Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. The basic premise of Stoic philosophy to me is life is going to kick you around.
It's going to kick your ass. It's going to go sideways. And you've got to be able to handle that. You've got to be able to not be broken by that.
And then this is the most important part. You've got to be able to turn it into something. You've got to find meaning and purpose in it. You've got to be able to rise to that challenge and then use that challenge to become better than you would have had it never happened.
That's actually something I talked to David Kessler about a few years ago. He's an expert on grief. He worked with Dr. Koopa Ross on the stages of grieving.
And he adds a new step, a sixth step, which is about how do you find meaning from grief and loss. Let me play a little chunk of what Ian talked about. There's some disconnection that I've heard over the years from people in grief. And as I started to talk about it, it became so apparent to everyone like, Dave, there's no meaning in a child's death.
There's no meaning in a murder. There's no meaning in a betrayal and a car wreck and a divorce and a pandemic. And I realized, oh, the meaning isn't in the horrible thing. The meaning is in us.
It's what we do afterwards. And that is precisely what Arthur Brooks and I talked about in today's episode as well, how you transform suffering into meaning. We did kind of a masterclass on all the different philosophical schools, the Stoics, the Buddhists, Catholicism, Arthur's own inner conflicts and more. I think you're really going to like this episode.
If you don't know who Arthur Brooks is, well, you should. He is a social scientist, one of the world's leading authorities on human happiness. He's a professor at Harvard, columnist with the Free Press, formerly the Atlantic host of the podcast Office Hours, contributed to CBS. And a wonderful speaker, he did a book with Oprah called Build the Life You Want, did the best selling book from Strength and a book called Love Your Enemies.
All of those are available at the Painted Porch, but let's just get into it with Arthur Brooks, here is part two of our masterclass on philosophy. All right, so give me, I think we can skip the Stoics. Does it get enough of that here? You can't get enough here.
They can't get enough. Tell me about Epicurus. Epicurus, well, of course, who is way before Epictetus. Yes.
I mean, it's what, 250 years before it. Roman. Yeah. So Epicurus predates a lot of this stuff.
Yes. And Epicurus, who is completely misunderstood today because it's the whole idea of eubedimonia versus headonia. Yeah. Right?
And headonia, which is hedonic and all these words come from it as if it's the pursuit of unbridled pleasure. It's actually not right in a bunch of different ways. Pleasure is a limbic phenomenon that occurs in the limbic system, an ancient console of tissue that's up to 40 million years old. Predates, homosapiens.
That's what produces your emotions, negative and positive, which you need to survive and thrive, to be sure. If you hit the lever of pleasure over and over and over again, you're tapping the limbic system and you're being managed by those pleasures. That's the reason that your friends from high school that wanted to feel good all the time are still living in their mom's basement because they couldn't make anything otherwise because they were being managed by their limbic systems. Delayed gratification is that other part.
Well, it's among other things. I mean, the whole idea of what we're talking about here is the other part. So that's how we think of of hedonism. It's not Epicurus.
Epicurus talked about enjoyment, not pleasure. Pleasure and enjoyment are related, but pleasure is a component part of enjoyment. Enjoyment is pleasure plus people plus memory. It moves experience into the pre-fold cortex, executive centers of the brain, where you can manage your pleasures and you can make permanent memories.
So doing, that's why it's a component part of happiness, enjoyment. If you're doing something that's addictive and you're doing it alone, you're probably doing it wrong. That's the whole idea. That's really important to be curious because Epicurus is all about enjoyment, which means you're surrounding himself with people and they were talking about pleasant, non-conflictive big ideas and living in extremely deep moral existence.
This was not a constant drunken orgy that was going on. I do think the best Stoics had a strong Epicurean streak. The first person who, I mean, Epicurus trashed Epicurus, and it was a complete... What had you to do with it was just using him as a foil.
When I think Epicurus having a life filled with profound suffering, like first 30 years of his life, he's a slave, I think there's probably something about him just at a human level that's like, fuck that guy. That guy is a rich guy. That rich guy is communing with his weird cult. Yeah, he doesn't know anything about it.
He didn't have to... Nobody broke his leg for sadistic pleasure. Epicurus never had to see Nero's court. He probably looked at Epicurus the way some of us look at an academic philosopher or a guru or something.
You don't live in the real world. Or Mar-a-Lago. Right? I mean, something where I'm like, really?
Yes. So for sure, but that's not what Epicurus was all about. Epicurus, I mean, as Libertines, the Berkeley generation of 68, they couldn't have lived with Epicurus. They wouldn't have been able to put up with the rules because Epicurus' whole idea is if you're actually going to live in a state of semi-permanent enjoyment, you better not reduce the pleasure.
Yeah, better not reduce the pleasure. And that's a really important distinction. And so what we can learn from him today is about this pillar of happiness. Is Epicurean enjoyment as most Epicurean pleasure is one of the best ways that you can become happier.
