Modern WisdomStoicism: How To Think Like A Roman Emperor - Donald Robertson | Modern Wisdom Podcast 274
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,091 words- 0:00 – 2:08
From CBT to Stoicism: why Marcus Aurelius became Robertson’s focus
- DRDonald Robertson
Nobody's perfect, nobody's wise. But to feel the kind of pain, in a way, of lacking wisdom, and to crave it, and to realize it's the most important thing in life, and to dedicate your life to this kind of endless journey is really what life is actually all about. (wind blowing)
- CWChris Williamson
You're a cognitive behavioral therapy-trained psychologist. Why are you-
- DRDonald Robertson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... writing about Marcus Aurelius?
- DRDonald Robertson
That's a really good question. Because actually, my first love was philosophy. And, uh, I, I think I came to philosophy looking for a philosophy of life, really. You know, something that would help me, uh, feel better about life, cope with adversity. And I didn't find it at university when I was doing my philosophy degree, uh, so then I started training in psychotherapy and stuff like that. Then after that, I realized I'd missed something, which is the one school, one major school of ancient philosophy that you don't normally study in an undergraduate philosophy curriculum. Uh, so it's like the stone that the builders rejected became the cornerstone, kind of thing. And so I discovered Stoicism, and I thought, "This is the thing that I was looking for the whole time I was at university and nobody ever told me about." And, uh, so I got into Stoicism and I realized it was also the philosophical inspiration for cognitive therapy. Not a lot of people know that. So the two things wedded together, and I thought, "Oh, cognitive therapists must all be really into Stoicism, then." It turned out they weren't, so I ended up writing a book about that. And I thought, "Oh, this is a nerdy, obscure subject that no one's ever gonna be interested in. I'm never gonna be talking about this on podcasts or anything like that in the future." And then it's, weirdly, it became trendy, like, a few years after I started writing about it, and I got dragged into this thing that suddenly people were getting tattooed on them and stuff like that. It kind of became a bit, uh, hip, just as I was getting a little bit old. Actually, I feel, uh, you know ...
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- DRDonald Robertson
... I'm get- I'm getting older now.
- CWChris Williamson
You've missed the boat.
- DRDonald Robertson
It's all kind of young, young kids that are into it and stuff. Uh, as I'm reliably told by the publishing industry, there is Millennials that work in the tech industry that are the, the demographic-
- CWChris Williamson
Okay.
- DRDonald Robertson
... that are into Stoicism, mainly.
- 2:08 – 3:50
Why Stoicism is trending now: social media, fear, and the need for a secular framework
- CWChris Williamson
Why do you think that is?
- DRDonald Robertson
Well, see, the thing is, you know, I always think I'm in a very lucky position, 'cause I talk to so many people. So sometimes when I'm answering questions about Stoicism, I think, "Oh, that's easy, 'cause I've asked them and they keep telling me why it is." So I'll tell you what they've told me, basically. So they tell me that they feel overwhelmed by social media and the news media bombarding them with alarmist stuff about things that aren't under their direct control. Like, they think the media are trying to fearmonger and instill hatred, but ... Which is accurate, probably. And they, they don't know how to deal with that, and they feel that they need some kind of philosophy of life to cope with it. Um, but ... Like Nietzsche said, you know, "God is dead, um, but we're still kind of living in his shadow," so they want something that's kind of like what Christianity used to do for our, our, our grandparents and so on. Um, but a lot of people today, especially, I think, in the tech industry, are, are quite rationalist, and they, they want a secular philosophy that's based on reason rather than faith, revelation, or tradition. And so they find in Stoicism – and there are historical reasons for this, uh, why they would – a, a secular alternative to, to Christianity and a kind of secular th- They want something like CBT, but that is bigger, that's a wh- Like a Western yoga, they also say.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- DRDonald Robertson
Yeah, I'm just telling you all the stuff they tell me, man. (laughs) It's like if you ... So, like, uh, yeah, they tell me, "We want a Western yoga. It's like Buddhism, but Western." And so they want more than CBT. They want a whole way of life. And so that's what Stoicism gives them.
- 3:50 – 6:22
Anomie, riots, and the psychology of anger in society
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, I've been fascinated thinking about what went missing with-
- DRDonald Robertson
Uh-huh.
- CWChris Williamson
... no, no consistent religion anymore now. And-
- DRDonald Robertson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... the most recent riots at the Capitol, I think are, are part of that, this anomi, this normlessness that we've got at the moment. Tradition is out of the window. We're ... The s- science is the new god, materialist, reductionist-
- DRDonald Robertson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... standpoints on everything are the, are the victor.
- DRDonald Robertson
Yeah. I just wrote an article about that yesterday. You, they, you're right on the button there, buddy, with the topical aspect of this, for sure, because that's exactly what people are asking about. And it seems odd that people would say, "Well, there's this ancient Greek philosophy that might be really relevant to the riots on Capitol Hill," so, you know ... I mean, I feel people hearing that might think that sounds really implausible. But, you know, already, loads of people are saying, "Yeah, it's anomi," like you were saying. It's disillusionment. You know, people have no sense of direction. They've lost touch with their values. And the more people are confused about their moral values, often, the more kind of rigid and dogmatic, like, you know, and, and draconian they become, uh, in trying to force their nonexistent values on other people-
- CWChris Williamson
Absolutely.
- DRDonald Robertson
... really paradoxically. And the more reflective people are about their values, you know, and in touch with them, the more flexible they tend to be about them, strangely. Um, so I think, really, I- Paradoxically, there's a connection between the lack of deep, sincere, moral self-examination in modern society and this kind of rigid, dogmatic prejudice. And also, there's a psy- there's a really obvious psychological angle to this, and it's kind of ... It's just ... I don't know. Like, it's so strange, 'cause it's glaringly obvious and nobody ever does anything really to address it on a societal level. And that is, we know that anger biases judgment and anger is related to political prejudice and racial prejudice and religious pre- That's been known for decades.Um, and yet, we allow the media to go crazy by provoking anger and fear, uh, in social media like partly because it's very structured kind of fueling that, escalating things like crazy. And so it's no surprise that prejudices, like, begin to proliferate in society. We need to help people manage their anger, and we need to help them reflect on their values. And weirdly, those are two things that Stoicism is fundamentally interested in.
