Anger, Love & 9 Life Tips From Marcus Aurelius with Donald Robertson & Lalya Lloyd
Right.
Speaker 2:Well, apparently well, King Arthur apparently Arthur was the king of the Britons, which was the Welsh people, the ancient Welsh people back in the day. And obviously, it got anglicized because that's what happens and then he's now an English king basically and Merlin is like this Dumbledore wizard.
Speaker 3:It's rule
Speaker 2:actually, that he's a ruse of the Britons. Am I saying that right? I'm sure they say Britons or Britons. Bretons.
Speaker 3:Yeah Bretons are
Speaker 2:the people in Brittany and Northern France. They have the same language as the Welsh people. So same dialect.
Speaker 1:And is it true there's a lot of Welsh people in Argentina or somewhere like that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, in Patagonia.
Speaker 1:How did that happen?
Speaker 2:I think just Welsh settlers went there trying to escape English rule basically. I think they just needed loads of farmers and stuff. It's the same as America, mind. I read a book on this Welsh newspaper in America in the 1800s, like a lot of Welsh speakers are over there because America back end needed loads of farmers and workers and Welsh people were just very industrial industrialized. So yeah, just workers, slave workers basically.
Speaker 2:They just went all over there and yeah, loads of community, there's a I was speaking to this American from Philadelphia on like one of these training things, I said, 'Where are you from?' He says, 'Philadelphia'. I said, oh, do you know Bryn Mawr, that famous college?' He's like, 'Yeah, yeah, lived on the road.' Said, do you know that's a Welsh name? He's like, nah. I said, yeah, that means big hill in Welsh. It's named after the place in Wales because the guy who founded it was Welsh.
Speaker 2:He's like, no idea, he's not even taught. There's a lot of stuff not taught. It's not wonderful, all this, the history, the Roman stuff as well. Was reading the book the other day on the Celts and the Romans made out that everyone that was not Roman were barbarians, but actually they weren't barbarians, like eating mud and stuff like that, they were actually quite civilised in a way.
Speaker 3:Well loads of Celtic druids, guess what, get this, they spoke ancient Greek. Is that right? Celtic druids spoke ancient Greek.
Speaker 1:They say strange thing. Julius Caesar said that they were Pythagoreans, which is a really strange thing to say. A lot of historians are quite puzzled by that. He says the druids were Pythagorean, which is a Greek philosophy.
Speaker 2:That's interesting, because they did say that the Bavarians, Celts were like they love to drink, didn't they? They were like they drink without like diluting. The Romans
Speaker 1:say that a lot, yeah, they like to drink wine.
Speaker 3:I think they all like to
Speaker 2:make an excuse, do know what mean? So we're the Romans, we're civilised and they're like crazy animals and that's why we are fighting them and it's like they just wanted to be in peace maybe I don't know. The The Celts made their way to Turkey. So they didn't go quite far like. It isn't The
Speaker 3:Romans were quite judgy about the Druids, they said that they practiced human sacrifice and things. I think there was a lot of negative propaganda from Julius Caesar.
Speaker 1:They tend to say they drink a lot, they go around naked, they don't have proper laws, they practice human sacrifice, all these kind of like, made the right speaker like cavemen or something almost like savages and stuff.
Speaker 2:Doctor It's miles away from that. They basically started aiming at the Germanic people underneath. So they had the Celts and stuff who were the first enemy and then it was like, right, it's the German people now. They're the Germanic tribes, barbarians now. The Celts are the Gauls.
Speaker 2:What are called the Gauls? The Gauls, yeah the Gauls, they're a bit different now. They're okay now. Then journal, isn't just in mind, you think about how history is written by that perspective all the time.
Speaker 3:Written from the perspective of the victors.
Speaker 1:Also they have mixed feelings about some barbarians. So the Germans and the Gauls get kind of quite, they're quite judgy about them. Egyptians are kind of like borderline, they've got kind of mixed feelings, Egyptians you're talking about. The Parthians are technically barbarians.
Speaker 3:Yeah, they're all over them.
Speaker 1:They're kind of like, yeah, but they're like, oh, they've got better weapons than us. They can't really sneer at them too much. Got better shiv. Yeah they got their asses handed to them a couple of times by the Parthians so they couldn't put them down too much.
Speaker 2:See, that's it. Then you got good old Marcus who saw everybody as human beings apparently.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well he says so like, I mean, he says that the Sarmatians one of the strangest things he says at one point is that he says people who take pride in capturing Sarmatians who were like one of these barbarian races, not Germanic but they were in Poland and Hungary, they spoke Iranian actually. He says someone that takes pride in capturing them has the mentality of a brigand or a robber. So there's one little fleeting comment in the meditations where he seems to kind of like say, we shouldn't really be viewing these people as just like slaves. Nowhere, he says everywhere throughout the meditations that we should treat other people as our brothers and sisters and so on. He doesn't say Roman citizens, he just says everyone, like people in general, which is kind of interesting.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think the Romans had the idea of making everyone a citizen. That was a good idea and stop a fight. I think it was Julius Caesar who said the Celts or the barbarians would trade humans for beer and wine. So they were like, these guys will literally trade their own people or slaves for wine. So I don't know what was going on back then.
Speaker 3:I'd trade you for wine.
Speaker 1:Would you trade me for In a plastic bottle.
Speaker 3:A wine in a plastic bottle. I trade Donald for plastic bottle wine.
Speaker 1:Harsh?
Speaker 2:There's nice wine that maybe in Greece and Italy as well comes in like a canister like
Speaker 3:carton. The carton wine, yes. Also in plastic bottles, it's very nice. Yeah,
Speaker 2:so they got it better than us. What's happening with the wine and stuff now? Are the Europeans are these holding it and British Brexit and not having any
Speaker 1:How is Brexit affected wine?
Speaker 3:Well, it's not affected Greek wine because hardly any Greek wine gets exported to The UK anyway. There's loads of amazing Greek wine. That's why when people come on holiday, they drink really well in Greece, but none of it gets exported.
Speaker 2:Why does it not get exported? The Greece money.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's expensive to export it. And there's more of it now than there used to be, but it's not at all common. I think there's like one Greek wine that you can buy in Tesco's or something.
Speaker 1:There we Super
Speaker 3:common.
Speaker 2:Never had Greek wine.
Speaker 3:The The organic soil.
Speaker 2:What's it? What was it called?
Speaker 3:Well, there's lots of volcanic soil in Greece, mineral y soil.
Speaker 1:It's good
Speaker 2:for the vines. I'll try it. But for everyone listening now, if you've got any questions for these lovely people before we start, then pop them in the box.
Speaker 3:It can be
Speaker 2:on anything,
Speaker 3:stoicism, Greek wine.
Speaker 1:We should say what we're going talk about, Scott, we said we'd get into things a lot better quicker this type of way.
Speaker 2:Well, I know people are going to want to watch that interview.
Speaker 3:What time is the interview?
Speaker 2:It'll be on in like an hour
Speaker 3:and a
Speaker 2:half or something like that.
Speaker 1:All right, okay. Well, we better get done before that. We've got a quite controversial topic today.
Speaker 2:I'm keen for controversy because abolish the royal family. Let's go.
Speaker 1:We've got, don't know, Madea is a princess, isn't she?
Speaker 3:Absolutely. Yeah,
Speaker 1:we've got some problems with royalty, controversial royal. Yeah. And we've got about a Greek tragedy going down. And when they say tragic, know, that's an understatement. It was very tragic.
Speaker 1:It's like the dial up to eleven in tragedy terms.
Speaker 2:I like it.
Speaker 3:It's very funny.
Speaker 1:It's very tragic. It's not funny. It is funny now.
Speaker 3:Sorry, I'm going like teacher mode, but the way that use tragic in English is completely different to the way the Greeks mean it. So we just say tragic to mean sad, but tragedy has actually got a technical
Speaker 2:Seating. Laalia, we've got a compliment here from Suzanne saying, I love how you can ask Laalia. Oh, Leila, she's asking is that
Speaker 3:Lalia is my name, is correct. Yes.
Speaker 2:Lalia, just noticed it. Leila, spelled Leila though, innit?
Speaker 3:No, it's spelled Lalia.
Speaker 2:Okay. She says, I love how you ask Alalia, anything and she has a really knowledgeable answer.
Speaker 3:You, Suzanne.
Speaker 2:But it says then Donald, not so much. Joking. Donald, I'm joking.
Speaker 3:I get all my knowledge now.
Speaker 1:Vali, I
Speaker 2:got a question for you. What school of philosophy do you follow? And look, Donald's not going to kill you if you don't see stoicism.
Speaker 1:I can't, I'll cover my ears.
Speaker 2:Actually the
Speaker 3:truth is I don't think I was a stoic, until two things happened. Well, three things. I became a teacher, I got Covid, and then I met Donald, and I think these three things have made me a stoic. I think I'm a stoic philosopher now.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Wow, have you practiced any of the cardinal virtues recently?
Speaker 3:Moderation? Yeah. I give an example of my moderation?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Are you doing moderation in writing? Are you doing moderation in your work, in your writing?
Speaker 3:Little and often, yeah, little and often. So like, I've got writing projects at the moment, I kind of was getting up every day and doing a little bit.
Speaker 1:Yeah, she's free
Speaker 3:so I've been journaling, like I've been trying to be really disciplined at the moment, so I get up every morning and because I make coffee for like ten minutes in the morning, I sit and I write in my journal while the coffee brews, that's perfect. And then I always have a little break mid morning, so after my writing, I get all hunched over at my laptop, so I have to stretch, so then I do my yoga, so it's perfect. So I have like journaling and yoga all before midday, So that's my moderation and discipline.
Speaker 1:You're good on that, yeah?
Speaker 2:And then
Speaker 3:it all falls apart in the afternoon, but hey, you know what, aren't born overnight.
Speaker 1:Room wasn't done.
Speaker 2:They're not. Well, Stowics are now, you can never be the ideal Sage in it, Donald. You can never be perfect. No, not even.
Speaker 1:Not even Zeno wasn't perfect. So please, wasn't perfect.
Speaker 2:Also, there's a few questions here. So, Greek games as barbaric as they look. Kimberly, Greek games as barbaric, yes. And then this is a follow on. Is it true in ancient Greece, they killed off loads of animals and our tigers fight?
Speaker 2:Or was my dad chanting poo poo?
Speaker 3:Interesting philosophical question.
Speaker 1:That sounds more Roman.
Speaker 3:The Romans killed
Speaker 1:wild animals
Speaker 3:in the amphitheater.
Speaker 1:Going to animals.
Speaker 3:Oh, do you want an amazing bit of etymology?
Speaker 1:Yeah, go on.
Speaker 2:Okay, so you
Speaker 3:know the arena, the gladiatorial arena, where the animals were killed, okay? Do you know where the word arena comes from? No. Oh my God, it's so exciting. The Roman word for sand is harreina, because the arena is covered with a layer of sand
Speaker 1:to soak up the Oh
Speaker 2:my days.
Speaker 3:An arena is something which is sandy to soak up blood.
Speaker 1:Oh my God.
Speaker 2:They are butchers.
Speaker 1:Everything, hippopotamuses, there was nothing the Romans wouldn't kill. Commodus, Marx Aurelius's son had special crescent headed arrows made and he had hundreds of ostriches released into the Colosseum, and he'd shoot all their heads off. Horrible, like sorry. Trigger warming, right? He shot the he shot the head of a lot of ostriches and they ran around like headless chickens, except bigger.
Speaker 2:That's a good aim. To be fair to him, that's a really good aim.
Speaker 1:It's both cruel and impressive.
Speaker 3:But that's so, yeah, because like little ostriches, I mean, big ostriches, like what did they ever do to him? I mean, they're totally harmless, right?
Speaker 2:Got nothing.
Speaker 1:Well, they're not harmless.
Speaker 3:I bet they could kick you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they'd kick your ass. They're dangerous actually.
Speaker 2:And then years ago, Greek coffee, why is this so much better than normal coffee? And my follow on, is Greek coffee the same as Turkish coffee?
Speaker 3:Yes, yes. To answer the second question first, Greek coffee and Turkish coffee is the same. It's finely ground coffee beans, not the same as instant. It's still like silty. It's like, if you make it and drink it, it's like mud in the bottom of your cup.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:But it's not, I mean, it's an acquired taste. A lot of people like Greek coffee.
Speaker 2:Is it stronger?
Speaker 3:It's strong, but it's also muddy. It's kind of
Speaker 1:got a muddy It's quite concentrated.
Speaker 2:Did the Greeks, did the ancient Romans have coffee?
Speaker 3:No, because it came from-
Speaker 2:Did they have drugs? Did they have some kind of like- They
Speaker 3:had good drugs, yeah.
Speaker 1:They were good drugs as well. And
Speaker 2:was there like a party atmosphere? Were they like socially taking drugs?
Speaker 3:Well, were socially drinking because that was like the symposium. They were definitely into
Speaker 2:Like opium or something on the party.
Speaker 1:Part of the religious ceremonies.
Speaker 3:Yeah, drugs were part of the religious rights. Drinking was more of a sociable thing.
Speaker 1:Think we'd go to church to get bakes. They found traces of ergot and
Speaker 2:love it.
Speaker 1:You'd say, mom, I'm just going off to church.
Speaker 3:She'd be like, don't be home too late.
Speaker 1:I'll see you in three days.
Speaker 2:In all sorts of visions, visionaries, the Romans, they had a good mind, they had a good. And I'll be a monitor about the interview with Meghan Markle, Harry and Oprah that everybody is keen to watch in The UK TV tonight.
Speaker 3:Okay, so we need to get on
Speaker 2:with it.
Speaker 1:Oh, we're gonna get on with it then, Scott. Can I share my screen?
Speaker 2:Well, that's fine. We can. Yeah. All good. We're good to go.
Speaker 2:Did the Greeks create the sewer system or was that the Romans? What was
Speaker 3:the question? The Greeks
Speaker 1:Did have the sewer system?
Speaker 2:The sewer system, I think that's a Roman thing.
Speaker 3:It's a Roman thing. It's the Roman thing. I mean, had, you can still to these days in, you can actually go down into the, they call it the Clowaca Maxima, the very great sewer, and it's still underground in Rome, like it's thousands of years old, but it's big enough to sail a boat through. So the Roman sewer systems were pretty phenomenal, yeah.