It's incomplete. Indeed, it's incomplete. That's why the Stoics are better on the meaning pillar of happiness. The Moderns are better on the satisfaction part.
And Epicureans are really, really good on the enjoyment part. No, and that's why I say you fuse them together and you get something really powerful because there's actually something pretty Spartan about Epicurus, right? He's like, you know, there's a joke about the Spartans that hunger is the best flavor. You know, like, and there's something about him.
He reduces his needs down pretty low. And then he's like, this is great. Everything's awesome. I don't have to reach for anything.
I don't have to go without anything. It's all very accessible and practical and realistic. He's not saying pleasure is, you know, flying in a new Gulf Stream to have lunch in Paris. He's saying, you know, this small pot of cheese is miraculous if you think about how it was made and if you savor every bite of it.
That's right. And the whole idea is, I mean, on the satisfaction pillar, your animal impulse tells you that it's about what you have and having more, which is the Gulf Stream, et cetera, which leads to ruin. Absolutely personal. Talking about anything else is personal ruin because you're going to rev it's actually better described as what you have divided by what you want.
And the denominator is more important because a very efficient way to get greater satisfaction in your life is by decreasing the denominator by wanting less. And so this epicurean notion of wanting less, wanting less, wanting less, wanting less and washing your satisfaction, rising rise and rise or enjoyment in this particular case. But of course, asymptotically, it doesn't work. You can't go to wanting nothing.
Yeah. Because if you want nothing, well, I mean, wanting for nothing, I suppose, that's a heaven, I guess, which is not what he was trying to create. I just think like I think about his garden and the simplicity and the beauty and the long evenings. It's a pretty simple thing.
Right. What it is is really in modern thinking and in Buddhist thinking, but really modern thinking, it's really a lot of mindfulness. And that mindfulness is a very hard thing to do because the human brain, the prefrontal cortex is designed for you to time travel retrospectively, prospectively and mindfully. Those are the three time zones that are actually in your head all the time.
Most people spend the least amount of their time here now that they don't spend their time mindfully. So Marty Seligman, a migrate mentor in the positive psychology of his and happiness, he says that we shouldn't be called, we shouldn't be called a homo-sapiens. We should be called homo-prospectis because we live in the future. It's 20 to 50% of your cycles on average are living in the future.
If you're an entrepreneur or a striver, the whole audience for the show is more like 80% of your time is there and you're missing your life. Epicurus is going to miss your life. He's saying, actually, this is better than the vacation that you are pining for this present moment. Don't build castles in the sky.
Don't do that. And don't be wishing that you could go backwards in time. Don't be enjoying your memories and don't be enjoying your fantasies. Enjoy this now.
And that's super hard to do. As a matter of fact, there's all kinds of evidence that our brain isn't even designed to do that very well. When you put people in fMRI machines and you say, think about nothing, then you turn on the default network instead of structures in your brain, you'll start thinking about the future automatically. Well, there's a famous letter that Epicurus writes where he goes, on this, the happiest day of my life, the day of my death, and that's what the letter opens.
He's trying to, he's trying to, he's saying, and again, for people who think that Epicureanism is hedonism, he's trying to say, you can be happy on the day that you die. So it's definitely not related to what you have. And it's not because he has some delicious last meal or something. He's just saying, this is the day that I have now.
So it's the happiest day of my life. Right. I'm alive right now. Yes.
And being alive right now is awesome. Yeah. That's the whole thing. And good.
We should all try to do that more. I'm never good at you. But it was contemporary of Socrates. Yes.
So that was about 500 BC. And this is, of course, a notion that this came out of the Vedic and Hindu traditions. So Gautama, Prince Gautama, Siddhartha, Buddhist Prince, Hindu Prince, completely sheltered from ordinary life, very, very rich. I wonder what's outside the walls of my castle.
It goes outside and he sees all the suffering for the very first time in his life and questions everything that he's ever been taught. This is, you know, approximately 500 BC, decides to, you know, figure it out on his own. Becomes a complete acetic, right? Just like the mendicant, she sees everything.
It doesn't eat anything, starving, miserable, the whole thing. And he realizes that that in itself is a form of attachment, that asceticism is a form of attachment. And under the Bodhi tree, where he's setting, which is still, you know, famous, famous metaphor for all kinds of enlightenment that we would get, he figures out the eightfold path of Buddhism. Fundamentally, that philosophy is based on these four noble truths.
The first is that life is, this is dukkha in Sanskrit. Life is suffering. That's actually not a good translation. It should be it.
And you'll appreciate this as a stoic. Life is dissatisfaction. That's what it really should be. Because it is.
It's not satisfying. It's not the way you want it to be. And there's a reason for that. We're aspirational creatures, which is why we're so unhappy and we're so successful because we're in the hunt.
