Speaker 1: Today, we're going to be speaking with David Fidler, who's the writer, philosopher
and also author of the recently published book Breakfast with Seneca, A Stoic Guide
to the Art of Living, which is a clear and accurate guide to the teachings of the stoic
philosopher Seneca.
David, it's really great having you on.
I appreciate it.
Speaker 3: Hey, it's great to speak with you, David.
Speaker 1: So particularly during the pandemic on social media and elsewhere, stoicism as
a philosophy has has become very, very much in vogue, with a lot of different people posting
everything from memes to articles about it.
And often there's this kind of very top level understanding that stoicism means showing
little emotion and just sort of being only slightly connected to the world around you,
which is not at all what the philosophy advocates for.
So.
So maybe we could start there with what?
What is the what is stoicism, right?
Speaker 3: That's a really good starting point and stoicism.
It's an ancient Greek and Roman philosophy of life.
But the issue that you're alluding to is the word stoic has actually changed to mean something
totally else.
Over the course of like many centuries, the philosophy itself is like twenty three hundred
years old, and now stoicism means to repress your emotions or keep a stiff upper lip.
And that has nothing to do with the original philosophy.
In fact, the Stoics were not unemotional in any way.
They experienced regular emotions and they thought they were fine.
The only problem that the Stoics had was with extreme negative emotions, which they felt
arose from incorrect opinions.
And they saw those extreme negative emotions as being things like anger, worry, anxiety
and things like that.
Speaker 1: So how did someone like Seneca?
What framework did Seneca advocate for for dealing with those negative emotions?
Speaker 3: OK?
One of the most central teachings of stoicism, this is something that all of the Roman Stoics
believed in.
And this is probably a huge takeaway for the people who are listening to this discussion
today is that their idea was that we can't control what actually happens to us, but we
can control how we respond to things.
They all believed in that.
And the main idea was that it's not really things or events that upset us, but the opinions
or judgments that we hold about things.
And an example of this that I use in the book is imagine it's like raining and you're walking
along one day and you walk by a big puddle and a car comes by and splashes you and you're
covered with water.
Well, someone might have the mental opinion that, well, I just got splashed, which is
a pretty objective way of looking at things.
But another person might think, Oh, you've ruined my entire day and then develop a sense
of anger and rage about that and then want to get even with the driver in some way.
So that shows how the opinions that we hold about things really influence our emotional
states or even act as the seed of these extreme negative emotions and this.
It's not.
Things are events that upset us, but the opinions we hold about things.
That's the origin of what is now known as cognitive therapy or cognitive behavioral
therapy.
And the Stoics really invented cognitive therapy.
That's what their theory of emotion was about.
And the modern people, the modern psychologists who invented cognitive therapy actually drew
on these stoic ideas and mentioned the Stoics by name.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, as I hear you talk about it, there's this book from the 20th
century by Victor Frankl man's search for meaning, which I don't think is overtly about
stoicism.
But he lays out in the context of surviving the Holocaust a very similar idea about he
could not control his circumstances, but he could control the reaction he had to those
circumstances, which seems quite similar.
Speaker 3: Exactly.
And I think there's a very famous saying attributed to him that our freedom exists and the fact
that we're able to pause before we make a decision or a judgment.
And that's really our source of freedom now.
Apparently, he didn't say that he went back to Rome, but the thought is the same and certainly
his his idea of, you know, is an exact parallel to that of the Stoics.
Speaker 1: One of the kind of big pushbacks and reactions.
As I see to this recent popularization of stoicism, our comments along the lines of,
yeah, that's really great to think about if your basic needs are met and you have time
to hang out on social media or reading books.
But if you're not sure where your next meal is coming from or you don't have housing or
you need health care and can't afford it.
Stoicism is not useful in that way, and it's another one of these sort of now becoming
commercialized ideas that spread on social media.
Well, how would you react to that critique of the popularization of stoicism?
Speaker 3: Well, I don't think that's really true, because now Seneca actually was very
wealthy.
The person the story philosopher I wrote the book about, he was actually one of the wealthiest
people in the Roman Empire.
But the earlier Greek Stoics weren't wealthy at all, and the most famous story to follow
him in Rome was Epictetus.
Epictetus was maybe like about 15 when Seneca died, and he was actually a slave.
So it was a philosophy that was embraced from slaves to Roman emperors, and certainly all
of these stoic ideas are applicable.
You know, by anyone today, it doesn't matter on your level of wealth.
In fact, the Stoics believed that our true goods lie within us, and they believe that,
you know, it's very valuable and it's an advantage to have like wealth, a beautiful family, a
beautiful house.
But it's only our inner character that allows us to use those things in a good way.
So for the Stoics, the most important part of life was really developing a good character.
And that's something they would say holds true for everyone with.
Speaker 1: If I recall correctly, Seneca had some views on crowds and mob mentality that
seemed like they might be relevant today to some degree, including to to media and sort
of some of the other modern things that humans today are presented with.
Can you talk a little bit about that?
Speaker 3: Sure.
Actually, Seneca has this story about how he went to see the gladiatorial games and
then people were being killed in front of his eyes and the crowd was cheering for the
death of the gladiators.
And the other people that were thrown into the ring.
And he was actually, as far as I can tell the first person to write about what is now
called a crowd or mob psychology, which was a study that developed in like the mid-1800s.
And people now study things like emotional contagions, things like that, and also how
we unconsciously assimilate the behavior of people that were exposed to.
And this this holds very true in today's sort of like internet world or Twitter world where
you know, you get these emotional contagions that seem to that seemed to float through
the internet.
And they're very contagious because sometimes you'll see like a video clip and you don't
have the full context of it.
And people are making judgments about it and denouncing it and things like that.