Speaker 2:What do they, like in a toilet, what do they use in the toilet?
Speaker 3:Sponge? They'd use a sponge, they'd use bit of water,
Speaker 2:leaves. Oh, a sponge of what? A sponge of, how would they make a sponge?
Speaker 3:No, no, they would dive for sponges.
Speaker 1:Get something from the ocean.
Speaker 3:Get sponges in the Mediterranean.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's amazing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And then they don't, it was public. So they'd sit in a row and they'd talk to each other and stuff. And like, this is unlikely suicide ever. I don't believe this, right?
Speaker 1:Suicide or
Speaker 3:sewer side?
Speaker 1:Suicide, nice one. So Seneca claims that there was a gladiator who morally objected to fighting in the Colosseum. And when no one was looking, he took the sponge which was on a stick in the latrines and shoved it down his own throat and choked himself to death on it. And Seneca says like that guy had courage Legend.
Speaker 3:That is like It
Speaker 1:seems to me if this was the case for Poirot, he'd be like, we found this guy in the toilets with a toilet sponge rammed in his throat and he's dead. He'd be like, clearly suicide. Why I don't know if that's suicide Poirot. It's like someone else. Imagine
Speaker 2:being a gladiator though, imagine being in there before going in the arena knowing, oh nah, nah, they must have all know, kept their pants before going out.
Speaker 1:Well, some of them apparently enjoyed it. They often but not always, they fought with partially blunted weapons. They would blunt the sword so they could cut you but they wouldn't be able to stab you. So wanted to see blood but not for people to die because gladiators were worth a lot of money. And they were massive sex symbols.
Speaker 1:I think it's Galen that talks a lot about how there was a one gladiator had pus dripping from his eye, he was covered in scars, like he had a knee or missing and all that. But he was like surrounded by Roman noble women that were like his groupies or whatever.
Speaker 3:The death rate was only not more than ten percent
Speaker 1:for
Speaker 3:gladiators in the arena.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's not bad.
Speaker 3:You had a 90 chance of survival.
Speaker 1:That's quite good. I
Speaker 2:would do that. I'd do half of him. But Galen or Galen, whatever his name is, I was doing my research on whey protein the other day because we're launching whey protein supplement, this like irritant free. He actually used whey protein as a medical medicine, like ailment, Galen did. He was one of the first people to use it as like a health supplement.
Speaker 1:Wow. Very cool.
Speaker 2:It's head of it.
Speaker 1:Things back in the day. We launched our thing. Yeah. Oh, you haven't Scott, you still haven't given me a
Speaker 2:Oh shit. Yeah. Sorry.
Speaker 1:Too busy talking about Bloody else, buddy.
Speaker 2:Talking about Judy.
Speaker 3:Thank you, everybody's desperate to watch the interview with This
Speaker 2:is better than Oprah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we have to, I guess we have to watch
Speaker 2:Yeah, you have to watch it, this is history this is. Oh, we'll see. It's gonna be big news.
Speaker 3:Hasn't the story already been made? Because hasn't it already been aired in The US?
Speaker 1:I it's been aired in The US, hasn't it? I've seen it on Twitter, trending on Twitter.
Speaker 2:That's when you know. So we're going
Speaker 1:to talk about love and anger and stoicism and stuff. And this is Laoja.
Speaker 3:You just love that photo.
Speaker 1:I love that photo because Laoja is an Android. Back at university, she's living the dream of writing a book about ancient and modern Greece and living with Donald, living the dream. And that's me, like psych therapist and author of repute. So we're gonna talk about love and stoic philosophy, which is controversial, right? You should be like, well, what's stoicism got to do with love?
Speaker 1:Well, I think it's got a lot to do with it. Like we're going see what the stoics say. And I don't expect everybody to agree with it. It's one of the things like when we're talking about Socrates, he says things that like most people actually disagree with, but somehow you come away with it thinking he did say some kind of interesting stuff though and it kind of like sticks in your brain a bit. And then we're going to talk about anger in Roman classics which is where Laoja comes in because we're going to talk about Medea who's this figure in Greek mythology.
Speaker 1:And the Stoics were kind of slightly obsessed with Medea. And Seneca, the Stoic philosopher wrote an entire Latin version of the original Greek play by Euripides. And then I'm going to talk about a load of practical stuff from Marx Aurelius about coping with anger. So Oh, they're your gifts. The gifts from the book, we've got a lot of stuff.
Speaker 1:So Stoicism, I would argue actually weirdly is a philosophy of love, although that might sound a bit odd. So we're told that Eros, the god of love was actually the patron god of the Stoic Republic. The Stoics had this Utopian text, like they visited the ideal society and Eros was the patron god of it. And Seneca says no school has more goodness and gentleness, none has more love for human beings, nor more attention to the common good, which is not what people think of. Probably when they think of stoicism, but in the ancient world, people often thought of stoicism as being this very, embodying a brotherly love, philanthropic love, as we will see.
Speaker 1:So this is an article by a scholar called William O. Stevens and he summarises I think reasonably well, the stoic attitude towards love. So this is pretty much saved us during the entire presentation almost. So this is what he says in a nutshell, he says, the stoic loves other people in a very free giving way. Free love.
Speaker 1:They actually were totally advocates of free love. And side note, originators of stoicism, Zeno wanted to abolish the law against adultery. Essentially they created free love. Bring it back, bring back, bring it back. He wanted to do away with a lot.
Speaker 1:So I thought people should be able to sleep with anyone they love. And the problem in the ancient world with that is establishing paternity. Right? So then they would say, well, if we didn't have the institutional marriage, like we wouldn't really know who was the father of the children. And Zeno said, well, we should just bring all the children up communally, the Spartans did.
Speaker 1:In my
Speaker 2:days, I did not think of that.
Speaker 1:Controversial, but that was what they said. So the stoic loves other people in a very free giving way this guy says. His love is not at all conditional upon its being reciprocated by the person loved. Now that's a radical concept.
Speaker 3:I know all about that I love Donald and it's just I don't get any
Speaker 1:unrequited love. It reminds me of being a parent actually. So you know, your parental love isn't conditional upon being loved back for your children, arguably, or is it? Certainly like that's something that's worth thinking about. The stoic does not compromise his own moral integrity or mental serenity in his love for others, nor is his love impaired by his knowledge of the mortality of his loved ones.
Speaker 1:We're going to come back to that in a bit. But he doesn't impert so Epictetus literally says at one point to his students, if you love someone, and it's messing you up, like it's making you really miserable and unhappy, he says, well, then it's not really love at all. Like it's something else that you're mistaking for love. He thinks genuine love, like love that's in accord with wisdom that's rational as the stoics would put it, like is inherently healthy, it benefits you and the other person. And if it's not like that, if it's damaging you or the other person, it's not really love, it's a kind of infatuation.
Speaker 1:And you shouldn't really call that love. This guy says, Roy McStephen says rather the stoics love natural affection are tempered by reason. So this might sound odd, but for Stoics love is completely consistent with reason, love is rational and it's in accord with reason and wisdom if you can imagine that. And his love and affection serve only to enrich his humanity never to subject him to psychological torment. As we said earlier, so love should always be a healthy thing.
Speaker 1:Marcus Aurelius at one point says something that sounds kind of Christian. This is why many Christian authors admire Marcus Aurelius. He talks about loving one's enemies. And he says it is peculiar to mankind to love even those who do wrong. And this happens when if they do wrong, it occurs to you that they are kinsmen number two, right?
Speaker 1:And that they do wrong through ignorance and unintentionally, we're going to come back to all of these things at the end of the presentation, and that soon both of you will die. And that above all that the wrongdoer has done you no harm for he has not made your character worse than it was before. Now I'm not going to elaborate on that, there's a lot to discuss in there but all of those themes we're going to talk about in more detail later. So it's very condensed, there's a whole bunch of stoic principles that he's kind of compressed together. Are like they explain how he thinks rational love functions in accord with clemency or forgiveness.
Speaker 1:And so as I said, apart from the relationship dimension of this, this guy was Roman Emperor and he was a magistrate. He wrote this on the Roman frontier when he was surrounded by what the Romans called barbarians, who would meet with him virtually every morning, I would think. And he's talking about the Marcomanni and Quadi and the Sarmatians as enemies that he's in the middle of fighting a war against and saying it is peculiar to mankind to love even those who do wrong. And to remind himself that people that seem like his enemies are actually brothers and sisters to him, and the brotherhood of man. Many people have read this and thought this is like early Christian ethics.
Speaker 1:It's a remarkable thing for this guy to have written this in private, when he's commanding an army of 140,000 men. And nevertheless, this seems to be how he's thinking about the war which is really a stunning thing. Stoicism and Christianity guesses what I've been alluding to Pierre Hadot, a very eminent French scholar said it cannot then be said that loving one's neighbour as oneself is a specifically Christian invention. Rather it could be maintained that the motivation of stoic love is the same as that of Christian love. Even the love of one's enemies, as we've just seen, is not lacking in stoicism.
Speaker 1:So stoicism was actually one of the major influences on early Christianity. St Paul came from Tarsus, which was the one of the main centers for stoicism. And he met the stoics, he mentioned them in the Acts of the Apostles, like they're literally in there. And many of the church fathers we know had studied Stoicism before they converted to Christianity. So there's this kind of Stoicism leaves its imprint on.
Speaker 1:So when we think of Stoicism as being kind of cold and unemotional, that's really a misconception. Nobody thinks of Christianity as being cold and unemotional. And yet Christianity derived all of this stuff from from stoicism, arguably, controversial, you know, either it's a coincidence that they say very similar things, or it's not a coincidence. They stole it. One of the most controversial things that the stoics say, so I'll turn to Lavia on this one.
Speaker 1:This is a shocker, right? Actually, I almost think we should get a warning for this. We're going to need a few trigger warnings, right? So we're going to talk about bereavement, we're going to talk about the death of children, and loved ones, and the stuff that ancient philosophers want to talk about. They want to talk about very extreme, very shocking things.
Speaker 1:So Xenophon, who was a famous Athenian general, he was a friend of Socrates. He wrote a book about Socrates called the Memorabilia Socrates. And there's a famous anecdote that Xenophon's son was an officer in the Athenian army and he was killed. And the news was brought to Xenophon. They said, we've got bad news, your son has died in battle.
Speaker 1:And Xenophon said, I knew that my son was mortal. So he prepared himself psychologically in advance, probably because his son was a soldier like he was, like for the day coming when possibly his son would die in battle. He said, I knew that my son was mortal. So it doesn't come as a surprise to me. Epictetus, the most controversial thing in any of the Stoic literature, I'm going to call it a Stoic kiss of death, just to kind of highlight it because it is in there and people often pick it out.
Speaker 1:I'll just tell you what Epictetus says, he says if you kiss your child or your wife, say that you only kiss things which are mortal and thus you will not be disturbed if either of them dies. Now I have to say that I think given the context that he means pathologically disturbed because Epictetus says it would be natural to be disturbed about certain forms of loss. But what the stories want to avoid is kind of clinical depression, like being completely overturned, overwhelmed by misfortunes in life like bereavement. And so I want to dwell on this for a moment because if we can get past the kind of rather the coldness of it, the extreme way that he says it, first of all, he's kind of paraphrasing this famous saying about xenophon, I knew that my son was mortal. The same when you kiss your son, you should think to yourself like I'm kissing a mortal.
Speaker 1:You kiss your wife, you should think that I'm kissing a mortal. And the Stoics have the saying that we should tell ourselves that one of their fundamental views was that we should say that everything is on loan to us from zoos, or on loan from nature. So they think that this is to get to right to the guts of this really challenging and quite profound idea, but maybe not everyone's cup of tea. The Stoics want us to think that our loved ones are on loan to us temporarily from the universe, so that we don't become rigidly attached to them. And we're prepared in advance for change or loss.
Speaker 1:And so we seize the day, as Lavia said last week, we make the most of the opportunity that we have with them.
Speaker 2:Donald, this is where stoics get their bad reputation from probably.
Speaker 1:This is the most extreme thing I think that they say. But I defend Epictetus in saying elsewhere, acknowledges that it's natural to be disturbed by loss. And here, he's really talking that the main target for stoicism would be more like clinical depression or something like a pathological distress. Also in the ancient world, people are generally more desensitized to the loss of children. Because typically in during the Roman Imperial period, you could expect probably half of your children to pre decease you roughly.
Speaker 1:And that actually came true with Marcus Aurelius who had 14 children and seven of them died before him. The loss of children was fairly common and death was more people would die at home rather than in a hospice or something, for example, people slaughtered animals. So death is something that people are much more familiar to and somewhat desensitized to in a way life is more precarious. That
Speaker 2:makes sense. Just on that point, came across the tick box of the day and it said like, you should be of your parents. I think I'm echoing by the way. Am I?
Speaker 3:No, you're fine.
Speaker 2:I'm fine. They said, How many times do you see a parent? He's asking a guy, he's like, I don't know, I see my parents twice a year. And he's like, You've only got like, how many years left to live? And they're like, I don't know, maybe ten.
Speaker 2:He's like, You've only got to see them 10 more times. If you think about our numbers, you've only got 10 more times of seeing your parents if you keep seeing them only twice a year. And then that guy was like, oh shit. Because he just thought everybody thinks, 'Nay, I'll see him forever. It's never going to stop.
Speaker 1:But if
Speaker 2:you think of it that way-
Speaker 1:He says don't live as if you think you've got another one thousand years to go. He says a lot of things like that. Now, Marcus himself, one of the weird things is in the Roman histories, we tend to get a description of Marx Aurelius' life, but not that many references to his philosophy. But sometimes there seem to be references kind of tucked in there, or maybe references prevailing ideas in Roman culture. This is what the Historia Augusta says about Marcus Aurelius's death.
Speaker 1:Such love for him, Marcus Aurelius, was manifested on the day of the imperial funeral, his funeral, that none thought that men should lament him, which is surprising since all were sure that he had been lent by the gods and had now returned to them. Now that I would say sounds very similar to stuff that Epictetus says. And actually, we don't know for sure, it may just be that's a description of how people in society generally were talking about it. But given that he's talking about the imperial funeral, where eulogies would have been delivered by Marcus Aurelius' friends, many of whom were Stoics, I don't think it's impossible that this comment reflects things that were said in the eulogies at Marcus Aurelius' funeral. And this sounds to me very reminiscent of a very familiar Stoic doctrine, the idea that we should view people as mortal, we should literally say that they've been lent to us by the gods and will be returned one day.