The first thing that we're talking about is the whole truth is that the source of our dissatisfaction is attachment, attachment to worldly things. The third noble truth is that the secret to actually breaking free from this dissatisfaction is detachment from these things. And the fourth thing you're like, okay, okay, okay. And then the fourth noble truth is the eightfold path of Buddhism, which is the rest of your life in a whole bunch of other lives.
It's like, ahhhh. It's what it comes down to, which is why Buddhism is hard. It's a really, really hard thing. But this sets in motion, this whole idea that, and it's a fundamentally non-theistic religion, whereas Hinduism that it's sprang from, is profoundly theistic.
And that is core. And it's what people really understand about Hinduism. It's not a thing. It's a family of related religions in the Indian subcontinent, largely in the Indian subcontinent, with a few other outposts like Bali, that where they're related, but they're very non-trivial differences between the variants of it.
Fundamentally, at its most esoteric forms, it's profoundly monotheistic. And it's very much like Christianity insofar as you have Brahman, which is the Godhead, has Brahman, Vishnu and Shiva, which are the three manifestations, three in one kind of Trinity, and then a whole bunch of other avatars and manifestations of God. The Buddhists are really different than that. Really we come out of a very different tradition than that.
And that's why Christianity is much closer to Hinduism than it is to Buddhism. We think of the karmic religions as kind of all the same, big differences, as it turns out. And Buddhism took over almost a whole subcontinent for hundreds of years. And then there's a Ray Conquista where Hinduism came back.
And the reason that this Indian subcontinent is largely Hindu today is because of the claim, the argument based on evangelists that were going through the countryside saying, don't you want God? Don't you want God? Don't you want to have a relationship with God who loves you, God who created you? And be like, yeah, what the?
Again, that convergent evolution, that there is some part of this human condition that wants that. Anthropologists have studied this whole, and again, for those who are Hinduists who are like throwing stuff at the laptop right now, sorry, I mean, this is a- This is a religious studies interpretation. Yeah, well, this is a Catholic who spent the last 12 years studying with Dalai Lama, okay, so which is an appropriate humility on this. But this is a really interesting thing because today we lump the karmic religions together and the Abrahamic religions together.
But in this case, Buddhism is super different than Abrahamic religions and especially different than Christianity, the goal of which is to live forever. The Buddhist goal in its essence is to break out of the cycle of birth and rebirth, which is because life is suffering and stayed at man. Yeah, to embrace the impermanence of it. Yeah.
So the Bhakavad Gita is the Hindu- It's one of the Hindu whole books. And that's the epic adventure of Lord Krishna, who's an avatar of Vishnu, the God Vishnu. What do you think that teaches us? So a lot because it's just huge- It's like the Odyssey.
It's like the Odyssey basically. And what it is, it's supposed to teach about life itself. Mm-hmm. It's the experiences of this guy who's an avatar, who's got a heavenly side.
It's sort of kind of a, what is it? The homeostatic union of metaphysical and physical in this guy and this Lord Krishna. And fundamentally, it's about him living this earthly existence, but a heavenly with a heavenly will. And the way I read it again with the perfect humility is that this is an opportunity for everybody to understand that there are spiritual beings living a physical existence that you are to.
Yeah. You would say in Christianity there's a Christ-likeness to Ryan. And that when you understand the metaphysical essence of who you are, not to be Gnostic, not to say that the body falls away because it's not important. In the contrary, it's the fusing of these two things.
It's the essence of life itself. And that you can have a profoundly metaphysical, spiritual transcendent existence in your ordinary life of like going into battle and marrying a girl and having your kids and paying your bills. And each one is, each one of us is kind of a microcosm of this larger spiritual- Yeah. And so people see themselves in Lord Krishna.
Yeah. That's the kind of see themselves in Ulysses. Yeah. They see themselves.
That's the whole point of a lot of these great epic. It's the hero's journey from India. Yeah. It really is.
It really is. And that's because there's nothing new under the sun. Sure. But oh, back to the point that you were making a minute ago, though, that anthropologists have found that there are no civilizations ever found that are not religious.
And that suggests that humans are built to worship. Humans are built. It doesn't mean every single person is religious because there's a ton of different experiences and different, I mean, just physical differences between people, to be sure. And the psychology being the biology, you might not have a very strong religious tendency.
You might or might not. Yeah. And different people do. But the whole point is in the main humans are made to worship.
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You just go to visit whatnot.com slash sell to start selling WHAT.com.com. Sell. It's interesting how easy it is to do the kind of religious studies interpretation of all the religions about your own. You know, you'd be like, this is what they taught.
This is where they live. This is how it evolved. This is what it meant. This is the technology in it.
