They missed out on everything, right? They missed out on the Declaration of Independence. They, they, they missed out on Lincoln. They missed out on Martin Luther King, right?

• 5:03Speaker 00

  They, they missed out on the suffragettes. They missed, they missed out on Sojourner Truth. They missed out on people who made massive breakthroughs in how we think about things, right? Like, the Stoics talk about justice in the abstract, and justice is a virtue and ideal. But then we've, we've had innovations as a society as we've gone along as to what justice means, who deserves justice, right? Marx and Marx talks about how he learns about justice from, from Cato and Helvidius and Anthrasia, but clearly not enough. He still lived in slave society and did nothing about it, right? He would have benefited from, again, the Declaration of Independence, but he would have benefited from the abolitionists, right?

• 5:47Speaker 00

  He would have benefited from the advancements that happened after. There was a quote I liked from Churchill, again, not a perfect person who was wrong about so many things, but a friend and colleague of Churchill said something about how Churchill venerated tradition but hated convention. So I like this distinction between, you know, the timeless principles or ideals that we try to live by, that we try to orient ourselves around, and then just the kind of practices that are just there that we leave unquestioned. I'll give you a good example at the core of Stoicism, and I've talked about this before. Cato the Elder, the great, great grandfather of Cato.

• 6:31Speaker 00

  Was there when Stoicism was introduced to Rome from Greece. I tell the story in Lives of the Stoics, but he's there and he hears these different philosophers debating philosophical ideas. Maybe he kind of likes Stoicism, but what he heard from the other philosophers, he was like, nope, this is not good. I don't like this new stuff. And he tried to ban them from Rome. And you think about the irony that just a generation or two later, his grandson is a well-known philosopher and is known as a philosopher for thousands of years. Cato himself is conservative, has these ideas. He's a protector of the mass maiorum, the old ways. But the old ways are not actually one thing. They change, they evolve, they have to. I talk about this in Discipline is Destiny, actually,

• 7:15Speaker 00

  which you can preorder now at dailystoic.com/preorder. But there's a quote that Queen Elizabeth favors. It's some Italian novelist who said, if things are going to stay the same, then things are going to have to change. Right? So yes, we venerate tradition, but we challenge convention. And the queen has done this over and over and over again. Because even the Beatles song, the queen, the queen, she changes from day to day. She evolves, she adapts, she inputs new information. And I think this is what Seneca is saying. Right? You respect the past, but you're open to the future. You're willing to question the past where it's wrong. You're willing to adjust from what you inherited from the past to make a better future.

• 8:00Speaker 00

  And where would we be if this never happened? Right? Not in a good place. So the Stoics understand that change is inevitable and in fact, tried to be progressive, tried to change, tried to adjust. And again, I'm using conservative and progressive here, not in the American political sense, but the larger sense. You have to do this. Truth is open to all of us. The ones who pioneered your paths are not masters, but guides.

• 8:27Speaker 00

  Be open to that change, accept it, look for new information. All that stuff ultimately supplements and improves upon this wonderful philosophy that we study. That's why I bring in new examples. That's why I try to read academic research. That's why I talk to experts. So I even vet it through my own experience. Do not feel that the Stoics are giving you doctrine or dogma. They are giving you principles. Principles matter. Principles should be venerated, but conventions, but the status quo, but the way we've always done things, the mass maillard, that is to be challenged. It must be challenged. That's where I'll leave you today. Think about where Stoicism is incomplete to you, where it should be adjusted, where it can be improved, what new things you're adding to it.

• 9:12Speaker 00

  Because that is an important, powerful thing to do.

• 9:19Speaker 00

  It's not that life is short, Seneca says, it's that we waste a lot of it. The practice of Memento Mori, the meditation on death, is one of the most powerful and eye-opening things that there is. We built this Memento Mori calendar for Daily Stoke to illustrate that exact idea that your life, in the best-case scenario, is 4,000 weeks. Are you going to let those weeks slip by? Or are you going to seize them? The act of unrolling this calendar, putting it on your wall, and every single week, that bubble is filled in, that black mark is marking it off forever. Have something to show, not just for your years, but for every single dot that you filled

• 10:03Speaker 00

  in, that you really lived that week, that you made something of it. You can check it out at dailystoic.com/mmcalendar.