Speaker 1:So I kind of imagined this might have been something that people were saying, partly because they heard it said in the eulogies delivered over Marcus Aurelius' remains.
Speaker 3:That
Speaker 1:was having dealt with something controversial, a stoic technique would be, could you take that literally and when you kiss someone, think to yourself, they're on loan to me by nature, nothing is permanent. Can you love someone Lavia and without attachment?
Speaker 3:Well, that's really hard. Mean, but then it's two things, loving somebody without attachment and then loving somebody mindful of the fact that you're mortal. Maybe I don't think
Speaker 2:that's the
Speaker 3:same thing.
Speaker 1:If you're not mindful of that, is that not a form of self deception?
Speaker 3:Yeah, probably is, yeah.
Speaker 1:So if you're being completely honest about it, you'd recognise that you really love your wife, for all you know, maybe you might get divorced one day, or people's personalities change over time.
Speaker 3:Do you to know something super cheesy? Like, here's a big share from me. Like the first time I properly fell in love, I was actually quite, I'm 26 anyway, I was so in love and this person made me so happy. And when, he was a bit Welsh actually. Legend?
Speaker 3:Welsh people, very lovable.
Speaker 1:Was lot bit Welsh, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:And this is genuine thing, but when I was really happy with him, I sometimes used to cry a little bit. And I could never work out why it was I was a little bit sad. And when I examined it, I was like, I love him so much. I realised that like, we're both more. It was like literally a thing of like, we're both One day, I'm not gonna have him.
Speaker 3:It like, I loved him so much that I I was aware of the fact that I wasn't gonna have him forever, and it made me sad.
Speaker 1:This is like Scipio Africanus from
Speaker 3:Paul I know, how deep is that, right?
Speaker 1:How deep How deep is one day Rome is gonna fall?
Speaker 3:So I think that's like, I totally get the stoic thing of like loving so much someone so much. You're just like,
Speaker 2:you know? Maybe maybe you know deep down as well that it wasn't maybe he didn't love you did he love you as much as you loved him?
Speaker 3:Oh, no. I think he did. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I mean, that's
Speaker 2:that's what gonna be like he's gonna leave me. So No.
Speaker 3:No. It wasn't that. I I mean, I know what that feels like as well, Scott.
Speaker 2:Was that another Welsh guy causing havoc?
Speaker 1:So this is, we're now getting into Laoghia territory. We're about to enter.
Speaker 3:Anger.
Speaker 1:Laoghia Territory. Not so much anger. I wouldn't accuse you of that. You're not an angry person. But tragedy.
Speaker 3:I
Speaker 1:like these posters, we've got a lot of really cool graphics from
Speaker 3:posters. Nice, it's not like 1930s
Speaker 1:that poster. Not sure when it's from actually. It maybe
Speaker 2:seen then? Is that Egyptian or is it? Someone gonna kill, oh my God, I actually someone's gonna stab someone in the neck.
Speaker 3:Trigger warning, trigger warning, trigger I think that's Medea stabbing her children.
Speaker 1:She kills her children. Oh my God. So it's pretty hardcore. She's an extreme example of someone that does something very self destructive in a rage. So Medea says, thus I shall be, well do you want to, the story is Medea is a princess.
Speaker 1:She comes from the Black Sea. She marries Jason of Jason and the Argonauts face.
Speaker 2:Jason.
Speaker 1:Then they come back to Corinth, they end up in Corinth anyway, Greece. And then the King of Corinth basically forces Jason to marry his daughter and to disown Medea. And Medea is going to be sent into exile. So she loses everything as we'll see in a moment. She's lost her homeland, she's been exiled even from the place that she's in exile in.
Speaker 1:She's like in exile twice over, three times over. She's lost a fortune and she's going to lose her kids. Because I think Creon wants them to remain with Jason. So she's kind of, she's lost everything. And she says in Euripides, thus I shall be avenged on Jason who has wronged and insulted me.
Speaker 1:So her husband has gone off with another woman. Like, and what shall I gain if he is punished thus? So she's kind of going back and forth on mine but this, how then shall it be done? I shall kill my children, she's got two sons, but I shall punish myself also and what do I care? So she's basically saying, I'm so angry, I'm gonna kill my own sons to get back at Jason because he's gone off with another woman.
Speaker 1:And even though this really hurts me, I don't care as long as it hurts Jason. So she's kind of this crazy extreme bunny boiler kind of example of this. But this is why Greek literature is so great Because it's completely uninhibited in a sense that they go to this really extreme, like and then Medina has been this very compelling figure throughout history, because she's such an extreme character. Don't you
Speaker 2:think? Yeah,
Speaker 3:I mean, she's partly, she's compelling because we at once sympathize with her and are revolted by her. We can, of course, can sympathize with, she helped Jason get the golden fleece. She'd left her family behind in order to be with him. She was an exile, then he betrayed her, then she was an exile again. You know, I've just counted five reasons why we should pity her.
Speaker 3:But, you know, and then she kills her children and it's like, well, of course, that one thing is so massive that it kind of outweighs the three, the five things that we really feel sorry for her about. But I mean, that's why she's such a problematic character because we pity her, but then she does this completely abhorrent act.
Speaker 1:As you can see, it's very tragic story.
Speaker 2:Does she kill herself as well?
Speaker 1:No. No, she's rescued. Well,
Speaker 3:at the end of Euripides play she's rescued.
Speaker 1:And Nelson Seneca's. Well, she ascends a
Speaker 2:That's so mad she didn't kill herself. How can she live with herself doing that?
Speaker 1:Almost kind of becomes demonic. So this is what Epictetus says about her. Epictetus says that Medea makes two errors. And he's really doing a deep dive into her moral psychology, there's a term for you. So he says, so Medea has lost her husband, her home, her status, her wealth, her children, Medea loses everything.
Speaker 1:Epictetus famously says some things are up to us and others are not. When we fail to get the things we desire, we naturally feel frustrated and distressed. And the more we demand having things and the more they're denied us, the more frustrated, more crazy and the more angry we'll become. So Medea is an exceptionally angry woman. Epictetus therefore says it was because she could not endure this, not getting the things that she desired that Medea came to murder her own children.
Speaker 1:So in short Epictetus is saying the root cause of this problem is that Medea will not accept her fate. Like she resents and she defies fate, she can't stand, she wants Jason, she wants her wealth, she wants her status and she can't accept the deprivation of these things. So students want to say look in a parallel universe, there's another version of media that just says, well, I don't really care if Jason goes off another woman. And I don't really care if I lose my kingdom and my wealth. If Jason brings up the kids, I'm okay with that.
Speaker 1:And she doesn't go crazy and mother her sons and get consumed by rage and stuff like that, because she's capable of reconciling herself to this deprivation.
Speaker 2:Is this real? This real? Did this happen? No. Is it mythology?
Speaker 3:Did this really happen? Well, I mean, obviously we've all read stories where this kind of thing actually really happens in real life, right? I mean, we've all read stories of this.
Speaker 2:This happened recently in a Netflix documentary, that guy that murdered his daughters to be with the other girl. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, sad thing, I mean, we think when we see it on the stage or we hear Donald talking about the ancient classics, we sort of think, oh, it's so far removed. How can anybody do that? But unfortunately we know that people go that crazy and they do this.
Speaker 3:So yeah, it's extreme, but happens.
Speaker 1:It's a form of, like what Epictetus points out is it's a kind of form of, we all know what it means for people to be self destructive and to punish themselves and in a sense Madea is doing that. Like she knows that it hurts her to kill her sons but there's a bit in Seneca actually that's really quite profound And there's a little bit in it where he hints that Medea feels guilty about having previously murdered, she also murdered her brother.
Speaker 3:She's trying to get four.
Speaker 1:She's done a lot of bad things. So in Seneca she's tortured by the memory of her crimes in the past and she wants to punish herself and so this is more relatable in a way like she's so tortured by this overwhelming guilt about horrendous things that she's done in the past that she thinks that she deserves to lose her sons. And so although she thinks this is a terrible thing and it's really painful to her, she also wants to hurt herself because she feels that she's a bad person and she feels guilty about stuff. So in a very twisted perverse way she feels like she wants to, it's a form of self harming like killing my sons, it just happened that she's also harming somebody else in the process of doing it. She's pretty messed up, it's pretty pathological stuff, right?
Speaker 1:Which is why it's so interesting. But having said that, Scott, weirdly, as Lalia quite rightly noted, Medea is arguably one of the most striking examples of an anti hero. She's very compelling and weirdly even the stoics who are very moralistic love Medea. Like not only do they kind of obsess about her, and they write a lot about Seneca rewrote the entire play in Latin. Chrysippus, the third head of the Stoics School, wrote a book that goes on about Euripides' play so much that people made fun of him saying they called his book The Medea of Chrysippus.
Speaker 1:And what they meant was that he quoted Euripides so many times that he quoted the entire play. They said, Okay, we get it, you really like this play by Euripides. The Stoics loved this, but they saw her as somebody who's really messed up, really pathological. The Stoics wanted to view, Plato thought we should get rid of the Greek tragedies
Speaker 1:Stoics tragedies because they set such a bad example. Thought the characters or protagonists in the Greek tragedies are the authors of their own tragedy. He has Socrates saying which is true. And Plato's solution to that is basically book burning, right, we should get rid of all these. The Stoics said, no, we should read them, but we have to read them with a critical eye and view them almost like they're case studies in psychopathology. So we should read Medea and not agree with her, but we should read it and think poor woman, how was she driven to this and what's actually going on in her head and treat it like a psychiatrist would treat a case study almost. But Epictetus goes even further than this.
Speaker 1:He says that what she did in killing her sons and everything else was the act of a great spirit, he says someone with a great nature, like a noble individual, a strong, a powerful like great spirited individual. The other weird thing he says.
Speaker 3:You're doing a great mixture of modern and ancient Modern and ancient yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, we'll do it properly then.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:What does that mean?
Speaker 3:The ruin of a soul which possesses great nerve.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, so my translation is not too bad. And this word that means ruin is also the word that the ancient Greeks used for a shipwreck, which is an even more evocative way of describing. So do you know what it reminds me of when we say something's a train wreck or a car
Speaker 3:Oh, train wreck,
Speaker 2:yeah.
Speaker 1:So he's saying my day is train wreck. He's like this is an effing train wreck. Not only that, her soul is a train wreck but nevertheless it possesses great nerve, great strength of character. And what Epictetus is saying, so she's an anti hero as we would put it simply today. So she could almost have been a hero because she has tremendous strength of character and grit and courage but she doesn't have the wisdom to accept her fate without resenting it and craving revenge against other people.
Speaker 1:So Epictetus thinks she has something that resembles tremendous courage but she doesn't have wisdom and justice in our character. So she's half of a hero and fortunately that's worse than not having courage at all because it means that she gives her the boldness and recklessness to do really atrocious things like she's a particularly dangerous individual. So nevertheless, there's something admirable about the enormous willpower and strength of character and courage that she has, if only she could direct it towards good. And this is kind of almost what the Socrates and the Stoics thought about the Spartans funnily enough. So people often think it's odd that they admired Spartan society.
Speaker 1:But I think the Socrates and the Stoics admired the Spartans for their self discipline and their courage, but they thought that that should be applied to the pursuit of wisdom and justice, whereas the Spartans applied it to the pursuit of slavery and conquest. So it's really what he's saying is that she lacks amor fati. And Epictetus literally says, talking to Medea, he's imagining speaking to her and he says do not desire the man Jason, and nothing which you desire will fail to happen. And in the world desire nothing other than what God wills. And then who shall hinder you?
Speaker 1:And who shall compel you? So again, he's saying in a parallel universe, there's another version of a story where Medea just goes, 'meh, whatever'. And you know, have Jason, I'm not bothered, I accept the fact that it's not under my control. If she could love Jason and kiss him and say he's immortal, one day he'll be gone and nevertheless I love him while he's with me but I'm not attached to him then she wouldn't have ended up in this train wreck in the first place. But Epictetus says it's because she's clingy, like she's overly attached, loves him like in a very demanding clingy way and not in a philosophical way that accepts the impermanence of things.
Speaker 1:Kind of like when we were talking about impermanence when we discussed Buddhism the other week. And then Epictetus says that she makes a second error. Epictetus in Euripides she says something that the Stoics were kind of obsessed with. At one point she says 'Tis true I know what evil I shall do but passion overpowers the better counsel.' So what she's saying is even though I know what I'm doing is wrong I can't help it because my anger is overwhelming me. And you might say okay I get you, like we say that today someone says I know what I'm doing is wrong but I couldn't help it because I was so angry.
Speaker 1:And Epictetus gets right to the heart of the cognitive theory of emotion and he says the most radical radical thing he could say, he says no, you're wrong, you're mistaken, Medea. We can actually believe one course of action is better and yet voluntarily do the opposite. It's not your feelings that are making you do it, it's your belief. You believe that it's better to kill your sons, you believe that getting revenge is more important than the lives of your sons. And he actually says that he says your belief, you believe that getting revenge on Jason is more important than sparing the lives of your sons.
Speaker 1:It's your belief that's guiding your actions, you're making an error of moral judgment. Don't blame it on your feelings. Someone could have the same feelings that you've got and they could choose not to act on them because they firmly believe that the consequences would be unethical. So Epictetus says no, it's your opinions and your opinions are wrong. It's not just feelings, you're making an error of moral judgment and someone could maybe have helped you by questioning that.
Speaker 1:Maybe if there had been someone there that had questioned you more thoroughly, you to really think things through, perhaps you would have arrived at a different course of action. So he says my dear killed her sons because she believed that going along with her rage and inflicting revenge on Jason was more important than defying her rage and sparing them. But nevertheless, I read this earlier and I thought I've written Sympathy for the Witch and it sounds a bit misogynistic but Medea was literally a witch, So she did black magic and stuff like that. Mean pretty hardcore in Seneca's version anyway, don't know about Euripides but in Seneca's version he goes into great detail about sort of eye of mutant wing of bat kind of stuff that she summons all these monstrous spirits from Hades and it's pretty hardcore witchcraft. Love this post I wish
Speaker 3:I can you more about the Romans. The Romans were quite obsessed with witchcraft.