Like this is why it worked. But it's fascinating to me in Athens this summer, you're standing at the pain of porche and stoic, fille, stoicism comes and you go, wait, wait, so St. Paul came here, met with the stoics. And then they walked up together next to the Acropolis and he gave one of the most famous speeches in all of Christianity.
And when you just read the Christian version, you're like, this is the Christian, you're not thinking that all of these faiths and ideas are intermixing with each other and walking the earth like Jesus and Seneca are alive in the Roman Empire. They're both teaching philosophical teachings. One we come to call religion and the other stays philosophy. But what do you think philosophically that the broad strokes Christian tradition can teach us?
And that's harder for me because I'm in the middle of it. So that's what I mean. I go to Mass literally every day. So for me, you're stoic.
I'm Catholic. Yeah. So you've got some of that. I think that's why I say it's the ones with me because they have the same cardinal virtue.
Well, yeah, for sure. But also it's worth pointing out that one of the reasons Catholicism Christianity is unbelievably imperialistic. It's just give me that's good. I'll take it.
Yeah. I like it. You need a imperialistic and they just take from anything and then absorb it and then invent it. It's sort of the America of religions.
They like to come on this thing. It's a melting pot and which is not to say that it's not true. The contrary, actually I really, I really, really believe it as a person. But I recognize that the best way for you to understand it, even from the inside, is by understanding the influences from the outside.
That's a really important thing to do. And even in the ancient world, by the way, there was a lot of Eastern philosophy that was warming its way into it because there were a lot of people coming from all over the place. I mean, you look at what in the Acts of the Apostles, what was going on in early Christianity and they talk about people meeting from all over the world. And so the idea that somehow because of the internet, we're able to see what's going on.
No, no, no, then too. Yeah, we think of the Romans as being like blonde with blue eyes or something. But Denmark or something, right? Yeah.
It's like, no, no, there's profoundly influenced by Carthage and Turkey and, you know, like, I mean, the Romans land, Roman explorers land in China during markets releases, right? And so you're like, this is, they're all intermingling. But anyways, what's the main Christian philosophical truth that we make? So the Christian philosophical truth, well, truth, the advance as far as I see it.
And again, this is where my humility is. I have to hit its apogee because, you know, I'll be learning this for the rest of my life and my wife's the theologian, by the way. So I mean, I'm getting, I'm getting, you know, I'm mainlining it at home all of a sudden. So Christianity is purely about the space of moral aspiration, right?
It doesn't deny that there is animal impulse. It doesn't say that animal impulse is evil, but it's all about getting as far into being the person that you're meant to be, which is in the image of God as you possibly can. And so worked out version of the entire method of actually how to do that. And so often people ask, what is it?
What added essence? What is it? Your animal impulse for you to live the best possible life is sort of three principles. Yeah.
And the three principles are love things, use people and worship yourself. That's animal impulse. And the reason is because stuff out there is like, I want, I want to be your cave, I want more animal skins, I want to be a buffalo jerky, I want to share more people in the ancient environment. We were, we lived in bands of 30 to 50 individuals, slaves and conquered.
But even before that, I mean, in our environment. So, so even in the time of, you know, the ancient philosophers, they were still, that was a graft from the brain that had, the human brain that had been evolved 250,000 years ago, which hasn't changed very much. And we've had the more or less the same intelligence for the past since the beginning of the place to see about a quarter million years ago. And so we're designed to be a kin-based hierarchical species.
And we want to rise in that. And that means that other people are there for our pleasure and advancement. Yes. That's how we see other individuals.
And now of course we bond to them as kin and we have, you know, all this biochemistry that makes us, you know, you see your kids and oxytocin goes, right, et cetera. But fundamentally, your people are there for your pleasure and use. And then you're the center of everything because, you know, the prefrontal cortex has got you in a psychodrama, which in the psychodrama is, you know, it's Ryan's lunch and Ryan's money and Ryan's podcast and Ryan's bookstore and Ryan Ryan. It's so boring.
Yeah. And so the result is the animal, the world of animal impulse, it makes you animal successful and utterly miserable. And God, according to the Catholic Church, according to the Christian religion, can set you free to your moral, to your moral aspirations. And that has a different formula.
It's like, this is kind of the transition from Old Testament to New Testament, right? Like, like, right? It's like clans and families and people doing fucked up stuff to each other, then Jesus, and everything after Jesus is about this more aspiration. That's the new covenant.
Yes. The new covenant, which is that, you know, today I give you a new teaching. Love your enemies and pray for those in person. Matthew 544, the sermon of the Mount, sums it up, right?
And, well, I mean, the summary is a Shema, which is do the wrong in me five. You will love the Lord, your God, with all your heart and all your soul and all your means in the original translation. That means, all right. When you got, you're going to love the Lord.
And then Jesus says, and you'll love your neighbor as yourself. Well, that's what I'm going to say. Hillel's summary, he's asked to, you know, define Christianity while standing on one leg. And he says, love thy neighbor as thyself, all the rest is commentary.