- 6:22 – 9:07
Marcus Aurelius and anger: private journaling vs public reputation
- CWChris Williamson
Marcus Aurelius had big problems with anger, didn't he? I think-
- DRDonald Robertson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... based on what I know about him, that was probably the biggest vice emotion that he had.
- DRDonald Robertson
He, he says that. I mean, we've, we've got slender evidence really. But he says, uh, in the Meditations that he was worried that he was going to lose his temper a few times and do something that he'd regret. And he's very preoccupied with anger, but so are our Stoics. I, I think he had problems managing his own anger though. Um, on the other hand, the histories. So we have these two sides of Marcus Aurelius. We have what he writes himself in his private journal, so kind of the, the inner psychological story. And it... and by the way, there's internal evidence that's fairly convincing to most scholars that this was never intended for publication. I agree with that. I think it seems unlikely that this was meant for publication, whereas Seneca's letters are... were definitely literary devices in that they were clearly meant for publication. Um, but in private, Marcus talks about his anger. In public, the histories of his reign, um, seem to say the opposite, that he was very calm, he wasn't easily provoked. There was one time when he lost his temper and ordered the beheading of a Germanic chieftain, but then he walked it back and sent the guy into exile instead.
- CWChris Williamson
What? After he had his head chopped off?
- DRDonald Robertson
No, not after he had... (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs) Sorry, mate. We'll just stitch that back on.
- DRDonald Robertson
We can stitch it back on. Don't worry. Don't worry. We'll fix that by a bit of glue or something.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. Yeah.
- DRDonald Robertson
You know, you'll be right as rain.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- DRDonald Robertson
No. No. I think he gave the order and then walked it back. He sent the guy into exile instead.
- CWChris Williamson
Who was it?
- DRDonald Robertson
But-
- CWChris Williamson
I was... so I was reading this morning doing my research.
- DRDonald Robertson
Uh-huh.
- CWChris Williamson
Was it Augustus that stabbed a slave in the eye with a spear and then apologized afterwards and was like, "What do you want?"
- DRDonald Robertson
You're very close.
- CWChris Williamson
And the guy said, "I just want my eye back."
- DRDonald Robertson
I love that story. You're very close. It was Hadrian, and it was actually a stylus. It's a thing that... like a fountain pen basically, you know? Like, they use these metal-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs) That's such a childish thing to do.
- DRDonald Robertson
I know. Like, it's like a kid having a ta-... like a lot of people that lose their temper in history, they do seem like toddlers, like having a m-... Hadrian... people love Hadrian. I'm writing about Hadrian at the moment, and I really see him as a giant toddler.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- DRDonald Robertson
Like, he's incredibly vain and... uh, had bad tempered and paranoid and, you know. Like, but yeah, he stabbed this guy in the eye and he said, "What can... is there anything I can do to make it up for you?" And the guy said, "All I want is my eye back." That's a great story 'cause it shows... and the Capitol Hill riots are funnily enough an example of that. Sometimes when people do things in anger, they cause harm that can't easily be repaired or may be completely irreparable.
- 9:07 – 12:07
Stoic ‘time-out’ and avoiding shock: pausing, predicting, and processing events rationally
- CWChris Williamson
That's one of the things that we should try and do a lot surely to take that third party perspective and make the action that we would have wanted us to do in the freshness of mind that we'll have tomorrow morning, not in the heat of the moment right now.
- DRDonald Robertson
That would be a great idea. Like, you should, uh, you should spread the word about that I think. You know, I think... I think if everyone did that, you know, the world would be a much rosier place, wouldn't it? But people act on impulse. Actually, it's very interesting that, that, that's generally true that, that most of those people who rioted and stuff, if you got them in a calmer moment, they would probably say, "Oh, I would never do that." But, you know, when people do crazy things, they often surprise themselves because your brain goes into a different mode of functioning actually, and all these biases kick in, and you're no longer reasoning clearly. Like, you start underma-... uh, you... we know that people underestimate risk when they're angry. They jump to premature conclusions. They make sweeping generalizations and stuff like that. Like, so your brain is in a different mode of functioning, and your thinking is foggy. So yeah, you're right. The Stoics have this strategy that's like a, a timeout strategy we'd call it in therapy, which is knowing that you're in this crazy state, in the fog of war, wouldn't it make sense once you've spotted that to go, "Yeah, hang on a minute. I may-... uh, I should maybe wait until I've calmed down a bit, and then I'll decide, you know, like whether I want to kick in the door to the, uh, the Capitol Building or, you know, like, you know-"
- CWChris Williamson
Pick up Speaky- Speaker Pelosi's lectern and-
- DRDonald Robertson
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
... carry it down the...
- DRDonald Robertson
Really a good idea. Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Did you see... Donal, did you see this? So I saw (laughs) this unbelievable photo where they'd stormed the Capitol Building and they were going through the entrance way, but they'd stayed inside of the ropes, the walkway.
- DRDonald Robertson
Really? Wow, I didn't see that. But I saw a video where the cops... I don't know what was going on actually. I... you know, I'm not even gonna say it. But some of this... whatever went on there, it was really quite shocking. And, uh, at the same time though, you know, I should say the Stoics advise us to say... not to be shocked by things but to say, you know, to remind ourselves, in a sense, we should have seen this coming. Uh, you know, whenever-
- CWChris Williamson
Well, it, it happened. It happened. It can't be unbelievable because it happened.