Speaker 1:Love The Greeks weren't so much into it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, but the Romans were pretty obsessed.
Speaker 1:So Epictetus says why then are you angry with the unhappy woman that she has been bewildered about the most important things and has become a viper instead of a human being. So now he says something even more controversial. Having said he also kind of admires her own ways, although he thinks that she's made these two fundamental errors of judgment. Now he says, we should sympathise with her. Like he says she was deceived, what else could she do but what appeared right to her?
Speaker 1:Epictetus says talking to his students about this. He says she's been blinded and maimed in her moral judgment and we should pity Medea like we pity people who are blind and lame. Now Epictetus was himself lame, like he'd had his leg broken allegedly by his owner while he was a slave and he was left crippled for the rest of his life. So he said, he used to say, know, being lame is an impediment to my leg, but not to my moral judgment. So he said, know, people may look at me and think I'm a slave and I'm poor, like, I've got a crippled leg.
Speaker 1:They said Medina is much worse off because it's her mind that's crippled, like her faculty of moral judgment and we should feel really sorry for her. Rather than we should not make the mistake of being as angry with her as she was with Jason. Otherwise we just kind of descend to her level as it were. And so you will see these themes recurring in what Marcus Aurelius says about how to cope with anger. Which are you going to remain with us, Lawyer, or do you want to make your exit?
Speaker 3:Maybe I'll make my exit, go save my voice.
Speaker 2:I've got a question for you though, before you leave. What's the difference between revenge and justice?
Speaker 3:Well justice, I suppose the Greeks would say that justice is something which is imparted by the state. And revenge is something which is imparted by the individual so revenge is is say when, if you think about the play famous play the Eumenides. This is where justice and revenge really come into focus in ancient Greek thought. So it's the last play of the Oresteia, which is the famous story of Agamemnon coming back from Troy. His wife kills him, But then his son Orestes gets revenge on his father and kills his mother, Clytinestra.
Speaker 3:But what happens is that Orestes, the son having avenged his father is followed around the world by the three Furies who were the kind of goddesses, demons of revenge. And this whole story, this whole saga doesn't come to rest until the final play of the Oresteia, it's in three parts. It's called the Eumenides', which is named after the Furies, it means the kindly ones. And a court case takes place on the slopes of the Acropolis, and basically that's when Athenian thought they kind of, they kind of put to bed this whole revenge versus justice thing. They have a lawsuit, and they have, it's actually a lawsuit of gods that judge on whether Orestes is guilty or not, and having found him not guilty of killing his mother for various reasons, they then take the Furies, these goddesses of revenge, and they embed her in the side of the Acropolis.
Speaker 3:And it's almost like revenge is sort of vigilantism, whereas justice is of the city. So justice is for the city to abortion, whereas revenge is something you do with vendettas, with vigilantism, with the family. It's out of control of the law. Justice is the law, revenge is sort of, you know, something which is beyond the law, but we want to keep within the law.
Speaker 1:I would add to that funnily enough, from my perspective and philosophy, in a sense, this is the central question of Plato's Republic. The contrast between revenge and justice. Plato's Republic is about the concept of the kyosuni or justice. It begins by one of the interlocutors, one of the people that Socrates is talking to, Socrates says, what is justice? And he gives a military definition of justice, which was well known in classical Athens, which is justice consistent helping your friends and harming your enemies, I.
Speaker 1:E. Helping your military allies and inflicting damage on your military enemies. And that he applies that quite generally to life. So they've taken this military concept turned into a philosophy of life. And to cut a long story short, Socrates questions this, pulls it apart and implicitly arrives at the conclusion that justice isn't helping your friends and harming your enemies, but that it consists in helping your friends and helping your enemies.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1:And so I. E. Harming your enemies would be revenge. Yeah. So he eliminates the concept of revenge from the concept
Speaker 3:Absolutely, which we have to, which is why in most legal systems, Even if somebody is guilty, they or perceived to be guilty. You can't even say that they're guilty right innocent until proven guilty, you have the right to a legal counsel. At all stages, or you know in democracies that function kind of correctly and according to Greek values, but yeah, I'd say revenge is kind of primitive and vigilanteist and from the heart and justice is in the city, it's in the democracy.
Speaker 1:Yeah revenge is about retribution, it's about this idea of somehow getting people bat an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, the lex talionis like paying payback. But arguably the idea, the concept of justice is about preventing vice or crime, and also rehabilitating people or restraining them from doing it again in the future. And actually, the paradox which the ancients were very aware of, is that sometimes and very often if you punish people and inflict revenge on them, you make them more likely to commit crimes in the future. There's a sense in which it's quite self destructive. Well,
Speaker 3:this is obviously a very, this is an amazing conversation that could become something a lot bigger.
Speaker 1:About modern society and about war. And even if they don't commit a crime against you, someone else will, their families or their friends will want revenge against you. So you potentially just create a cycle of violence, like if you indulge in the desire for retribution or crime.
Speaker 3:There we go, that was an incredibly short answer to the question, is justice and revenge the same thing? That's a
Speaker 2:good question by Vicky Simpson. I didn't even think of it until she asked us like, my God, I didn't even know the answer. What is the difference? But yeah,
Speaker 3:that's amazing. What a great question.
Speaker 1:Yeah,
Speaker 3:that's a great question.
Speaker 1:Socrates would love that question. Like you asked a question, which is the basis of the Republic, like Plato's magnum opus. So they're coming up with the right question.
Speaker 2:Right,
Speaker 3:I'm gonna go rest my throat.
Speaker 2:No problem. Thank you so much again. Bye. Thank you.
Speaker 1:But yeah, But you, Scott.
Speaker 2:You mean you nobody, but the thing is, revenge, if justice doesn't happen and the state or there's corruption going on, revenge turns into revolution and the people who are getting the tough end will all just cause a complete revolution which is what happens and then it's even worse.
Speaker 1:Well and also I think you saw what you saw maybe arguably, I'm very interested in this number, I won't talk about it too much, actually. So I could talk about this all day. But I just what I would say a plug here, actually, I wrote an article recently for ABC News in America. There's a lot of podcasts for them with a guy called Mick Mulroy, who's a friend of mine, who's previously involved with the US government and still to some extent, and he's an expert on domestic terrorism. He's ex Marine and ex CIA and he was a Deputy Assistant Secretary for Defence for The Middle East under General Mattis.
Speaker 1:And so Mick's very interested in Plato's Republic and then Greek philosophy in general, And then how it relates to things like the riots at The US Capitol. And this idea that people had abandoned enough, didn't even have enough belief in democratic system or the legal system, that they thought there might be legitimate political or legal means to try and address injustice to society. They thought what they needed to do is break into the capital and teach the politicians a lesson, to get revenge on what they perceive to be corrupt politicians. And so there's a lot of concern in society in general. We wrote an article about how Socrates would maybe help people to question whether this is a rational or productive way of responding to perceived injustice in society.
Speaker 1:Aren't you potentially just making things worse by acting out your anger in this way, and you're becoming everything you hate. Like those people rioted at the Capitol were driven by a hatred of injustice or perceived injustice. But what they did absolutely embodied injustice. So they became the very thing that they claimed to hate, ironically. That's often the case when people get really, really angry.
Speaker 1:Often what they do, as in Medea's case, seems like they're just kind of biting off their nose despite their face. It seems incredibly self destructive in many cases. So what we're to do about it, Scott, we're going to need help from the god of therapy. Apollo is the God of therapy in Greek society. He's the God of many things.
Speaker 1:He's the God of playing the guitar, or the kythera. He's the God of the arts and poetry in general. He's got a wrestling and martial arts. But he's also the god of healing, like Apollo. And Marcus Aurelius at one point in the meditation says I've got nine gifts or 10 gifts from Apollo, ten gifts from Apollo, one from him and nine from the nine uses that represent the different branches of the arts.
Speaker 1:Is Apollo's temple at Delphi or something? Am I connecting there? The temple at Delphi, which is just down the road from where I'm at the moment, it's like a couple of hours drive towards the Mount Parnassus, on the side of Mount Parnassus, there's a temple in this place called Delphi, and it's the Temple Of Apollo. And it was very important in ancient Greek society, the Pythia, the Oracle would give these paradox ical announcements. It's often important in Greek tragedy.
Speaker 1:So she said that there was no man wiser than Socrates, for example. And Socrates said, well, I don't believe that that could be true. So he dedicated his life to proving that nobody was wise. And he said, it may be that there's no one wiser than me, but that's only because nobody is actually wise, paradoxically, a really roundabout way it came true.
Speaker 2:Well, reason I bring that up is I read in that Keltz book that they actually managed to break the lines and they took the Apollo's temple at Delphi, they took it off the Romans at one point or maybe it was maybe in the Romans. At
Speaker 1:one point, yeah, I'm not sure.
Speaker 2:I don't know what they did though. They just had a party.
Speaker 1:One point, the thing about temples is that's where people tended to store treasure. So I mean, bit like the Christian monks having a lot of gold and Vikings raiding it is much the same and perhaps even more so in ancient Greece and Rome that temples were like almost like banks or safes, like they stored a lot of gold and treasure in them. So they were obvious candidates for people to raid it. And I guess part of the idea maybe is that temples, because they were considered sacred, that people maybe believed that they were a little bit safer against being looted. So not only do you commit a crime by stealing stuff, you'd be committing a double crime by committing sacrilege.
Speaker 1:But they were periodically looted and destroyed. Unfortunately, a lot of important things were lost. So Marcus Aurelia says these 10 gifts are like therapy techniques, we would say the cognitive strategies for coping with anger. And you'll see kind of ways in which they relate to stuff that we've mentioned earlier, like even what Epictetus says about Medea. So number one, he says, first consider how you stand in relation to them, people that are making you angry, and how we were born to help one another, he says.
Speaker 1:And from a different angle, how I as Emperor, he says, was born to preside over them as the ram over his flock, or the bull over his herd, how he has an obligation to the people he's meant to be looking after. And then go back to first principles, he says, if all things are not mere atoms, nature must be the power that governs the whole. And if that be so lower things exist for the sake of the higher and the higher for one another. But his main point here is this stoic idea. And this is probably the most controversial thing he says there, that the stoics believe that humans are by nature social creatures.
Speaker 1:And this is a really old concept in Greek philosophy that goes all the way back to a very famous speech by one of the earliest sophists, a guy called Protagoras, who gave this elaborate beautiful speech, arguing that almost in a kind of evolutionary sense, he says look tortoises have shells, bears are really big and strong, like rabbits dig warrens and go under the ground, look birds can fly away, so other creatures have claws and teeth to defend themselves. So he says nature has given all of these creatures ways to protect themselves, either by using their bodies or their environment. He says but humans are uniquely vulnerable. He says humans are as infants for a long time, more than other mammals are dependent on the care of their parents. And he says humans, rather than claws, or shells, or teeth, like have society to protect them.
Speaker 1:The gods, he says, gave humans communities to band together and protect themselves against other creatures. And he says in order to have a community, we have implanted within us an innate sense of justice and fairness. And it's by that we have social contracts and the ability to maintain a community. Because if we didn't have justice, we wouldn't have communities, they wouldn't survive and then we would struggle to survive. We'd be like cavemen or something like that, you know, really to flourish as human beings.
Speaker 1:We need to band together and we need some kind of sense of justice in order to have a fair and equitable society. So Marcus says this isn't human nature, it's part of our DNA in a way. And so the goal of stoicism is living in agreement with nature and therefore Marcus concludes that we have this moral obligation given to us by nature to get on with one another, to live in harmony with other people. It's part of what it means to be a human being. And we're humaning badly, like if we argue and fight and quarrel with our fellow human beings.
Speaker 1:So the stoics want say we have this really deep seated ingrained moral imperative within us, like to try and live in harmony with other people. What it means
Speaker 2:to be.
Speaker 1:So it's one that he comes back to that again and again in the meditations, he really believes this is very fundamental. Although I think it's the most fundamental, the most basic principle he has, it's maybe the one that many modern readers and Marxist really find hardest at first to kind of wrap their heads around. We tend to think of ourselves as more individuals and more self centred, whereas the Greeks thought, no, we're inherently part of a community.
Speaker 2:We also need to realise, we're happy to take things of other humans who have built technology and electricity and the internet and zoom we're talking on now, we're all happy to take all our amazing things other people have done, but we're
Speaker 1:not willing to give away anything away. We're standing on the shoulders of giants, like we were using, even the language that we use is inherited, we would be nothing without language, you wouldn't even be called Scott. Like you wouldn't a, you be able to string two sentences together in your mind if it wasn't for the fact that you have a language to do it. And we depend on other people to give us culture and language. Our very identity would be inconceivable if it wasn't for the fact that we inherit language and culture from other people.
Speaker 1:And so it's a strange thing, we come into the world already kind of entangled with other people. And so we need to live harmoniously, live virtuously, live to the best that we can, rather than kind of struggling against that and trying to be in denial of these deep bonds that we have with the rest of humanity. So number two, when you're getting angry with somebody, these are all ways of remedies for anger, these are all things he thinks Medea should have done. So we should consider their character as a whole, consider what sort of beings they are at table and bed or elsewhere, above all what compulsions are subject to because of their opinions and what pride they take in these very acts. And actually Epictetus is doing this to Medea.
Speaker 1:Like he thinks of her in a very rounded way, he's able to look at Medea and say we shouldn't get angry with her because she has strength and virtue within her, although she does this kind of terrible, terrible thing. But also when we understand her story, we kind of understand how she got there. And we should feel pity for her, because we should understand that she's morally blinded. She's demanding things, she doesn't understand that by placing these rigid demands on external events, she's setting herself up for a kind of neurosis and frustration. So Epictetus kind of wants to say she doesn't know better in a way, she's morally ignorant.
Speaker 1:So we become less angry with people if we can understand where they come from. Now, that's the saying to understand all is to forgive all. And it might seem controversial, but what I would say is as a counsellor and a therapist over the years, I used to work with young offenders. For example, like I kind of was a young, when I was a young guy, I was kind of pretty off the rails. And I've got trouble with the cops a lot.