I mean, okay, love God, love God. And that's huge because everything in that is about faith. Right. Somebody you can't see with whom you have apparently one side of conversations, a lot of cumbersome rules.
No, no, no, love him. And that's really important. Why? Because Aquinas in 1265 defined love is to wield a good of the other as other not standing your feelings, which is super, but very stoic, very stoic.
Love is to wield a good of other people, whether you feel it or not, because it's not a feeling. It's an action. Yeah. It's an action.
It's a decision. It's a commitment. Right. It's a, and that's huge.
And that's really, really central Christianity. It's a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a good life. Which is the formula, which is different. It, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it's like love things use people worship yourself.
Yeah. It's kind of changed the verbs and nouns around use things. Right. Yeah.
And abundance. Beautiful. Dominion over the, yeah. For sure.
But it's, it's great. Yeah. It's great. It's great.
Love people. Love people. Because that's what we're made to do is to, that's what we were just talking about. Sure.
And worship Lord. Right. And worship God. Because only God is made for worship.
Sure. Clash with the Christian so much. And you realize what a radically transgressive idea Jesus is bringing into the world by saying, love the neighbor as they self. Good Samaritan care, basically care about.
Other enemies. Right. But care about the people that the Roman Empire uses up. Right.
And smashes and destroys when they get in it, like, when you read about the Roman Empire is fascinating as it is, you go unless you're the emperor or a senator or one of the families, it's a shitty place to be. Right. And so what, what, what, what the Christian, sort of invention is that, no, no, no, it's actually, you know, the Mike Helen here. It's, it's the little guy that actually matters.
Right. That's who you have to care about. And the Roman philosophy of might makes right is then is articulated again and again and again and again throughout history, most of it will be Nietzsche. And then Ein Rand.
I mean it comes back and it comes back and it comes back and it comes back and it comes back and it comes back and it defends against ourselves Christianity. Christianity is always the defense. No, no, no, no, no. Read it again.
Read it again. The truth of the matter is this, you know, the whole concept of the enlightenment is problematic as it is for Christianity. Comes from the idea that if you, and again, this is Matthew 544 in the sternum of the Mount where he says this, like, Jesus says this crazy thing. He says, you have heard that you should hate your enemies and love your friends today.
I give you a new teaching, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. The most transgressive teaching of all time, which is use things, love people, worship God. It's the gospel of love, notwithstanding your feelings. It comes down to this stoic principle that comes through the metaphysics of the stoic principle.
It's like fight against that lower part of your nature to aspire to the Christ-like part of your nature. That's what you want to do. And that will give you the best life. That will give everybody the best life.
That's what you're supposed to be. That's how you get to heaven and heaven starts here is a pullback. But by the way, this changed back to philosophy, you know, the idea in ancient Roman times and most of history forever is it might mix right that if you want their people who disagree, coercion is the only tool. Negotiation and persuasion come from that idea that you can love your enemy.
Sure. Well, then your enemy, yeah, even if they're wrong, even if they do bad things, you're equal in some sense. And by the way, if you persuade somebody, it's win-win. If you negotiate with somebody, it's win-win.
If you coerce somebody, it's win-lose. We went from a world of win-lose into one that's largely win-win because of this idea. The Crusades in religious war is not mistaken. Of course, because it's always the exceptions.
Well, that's the human. Of course. That's the animal impulse that's puncturing its way into the moral aspiration again and again, and it will always be thus. We'll do kind of a lightning round with some of these other ones as we wrap up because we've got it done.
We've got it done. We've got it done. Really? I thought it was like 15 minutes.
We'll be here for five hours. I think I'm Rand is interesting. I always loved Christopher Hitchens rejoined her to the idea of the virtue of selfishness. And he said, I'm not really sure humans need any help in that department.
I know. And I've always felt that there's an interesting parallel or contrast between the allegory, the cave, which we're talking about, and Galt's Gulch in Atlas Shruck. It's like, hey, the little guys are parasites that are taking from you. They don't appreciate your genius.
They don't understand that you know truth. But to your fantasy world where only the smart entrepreneurs and the genius is hanging out, fuck everybody else. That is the opposite of what Plato was saying you do with enlightenment. But it's quite neat, it's really quite neat.
There's a version of that in more modern America that I love. It's my favorite philosopher. Okay. Ralph Walden Emerson.
I love Emerson. You think he's like, he's Randian, but not awful. Several lines is everybody should read several lines. Yes.
Several lines is like a tall glass of cool water on a summer day in Bastrop, Texas. It's noicism in Christianity mixed together. But with a little Randianism, a little objectivism there, right? It's like the sturdy lad from Vermont, New Hampshire, who builds it, makes it, farms it, and always lands on his feet like a cat.