And it's very easy to get swept up in that kind of behavior.
And Seneca warned about that specifically.
If he was alive today, he would say, you know, take a step back and don't assent, you know,
immediately to the judgment of the crowd or the mob, but wait until things become clarified
and also, you know, be mindful of due process as well.
You can't make those judgments just based on a tweet.
Oftentimes, usually, you need further information.
Speaker 1: What was you write in the book about the value of time and of not postponing
what one wants to do sort of indefinitely?
Or, I mean, maybe even to any degree beyond what's kind of logistically necessary?
Can you talk a little bit about that and the connection to stoicism?
Speaker 3: Right?
Well, this is something that's really specific to Seneca.
He writes about this a lot, and he says that time is our most valuable asset.
So people are very careful about the way that they guard their wealth.
But when it comes to guarding their time, they don't even think about it usually.
And his idea is that people spend a lot of time rushing around and acting as though they're
preoccupied with things, whereas it's more of an act sometimes.
And he felt that we should be very careful about the way that we use our time.
What I would say he actually talks about, for example.
Like how people believe that they'll someday retire and they spend their entire life working,
but then he says, how do you know that you'll live to be 50 or 60 years old?
You could die any moment.
And his his idea was like finding some kind of balance between work and leisure.
And he would have agreed with the modern idea that we should work to live rather than live
to work.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that, you know, sometimes you you get these distortions, I guess I would
say of some of these precepts and they are sort of exaggerated and taken to the extreme
where like what you just said would be taken to mean, you know, this kind of you only live
once, don't plan for the future at all kind of mentality.
But really, it seems to me the value in thinking about these things is about finding some kind
of balance that that makes sense rather than picking some extreme to adhere to.
Speaker 3: Exactly.
And that's something that everyone really has to deal with on their own because everyone's
life is different.
So how one person will find the kind of balance between life and work will be different than
another person.
But it's certainly an important question to think about
Speaker 1: going back a little bit to the social contagion thing, which you know you
explained and I think is really clear when it comes to like stuff on the internet as
an example.
When you look at the socio political system, maybe specifically in the United States, what
are some other areas in which this social contagion is taking place that would be interesting
to to be aware of?
Speaker 3: Well, I think actually one of the reasons that this has become such a phenomenon
is it's exacerbated by the internet.
And another aspect of it also is that the internet has been very good for many things.
For example, we can have discussions like this, but in other ways, I think it's been
very, very negative because people base journalistic coverage now on the number of clicks that
stories get.
So journalism has become very clickbait.
And it's also really harmed, you know, serious print journalism.
So basically, journalists and the media have every reason to encourage people getting angry
about things, for example, because you know, it's those stories that make people angry
that usually have the highest, you know, click through rates.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
And I mean, we see that daily where a story that we spend a while researching about to
take today, you know, the build up to what's going on with Russia and Ukraine, right?
It just is not going to generate even a fraction of the interest that Joe Biden calling that
Fox reporter a son of a bitch yesterday is going to generate.
And if you ask me, which is most substantively valuable, it's obviously the geopolitical
impact with historical implications of the Ukraine Russia thing.
But it's not it for all the reasons you're talking about, it's just not going to do as
well.
Speaker 3: Right?
You know, another thing, too, is that you have this huge media platforms now.
And so they have a certain amount of space allotted for, you know, the so-called news
so that if nothing's happening, they actually have to fill it with something.
Yes.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
No, that that's that's certainly an issue as well when it comes to Marcus Aurelius is
often sort of your book focuses on Seneca, but you mentioned Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus
Aurelius kind of the third in the maybe most three known Stoics.
What does his perspective did his perspective differ in significant ways from that of Seneca?
Speaker 3: Mm hmm.
It's really interesting because when I was researching the book, I looked into this in
a great deal of depth, and it's surprising how similar the views of the three main Roman
Stoics were.
For example, an average reader wouldn't notice this, but.
All three of the Roman Stoics believed that when you were on your deathbed that you should
feel a sense of gratitude when you're dying for the gift of life that the universe has
given to you.
Hmm.
And I find that to be amazing, and that for them would be a mark of a life that was, well,
well lived.
And that was the whole point of philosophy is to live a life that's truly worth living.
So if you felt a deep sense of regret on your deathbed, that would probably mean that you
felt that you had made some very serious errors in your life.
Another idea that I think is very important for people today that comes from the Stoics,
all of the Stoics believed in this.
They were the most pro-social philosophers in the ancient world, and they taught that
we should all contribute to society.
Marcus Aurelius was obsessed with this.
His meditations is a pretty short book, but he he reminds himself like, this is personal
notebook.
He reminds himself 80 times to contribute to the common good.
And and the Stoics didn't believe these things in the way that a religious person would believe
them because they were philosophers.
So they always had an argument for this.
And their argument was that all people are born with the faculty of Reason, which makes
us rational creatures.
And it also makes us equal to one another.
So the Stoics were the first philosophical school to say that human beings were equal
to one another, the idea of human equality.
And it also means that because we have this spark of reason in common, there's a, you
know, universal brotherhood or sisterhood of humanity that we're all part of.
And that means we should help each other.
And over the course of centuries, it took a very long time.
This stoic idea led to the idea of human rights equality and ultimately to the elimination
of slavery.
In some ways, because the Enlightenment philosophers who are talking about human rights and criticizing
the institution of slavery were very familiar with these stoic views and drew upon them
Speaker 1: incredible historical context.
And some of what we've been talking about today is in the book Breakfast with Seneca,
A Stoic Guide to the Art of Living.
We've been speaking with the book's author, writer and philosopher David Fidler.
Really appreciate your time today and your insights.
Speaker 3: Great.
It's been wonderful speaking with you.