Speaker 1:And when I was a young guy, not a lot of people know this, but I was kicked out of school. And I was put on a rehabilitation scheme for young offenders. I wasn't one but I went on a rehabilitation scheme with kids that have been in Boston and stuff. So I was kind of lumped in with all these guys. And then I guess I kind of turned my life around and stuff.
Speaker 1:But they so as a counsellor, I worked with young offenders and kids that were socially excluded. And some of them did really horrendous things. Some of them bullied other kids, they did things horrible, violent. But I never really felt angry with them, because I spoke to them about their lives. And I kind of understood how they got to where they were.
Speaker 1:So it doesn't mean that I thought what they did was okay. But I kind of understood how what led up to like and how maybe their parents had influenced them, or how maybe they felt like Medea, so angry and so beaten down by society that values didn't make any sense to them anymore. They felt the world around them, like people storming the capital, they believed that society around them was so corrupt, like that didn't make sense to follow the rules anymore. And that's how they got where they were in many cases. So what Epicties and what Mark Ceruleus is saying here is like when we try to empathise with other people and view them in a more rounded and complete way, then we should naturally feel less angry with them is a way of moderating our anger.
Speaker 1:So I found that as a therapist, I didn't really feel anger towards these kids. If I took in isolation the individual things that they would do, maybe it would make me angry. But when I pictured their whole personality and their personal history and so on, it kind of watered down my feelings of anger. It made me think, yeah, I kind of get why how this happened.
Speaker 2:That's a frequent thing that I've encountered myself as well. You get into argument with someone and they'll pick like one thing you've done and your reply is, you haven't done this good thing, this good thing, this good thing, this good thing. And you pick one bad thing and then you call me a specific umbrella term and it's like, can't see
Speaker 1:my face. Madea is doing that to Jason. So Jason is marrying this other woman and Madea hates him now and wants to just punish him as much as possible. But she could have thought yeah, but like, Jason also used to love me and he did many good things as well. So I don't want to punish the guy that's the father of my children and we had all these years together when we were happy.
Speaker 1:Like we get tunnel vision when we're angry, like and we'll just focus on this one aspect. So she's really focusing on one act that Jason has committed and forgetting about all the good things that he did. And that allows her to go to this extreme, know, quite my dear's problem is she has this extreme tunnel vision, right that goes hand in hand with her rage.
Speaker 2:The common thing for what guys do to girls, people say it's like a girl, I'll call a girl like a psycho for one thing she does is like, maybe she's checking up her name or whatever. Then the straightaway label psycho as if every act he's ever done is a psycho. Mean, it's bad.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's a lot of labelling people do in society in general, like it's what we call thinking error, a cognitive distortion and cognitive therapy. Like labelling people in kind of black or white terms, it's once you realise that you see people do it a lot. And it seems like a very simplistic mistake to make. But we're all capable of doing that when we get very emotional. So people are either whether demonize them or we idealize them.
Speaker 1:It's harder to see people in a mood, good and bad in everyone. Like when we see people in a rounded way, there's good and bad in everyone, our emotions tend to be more balanced and nuanced and less extreme. But it takes more maturity and more intelligence to see things in a rounded and balanced way. Said, was it
Speaker 2:a stoic that said, Oh, someone says something bad about me, well, they don't know enough, they should have said way more bad things about I
Speaker 1:say that particularly well, like when they say bad things about me, go, you obviously don't know what you're talking about, right? Because if you did, you would have mentioned all the other things that are wrong with me as well. Happy to see you, you would have mentioned all my other faces as well. So like, they clearly don't know what they're talking about. He said he was kind of making a joke out of it, which is pretty cool.
Speaker 1:Number three, no person does evil willingly. I remember talking to the US Marines about this and I thought they were like, I was kind of like, I had to warn them in advance. Was like, this might seem controversial, but they were cool with it. They were like, it's an interesting idea. This is Socrates through and through, right?
Speaker 1:So Marcus Aurelius is saying this, he's really quoting Socrates, he's a very famous Socratic paradox. So Marcus Aurelius says, thirdly, consider that if they're acting rightly in what they do, you've got no reason to be annoyed. But if they're acting wrongly, it's plain that they're doing so involuntarily and through ignorance. For as no soul according to Socrates is ever willingly deprived of the truth. So neither is it willingly deprived of the capacity to deal with each person as he deserves.
Speaker 1:At any rate, people are upset if they hear themselves spoken of as unjust, callous, avaricious or in a word as people who offend against their neighbours. So what Marcus is saying here is that very often when someone does something and you think it's unjust and you tell them, they'll get annoyed because they don't believe that it is unjust. But then if they don't believe what they're doing is unjust, if they think that what they're doing is right, it's not a problem in a sense of them being a bad person, it's a problem of them being misguided or ignorant, kind of like you would say of a child that makes a mistake. So stoicism is very forgiving in this respect. It thinks people are just making mistakes, like when they do things that are bad.
Speaker 1:As you might say, no, no, no, they knew what they were doing. They knew what they're doing is wrong. Now they knew that you think it's wrong. They don't necessarily agree with you that it's wrong though. Of course, the majority of people that do commit crimes know that everyone else thinks it's wrong.
Speaker 1:They don't agree with them. They think it's trivial. They don't see it as important. And if you do think it's important, and they don't think it's important, then you have to conclude that they are misguided, or somebody is, it's either you or them. And if you're the one that's misguided, then you shouldn't be angry with them.
Speaker 1:But equally, if you think that they are misguided, then you should empathise with them, rather than being angry with them. And you should be trying to educate and inform and rehabilitate them, rather than get revenge against them. And that's what Marcus is saying here. This is an extraordinary thing for a magistrate to say, and for someone who's in command of 140,000 troops on the Roman frontier, like to say this, as he's engaged in the middle of a war. So a very famous Socratic idea, no man does evil willingly, because no one who does evil really understands that they're doing evil.
Speaker 2:Go to the top.
Speaker 1:Another good example, what I said to the Marines was look, every genocidal maniac, every evil tyrant and a dictator really believes that they're justified in what they're doing. And in fact, some of the most dangerous people you'll meet in life are the people that really believe that what they're doing is justified.
Speaker 2:That's the problem. It's the story they tell themselves.
Speaker 1:Cognitive, yeah, it's the story they tell themselves, it's their beliefs that are the problem, but beliefs can potentially be corrected. We should be trying to figure out where they've gone wrong and rehabilitate them where possible. Number four, Marcus says remember that you're not perfect, Scott, believe it or not, you're not perfect. You're not perfect, buddy. Neither am I, is probably Laoeya maybe is.
Speaker 1:But none of us are perfect. And this is a strange thing to say, I've mentioned to you before that most schools of ancient philosophy were named after their founders. So Pythagoreanism is named after Pythagoras, Epicureanism is named after Epicurus, Platonism is named after Plato. But the Stoics were founded by Zeno and they didn't name themselves after Zeno. They called themselves after the place they met because they did not believe that Zeno was perfect.
Speaker 1:Even the founder of the whole school of stoicism, they thought isn't perfectly wise. So he's not a guru, they didn't put him on a pedestal. This is really important to stoicism. It's not a personality. It's not a religion, it's a philosophy.
Speaker 2:I love it. I love that. That's my favourite part
Speaker 1:said you guys need to figure this out for yourself. You know, I can tell you what I figured out. Maybe you agree with me, maybe you don't. But I'm not like some divine guru figure. So Marcus says, fourthly, consider that you for your own part also commit many wrongs, Scott, and are just the same as they are.
Speaker 1:Even if you do refrain from certain kinds of wrongdoing, you have at least the inclination to commit such wrongs, even if cowardice, a concern for your reputation, or some other vice of that kind saves you from actually committing them. So this is like many people only refrain from doing bad things because they don't have the opportunity. Or they're not bold enough to do it. Mean, look at Stalin and Hitler and all these tyrants that did horrendous things. But every one of us knows that there are loads, 1000s, 10s of 1000s of other people in the world that would do even worse things if they were given absolute power.
Speaker 1:Like I think I've met a few taxi drivers. That would be worse than Hitler, worse than Stalin, like if you give them that much power, right?
Speaker 2:Look, think of the moral. So Churchill is a controversial character, right? And he at once, one time basically killed loads of Indians because he decided British people needed the food more than Indians, took all the food away. They starved to death. Like a big, what you do in opposition, obviously that's terrible to do.
Speaker 2:You shouldn't really starve from the death, but then there's stuff like that. People think he's a hero, then if you look at that incident, he's a disgusting person.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like there's good and bad in everybody and it's difficult to have a balanced view. And then society makes it hard to have a balanced view about people as well. People want us to label in black and white terms. So we have to kind of constantly be mindful of that and struggle against it. So I mean, how does this apply to Medea?
Speaker 1:Medea is furious with Jason, but Medea is not perfect herself. And if she really recognised some of her own vices, maybe she wouldn't have been so angry with Jason. Maybe there's a lack of self awareness there. There's a cliche in therapy, we say when you point the finger at someone else, there are three fingers pointing back at you. So when Madea was kind of like angry with Jason, maybe she should have looked at herself and thought, maybe in some ways I'm capable of being selfish, maybe if the tables were turned, potentially she would have gone off with somebody else, like under similar circumstances, it was the other way around, you know, maybe she's guilty of other vices.
Speaker 1:Maybe Jason isn't all bad, maybe Madea isn't all good, you know. So Marcus actually says we should stop, pause and ask ourselves whether we are not capable of doing the things that we're angry with other people for.
Speaker 2:Do you know why I think Marcus is so good to this as well? It's because he had skin in the game in a way, he was on the front line, he saw the death. If you remove yourself away and away and away from the actions you do, you become disconnected. So you can do some really bad shit. You can just say, yeah, do that.
Speaker 2:And then as 200,000 people dead to me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, he says, yeah, he's totally has skin in the game. I mean, there are hints in the meditations, even apart from the fact we know he stationed himself in the front line for many years, which not every many Roman Emperors wouldn't have done that, they would just stay at Rome. But he was there and even appears to have crossed the frontier and gone over into foreign lands into the Germanic lands. And he wouldn't have been in the middle of battle, but he was close to it. There's a bit in the meditations where he just very casually says, you know sometimes after a battle, see there's a body lying there and then the head is over there somewhere several yards away, and how that seems really weird and unnatural.
Speaker 1:He uses it as a metaphor and he says that in the same way when somebody gets angry with another person, or they're alienated from another human being. He says he sees this as being as unnatural as a head lying several yards away from the body. But the interesting thing is that he just kind of casually uses this as a metaphor. This is something he's seen, just wondering about it. You know, other day when you saw that head and it was like lying over there and the arms and legs were over there.
Speaker 1:There's a little hint in there that he's actually been quite close at least to the aftermath of battle. Yeah. Number five, he says you can't read other people's minds. Fifthly, you cannot even be certain that what other people are doing is wrong. For many actions are undertaken for some ulterior or hidden purpose.
Speaker 1:And as a general rule, you must find out a great deal before you can deliver a properly founded judgment on the action of others. Now here, he sounds like a magistrate. So he's saying, look, you know, like sometimes people do things for reasons other than you think. And it kind of goes back to what we said earlier, there's an overlap between a lot of these. So what Socrates said about no man does evil knowingly.
Speaker 1:Marcus here is saying, look, when you think someone's doing something out of badness, it may be that what they think that what they're doing is right. You know, maybe you don't even really understand their motives at all. And often people do horrible things for what seemed to them like good reasons, or valid reasons. And if you understood your reason, the reasons you might think I don't, it's not that think you're evil. I just think you're crazy.
Speaker 1:Or you're like really mixed up for thinking that this was a good way of improving society, or this was a good way of protecting your family or whatever your motives were. So we'd be more inclined to say you need therapy or rehabilitation rather than you need to be punished or anything.
Speaker 2:They do a bad thing to stop an even worse thing happening is another one where they get into that dilemma.
Speaker 1:So in Medea, her motives are pretty mixed and complex. And like I said, even in Seneca, it's partly that she's kind of been taught by Jason into doing these horrendous crimes in the past, like mothering, dismembering her brother. And she's partly tortured by that. I mean, in a way, Medea almost seems like she's got PTSD. Like, she has what we would call moral, what she describes is similar to what psychologists now call moral injury.
Speaker 1:So moral injury is when someone and it's often in the military does something that they kill an innocent person, for example, or they do something that racks their conscience afterwards. And then that becomes a kind of trauma to them, it's a sort of moral trauma. Medea has this kind of moral trauma, like she does to help Jason escape, like she kills her own brother. And then she's traumatised by this. And she feels that she needs to punish herself.
Speaker 1:So when we kind of understand that it's really messed up perverse kind of twisted pathology that she's got, it's almost like we think you need therapy rather than you need to be punished for what you've done. So Marcus is saying here, look, it's hard to read other people's minds and to be certain what their motives are. The motives are often more complex, more subtle than we assume. We call this mind reading in cognitive therapy because people do it a lot. When people are angry or upset, they often jump prematurely to conclusions about what other people are thinking.
Speaker 1:So number six, he says that we should remember life is transient. When you're annoyed beyond measure and losing all patience, remember that human life lasts for a moment. In a short while, we've all been laid to rest. Scott, we're all going to be toast. The sands of time are running low.
Speaker 1:And as Iron Maiden say, so in Medea's case, I mean, again, she's so angry with Jason, because he's gone with this other woman. But if she had this broader perspective, and she thought, look, we're all going to be toasts in anyway, know, life is it worth getting, that just takes the edge off it. It's kind like saying is it worth it? Is it worth getting that angry with Jason, given that Jason goes off another woman before you
Speaker 2:know
Speaker 1:it, they'll be old and dead, so will you. This is just a blip in the history of the universe. Everything is temporary. So this thing that you're getting really, really angry about is transient. Is it worth therefore getting that angry about it?
Speaker 1:It's getting this tunnel vision, it feels like you're getting angry about something that's all important. But when you view it as transient, it seems less all important sometimes.