That's a moral superiority as far as Emerson is concerned. But the difference between Rand and Emerson is that guy, although most of his money comes from his dead wife, but he's funding the whole transcendental scene. He's paying for it. He's generous.
He's helping slaves on the Underground Railroad. He's a good friend. He is generous to a fault, right? The obligation is there.
That's why the Rand stuff doesn't do it for me, but Emerson, here's the problem that I have, though. Here's my internal conflict. I'm a Catholic. And Emerson is like a...
He's a... Well, he's a heretical Unitarian. Yeah. Right?
Which, you know, we think of Unitarianists today as people who believe in up to one God. Right? Yeah. And it's all cool, man.
But no, no, no. Unitarianism was a real, it was a real going concern, knowing that part of the 19th century, 1840s, et cetera. But the rugged individualism, which just speaks to me, I love it. I love it so much.
That's the best part of what being American is supposed to be. That's what it's supposed to be. And the matter is that it's very, very incomplete because we need community. We need people.
I believe we need God. We need to transcend ourselves. We need to transcend ourselves to transcend ourselves to the divine and transcend ourselves toward one another. What about nature, though?
Emerson would say nature is that form of trans- Sort of. I mean, but basically he's individuals. And so I'm always my inner conflict is that in fact that I'm 75% right on board with the Pope, but there's that 25% of Emerson is calling it me all. And I have a big, big, strong libertarian streak in me, but it's an Emersonian libertarian streak.
That's what it is. It's a kind of mild creepiness that actually comes from the radical me only and the weak are cursed. If it's liberty fused with a strong sense of personal obligation in virtue, it works. If it's you're free to do whatever you want and fuck these guys.
It's pretty vicious. Everybody. Everybody, but me. That's a problem.
It seems to me, and there is a balance in there, and this is actually one of the things that's really great about studying multiple philosophies, which of course you've done, is that you don't, you can live in multiple roles at the same time. You can understand yourself out of the problem is, and this is the academic problem is when you go in one particular direction, you're not actually going to be testing any of your ideas as a result of that. And that's how you can get more and more and more and more weird and wrong. And that's a lot of what's happening in academia, these weird exotic ideas of a human person that lead to these fads and panics and American life and ruined universities, cancel culture and radical activism and the whole anger that we see in a lot of it today has to do with the fact that we're just not good intellectuals enough.
So speaking of a multi-disciplinary approach, let's go back in time a little bit. He doesn't get a school attached to him, but I think Montaigne is a very little bit Montaigne. Really? I mean, I've read Montaigne, but I know very little bit.
But I think it's interesting that all these guys, he doesn't get a school but has so much to teach us about intellectual humility. But epistemic humility is where that comes from. Yes. What do I know?
And curiosity, I just think it's fascinating, I have a book in the book, it's my favorite biography of him, but like the idea of when you realize he was living in the middle of the Reformation and the counter-Reformation where thousands of people are being burned at the stake for having different religious beliefs and he's like, what do I know? And they're discovering the new world. And people are like, oh, it's filled with cannibals. And he's like, we draw and quarter people.
We're not so great. And I think there's something beautifully open minded and yet based in very much in the classics in Montaigne that's worth. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Every time I read Montaigne, I wish I knew more for sure.
And it's funny because there's a balance there too. I mean, you can become the syndicos, everything is, everybody's fat and stupid, right? But that's not a good way to live either. I mean, it's a good thing to say, to actually be able to recognize all the wonderful things that your culture does well, maybe better than other places, and then want to share it as opposed to being triumphalist about it.
And then also having an open mind to say there are other things that we can learn we can be better at at the same time. Yes. He traveled a lot and one of the lines about him is that he loved meeting anyone, he came across on his travels except other Frenchmen. He didn't need to meet another.
He was French. He wanted to meet people who are different than. Yeah. Yeah.
That makes sense. And you see that a lot. You see that a lot with people who are really trying to learn about the outside world. There's almost nothing more annoying knowing the people from their own hometown.
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What about Camou? Oh, yeah. So the absurdist school often distinguished from the existentialists, of course. Camou is super interesting.
I mean, Camou is, because his medium, he's kind of like a fine Rand in the sense that he was a novelist. He's actually good at it. He's a couple of them short and exciting and interesting. And there's no 90 page speeches.
There's no 90 page speeches. That's absolutely true. Camou is a, I mean, so what's, if we read one, Camou, we'll read the mythicists, right? That's the one thing to read.
I remember trying to read it in eighth grade. We're talking happiness. That's the one we should. That's the one to read.
And I've written about the mythicists because there's one key idea in the mythicists that I just tried to, I mean, there's a lot of stuff that Camou says about. And it's basically this. Something as cicipient is an exercise in futility. The whole idea of something's futile.