- DRDonald Robertson
Yeah. I know. Actually, people were predicting it. You know, one of my friends wrote an article last November like the, you know, talked about exactly this sort of thing happening. And, uh, so pe-... it's like people have been telling us for ages. Uh, it's like in Cassandra in Greek mythology. She was given the power of prophecy but cursed so that nobody would believe her.... and so I feel there's a lot of Cassandras walking about at the moment, people going, "I told you this was gonna happen," and nobody listened, right? So, the Stoics say, we- you know, it's all too common that people go, "This is unbelievable." But what we should say is there were s- there are always signs, and we should be asking ourselves why we didn't pay more attention to the signs earlier. That would be a more rational, philosophical way of processing this.
- 12:07 – 15:02
Do we still have new things to learn about Marcus? biography, spies, and hidden context
- CWChris Williamson
Mm. Do we have anything left to learn from Marcus Aurelius? 'Cause there's only a limited amount of information that we've got to go on him. Like, is there a day where all of the insights will be exhausted? Haven't we already reached that?
- DRDonald Robertson
Man, this is a question close to my heart 'cause I'm in the middle of writing not one, but two books about him at the moment, that, which is a thing I'm told doesn't normally happen in publishing. But I'm doing a, a graphic novel at the moment about his life, and then I'm also writing a biography. And I thought, there are like at least half a dozen biographies of Marcus Aurelius, and my, my last book has a lot of biographical stuff, so I thought, "Do I want to write another biography about Marcus Aurelius?" And the strange thing is, yeah. I- I immediately, I thought, "There's loads of things that I still think are worth saying about him." Like, there are people, there are things that people ask me all the time that aren't in How to Think Like a Roman Emperor, and I, I wish I'd had space to address them. And so, and in terms of his life story, you know, I keep coming across new angles and thinking, you know, "Why has no- why has nobody ever, uh, written about this before?" I'll give you a sneak peek, right? Uh, Hadrian had, um ... the guy that advises us, by the way, there's a Polish guy that advises us on the historical authenticity of the, the stuff that we're writing about for the graphic novel, and, uh, he's a big fan of the Frumentarii, who were the secret police in the Roman Empire, strangely. Like, that's his kind of like niche, nerdy area. And Hadrian was really into the secret police and the delatores, who are informers. He had spies everywhere 'cause he was super paranoid. And, uh, I think no one's ever really written about the fact that Marcus Aurelius probably knew that he was growing up in villas that were full of potential informers, and that everybody kind of knew. Epictetus writes about this. E- Epictetus, his writings Marcus Aurelius was acquainted with, says, like, everybody knows that s- if you slag off Caesar, it'll get back to him, and, you know, you could be for the chop, like, so you have to watch what you say when ... 'cause there's, they had so many servants and slaves in those houses that any of them would potentially go and grass you up and then they'd get, you know, uh, paid a lot of gold for, for doing it. So, they really felt they were being watched all the time, and, uh, the Historia Augusta says something quite creepy about that. It says Marcus Aurelius was reared under the gaze of Hadrian, right? So, then if you read The Meditations, Marcus says in it things like, "Never do anything that requires walls or curtains." Now, that suddenly takes on a, a different meaning when you realize that he grew up in this environment surrounded by informers and spies in the service of this crazy, paranoid emperor who kept executing potential rivals to the throne. So, no one's written about that though, as far as I'm aware. Now, I think it sheds a light, a connection between the historical events and, and the significance of some of the things that, that Marcus is talking about.
- 15:02 – 18:31
Walking through Athens: Stoic geography, the Agora, and archaeology as “confirmation”
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, 'cause you can only see it in that broader context, right? I was, um ... I spent my birthday last year on the Stoa Poikile-
- DRDonald Robertson
Aha.
- CWChris Williamson
... uh, in Athens, uh, which was like-
- DRDonald Robertson
You mean in the bar? Were you in the ... You mean in the, the bar beside it or?
- CWChris Williamson
No, on the steps-
- DRDonald Robertson
You have-
- CWChris Williamson
... of the Painted Porch, yeah.
- DRDonald Robertson
No you didn't. Well, uh, no, you mean the Stoa Atalou, the, the one that's like a museum in the Agora? Like-
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- DRDonald Robertson
... it's all shiny and new.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. Well, I ... Is that not on the spot of where the other-
- DRDonald Robertson
No.
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, is it not? I ... Are you-
- DRDonald Robertson
No, it's-
- CWChris Williamson
... gonna ruin this for me? Donald-
- DRDonald Robertson
Sorry.
- CWChris Williamson
... that was my birthday.
- DRDonald Robertson
Actually, wind that back. You were really close, though. You were just across the street from it. Like, that's, uh, that's, uh, that's actually kind of a museum. It's the-
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, yeah.
- DRDonald Robertson
... uh, the Stoa of Attalus.
- CWChris Williamson
Okay.
- DRDonald Robertson
And so it's a replica, right? But it's beautiful. And, uh, across the road, there's this dirty hole in the ground full of garbage and graffiti and stuff with some, like, rubble in it, and a lot of cats.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- DRDonald Robertson
And that's the Stoa Poikile, which ironically used to be this ... the original Stoa Poikile, you know it means Painted Porch. Like, 'cause it was like an art gallery. It had these four huge paintings by the leading artists of the day so that the Stoics lectured in front of these works of art. It would've been as beautiful, maybe, as the, the Stoa that you were on, the Stoa, uh, the Stoa Atalou. Yeah, you were on the wrong porch, buddy. But it was still-
- CWChris Williamson
Why does it-
- DRDonald Robertson
... it was a good porch.
- CWChris Williamson
I ... Google Maps needs-
- DRDonald Robertson
Ugh.
- CWChris Williamson
It's two, they told me 2,500 years to get the directions right, and obviously Google Maps has taken me to the wrong place. No, I loved it. I spent last ... the birthday before at the Vatican and around the Roman Forum and then the Agora-
- DRDonald Robertson
Uh-huh.
- 18:31 – 20:54
Why Roman emperors adopted Greek philosophy: cultural prestige and Stoicism’s ‘toughness’
- CWChris Williamson
Sorry, Socrates. Aurelius was the emperor of Rome, but he was following a Greek-born philosophy.
- DRDonald Robertson
Yes, weird isn't it?