Speaker 2:I had an example of that happen Saturday, saying I was reading a book, Oxford press version and the author spoke with the Romans, the barbarians, the Irish, the Scottish. When it came to the Welsh, he said that the Welsh teaching their kids Welsh was against human rights. I was like, you just mentioned the Romans, the barbarians, the Scots and the Irish said nothing about that. When it comes to Wales and the Welsh people, you said we're going against human rights. I was like, I'm going to email him.
Speaker 2:I'm going to email him. And then I was like, I'm gonna email him. I'm gonna email him. And in the end, I was like, what's the point? Like, what is it?
Speaker 2:What am I gonna get out of emailing this guy?
Speaker 1:It's not worth it, buddy.
Speaker 2:It's not worth it. What's the point? Like, leave it there.
Speaker 1:That's not worth it.
Speaker 2:By your books? Have you heard emails from your books, someone like Donald, what you said you? Yes.
Speaker 1:I love receiving them. Messages and stuff like, people email me literally almost every day. Not all kind of like arguing with me. You mean, 90% of them are really nice, right? Like, I got a lot of really nice emails.
Speaker 1:But then like, I'll get people kind of like arguing with me about stuff. I'm kind of used to it now though. Nice. So number seven, and this is the famous stoic maxim. And this quote is the basis of cognitive therapy, all cognitive behavioural therapy.
Speaker 1:Seventhly, that as Epictetus had said, again, is Marcus's voice, it's not people's actions that trouble us for those that are of own ruling centres, that's their business. But the opinions that we form about those actions. So eliminate your judgment that this or that is of harm to you, make up your mind to discard that opinion and your anger will be at an end. And how are you to do this? By reflecting that wrong done to you by another is nothing shameful to yourself.
Speaker 1:For unless action of which one should be ashamed is the only true evil, it would follow that you too must commit many wrongs and become a brigand and one who will stop at nothing. So what he's saying is here basically that it's not things that upset us but rather our opinions about them. And this is really the Stoics fundamental issue with tragedy. Like they say, look, Medea is only really angry with Jason because she believes that it's unacceptable for him to go with this other woman. But she could have viewed it differently.
Speaker 1:Like there's 101 other stories that she could tell herself about the same situation. Like she could have said, well, it just proves that he never really loved me in the first place anyway. And I'm better off without him. Could have been another, you know, in which case, she would have felt relieved, maybe rather than angry. So, you know, like, this is the she's picked a particularly anger provoking way of interpreting the situation.
Speaker 1:Epictetus and Marcus are saying that she reminded herself it's her own way of looking at it, it's her own value judgments, it's her own beliefs that are really making her angry. It's not Jason that's making her angry. It's her beliefs about Jason, it's her opinions about it that are making her angry, she's doing it to herself basically. The Epictetus said everything has two handles, a good handle and a shitty handle. But most people pick things up with a shitty handle.
Speaker 1:And the story is that we need to learn to pick things up with a good handle. So there's like a good and a bad way of looking at any situation, good, bad way of interpreting it, good and
Speaker 2:bad
Speaker 1:perspective. One that's unworkable, one that's more constructive, rational and helpful. I told my little girl that I don't think she was ready for the metaphor yet because she was only about eight or nine. I said, babe, did you know that there was this philosopher a long time ago? He said, everything has two handles, a good handle and a bad handle.
Speaker 1:And she said, that's not true, daddy. She was taking it about literally, Scott, two handles, what are talking about? You're crazy.
Speaker 2:Well, what would you say in this regard? So you're saying now like, look, it's your fault if your beliefs are Buddhist. I'm that woman the crazy one saying like the one that's going to kill her kids I'm like this is my wrong belief have you seen what's happened to me all this has happened to me how can you say it's my belief Donald you nutter it's actually happened to me, how can you say it's my belief there's a problem, do you know I mean? It's like
Speaker 1:Because the first thing the Stoics and Socrates say is, is it conceivable that the same thing could happen to someone else and they would respond differently? So does everyone feel the same way? So and they would also say, the things that have happened to you have happened to other people in the past, you're not the only person that's ever been exiled. You're not the only woman that's ever been jolted by her husband. And does every exile, does every jilted lover murder their kids?
Speaker 1:No, only Medea does. Because you're picking up at a shitty handle, Medea. Other people have found ways. So as Xenophon lost his son, he said, already knew that he was mortal. He picks up with a good handle, that's his way of dealing with it, processing it.
Speaker 1:He's like, knew in advance he was doing a dangerous job. So I was prepared for the fact that one day I might get this news.
Speaker 2:If you said that you would get grilled in the media. Imagine I came out, Scott, your son's dead. I knew he's human. I would literally get, your people would attack you wouldn't they?
Speaker 1:Everything today gets quoted out of context. Like, it's like people make a kind of, like, that's the game that people play. So in ancient philosophy, you look at things that people say, and then try to understand why they said them, like what it means, what the wider context is. And then there's usually a rationale for it. But that's why it makes us all stupider.
Speaker 1:Like if we take everything at the surface level, by we quote it out of context without understanding why it was said or what else was said before and after it. We live in a world of sound bites, we oversimplify everything. So the other thing that Stoics say and boy does this apply to media. And I said this is not a really famous stoic slogan. And actually, this applies at two levels.
Speaker 1:So anger does us more harm than the things that we're angry about. So eight for the anger and distress that we feel at such behaviour brings us more suffering than the very things that give rise to that anger and distress. So that's true in a trivial sense, and then in a much more philosophical sense. So Epictetus or Marcus would look at Medea and say, you know, your anger is actually doing a lot more harm than the thing. I mean, so what Jason's going off on other women, like that in itself, it's not the end of the world.
Speaker 1:The consequences of your anger are far more catastrophic than the thing that you're angry about. Like, I mean, what you've done is devastating. By the way, she did a lot of other bad things as well. Burned the city down as well. Tell
Speaker 2:us everything she's done. You're like, Oh, yeah, and she killed her brother. Oh, and she burned the city down.
Speaker 1:I forgot to mention that that didn't seem important at the time, Scott. It stuck my mind. She also burns the city down of Corinth. Like, so I'm sure there's probably other things as well. Oh, she poise Yeah, she does.
Speaker 1:I think she also mothers Jason and he's brave. She poisons them. Like, that also seems trivial at the time. I was like, know, she mainly mothers the kids. She also mothers two other people in Bunsen City down.
Speaker 1:So it's like that meme of Elmo or whatever, like everything, just carnage, Medea is crazy, she goes to the extreme. That's why it's so compelling. Why you kind of think you don't get stories like this anymore. Like she's like, doesn't do things by half.
Speaker 2:No, if I play burning the city is a big, big accomplishment.
Speaker 1:I'll burn the whole place down, right? Just because this guy just because my husband's dumped me. There's more to it than that, still despite all the things that happened to her, it doesn't justify burning the city down and murdering our kids. So at a practical, a physical level, she's done far more damage than the thing that she was angry about. But also Epictetus would say, look, exile losing your husband don't really harm you in a sense.
Speaker 1:They're external things like to someone else, those things might be trivial. But your anger destroys your character. This is why Epictetus, again, might say when Epictetus says she turns into a viper, maybe that sounds a little bit misogynistic, unless you know that he says the same thing about everybody. So Epictetus says because reason is what makes us distinctly human, when we abandon reason and give into anger, he says that we literally become less human in a way. Literally, you're less human now when you're acting in accord with anger because you've jettisoned reason and it's reason that gives us humanity.
Speaker 1:And so he says, literally, she's degraded herself or a man would in the same situation, to the level of being like an animal. She's not thinking rationally about what she's doing. She's maimed or blinded herself. But he also thinks she's done this unintentionally, she doesn't realise that she's doing it. So it's voluntary, in a sense, but in another sense, it's involuntary because she doesn't have insight into the fact that she's doing it.
Speaker 1:Can use harm to her character.
Speaker 2:Sorry, I was gonna say you can add the third biological layer that the stress and we're getting angry over something is that response is actually more harmful than the stressor itself.
Speaker 1:Give yourself a dog.
Speaker 2:Yeah, basically. So she's given, she probably had ulcers, no doubt.
Speaker 1:She must have, she gave everyone else an ulcer. Give them blisters by setting fire at the city. Number nine, kindness is the antidote to anger. So he said, this is again contentious, but the stoics say look, another therapy we do in modern psychotherapy, are several kind of basic strategies that we may employ. And one very old behaviour therapy strategy is to do the opposite of the thing that you want to get rid of.
Speaker 1:And this is what the Stoics are doing here. So they say, Well, what's the opposite of anger? And they say, Well, the opposite of anger would be kindness. And they mean this technically. So they say anger is the desire for revenge, or they define anger, at least a certain type of anger, certainly Medea's anger is a desire to harm other people, because you perceive them as having acted unjustly.
Speaker 1:So Medea fits that perfectly, she perceives Jason as having acted unjustly. And so she has this overwhelming desire to harm him and the other people involved. And so the story said, what would be the complete opposite of that? It would be the desire to help other people by reforming or educating them. So they think we should repay anger with kindness.
Speaker 1:So rather than trying to punish people, we get in a spiral of revenge by doing that. We have to break it by trying to re educate and reform other people. It's the only way we can get out of this kind of cycle. He says ninth, that kindness is invincible if it's sincere and not hypocritical or a mere facade. So he says we can replace anger with kindness but it has to be genuine kindness.
Speaker 1:We have to genuinely want to help the person that's angry with us and with whom we're angry. So for what can be the most insulting, what can the most insulting of people do to you if you're consistently kind to him? And when the occasion allows gently advise him and quietly put him in the proper course at the very time when he's attempting to do you a mischief. So Marcus doesn't mean invincible in the sense that if you're kind to someone, of course they can just tell you to F off, you can't control them. Like the stories are very clear that some things are up to us and others are not.
Speaker 1:Other people aren't up to you. Madea doesn't control Jason. Jason doesn't control Madea. But kindness is invincible in the sense that nobody can stop you from being kind if you choose to be so. It's a choice.
Speaker 1:It's an attitude that
Speaker 2:you can adopt, no one
Speaker 1:can take it away from you, it's entirely within your sphere of control, the decision to exhibit kindness. And so there's an example, Marcus gives an example of this. So he imagines talking to someone that he describes as his son. Now, it's tempting to wonder if this is Commodus, who would have been maybe 14 at the time that Marcus wrote this. So Marcus gives this little example, he says no my son, we were born for something other than this.
Speaker 1:It is not I who am harmed, it is you, my son, who are causing harm to yourself. So he says, this person was angry with him, he imagines that he'd have this conversation with them. And interestingly, those are two of the 10 remedies that he mentioned earlier. So he imagines talking to somebody that's angry with him, he's having a quarrel with somebody. And what he does is bring into play two of those remedies.
Speaker 1:So we were born for something other than this is the first one, we were born to help one another. And you're just harming yourself more than you're harming me is anger does us more harm than the things we're angry about. Interestingly, see, he wants to reform and educate the person that's angry with him, maybe it was Commodus, and show him tactfully in general terms that this is so and that not even bees behave in such a fashion, nor any other creature of a gregarious nature. So he wants to say, look, even animals try to live in communities and work along with each other. And humans are much more sophisticated than that.
Speaker 1:So it's against our nature, like to turn on each other, we should be trying to resolve our conflicts and work as a team. We're born to live in communities and get along with one another. But you must do so in no sarcastic or reproachful spirit, but affectionately. So notice he says, if you're going to try and educate someone and reform them, you have to do it sensitively and affectionately. And with a heart free from ranker and not as if you were lecturing him like a schoolmaster or trying to impress bystanders, but as one person to another, even if others should happen to be present.
Speaker 1:So he's thinking very carefully about the way that he does this, the tone of voice that he does it. And it's interesting just that he puts as much effort into imagining how he's going to communicate with somebody that's having a quarrel with him. And then he says, the tenth and final gift and if you will accept this tenth gift from Apollo, the leader of the muses, namely that it's sheer madness to expect the bad to do no wrong, for that is to wish for the impossible, But to allow that they should do wrong to others, yet demand that they should do no wrong to you yourself is senseless and tyrannical. So this is this idea of stoics that it's inevitable that people are going to do vicious things. And this way in Medea's case, would be rather when people are angry, they often act as if they're shocked.
Speaker 1:They say I can't believe it, I can't believe Jason's done this to me. Whereas what she could have said is shit happens. People are unfaithful, they vacillate, marriages break up, it happens to other people, I shouldn't be shocked if it happens to me. And so this is like the stoic idea of that we should be ready for misfortune, because misfortunes befall other people. So they're not shocking.
Speaker 1:We know that marriages break up, so why should we be shocked? When I was break, why shouldn't we be ready for it? There are good and bad people in the world and everybody has a certain degree of folly and vice in them. So why should we be surprised if even the people that we love can sometimes do things that seem foolish or vicious in our eyes? Because we already know that all humans are fallible.
Speaker 1:So at the very least, we shouldn't be shocked by it. And the Stoics think we only ever get really, really angry when we act as if we're surprised. And if you take away that edge of shock or surprise, then our anger will be moderated to some extent, it won't be as severe. And so Medea is only as furiously angry as she could be, because she just finds it inconceivable that this could have happened. Whereas actually from an outside point of view, it's perfectly conceivable.
Speaker 1:Like Jason was fallible, like he was tempted to be unfaithful to her. Know, loads of people have done that throughout history. It's not a shocking or inconceivable thing. So with that, Scott, I conclude like this is like my case for the case study of MIDEA. And hopefully, you know, I don't expect people to agree with everything I've said about love, or everything that I've said about anger.
Speaker 1:But I hope it's given them food for thought. Because there's a lot of juicy ideas in there for you know, and even if they just kind of agree with one or two of them, or they get them thinking, I think that's really the main thing. Just want to stimulate discussion and get people to think about these things.
Speaker 2:Coming in for you. What about trusting someone?
Speaker 1:Always a bad idea.
Speaker 2:Can we live a life and not for trusting people? Like is that a good life?
Speaker 1:You know, actually what I say, I'm joking, but trust shouldn't be all or nothing. And we should trust people to some degree. And of course, because if you don't trust anybody, that's pathological, If you never trusted anybody over anything, you wouldn't trust any experts, you don't trust any politicians, don't trust the police, don't trust anyone, that's a road to madness. But equally, if you're gullible and trust everybody, even untrustworthy people, that's a big mistake as well. So the simple answer to it is you're going to have to depend on your judgement.