He's pushing the boulder up the hill. He almost gets to the top and falls by the gummy. So this is the Greek myth of ciciphas, which is being punished for all time by never being able to accomplish his task, is the whole thing. And he goes through this and he does a philosophical treatise on this, but here's the last part, the last point that Camou makes.
The most important point is what everybody misses, because everybody's like, yes, ciciphas, that's suck. Yeah, life is like that. Life is kind of absurd and dumb, right? You roll it up and it rolls back down.
That's just like another day, another day, another day. But Camou says in the end, one must suppose that ciciphas was a happy man because he had something that's the point. That's the point is that he had a purpose. Was it a futile purpose?
Yeah, but welcome to life, man. I mean, just feed yourself and keep your biological organism running and try to pass on your genes a little bit. And you're actually just like everybody else and trying to pretend that you've got this unique goal and it's got this mission, unlike any, you know, a world historic figure here, you know, and actually you're just like absolutely everybody else and you're rolling the boulder up and just rolling back down. But you know, God bless you, you got something to do.
Lucky you. When I think fascinating about Camou and I'm just starting to read about him more, is he's supposed to be the embodiment of these modern philosophers who like Nietzsche. God is dead. It's all meaningless.
Stupid absurd silly. Then you look at his life and here he is speaking out about the moral issues of his time. He's in the French resistance in World War II. He is actively, this is not an I list in practice and he is in fact, you know, in the thick of he is involved in public life in the way that stoics say you have to be involved in public life.
Because you can't work out your ideas unless you're completely alive, which is what they go. But also they aren't ideas. They're ways to live. You have to be the philosophers, not just the person who arranges them well on the page, which is the problem with the procures, because he was sitting in his garden, right?
He was actually out. He wasn't out in the world. He was a great religious movement, by the way, have been those that are in the world. It's really interesting when you actually look at it, even in the Catholic world, you find these great movements that are trying to work for a better world in the individual world.
Catholic worker, but even some that are not utopian and not even progressive at all. What they're trying to do is to build a better world and they're understanding their own theology, like Mother Teresa, through the way that they're lifting people up at the margins of society and in the poorest places in the world, which is a really interesting thing. And an important thing to do, and that's kind of a kind of kamoo in the way that he's actually living his life which we don't remember, of course, but then you get sartra sitting there smoking up, you know, Campbell Strait and the Galois and his, you know, Sippin and his Breso. And he was kind of living this intellectual existence, this hermetically sealed existence, which is one of the reasons that when you read Campbell, you're like, I can kind of understand life through this and you read Sartre, at least I read Sartre and I'm like, I gotta get it.
I'm gonna get it. This is all theory. This is just theory, as far as I'm concerned. Well, I think the fall and both the fall and the plague are two striking books for this moment.
I mean, the fall is basically this smart guy's walking through the streets of Paris and he hears someone go into the river and he's busy. So it's like, well, not my problem. Right. I mean, I, the idea later that he could have done something.
It's a moral allegory about indifference, dude suffering and pain of someone else. It's basically, he's talking about World War II, but he's probably also talking about people like Sartre who are philosophers in this moment where the world is on fire and they go, I'll get some reading to do. I know. And we didn't even talk about the Russians who are contemporaneous to the Russian existentialists.
We're having this huge moment. I mean, you gave me the diurea wisdom from Tolstoy. The calendar of wisdom, yeah. The calendar of wisdom you gave the last time I was here as a matter of fact.
Yeah. Yeah. And Tolstoy and Dostoy are having this huge moment right now. This is the next big thing for young people.
I think so. For sure. I think that our people are continuing to be super interested in, in stoicism, but the Russians and apparently, and how do I know this because my publisher says that everybody, there's manuscript after manuscript is coming in about the, about Russian existentialism, largely on the Tolstoy Dostoy. You have to see who are contemporaneous but didn't know each other.
But a lot of what we're talking about here, you can learn just by reading Brothers K. Well, what's interesting too about that Tolstoy book is that. Calendar of wisdom. It's so good to read right for bed.
And it's very, I mean, there's a lot of Catholic teaching. Yeah. Yeah. But he was super religious.
Yes. But what I thought was interesting is I did a lot of research on Gandhi for the justice book. And it was actually, so people know, you know, civil disobedience. So they think there's this through line from emmers from throw to Gandhi who were not that far apart in time.
But actually, Gandhi finds out about the row through Tolstoy and you go, Oh, okay, this is, this is how it's all floating around. And that it was his, it was Tolstoy's religious thinking, like, as far as we know, Gandhi doesn't read any of Tolstoy's fiction, but he reads his spiritual and religious writings. And that's partly what inspires like the movement. Yeah.
Well, then we get civil rights. Yeah. And the Dostoevsky stuff that is really coming back right now, and by the way, the probably the most interesting thing that informs a lot of the stuff from Tolstoy is autobiography. Where he talks about his near suicide at 51.