- CWChris Williamson
What, how, how come?
- DRDonald Robertson
Because the Romans weren't that good at philosophy. Like, they, um, they, they had this thing about loving Gree- they really admired Greek culture. When they conquered Greece, um, they decided that they felt bad about that. Again, like a lot of ancient histories about people -
- CWChris Williamson
Regret. (laughs)
- DRDonald Robertson
Yeah. They, they totally trashed Athens and Greece, and destroyed the libraries and things, and gutted it. It was sacked by a Roman dictator called Sulla. And then the subsequent generation, exactly like we're saying, felt, had a big guilt trip about it.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- DRDonald Robertson
And they, they thought, "We actually quite like Greek culture." And some people say also they stole all the books and kind of distributed them and sold them. And so people kind of found out a lot about, uh, b- about Greece 'cause, because they pillaged it basically. And, uh, and then they started to embrace Greek culture and get more and more into it. And the weird thing was they, they really took to Stoicism, um, because Stoics, they thought were a bit more tough-minded and that kind of resonated with Roman values, they thought of themselves. They liked Greeks, but they thought of Greeks as kind of lightweights and like a bit effete, a bit fancy. And they thought, "We want to like you guys, but if you were a bit tougher, like us..." And so they were like, "Oh, the Stoics. There you go, like, the Stoics are the, the tougher side of Greek culture." So, the Romans completely embraced Stoicism. And actually, the guy you mentioned earlier, Augustus, was the founder of the Roman Empire and the first emperor. And we don't know much about this, but cryptically, we know that he had two Stoic tutors, and he wrote a book on philosophy, which is lost now. It's actually an exhortation to philosophy, which is normally like a speech, like a motivational speech trying to encourage, usually aimed at young men, trying to inspire them to get into philosophy. And, uh, so it seems that he kind of dabbled in Stoicism and maybe set a precedent then for later emperors to kind of associate with it.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- DRDonald Robertson
By the time you get to Marcus Aurelius, you've got the first example of somebody who seems like a ... what's the expression? You know, like a f- just a full-on card-carrying Stoic, uh, as emperor. But also, Greek, being into Greek culture was trendy at that time.
- 20:54 – 26:05
Where did the ‘philosopher kings’ go? Christianity’s rise and Stoicism’s hidden influence
- CWChris Williamson
Upon reflecting and all of the different stories about how Zeno of Citium was, he crashed in his ship and then he found himself in a bookstore and all of the different stories that I seem to hear to do with the, the way that people began their philosophical journey in, in and around that period, it's so romanticized. Yes, there will probably have been a little bit of artistic license used. But hearing the way that Marcus Aurelius spoke about himself, the leader of what was essentially the free world ... well, it wasn't that free, but the leader of the world, uh, at the time-
- DRDonald Robertson
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
Um, hearing the way that he spoke, hearing th- e- even stories about Augustus, you know, he was into philosophy, trying to write these, these speeches and treaties to bring young men into philosophy. What's happened between then and any point after then in history, including now-
- DRDonald Robertson
What happened?
- CWChris Williamson
... where you have these philosopher kings? Yeah, I just wonder why ... It was obviously seen as a competitive advantage-
- DRDonald Robertson
Uh-huh.
- CWChris Williamson
... to be able to understand-
- DRDonald Robertson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... the inner workings of the human mind and what does meaning mean and what is purpose in life, et cetera.
- DRDonald Robertson
Uh-huh.
- CWChris Williamson
Why did that stop?
- DRDonald Robertson
Are you asking me where did it all go wrong?
- CWChris Williamson
Yes.
- DRDonald Robertson
(laughs) Basically. Um, well, okay, this is gonna be a controversial one. And actually, historians are a bit unsure about the answer to that. But the traditional answer that people tend to give is that Christianity supplanted Gr- Greek philosophy. And, you know, i- this is debated by some people, but, you know, conventionally, people will say, "Well, the Christians closed the Greek philosophical schools and banned teaching of philosophy, and, uh, and Christianity became dominant." And, uh, it was, uh, in some ways antagonistic to a lot of the learning that had accumulated up until that point. Now, on the other hand, uh, Christianity, to me anyway, looks really super Stoic. Like, Christianity, there are many, um, kind of, passing allusions to Stoicism in the New Testament. And several of the church fathers we know tr- studied Stoicism before they became Christians. Saint Augustine, Tertullian, some of the Gnostics were, were into Stoicism and the, you know, early Christians in general. They saw the Stoics as being, like, the closest thing in pagan philosophy to Christianity. I'll give you a good example of that. You know Dante's, um, Divine Comedy, in the second book of it, in the Purgatory, um, the person who's guarding the gates of purgatory is a famous Stoic called Cato the Younger or Cato of U- Utica. And so Dante's basically saying like, "If it wasn't for the fact that you don't believe in Jesus, like, buddy, you would be, like, basically a saint. Like, you're, like, the, you're basically a pagan saint. Like, you're the close-, you're as close to the gates of heaven as you can, you can basically get." And that was how he sort of portrayed Cato.... um, this kind of like, uh, you know, a s- as a Stoic who was kind of the, as close as pagan culture got to Christianity. And people have said, many Christians have said that about Marcus Aurelius. They read The Meditations and thought, "This sounds kind of Christian in places. There's a bit in it where he even says you should love your enemies and things like that. Why, I mean, that sounds like the New Testament." Also, a bit of trivia for you. Um, the Stoics are actually mentioned in the New Testament. Not a lot of people know that. In the Acts of the Apostles, uh, Saint Paul goes to the Areopagus, which is just near where you were. You went to the Acropolis, right? Like, there's a big rock covered in broken beer bottles and graffiti, anarchy symbols at the bottom of the Acropolis called the Areopagus, the, the, like, the, the Rock of Mars, where they used to give, um, speeches and things. And Saint Paul goes there and gave a famous sermon to a bunch of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers. And he quotes, uh, a Stoic poet to them called Aratus. So th- the Stoics were kind of connected to Christianity, and they influenced Christianity. Th- especially the, this idea of brotherly love that you get in Christianity? Th- the main precedent for that in, uh, Hellenistic culture is in, in Stoic philosophy. People hearing Christians say that would be like, "That sounds like Stoicism." And I think if you read Marcus Aurelius, you can see, he talks a lot about, you know, brotherly love and natural affection and cosmopolitanism and yada-yada. That's why people read it and think, "There's something Christian about this."