Speaker 1:Like many things in life, there's not a hard and fast rule. Like should you trust people? It's not a yes or no answer. You should trust some people some of the time about some things. How do I know when?
Speaker 1:I'm going to have to use your judgment. How do you know if you can use your judgment? You look at different types of evidence, you look at someone's behaviour, and you don't trust people more than you need to trust them in certain situations. And you learn from your mistakes over time as well. And you judge what the stakes are, like should you trust someone about whether they're going to share their candy with you?
Speaker 1:Well, maybe it's not really that big a deal, right? We have to stress about it. Should you trust someone if you're going into a business partnership with them? Maybe you need to be more careful and scrutinise the evidence more cautiously because the stakes are much higher. But this is true, know, I would say if that sounds like a non answer in a way, I think the real challenge in life is that we're tempted to look for cut and dried yes or no answers.
Speaker 1:Like it's laziness or it's easier when we're under stress and it's hard to think things through on a case by case basis and exercise judgment. That requires time and effort. And so when we're upset we don't want to do it. But really, the most helpful thing in life is to learn to have the patience to weigh things up on an individual basis and think, can I actually trust this guy? Do I need to be less trusting in this situation?
Speaker 1:Can I afford to be more trusting in that situation?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and then in regards to the regain of trust, another question is the same thing as like to learn from your previous experience and make a better judgment really.
Speaker 1:I look back on life and you kind of think here's a good one, Scott. I don't know, maybe this is different for different people, I suppose. But once you hit 40, I think you have a moral obligation to look back on your life and learn stuff from it. This is my little rule of thumb. Maybe before that, but I always think once you're at 40, you don't have any excuses, why you should look back on your life.
Speaker 1:So you can look back at that point and think, in the past, when you lent money to people, or other things, like what percentage of the time did you get that back? You're laughing. But so when next time someone says, Scott, could you lend me £100? You might think, well, let me just review my track record by lending money to people and how many times I actually got it back. You can learn a lot from your experience in that way.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's absolutely individual. Depends what type of person you want to be as well. You see a lot of this where guys and girls will be like, no, can't trust someone, there's one person cheated on me so therefore I'm never opening up to anyone ever again.'
Speaker 1:Then nobody will ever trust you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you have to open up two way street.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you have to trust people to some extent in order to have a relationship. It's almost like a social contract. It's a bond that society is based on and a relationship is based on. Has to be a degree of trust in a relationship. As a counsellor, a therapist, one of the things I've seen is what you mentioned earlier, people, I think checking messages and kind of being suspicious and jealous.
Speaker 1:And that's a surefire way to destroy any relationship. I've worked with many clients that do stuff like that and drives them crazy. And then it really undermines the relationship. There has to be a degree of trust. But at the same time, you have to avoid gullibility.
Speaker 1:So there's a kind of balancing act. But if you can't trust someone, if you can't develop trust in someone, at least to some extent, then do you really have a relationship at all?
Speaker 2:Yeah, what is it? What it is if you don't have trust? What are doing? We just have a chat and then not believe in anything they say and then telling you to your mate, so I saw like
Speaker 1:How could you ever expect anyone to trust you if you don't trust them?
Speaker 2:Don't rush
Speaker 1:into trusting people prematurely. Like it's okay to kind of sometimes rethink it, like review it, like based on what's happening around you, like the evidence. You've got to retain your objectivity somehow. It's difficult when you're in love. Like you don't think rationally, the Stoics want us to love wisely, to retain a certain amount of objectivity.
Speaker 1:And they think that the way to do that to kind of avoid being swept away and hang on to objectivity is the kiss of death basically is to kind of think, maybe not literally, to think, you know, this is temporary. So I'm going to like make the best of it, you know, while I can for however long it lasts. And they think viewing things in that way helps us to retain a certain degree of detachment and objectivity. But other people romantics would say that's not love. You have to love requires a certain amount of craziness or passion.
Speaker 1:And I don't know the answer to that. Think I probably side with the Stoics and Socrates more that love should be a bit more detached and more rational and all the fruit to be healthy. But I know for other people, the idea is so ingrained that love is crazy and irrational that
Speaker 2:would create Even those times, those
Speaker 1:people are cliche.
Speaker 2:My ear going?
Speaker 1:No, I was just talking over
Speaker 2:you. No, can hear myself.
Speaker 1:Can you? I don't know. Are you not echoing for me, buddy?
Speaker 2:Swear I'm not on any drugs.
Speaker 1:Voice is in your head,
Speaker 2:Scott. Basically, Yeah, like you said there, so even the people that have that fiery love where they're completely in love crazy, did it last? Did that last forever? Did that feeling No, it doesn't. So they're clinging onto this, it's like clinging on to anger, it?
Speaker 2:It's clinging on to such an intense one kind of self emotion.
Speaker 1:And could call it something else, could say is that love or is it infatuation? Is it love or is it kind of is it neediness or lust or desire? Maybe it's something else. The Stoics would say it's not love, because it's kind of blind. People say love is blind, the Stoics would say no, actually that's not loving.
Speaker 1:You know, love is enlightened and rational and wise and understands. And, know, I think there is a sense in which if you lose the objectivity, then maybe you're not really loving the person at all. I'll give you a good example of this. Know, I mean, I hope people can find this relatable. Again, I don't expect everyone to agree with me.
Speaker 1:But hopefully it's food for thought. If you love someone in that kind of infatuated way, you'll tend to idealize them, right? So it's more like you're falling in love with a projection, like you're falling in love with kind of what you want the other person to be, rather than maybe warts and all looking at reality. So how can that really be love when it's not actually aimed at the real person? It's like a cardboard cut out of them that you have in your mind, it's an ideal.
Speaker 1:How can that actually be love of the other person, if it's not even directed at the real person, it's directed kind of abstraction, or an ideal. So that's my view about it. I think if you want to really love someone, you have to love them what's known. And if you do that in a balanced way, it's less, it's going to be more detached. And it's not going to be that kind of infatuation that people describe.
Speaker 1:But I think as we live in a society where love is idealised, which it wasn't in the past. And, you know, we have rom coms and romantic dramas and things like that, that kind of portray love as being this total infatuation, which is probably quite toxic.
Speaker 2:Very toxic. And that's the normal, that's the norm now. That's the normal love. Like we've been growing up a TV show.
Speaker 1:Can't live without you, Scott.
Speaker 2:Oh, please. I don't want you to be able to live unless you can't live without me, Donald.
Speaker 1:But it's also compelling. People don't want to be loved by somebody who's dependent on them. Or if they do, that's not really love on their part either, right?
Speaker 2:A lot of people want it, they want you to love them so much that your life is then. Do they
Speaker 1:really want it? That's kind of almost sadomasochistic, right? Is that really love at all? Or is it something else? But for many people, it's kind of like that kind of attachment and dependence is actually kind of repellent, like it's not attractive.
Speaker 1:Although some people think they can kind of use it, like, you know, they like people to be dependent on them, maybe they can exploit it, take advantage of it, like you're leaving yourself wide open to be exploited. Is another infatuation.
Speaker 2:The worst type of love is like the love of a couple creating this perfect image of themselves for social media. So the images they created themselves, they put it on social media, that is the love there. They they put it out in the world, they get likes and comments and friends and they will live for that. Even if the reality is arguments, they don't even talk to each other. Just ah.
Speaker 2:I've got
Speaker 1:a bombshell for you, Scott. I mean, this is a simple one, right? Everyone knows this already. But that's all when you throw out, I have a lot of these conversations. I love talking about love.
Speaker 1:It's it's great. It's a cool subject. It's one of my favourite subjects, right? And we talked about it a lot about today alongside anger, but there's many other things we could say about it. And they're all kind of unanswerable questions, but they're good questions.
Speaker 1:This is how Socrates used to talk about it. Socrates asked in the Carmides, he says, does like attract like or do opposites attract? Or are we attracted by someone that we perceive as offering a remedy for weaknesses or wounds that we have? And in that case, what happens when those wounds are healed and we no longer need the remedy? Does that mean that we cease to love them, like once we've benefited from them?
Speaker 1:So he has all these interesting questions about the nature of love, that would be more like dependence, I guess, in a sense. But here's one that is touched on by the ancient philosophers. Can you love somebody if you don't love yourself?
Speaker 2:I don't think you can love them in a healthy way if you don't love yourself, because then you basically start relying on them for your self love.
Speaker 1:It becomes dependency very easily. And if you make yourself love conditional on love and approval from other people, then that's also quite toxic. So you have to learn, I think, independently to love yourself. Ironically, you have to learn not to need other people in order to be genuinely lovable. I think you need independence, be attractive.
Speaker 1:I think.
Speaker 2:That's your number one, is going out to the world.
Speaker 1:Self love, we should run a course, we should design a course on self love, the science of self love.
Speaker 2:It's definitely picking up because even International Women's Day today post being like, love yourself, do something that loves yourself. All you need is yourself. You don't need no man. There is a massive truth in that. Like you don't need someone else, but how can you break through to people?
Speaker 2:I think it's very like a lot of people say it, but then they don't mean it. Think they need someone else to make their life a whole, like two people love and all that stuff. It's a paradox.
Speaker 1:Make yourself whole, otherwise it turns into neediness and dependency rather than like a kind of healthy love.
Speaker 2:We definitely should do more. Think see what people say about the love things. I think obviously doing health and fitness is great and all that, but everybody's still a human being listening. Everyone still has these things.
Speaker 1:I'll tell you a shortcut. I think one of things that helped me most in life is having a child, like having a wee girl, because it gives me a certain amount of objectivity thinking about what does it mean to love someone else as a parent? Like, for example, I said earlier, I kind of glossed over this, the idea about the does it depend on reciprocal love? Well, that doesn't really work that well if you're a parent, because sometimes your kids are gonna get annoyed with you. And they'll do things that are okay, but does that mean you don't love them anymore?
Speaker 1:So if you're going to genuinely be good, loving your kids as a parent, it needs to be in a sense unconditional. It can't be on and off and up and down. Because kids need your love the most when they're kind of being unlovable, when they're having a temper tantrum, like when they're being a bit obnoxious or whatever, like that's kind of when they actually need you, like to exhibit parental love towards them. And I think some people like bad parenting would be when the kids are misbehaving, the parents are like, I don't love you anymore. And it switches off.
Speaker 1:And then that makes everything 100 times worse, like for everybody. But I think the thing that helps you is encourage, you know, this is a controversial suggestion. If people think how can I attain independence in a relationship and detachment? How can I learn to love myself, rather unconditionally, rather than loving myself in a way that's conditional on approval of others? I'm going to make a controversial suggestion, Scott.
Speaker 1:I think the roundabout way to do that is to encourage your partner's independence. I think like, the way to do that is to encourage your partner to be more self sufficient, to make your partner stronger and more independent and discourage them from being dependent on you for approval. And I think if you do that for them, then you'll be more capable of doing it for yourself. And they'll be more capable of encouraging you to be loving in a non attached independent way. But that requires a certain amount of courage and confidence in a relationship.
Speaker 1:Like, you know, if you build someone up and boost their ego and make them feel strong and confident, how do know they're not going to leave you? You have to be confident enough to think unconditionally, you want to build up and strengthen your partner. And I say that because in many, many relationships you hear about people doing the opposite. They bring their partners down and make them weaker. Do you know in relationships, there's a very simple question asked people in therapy about their relationships and often simplest questions are the powerful ones.
Speaker 1:It's asking the unaskable question, right, But when people are troubled by a relationship, is often all they need to ask themselves, say does this relationship make you stronger or does it make you weaker? And in many relationships, people go, well, to be honest, I can't really, here's a clue if you're in therapy, in the first place, like, know, not always, but if you're in therapy, of your relationship, kind of by definition, your relationships making you weaker, like often. Doctor.
Speaker 2:Great question.
Speaker 1:Why you're in therapy discussing it, right? So what sort of relationship makes you weaker? Bad relationship, toxic relation, it's not a good one. Shouldn't relationships make you stronger? Are you making the other person in the relationship stronger or weaker?
Speaker 2:That's good. Ideally,
Speaker 1:in a good healthy relationship, it should make both partners stronger.
Speaker 2:Good way of looking at it, what if the other person making them weaker, by mistake?
Speaker 1:They become stronger, you become more independent, become less dependent on the other person, then you might fly away. So it requires if you're going to make the other person stronger, it requires not being clingy, by being less attached to them. But if you make them stronger, they'll make you stronger.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And if they run away from you at the end and they got their own independence, so they just feel like whatever, happy days, whatever. I mean, that's easy, easiest said and done in it. But you see all the people who are clingy, it's like, why? Stop clinging and making people reliant on you.
Speaker 2:It's weird. You someone seven free. Yeah. That's the If you love them seven, three, they'll come back. Maybe, unless you feel really clingy.
Speaker 2:Some comments here. Jaspreeti, I know, I know. Two holes and not two halves. Yes, yes, yes. I think the best way possibly, even the only way to learn about yourself is through relationships.
Speaker 2:I think that's true in regard to not just romantic, but work relationships, family, everything. Vasilis Khambhutani says, he says you are only like you because of relationships. If nobody had a relationship with you, you wouldn't exist. And you think about it, it's true. If nobody had any relationship with you, do you even exist?
Speaker 2:Because you've got no interaction with anything.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You'd be like Robinson Crusoe. Yeah, basically. Are you still haven't seen Castaway?
Speaker 2:I haven't seen Castaway, but it's been referenced many times now. Had my friend, he had the castaway look apparently. So I need to look it up.
Speaker 3:It's classic.
Speaker 1:There should be bonus in Yes.
Speaker 2:I think relationships should be like bonus, looking at it as like a bonus. I think so. Like, oh, this is a bonus to
Speaker 1:my life. I agree, actually, because it's probably, it's not so safe, it's partly in the hands of fate. I mean, I hate to break it to you, But there's not some kind of magic formula. And you know, it might be imagine what it was like in the past when people lived in a little village in straw huts. Right?
Speaker 1:You know, like, if you met someone and fell in love with them, lucky you, but maybe you don't. Like, it's kind of the luck of the draw, buddy. And you know, even today, like, you know, it's like that to some extent as well, like if you meet, you know, you might just be unlucky and have a string of bad relationships, you bump into the wrong people. And then eventually you meet the right person, and it's a whole different ballgame. It completely transforms your perception of yourself.
