Philosophy

In The Virtues of War Alexander the Great comes to a river crossing only to be stopped by a philosopher who’s standing in his way. Irritated, a man from Alexander’s crew shouts, “This man has conquered the world! What have you done?” Unmoved, the philosopher looks at him and says, “I have conquered the need to conquer the world.”

Though a fictional conversation, it’s an accurate representation of the difference between Alexander the Great and Diogenes the Cynic. Unlike Alexander, Diogenes wasn’t concerned with his image or his ego. He had few wants. He was more powerful than the ruler of the world—because he was the ruler of himself.

Last month I read and took notes on Ryan Holiday’s Discipline is Destiny. For this post, I filtered out everything but a few key takeaways and tied in ideas from The Daily Stoic and Ego is the Enemy.

Ambition Requires Balance

Ambition, Ryan writes, can easily become an addiction. And it’s the worst kind. Because, unlike gluttony or drinking, society rewards ambition. When it comes to successful people, he says, “we don’t ask them what they are doing or why they are doing it, we only ask them how they do it. We conveniently ignore how little satisfaction their accomplishments bring them, how miserable most of them are, and how miserable they tend to make everyone around them.”

It’s important to note that ambition is a good thing; what’s harmful is unfettered ambition. It’s the millionaire who has time for everyone except his own family. It’s the professional athlete who won’t retire. This isn’t freedom—it’s slavery. Slavery to ambition. On the flip side, however, lying around all day with no aspirations is not ideal either.

Ambition, like virtue, requires balance. It requires what Aristotle called the “golden mean”—the middle ground between excess and deficiency. For example, when it comes to pride, the virtuous person isn’t excessively proud, but neither is she excessively humble. She has a modest, self-respecting confidence. The same with courage—the courageous person is somewhere between recklessness and cowardice.

And living within this golden mean is easier when we’re aware of what we—not other people—value.

What We Actually Require

The All-Star forward Kawhi Leonard signed a four-year contract with the L.A. Clippers for $176 million. Still, Ryan writes, he drives his 1997 Chevy Tahoe that he’s had since high school. Not because he’s cheap, but because, “the things that matter to [him] are cheap”. 

When it comes to money, all you really need is enough to not have to do what you don’t want to do, and enough to stick with your main thing (e.g. painting, coding, writing, fund-raising, filming, care-taking—whatever it is that gets you out of bed in the morning). If we don’t know the answer to how much money is enough, the default answer becomes more.

Again, it’s a balance. Extreme generosity on one end, extreme greed on the other. If you give away everything you own, it would be impossible for you to live a good life and flourish. You would end up depriving yourself, and the world, of your best. On the flip side, if you sweat every penny or are a slave to consumption, you’re also not doing yourself, or the world, any good.

Self-discipline, temperance, moderation, whatever you want to call it, is not about deprivation. It’s an opportunity for freedom. “In the last analysis,” Bernard Baruch said, “our only freedom is the freedom to discipline ourselves.”

Unrestrained Moderation

Marcus Aurelius was the literal ruler of the world. He had more responsibilities than anyone. Yet he would remind himself to “not be all about business.” To have “unrestrained moderation” in all things. Not to be too selfless or too selfish, not to be too timid or too reckless, not to work too hard or too little. “Not to be constantly telling people (or writing them) that I’m too busy, unless I really am. Similarly, not to always be ducking my responsibility to the people around me because of ‘pressing business.’”

What’s incredible is that he had unlimited wealth and power, yet his focus was on being a good person. “Just that you do the right thing,” he told himself, “the rest doesn’t matter. Cold or warm. Tired or well-rested. Despised or honored.” He knew, like Diogenes the Cynic, that good character—not money or power—was the real source of freedom.

Author Steven Pressfield said most people pay attention to their careers, communities, finances, etc. “Not me,” he says. “I put my attention on the unknown or as-yet-unrevealed content of whatever book or story I’m working on.” If you’re in the creative or entrepreneurial realm, “what you’re interested in is something that doesn’t exist yet. Or, perhaps more accurately, something that does exist but whose contours have not yet revealed themselves.”

The idea of what doesn’t yet exist, which is this email’s theme, has shown up in recent stories I’ve read…

The Next Most Necessary Thing

On December 15, 1933, a woman named Frau V. asked Carl Jung how to best live her life. The short answer: no one can tell you. “One lives as one can,” Jung replied. If she wanted a definite answer, a definite path, she “had best join the Catholic Church, where they tell you what’s what.”