- CWChris Williamson
Mm. I'm currently halfway through The Immortality Key by Brian Muraresku. Do you, have you, have you read this?
- DRDonald Robertson
I haven't read that. Don't know of it, actually. What's it like?
- CWChris Williamson
He has... It's part of the, um, psychoactive pagan, uh, conversion theory. I can't remember the full, the full theory of it. I need to get it before I... But it's all about, is it eleusis?
- DRDonald Robertson
Yeah, eleusis.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, and the Khryon, um, which was this, uh, the... Uh, priestesses at the time used to give these particular drinks-
- DRDonald Robertson
Poisons.
- CWChris Williamson
... and have these rituals.
- DRDonald Robertson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
And his argument is that it was a psychoactive substance.
- DRDonald Robertson
Ergot?
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- DRDonald Robertson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, the ergot that was in the grain. Um, and it's-
- DRDonald Robertson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... an entire book. It's hu- it's like 400-
- DRDonald Robertson
Really?
- 26:05 – 28:48
Purpose and values: the Socratic-Stoic claim that the examined life is the meaning of life
- CWChris Williamson
Very, very well done. Um, right. Enough, enough learning about the, the actual history. What did the Stoics say about finding purpose in life? People need that, that anomi at the moment. What do they say about finding purpose?
- DRDonald Robertson
It's a good, they say it's a good thing and we should all do that. But the, the S- the Stoics are like the, the great-grandchildren of Socrates, right? I see them as all being part of the same Socratic Stoic tradition, essentially. Um, there's one author, th- ancient author that says the Sto, the Stoics are a Socratic sect. So, this aspect really lines up with Socrates, right? So Socrates said, "The unexamined life is not worth living," which is pretty hardcore. Right? He said, you know, "Life is all about finding your values." He calls it the, the, uh, finding, questioning the most important things in life, he calls it. We would say your values, but they also call it the arete, the virtues. Um, so Socrates, uh, spent his whole life interrogating people about what's the meaning of justice? What's the meaning of courage? You know, what's the nature of the good? What's the nature of virtue? And he said, you know, he wanted to do that in the afterlife at his trial. And he said if they told him they would release him and send him into exile, but he would maybe be executed or tried in another city if he didn't keep his gob shut and he kept on asking questions about these things, he, he said, "You... I wouldn't be able to stop." Like, "There's no point doing, sending me into exile," he goes, "because I'm just gonna carry on doing it." Like, that's what he says in court in Plato's Apology, which is totally unapologetic, ironically. So yeah, like he... Not only does he say it's a good thing. He says it's actually the meaning of life, is to question your values and explore them really deeply. And, you know, that's why Socrates thought that wisdom was virtually unattainable. And so he insisted on calling himself not a sophistes, not a wise man like the other gurus around did, but he called himself philosophos, like a lover of wisdom or a friend of wisdom. And the connotation of that, Plato makes really clear, is that Socrates said, "I don't have wisdom, but I have the next best thing, which is a love, respect, and admiration of wisdom." Right? So somebody who genuinely from the bottom of their heart aspires to wisdom is almost as good as somebody who actually is wise. Like, you know, they're almost as admirable. Th- they're a seeker after truth, and they're on the right path. Like, their heart's in the right place kind of thing. And Socrates wants to say, like, that, that's the meaning of life, right? Nobody's perfect. Nobody's wise. But to feel the kind of pain, in a way, of lacking wisdom, like, and to crave it, like, and to realize it's the most important thing in life, and to dedicate your life to this kind of endless journey,
- 28:48 – 34:04
The dark side of self-help: avoidance, rumination, and neglecting anger
- DRDonald Robertson
like, is really what life is actually all about. You know, it's more about the journey than the destination, in a sense, for Socrates. It's about the method of Socratic questioning. And so we... Like you, we were saying earlier, we live in a very unquestioning society. Now, I'm, I want to emphasize that, because if you go on the internet, you'll find it's full of self-help books and articles. But I think there's something deeply ironic about this, because although everywhere we go, we're surrounded by self-help advice, I still feel there's a massive lack of reflection in modern society. And sometimes I think people are using self-help actually as an avoidance strategy, like a way of... That, that I'm very attuned to this from, from being a cognitive therapist, because any decent modern cognitive therapist, probably any modern psychotherapist should tell you, the first thing a psychotherapist normally ends up doing, especially these days, I think more over time, in their, their initial assessment session, is asking clients what existing self-help or therapy strategies they use, and often getting them to stop doing a lot of them.... like, because many of the strategies people use are actually counterproductive, we now realize, and, and, you know, there's a lot of bad self-help and psychological advice that, that circulates on, on the internet. So, although people talk about self-help, and they're kind of fascinated by it in our society, it's like a huge thing. Like, uh, I'll give, and I'll give you a really clear example of that. It's my favorite subject right now, super topical, anger, right? Hardly anybody is really bothered to talk about and do anything about anger in themselves and in society. The people that talk about self-help are more likely to be talking about personal suffering, like anxiety and depression, but they're seldom really addressing feelings of anger, and there are psychological reasons for that. Um, we know that to be the case. I think anger is the royal road to self-improvement though. I think people are really missing a trick there. I think it's much easier, in some ways, to address anger first, like, and there's a huge potential there for self-improvement, if we could just kind of, as a society, encourage people to question their anger more. And the Stoics thought anger was the main thing we should be working on precisely because they said, you know, it's the, the emotion that's most obviously a threat to society. Uh, it's the most interpersonal emotion in a sense. So, I really, that's kind of one of my passions at the moment, uh, and I use that word advisedly, is that, uh, we need to get people to kind of really do self-help more on anger, like, it's a massive gap.