And he's looking for meaning. He's looking for me. I have a book coming out on meaning in March, the end of March called the meaning of her life. And it's one of the main first big chapter stars of the story of Tolstoy, where he says, I thought I could find meaning through my writing and I couldn't.
And then I tried to find meaning. By the way, one of the best and biggest to ever do it. Oh, yes, I could didn't work. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature four times.
Yeah. I mean, that's how, by the way, how new he is. Yes. The people is like 1910, you know, but he says, and then I looked to biology and science, which we were in this technocratic moment then, which Dostoevsky called the Palace of Crystal, which meant all a mathematically worked out world off a lot with AI.
Yeah. And he said, I looked for in biology and science and he studied assiduously and he couldn't find meaning there and he concluded that meaning didn't exist since his love. By the way, he had 13 kids. And so he had a lot going on.
And he said, I concluded that I've had no meaning. It was meaningless. And so I had nothing left to kill myself. So he goes off to just like, to a little village.
It was a little tiny little village. And he just lived doing the peasants who he was a super famous rich guy. Nobody knew who he was. Yeah.
Like nobody knew who he was. And they were illiterate and they were farmers and they were just going to church and saying their prayers and living their family lives and having their parties and having a good time and all that. Oh, meaning is love. Yes.
Meaning is love for God. Meaning is love for your family. Meaning is authentic friendship. Meaning is actually working for other people by sanctifying your work through what you do if it's plowing the field.
And he said, he understood meaning after that. And that's how he found meaning in his own life was by actually living his life in real life as opposed to using highfalutin ideas to try to find it somehow out in the ether. Which is ultimately, man. That's us too.
Sure. You know, it's us too. It's like, you know, your grandfather, grandfather holiday, you know, he never, I guarantee you never came home from work and said to your grandma, honey, I had a panic attack behind you. I had a panic attack behind the mule today.
It's too busy. Well, because he was too busy living. Yes. And he understood the meaning of his life.
That's a very tall story. I asked idea, very dusty. I asked idea. That's that people are starting to rediscover in these Russian existentialists.
Christian existentialists. So maybe to bring it to a close talking about meaning, talking about the existential vacuum, maybe we conclude with Franco. Victor Frankl. Yeah.
Man's search for meaning of his most famous book, of course. Yeah. Yeah. Well, he starts by quoting Nietzsche and the introduction of the book, he quotes Nietzsche.
And everybody says it's Victor Frankl because it sounds like Victor Frankl because Nietzsche, a man can can, can, what does he say? He can bear any what as long as he has a why. And Nietzsche and concept. But of course, Victor Frankl, his whole point was that meaning is everything.
Yeah. That if you don't know the name of your life, there is no reason for life. And that's one of the three pillars of happiness. There is enjoyment, there is satisfaction.
But meaning is absolutely the most important. And that's of course the one that is most absent today is meaning. The why of what we're actually doing. That's why I dare say, besides the fact that you're just an incredibly writer, people want your stuff because they want meaning.
They're looking for the meaning of their lives. And they can't find it in all the babbles and doodads and googas and nonsense that the distracting world is giving them. So this new book that I've got talks about how we've changed our brains, that we've walled off literally physically the parts of our brain that we need to assess questions of meaning. And the only way we can do that is by going back and living more like grandpa holiday, but with right all these books.
But also, I think maybe a through line between most of the philosophicals, particularly the eastern ones you talk about so much more specifically, Victor Frankl is saying, and then of course, his experience is confirming it, there is none of these things without suffering. You have to transform suffering into meaning. That's the trick of the human experience. And in fact, if you don't suffer, there is no meaning, which of course is one of the biggest mistakes that we make in the therapy industrial complex today is to say that if you're sat in anxious, there's a pathology that needs to be fixed.
Yeah. And they're studying at Harvard. If they're not sat in anxious, they need therapy. Right.
You know, that's the truth of the matter. And unless they lean into it, I mean, the great trick, the great stoic trick, the great Christian trick, the great trick of life is not just a start, you stay and say, I'm grateful for the things that are going to, that are going to enjoy this day is to say, I'm grateful for the suffering that will be following me this day. Bring it on. Yes.
I can handle it. That's what we're going to learn. I guess it's not even just I can handle it. It's just that my life is like, I will, I'm not fully alive unless I have a verse of experiences and I'm dealing with them like a responsible, grown up, fully developed person.
Yeah. And if meaning can be derived from suffering, then it means you can be happy and thrive in any condition and any kind of life. If happiness can only come from things going very well, then it's only available to a small percentage of people, a small percentage of the time. It's a much more resilient and robust formula.
That's right. And that's why that's where Epicureanism gets it wrong is that it's got one pillar of the happiness formula. Yeah. And there are a lot of people who are really, I mean, it's like they take what they see to be stoicism and they push it to the, okay, if it's not hurting me, I don't like it.