The individual path, he explained, is never prescribed. You won’t know what it is in advance. It doesn’t yet exist. All you can do, he said, is the “next most necessary thing”; put one foot in front of the other.

The next most necessary thing. That’s how you live your life, how you make your own way. That’s how you create what doesn’t yet exist.

What Could Be

Coach Hal Mumme revolutionized American football. From the beginning of his coaching career in the late 70s, Mumme was obsessed with creating the perfect pass. He traveled the country in search of information, picking the brains of forward-thinking coaches who weren’t afraid to throw the ball. He learned Bill Walsh’s West Coast offense. He studied Glen “Tiger” Ellison’s radical yet brilliant run-and-shoot offense, which involved spreading the field and forcing the defense to cover more ground. He learned Darrel “Mouse” Davis’s pass-heavy, option-friendly improvement to the run-and-shoot. He studied the films of BYU—one of America’s greatest passing offenses in 1985. From the Canadian Football League’s second-winningest coach, Don Matthews, he learned the power of the 2-minute drill. (Mumme would sometimes run the 2-minute drill throughout an entire game, demolishing stronger and faster teams in the process). 

What pushed him to keep learning, experimenting, synthesizing, and creating was the feeling that there was still something missing. He had a vague notion that these ideas could be made into a repeatable system. He couldn’t have known it at the time, but by keeping his attention on what could be, on what did not yet exist, he would eventually develop this system, the legendary Air Raid offense (parts of which are used today by everyone from the Bowling Green State University Falcons to the San Francisco 49ers), and forever change the way football is played.

The Art of Living

Marcus Aurelius says to himself, and us, “You have proof in the extent of your wanderings that you never found the art of living anywhere—not in logic, nor in wealth, fame, or in any indulgence.” Where, then, is the good life found? In actions based on the principles of justice, self-control, courage, and wisdom.

Like Jung, Marcus said life’s meaning is found in action. It’s not found by asking a wise person, or by reading thousands of books. It’s certainly not found in idle pondering. The meaning of life, as Viktor Frankl said, is not our question to ask. Life is asking us the question, at every moment.

We answer through our actions. We answer by doing the next most necessary thing, putting one foot in front of the other, imagining what’s possible, and moving closer to what could be.

Early in his career, professor and philosopher René Girard was asked to teach literature. For the first time, he read classic novels by authors like Dostoyevsky, Proust, and Flaubert. During his readings, Luke Burgis tells us, he noticed a pattern: none of the novels were plot-driven or character-driven; they were desire-driven. The object of the characters’ desires? Other characters’ desires. We are hardwired to imitate. Our desires, he realized, are mimetic.

Models of desire are all around us, which is why I’m using mimesis as this week’s theme…

To Be or To Do

The best American Fighter Pilot in history, John Boyd, first gave his famous “To Be or To Do” speech to the young Captain Raymond Leopold: 

“Tiger, one day you will come to a fork in the road, and you’re going to have to make a decision about which direction you want to go.” He raised his hand and pointed. “If you go that way you can be somebody . . . you will be a member of the club and you will get promoted and you will get good assignments.” Then Boyd raised his other hand and pointed another direction. “Or you can go that way and you can do something—something for your country and for your Air Force and for yourself . . . . you may not get promoted . . . .  and you certainly will not be a favorite of your superior. But you won’t have to compromise yourself. You will be true to your friends and to yourself. And your work might make a difference.”

To be somebody, or do something. To work for a title, or for a cause. To want what other people want, or what you want. To think mimetically, or purposefully.

Torches of Freedom

In 1929, the president of the American Tobacco Company asked public relations expert Edward Bernays to help rid the negative stigma around women smoking in public. Bernays agreed and decided on the perfect time and place: the Easter Day parade in New York City. The parade was a way for high-society New Yorkers to sashay down Fifth Ave, showing off for the feverish media and lower-class onlookers. Bernays convinced a few of the parade’s influential women to smoke while they strutted down the street. He made sure that the photographers and journalists covering the event referred to the women’s cigarettes as “torches of freedom”. It worked. Women began lighting up in public, a celebration of liberty. Within a year, sales of Lucky Stripe tripled.

Peter Thiel’s $500,000 Bet

Our tendency to model behavior is what makes Facebook so influential: it’s full of billions of models of desire. It’s not celebrities or pro athletes that influence us most, it’s the people who look like us. When asked about his $500,000 Facebook investment that earned him $1 billion, Peter Thiel told Luke Burgis, “I bet on mimesis”. 