- CWChris Williamson
That's interesting. I, for better or for worse, anger is an emotion that for me is very, very, very rare. I think I'm fairly cognizant at, at knowing what's going on. The texture of my own mind is something I'm not totally ignorant to. Um, and yet over, um, the last month or so, there was a period where I got angry, and oh my God, it is such a hell of an emotion, especially when you're not necessarily attuned to it.
- DRDonald Robertson
Uh-huh.
- CWChris Williamson
There's other things that occur more frequently in my life, and it's like the devil that you know. You, you understand, okay, we're at this stage, we're at that stage, and you almost get into the rhythm of understanding how you deal with it, but anger is so all-encompassing. And when you then scale that up into crowds, these crowds can be virtual, online, in a group-
- DRDonald Robertson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... in a, a, a Reddit thread, on a QAnon sub, sub-forum or whatever it might be, or they can be in person at a football riot or at the, the Capitol Hill, it can cause that. Um, I, I wanted to loop back to something you mentioned as well about how people are using personal development to almost stave off the different fears that they have, and I'm 100% in agreement. I've had this theory for a long time that the current longevity, biohacking, productivity movements, time management, all of these things are working on an Ear- Ernest Becker's Denial of Death, that people terrified about the fact that lives don't have any greater meaning.
- DRDonald Robertson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
We've removed our connection to the wider world, to nature, to the awe of the night sky. And what are they doing? "Oh, if I live longer, if I get more done in less time, then I won't have this fear anymore."
- DRDonald Robertson
I can give you a long list of reasons why self-help is an avoidance strategy, like, uh, many, many reasons. Uh, here's number one. Clients come into therapy. They'll usually go, "I've got this huge library of self-help books that I've been reading for years," right? So, a lot of self-help reading just encourages what we call ruminative thinking. So, people are thinking about their problems and chewing them over and not actually doing anything to change them. A lot of self-help strategies involve emotional control or suppression, like, so using breathing techniques, visualization techniques, mantras and things are ways that people use to actually avoid engaging with their emotions and processing them naturally. Um, people use self-help as a way of getting direction from authority figures, like psychologists, rather than becoming more self-reliant to identify their own values. Like, there are many ways that, that people use self-help, uh, advice in a, a, a way that's obviously counterproductive. And the clients who are in cl- therapy will tell you that themselves, like, it's very common clients come into therapy and they say, you know, "I read all these articles and I've got this massive library of self-help books, but I'm not getting any better." Like, and, uh, you know, there are reasons for that.
- 34:04 – 41:19
Objective representation & cognitive distancing: Stoicism as anti-rhetoric for the algorithmic age
- CWChris Williamson
I was having a look at objective representation and cognitive distancing, uh, when reading your book. And how does that relate to the Stoic work, and, and what is it, and how can people utilize it?
- DRDonald Robertson
Phantasia kataleptike is the, the Greek, um, and it, it's hard to translate, but it, uh, well, it actually means a, a, an impression or a representation that grasps reality, is grounded in reality. And what the Stoics appear to mean by this, so, objective representation is Pierre Hadot's kind of paraphrase of that, and it, it means describing events in a way that suspends value judgments or emotive rhetoric, right? I was gonna say a minute ago, actually, if you want to experience anger, like you were saying, you know, just go on the, the comments on YouTube or something like that for five minutes and, you know, it's like a laboratory experiment in anger exposure, like, it's hard. And even if you don't have anger, you've got to deal with other people's, right? But the internet is f- full of people using strongly emotive language, um, like, you know, rather than saying... People say things like, you know, "You shot me down in flames and tore a strip off me," when they could say, "Oh, you just expressed disagreement with part of what I said." Like, so the Stoics want is... (laughs) This is why Cicero thought the Stoics were rubbish at legal rhetoric. Like, he was like, "You guys, you, you-"
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, 'cause there was no drama, there was no-
- DRDonald Robertson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... there was, there was no showmanship with it.
- DRDonald Robertson
Yeah. He goes, "You make everything too concise and too kind of banal," and they were like, "Well, th- like, that's to get rid of the effect of rhetoric, right?" Like, you know, like, sure, in a law court you're trying to manipulate the audience; we're trying to undo that. I call Stoicism kind of anti-rhetoric or counter-rhetoric. And, you know, in the ancient world, there were these lawyers/stroke-... self-help gurus called the Sophists. And I used to, for a long time, think we don't really have Sophists in the mo- modern world. Maybe we have, like, self-help gurus and stuff, but it's not quite the same. And then one day, it dawned on me, like, we do. We have digital Sophists. Like, Facebook is basically a massive Sophist, and so is Twitter. So, the, the Sophists would just say whatever would get a reaction out of people. Like, and Socrates was like, "This is a problem, man. You guys are just saying whatever, you know, evokes anger or what, uh, gets the cl- the crowd to applaud you or whatever, and you don't really give two hoots about the truth. Like, you're just saying whatever gets a response from people, and that just leads to distortion. It amplifies people's emotions." And then one day, it dawned on me. I thought, "Yeah, we don't have Sophists like that anymore, because now they've been taken over by algorithms." That's basically what social media and social media is, is this massive Sophist. And so we need Socrates and we need the Stoics to teach us this, how to protect ourselves against sophistry and rhetoric and the manipulation of our emotions through the use of emotive language. So, the Stoics say we should learn to re-describe things in a more down-to-earth and objective way so that we can stick to the facts, like, and not distort things and, and kind of, like, in a way that fires our emotions up.
- CWChris Williamson
How can people apply that cognitive distancing? Obviously, it sounds great.