Speaker 1:But it's like, it's a crapshoot, right dating or relationships or whatever, you know, it's like a roll of the dice. And then you don't really know, obviously, you can be more careful about the type of people you meet in the circles you move in and, you know, like what your criteria are, but at the end of the day, you don't control other people, you know, and I'll tell you, I'll let you in the secret, Scott. People are different by enclosed doors. Like, so, you know, you meet people and they seem quite normal at first. Why, and then you live with them for a few weeks or months.
Speaker 1:And then a true character emerges behind closed doors. Like, you you have conversations with people who get buying clothes, you think, geez, man, if anybody was listening to this, what's being said in private here. But when you're dating people, don't see that side of them at first. Like that's how people partly end up in toxic relationships, because it takes a while for the kind of pathology to emerge. People keep it a secret when they've got violent temples.
Speaker 2:Know, Doctor. That's often the case, isn't it? Like the people who say like, was such a lovely person. Mother mentioned that my father, to be honest, she was like, yeah, and all my family were like, yeah, he'd come to the club, he would bring the flowers to your mother, he'd get everyone drinks, he'd flash his cash. And then as soon as he got with her, he didn't give any money.
Speaker 2:He didn't engage at all. Was the opposite. As soon as he got the goal, it was the opposite behavior, which is what true behavior was. Lot of people do that. They fake someone to get someone.
Speaker 2:But there's a new app coming out now because basically it's out now. They're creating private rooms online. When you sign up, you have to get invited into this room. So someone knows who everybody is, but as you come in, it's like a masquerade. Nobody knows who's talking in the groups.
Speaker 2:You got your own fake names. And the reason they're doing it is because they were talking to these tech founders and they're like, Oh mate, when you did that post the other day about Black Lives Matter, whatever, it's great. He's like, I don't believe that. That's just the PR side. I don't actually believe that.
Speaker 2:And then this guy was like, everybody probably has the same thing. Nobody actually believes what they put out there. So let's get them in a private room to say what they actually believe. And now they're trying to get those rooms going. And that's going to kick right off if you think about it.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, this is one of the things that here's like, this is just a random thought, I'm going to say it, like, it's one of my little kind of things, I think what would I teach my daughter growing up, like if I was going to hand over, like something to if I could teach her some kind of like a little power of wisdom or whatever. One would be, like I was saying to you a minute ago, a sense, like human nature means that people conceal a lot of stuff, right? So one of the things you learn as a psychotherapist fifty two percent of people in America gone to the largest ever prevalent study, the National Institute of Health, have a current or historical mental health diagnosis or meet the criteria for one, But funnily enough, people that have mental health problems don't normally wear a badge that says, 'I've got borderline personality disorder' or 'I've got clinical depression' or whatever, right? So that means shock horror that we tend to underestimate the prevalence of mental health problems, because people keep it secret. But if you're a psychotherapist, you work with people who tell you like, know, they're suicidal, they've considered doing this, they've considered doing that.
Speaker 1:You know, they have these kind of like horrific anxieties that torture them, whatever. And that's the guy that works in the bank, or that drives you a bus, or that you're dating online, or, you know, so like, you know, anxieties, depression, other problems are more common than people realise. And for the very simple, stating the obvious reason that people are embarrassed to admit it, So they keep it secret. So we all massively underestimate it. I'll give you another example.
Speaker 1:It's the same but different. Like people underestimate how much debt, it's kind of like the average debt like because people don't go around with a badge, a sticker on their forehead, saying they owe like you know $50 or whatever. So people underestimate how prevalent debt is. Physical health problems as well, I wish I need to dig this out, there's some good statistics on like over forty-fifty, like how common chronic health problems are. Right?
Speaker 1:So like there's a tendency for people just to kind of assume by default that other people don't have chronic health problems. And then we're all puzzled, we go, I don't understand why that guy was being a bit cranky with me today. Like, boy, maybe he's got some kind of health problem, you know, could be something like sciatica or whatever is playing up really badly for maybe gets migraines or something like, but these things are all over the place, people don't tell you about them. Right? But common sense tells you, like mental health problems, financial problems, relationship problem, like people don't print it on a T shirt though.
Speaker 1:And if you knew what was going on in their lives, you probably view the behaviour differently. But common sense tells us, like these things are common. They're everywhere around us.
Speaker 2:That's the main takeaway, isn't it? To realise that I think you become way more empathetic in general, and you'd be a nice, a kinder person, more patient, everything. It'll make you a better person all around. So yeah, that's key. But yeah, I think the interview is on now, the Royal interview.
Speaker 1:Oh, maybe we should wrap up then so that everybody can get off and check out the latest drama with the royals.
Speaker 2:What maybe if they believe it's true love or not, who knows? What is this love they have? What is the love of the royal family?
Speaker 1:Well, do you know famously Prince Charles said that? Like he was interviewed after when he was engaged. And so there's a clip of it, he was with Princess Diana. And they said, so you guys really in love and Prince Charles says, well, what is love? And people are like, well, that doesn't bode well.
Speaker 1:Don't say that in front of your fiance.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he was in love with someone else and he didn't wanna say we'll have to talk about that next week. Yes, let's talk about love start off next week and that shenanigans and stuff like that.
Speaker 1:I don't have a lot to say.
Speaker 2:Let's try to do it. Last week, next week, so of this striking soul challenge and it's been awesome. But yeah, next week, Donald, bring us
Speaker 1:How are turtles getting on? Are they all meeting their goals and stuff?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I'd say there's something called the valley of despair, if you'd have it. I spoke with us typically what happens week three to four, I think a lot of people are feeling their lockdown, but a lot of people are only up now Donald, they're doing well.
Speaker 1:This morning, I had my cold shower every morning, fasting today, I forget. I fast every Monday, fast anyway, every day. So every time I'm fasting, and do my one meal a day. And I went, I jumped my rope and stuff. And I went to the park again today, the kids were all doing Taekwondo, was load of school kids doing Taekwondo in the park.
Speaker 1:So I was jumping my wee skipping rope in the park for a while. So I've got calfs, bricks, Scott, I just need to do the rest of my body now, I've got one muscle group that's like
Speaker 2:Get on the press ups Donald, do you know what, do you want to do, my favourite workout of the week is the boxing class that one of the instructors does. I'll send you a link to it to do it. Can do it. It's fucking brilliant. Honest to God.
Speaker 1:A long time, all my life, entire life, actually, pretty much my whole life, done press ups every day, just not as many now. But for like a long time, did 100 press ups a day. I used to do that hand where you clap your hands.
Speaker 2:See, you're a pro.
Speaker 1:And then my wee girl would lie on my back. And I do press ups with her like sitting on my back. But I don't think that was very good for my slip desk.
Speaker 2:I think you could be in fitness influencer. I think we just have to change your position.
Speaker 1:I topped my game a little bit. Maybe Poppy could do that. Okay, I'll train her up. She could be
Speaker 2:a fitness influencer. I've posted your stoic soup in the group as well. I'm going to follow-up on that if anybody's tried it this weekend.
Speaker 1:Put her your chest.
Speaker 2:What's that?
Speaker 1:Put her on your chest.
Speaker 2:Grass doesn't grow on steel, Donald.
Speaker 1:Grass doesn't grow on steel.
Speaker 2:Steel, yeah? But yeah, I
Speaker 1:think it's very nutritious. It's a load of vegetables. Good for the winter.
Speaker 2:Doctor. Well, yeah, well, when it gets to the cold winters, no doubt, but I'm going get it going in the summer. I'm going to try it out. And then hopefully we'll get the stomach soup trending on Doctor.
Speaker 1:I'll make some soon.
Speaker 2:Doctor. Make someone send a photo.
Speaker 1:Doctor. I never get around to Molly makes a lot of soup.
Speaker 2:Doctor. Yeah, well, you're lucky.
Speaker 1:She does our yoga, like pretty consistent every day she does our yoga. Like, so discipline, self discipline, consistency. We
Speaker 2:do yoga twice a week, man. I'll send you links to the replays and you can give us your Lallie, I can give an opinion on yoga, you can give opinion of boxing, happy days.
Speaker 1:That'd be great. I'll enjoy that. Like, I'll go to the park, know, all the kids out there like train out in the park here, it's good to see them out in the open. Like I said, they're all doing Taekwondo with their pads and everything. Like we're doing spinning back kicks today or like 12 year olds, 14 year olds, whatever, like big crowd of them in the local park doing it out in the sunshine.
Speaker 1:Don't mess with them.
Speaker 2:Need you to build Plato's Republic.
Speaker 1:I don't know why there's so many martial arts in Greece, actually. I mean, have long history of wrestling was a big cultural thing here historically. Maybe it's kind of still in their blood.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, good book for you to read and finish it on this one is 100 nasty women of history talks about in a good way, like badass women. And one of them was the founder, one of the Shaolin monk temple people, she was the founder of Wing Chun, which is what Bruce Lee was taught. She taught it to a girl called Wing Chun who was like basically, she didn't want to marry this man and she was like to the husband, well, future husband, she's like, look, if we have a fight and I win, I don't have to marry you. He's like, yeah, obviously. And she got taught Wing Chun and then
Speaker 1:boom, fucked
Speaker 2:her up.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, I think very interesting, like Medea, like, it's pretty badass, though she's kind of evil, and a lot of evil. And, or misguided, deeply misguided. There's some bad at the Pithea, we've talked about the Temple Of Apollo, but my favourite badass woman from history, right, have a soft spot for my wee girls, one of my wee girls favourite by this woman from history. There's a movie coming out about her, like, I guess it's in a year or two, Cleopatra, big fan of Cleopatra, one of the most highly educated women in ancient history, like a general, she commanded the Egyptian army.
Speaker 2:Was she married Julius Caesar?
Speaker 1:Had a kid with him.
Speaker 2:There's another woman I read up about who was trying to become the second kind of Cleopatra. She basically took Egypt of Rome at one point.
Speaker 1:Who would that be?
Speaker 2:What's her name? She basically was like, she took the Eastern part of the Roman Empire. And then I think it was Claudius who was like, okay, there's time to sort this out. It was after August, Claudius was after Augustus. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was Claudius like, okay, I'm gonna have to sort her out now. But she took Egypt off Rome. And they just like left her for a bit. She was trying to be like the next Cleopatra, basically.
Speaker 1:Cleopatra was basically the last of the pharaohs. So yeah, she was like a highly educated woman, very powerful woman. The Romans were scared of her, I think.
Speaker 2:Well, she had that, obviously, there's rumors ago about doing it like, she's this, she's got these powers probably, she can do this, she can control you.
Speaker 1:That's the
Speaker 2:best way to get someone's head. You think you've superpowers? You've already won the battle.
Speaker 1:Got them running skilled.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But she was apparently like stunning as well, wasn't she?
Speaker 1:No, actually, even some of the ancient sources kind of question that. The funny thing, they that she was kind of very sensual and that kind of sense attractive. But there's also I think there's actually a coin that has a depiction of her and it's not flattering. What can
Speaker 2:you do with a coin?
Speaker 1:Even in the coin, she doesn't look like stunned. I'm saying that this is a judginess coming through from Poppy, because she was watching a documentary about it and she was like, they had Liz Taylor or whatever, at one point, and then they showed the coin and Poppy was like, Woah, that doesn't look like Liz Taylor.
Speaker 2:I'll just make a coin out of you now and be like, Look at Donald on a coin and be like, Fuck, no.
Speaker 1:I know, I was like, his nose is all wonky and stuff. It was a bad coin.
Speaker 2:That point, government went through hell. But yeah, maybe she wasn't, but she must have been, because there were so many stories about her beauty, wasn't
Speaker 1:No, will, talk there, maybe they're rarely, I think it's Flutarc or some of the sources say that it was more like she made herself seem attractive, because she was very kind of erotic, very sensual. But not necessarily.
Speaker 2:That's interesting.
Speaker 1:Actually an attractive woman to begin with.
Speaker 2:Well, do want to get do you want to get
Speaker 1:a Maybe?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Do want to get a roundup and Cleopatra for next week? We'll talk about Cleopatra love all that stuff.
Speaker 1:Doctor. Maybe we could talk about Cleopatra. That'd be cool. That would be great. I've got some good pictures of, I can show you the coin and you guys can be all judgy, like for yourselves then.
Speaker 2:Okay, I'm down
Speaker 1:to that. You know, I'll shoot on Liz Taylor. That's an amazing film, that's beautiful film. Is that Anthony and Cleopatra or whatever, the one that no one watches because it's like three hours long. Costumes and stuff are stunning though.
Speaker 1:Well, let's cover Cleopatra then, let's do it. Right on.
Speaker 2:Right then Don.
Speaker 1:What's her name? Gal Gadot is going to play Wonder Woman? No. No, no, that's Scott. You haven't got your finger in the pulse of the movies.
Speaker 1:She's Wonder She's not Cleopatra.
Speaker 2:She can be actually. Cleopatra maybe is Wonder Woman, who knows? Maybe Wonder Woman was based of Cleopatra. I'm thinking about it.
Speaker 1:Wonder Woman, Cleopatra, both Greek ethnically. Because a lot of people are saying Gal Gadot doesn't look Egyptian. Cleopatra was the last of the Ptolemaic dynasty, who descended from one of the generals of Alexander the Great, conquered Egypt, like a couple one hundred years later or whatever. So like she was actually ethnically Greek or Macedonian.
Speaker 2:Persian. Is it Persian? No, Persian was more East, is it?
Speaker 1:Actually, she had some Greek, I think she has some Persian blood, like it's a mixture of like Greek and Persian.
Speaker 2:Gargadol will be perfect for it, she's stunning.
Speaker 1:Yeah, she'd be good.
Speaker 2:I'm excited.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. You're a dad and you've got a wee girl, think all the dads are like, yes, Wonder Woman, anything like that. Off you go watch the space girls and Wonder Woman.
Speaker 2:Ready to war. Oh, there we are then happy days. Lovely session again, Donald. I enjoy these Monday nights a lot, but we'll touch base and I'll see you next week.
Speaker 1:Yeah. See you everyone. Bye bye.