Find Yourself a Cato

Roughly two millennia before Girard put a name to it, Epictetus saw mimetic desire firsthand. As a slave in Nero’s court, he witnessed the endless cycle of competition and conflict. He watched as people fought and conspired over power, money, and fame—things they wanted because other people wanted them.

Five hundred years before Epictetus, the Buddha recognized our proclivity to mimic what we see. We’re on the constant lookout for change, he said, which is why desires and cravings seize us from moment to moment. As Karen Armstrong writes, the Buddha understood that “we are consumed and distracted by the compulsion to become something different.” 

We’re inclined to become something different, but we’re also inclined to become something better. That’s why we have ambition, why we want to grow, why we work so hard: to become who we’re capable of becoming. And the best place to start? Choosing a model worth following, a person whose values align with ours, and whose example teaches and challenges us.

Seneca advises us to “choose ourselves a Cato.” Choose someone whose high standards encourage us to raise our own.

“If, at any moment, you are unable to name a great man who is, or has recently been, having an influence on your conduct,” Ernest Dimnet said, “you will be passing the verdict: ORDINARY on the quality of your own thought and existence.”

Find a model whose greatness inspires your own.

One day, as a small boy, the Buddha sat under a rose-apple tree and watched as the fields were plowed for the coming crop. As he looked on, he saw insects and their eggs destroyed during the plowing. This saddened him. As Karen Armstrong writes in Buddha, he “gazed at the carnage and felt a strange sorrow, as though it were his own relatives that had been killed.”

But then he felt something else: pure joy. The kind of joy that blooms in your chest when you’re absorbed in a moment, when you’ve forgotten yourself. The kind of joy that fades the second you become aware of it, when you attach an “I” to it.

“The child had been taken out of himself by a moment of spontaneous compassion, when he allowed the pain of creatures that had nothing to do with him personally to pierce him to the heart,” Armstrong writes. “This surge of selfless empathy had brought him a moment of spiritual release.”

His compassion for all living beings gave him his first taste of enlightenment. And this compassion came, in part, because he forgot about himself.

The Buddha said that the main reason we suffer is that we don’t see things clearly. And we don’t see things clearly because of our tendency to over-identify with our “self”, thoughts, and feelings.

But this doesn’t have to be the case. We too can decide to not take ownership of our thoughts and feelings.

The Buddha said our being (mind, body, soul) is in constant flux; we have no permanent “self”. Nowhere on your body can you point to and say “this is me”. We’re constantly changing from moment to moment.

Our thoughts, fears, cravings, and desires are always changing too. They’re so fleeting, so impermanent, so empty that the Buddha regarded them as “remote phenomena that had little to do with him”.

But how can we view thoughts—which are about as local as they come—as remote?

It may be best explained by the theory popular among Vipassana meditation teachers and evolutionary psychologists, called the modular model of the mind theory.

Basically, this theory says that our unconscious mind is a collection of interconnected and fluid, yet specialized, modules. As Robert Wright says in Why Buddhism Is True, these modules are activated by feelings and are responsible for sending thoughts to our conscious mind.

According to this theory, our conscious mind doesn’t create thoughts—it receives them. We choose whether to take ownership of them, or let them float by.

For instance, let’s say we’re watching Halloween. This might activate our “fear” module. This fear module might then send the thought—make sure the front door is locked—to our conscious mind. Or, let’s say you’re on the lookout for a romantic partner and you see an attractive man or woman. Your “find a suitable partner” module might activate, telling you to show off.

If we choose to take ownership of the thoughts we receive, it’s likely that we will also take ownership of the feelings—putting ourselves at their mercy. 

Similar to the Stoics, the Buddha taught that if something is outside of your control, and it’s causing you to suffer, stop identifying with it.

Easier said than done, I know. (Buddhist monks spend their entire lives practicing this type of detachment.) But it’s powerful enough that whether you practice it one time or millions of times, you can benefit from it.

Once a skeptic, Robert Wright now uses mindfulness to help relieve his pain. If he’s experiencing anxiety, he might ask himself, Where, exactly, is the source of this feeling? Maybe he discovers the feeling is in his chest. He will then direct his attention to his chest, studying this newfound feeling as an outside observer, mindful of its separateness. It may be anxiety, but it’s not his anxiety. By not identifying with it, it loses its power.

Thoughts bubble up. Feelings demand our attention. But the less we identify with them, the clearer we see. And the clearer we see, the more compassionate we are, and the less we suffer.