- DRDonald Robertson
How do they do it? The Stoics just want us to prac-... Like, when we're, we feel that we're getting upset or angry about something, first of all, like, they want us just to pause, and maybe to say to ourselves it's not things that upset us, but rather our opinions about them. So, realizing that it's our way of thinking that's causing us to, to feel so upset, rather than the event itself. Take responsibility, basically, for our value judgments. And then to re-describe it, to say, like, what, what's actually happening here in more specific, down-to-earth, and objective language. And when we do that, the Stoics think that helps us to moderate the, the effect of our emotions. And then the other thing is to broaden our perspective, because... I mean, the Stoics were way ahead of their time, right? And if, if, if you think the Stoics were ahead of their time, my friend, like, you want to go and read some Sigmund Freud. Like, 'cause that wasn't that long ago, and people were, people still use Freud today, right? Even though that would be, like, alchemy or something. Like, you know that, like, Freud was pre-scientific psychology, right? So, I remember when I started as a psychotherapist, psychoanalytic approaches were still kind of not that rare. You know, people still took them quite seriously. Um, largely, Freudianism in its traditional form has kind of died off now. But if you compare what he was doing to what the, uh, the Stoics were doing, they were way ahead of their time. Like, they, the Stoics seem futuristic compared to Freud. Like, Freud had no idea, really, what he was talking about. Um, and, you know, m- most of regard contrary, people are gonna be shocked if I say this, but I, I think there's very little of value in Freud's writings, and I have a master's degree in psychoanalytic theory. Incidentally, I trained as a psychoanalytic counselor, um, and I had psychoanalysis myself, uh, and it was interesting.
- CWChris Williamson
It's just, was it not just projection? Was it not just an entire lifetime-
- DRDonald Robertson
It was all projection.
- CWChris Williamson
... of internal projection? Yeah.
- DRDonald Robertson
Freud, um... I, I'm very interested in Freud's biography, actually. Freud's father died, and then he had a lot of dreams about, uh, that were traumatic for him, and he decided to interpret his own dreams. And he, he believed that he unconsciously was attracted sexually to his own mother, um, and frightened of his father, uh, and there was this kind of love triangle. And then he just assumed that that applied to everybody else, which is obviously crazy, right? Because he'd hardly seen any clients. He'd seen about five or six clients, I think, by the time he'd already decided that this was true of everyone. And Freud hated therapy. Like, he, he really didn't like doing it. If you look at his collected writings, you know, there's, whatever, 12 volumes or something, I think there's only one volume actually about therapy. And the rest of it's all this crazy theory and him doing psychoanalysis on Leonardo da Vinci and Moses and, like, weird speculative anthropology and stuff. He, he just wanted to be a kind of armchair, like, uh, you know, theorist or whatever, really.
- CWChris Williamson
Is, is that not the, the biggest distinction between what he did and what the Stoics did, that it was a philosophy of action born in the crucible of real life?
- DRDonald Robertson
Yeah, and Stoicism lasted a lot longer. I mean, Freudian psychoanalysis was trendy for, like, I don't know, like, 60 years or 70 years or whatever. And then, it's, it's pretty much dead in the water now, you know. It's, it's like, like I say, it's like a few, a bit like alchemy now or something. Um, but Stoicism flourished in the ancient world for five centuries. Like, and that meant, you know, but to Marcus Aurelius, Socrates was ancient history. Like, Socrates died, uh, 500 years before, uh, before Marcus Aurelius, um, was even born. And, uh, you know, that person is like, like I was talking about, somebody in the late medieval period, right? So, they're like, "We've been doing this for a long time." Uh, and so a lot of people in Greece and Rome and all over, like, the known world had been practicing Stoicism. We know of 80, uh, Stoic philosophers from antiquity. Uh, the names of authors or teachers, like, there were loads of them. Um, so, like, it was something that they developed over a very long period of time. And I, I'm
- 41:19 – 45:45
Broadening perspective: attention narrowing under stress, social media “thin slices,” and compassion
- DRDonald Robertson
still puzzled by it and impressed by it, like how much of it is, is relevant and is confirmed by modern research in psychology. So, the one, the one I was gonna mention is we know now that when people get angry or depressed, they, they... there's a narrowing in the scope of attention. So, people can normally pay attention to, like, maybe five or six things at once. So, you could be driving your car and listening to the radio and, and maybe thinking about what you're gonna have for dinner, and also kind of, like, telling your kids in the back seat to keep the noise down or whatever, right? So, you can walk and chew gum. Like, you can do more than one thing at a time, you can multi-... a task, or whatever, except when you're under stress. Like, so when people, like, become very emotionally distressed, their scope of attention narrows and they're less capable to think about multiple things at once, right? And we do this thing called threat monitoring, where we tend to really zero in, put under a magnifying glass, the, the things that we see as threatening or upsetting. And the Stoics realized that we did that. Like Freud has no concept really that's equivalent to this. He thinks what you should really be doing is trying to figure out whether it symbolizes castration in your dreams or something like that.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- DRDonald Robertson
Like, which nobody, nobody thinks is helpful today.
- CWChris Williamson
Sigmund, for the love of God, leave it alone.
- DRDonald Robertson
Freud literally tho- like, Freud literally thought all f- he says all forms of anxiety are disguised castration anxiety. Like, all forms of anxiety. Like, that's how crazy Freud's theory was. Anyway, the, um, the Stoics were like, "No, like, I mean, anxiety is caused by your value judgments," like you'd think, like, most people might assume, right? So if you think something is really, really bad and it's about to happen, then you're probably gonna feel anxious, right? So it's got to do with the value that you invest in external events, uh, especially if they're n- they're, you know, they're not directly under your control, it's gonna feel more anxiety provoking. That, that's common sense in a way. And so the Stoics think also we narrow our attention down onto things, and they realize if you broaden the scope of your attention, it will tend to dilute the emotional response. So you might have said something that annoys me on Twitter, right? And maybe I don't know anything about you and I haven't seen what your day's been like. All I know is that you just said something c- that could be taken in a slightly offensive way, like... So now taking that one remark in isolation, I'm gonna focus my attention narrowly on it and have this kind of intense emotional reaction to it. Whereas if I broadened my attention, like, I might, you know, if I did know more about you, I might think, "Oh, maybe you do a lot of good things. You know, maybe you've had a bad day, like, you know, maybe you gave money to charity yesterday." Like, so there would be a more rounded picture of you. That's really one of the things that's lacking in modern society. We react to these little slices of people's character or behavior rather than viewing their personality in a rounded way. Socrates talks about this problem explicitly, um, actually in relation to his own wife, Xanthippe. So people say, "Oh my God, how can you stand to live with that woman?" 'Cause she had a notoriously bad temper, right? And Socrates was like, "But she's a really good wife and a good m- she just shouts at me occasionally. Yes, she threw a bucket of water over me once, but, like, I try and interpret her behavior in a rounded... She's also, like, a really awesome person." Like, so Socrates has this whole dialogue about it, where he says, you know, you've got to view people, you've got to go past the appearance and get to the reality, and that means, like, focusing in a more broad way on somebody's character as a whole. And we don't do that today, we narrow our attention down. Social media, by its very nature, potentially encourages us to do that, 'cause it speeds up communication by abstracting little pieces of information out, but that prevents us really from getting to know people properly. And, you know, to u- to understand all this, to forgive all, the saying goes, well, you know, I don't know if we could take that literally, but certainly the more we know about people, the less likely we are to have knee-jerk emotional responses to the, the things that we do. Especially if we make an effort, like to maintain that rounded perspective on things. 'Cause on the one hand I can see the nasty thing that you said, and I have, uh, maybe I still have an emotional reaction to that, but when my attention has broadened, I'm also seeing and remembering other nice things that you did, and so that compensates or it balances it out. So I can still disapprove of the thing that you did, but not be completely emotionally overwhelmed by it, 'cause I'm adopting a more balanced perspective.
- 45:45 – 1:14:10
Adversity, pandemics, and voluntary hardship: meaning through challenge and mortality reflection
- CWChris Williamson
What would Marcus Aurelius and the Stoics have to say about facing adversity?
- DRDonald Robertson
They think it's a good thing, like, which seems like a truism, but there were other people that thought it was a bad thing. Like, there were other philosophers in the ancient world that thought you'd be better off going and living in a commune and avoiding c- like... Allegedly, Epicureans will get upset if I say this, 'cause there's some disagreement about it, but in the ancient world people thought the Stoics and the Epicureans were almost polar opposites. And Epicurus l- lived in this little private garden on the, uh, uh, outside, uh, Athens, uh, surrounded by a circle of his friends in relative obscurity. And allegedly he said it's better not to marry or have children or get involved in public life. Like li- you know, basically live like a monk or live like a, in a hippie commune or whatever, like all peace and love and, and try and keep it tranquil, like, whereas the Stoics wanted to get right in the middle of the fray, like, they were where you were, right in the agora, like, you know, just like f- you know, the, the Stoic face the agora. Same as Socrates would go and do philosophy in the street and at his friends' houses. And so the, so the downside of that is that people would be really abusive to them. People, um, used to beat Socrates up in the street, like they'd threaten him, they'd shout abuse at him, because he was asking too many questions and rocking the boat. But Socrates was famous for apatheia, like, which is, you know, a term that we use in Stoic philosophy. We're told that it was really Socrates that made this concept famous. He was unruffled, he was as cool as a cucumber and as unruffled as a tortoise. Just, like, that's pretty unruffled. Like, he wouldn't let anything bo- Have you ever seen a tortoise that looked ruffled?
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs) No.
- DRDonald Robertson
Exactly, right? So that's, uh, Socrates. He wasn't easily fazed. But the thing, when we talk about temperance and self-control in Ancient philosophy, like one of the most obvious ways that's manifested is in being able to have conversations without losing your temper. And Socrates was famous for that. Epictetus, the Stoic teacher, loves Socrates. Goes on and on and on about him. He tells his students that they should emulate Socrates.... but then he says something really weird that I think should freak out modern readers of Plato. He says, "You know the most important thing that you could learn from Socrates is that he never got in quarrels." It wasn't even the things he said. It was the way that he said them. It was the fact that he was always good-humored and artfully polite, and even when people got angry with him, like, he was able to defuse it. Like, he never, ever lost his temper with other people. Like, so talking to people about really sensitive subjects, like religion and politics and stuff like that, you know, often it just degenerates out ... you see it all the time on the internet. But Socrates didn't avoid these discussions, and he also didn't let them spiral out of control. So, he, his adversity was facing argumentative people, bad-tempered people. Now, in the end, he did get executed partly for that and, and for other things that he did along the way, right? But throughout his life, he was known for this magical ability, this paranormal ability to be able to talk to people about really sensitive subjects and interrogate them about it. And for the m- for the most part, not to punch them in the face.
- CWChris Williamson
What if the adversity isn't so easily, cerebrally sort of explained away? It's not just the sort of thing that you can have a discourse about?
- DRDonald Robertson
For example?
- CWChris Williamson
A pandemic.
- DRDonald Robertson
Oh, the pandemic. I mean, funnily enough, Socrates lived through a, a plague. And Marcus Aurelius, you, you know, lived through the, the Antonine Plague. Um, I mean, you know, like books on Stoicism have shot through the roof in terms of sales since the beginning of the pandemic, so I think instinctively, a lot of people have felt that Stoicism could help them deal with the adversity of the pandemic. Not just 'cause of the historical connection, but they kind of have this visceral feeling that Stoicism is relevant to dealing with this situation. The, the ancient Stoics write a lot about how to cope with being sent into exile, and I used to think, "That doesn't seem that relevant to me in my life." Then the pandemic happened, like, we had quarantining and all that, and I thought, "All that stuff I read in Seneca about exile suddenly seems really relevant now." (laughs) It's basically the same thing. Like, I mean, I wasn't sent into exile by the Emperor Nero or whatever, but, like, I might as well have been.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- DRDonald Robertson
You know? Like, I'm not allowed to leave my house except to go out for groceries. Like ... and, uh, I think it, it suddenly seems relevant to people. But I, I don't ... I feel like I almost don't need to persuade people of that 'cause it seems like everyone has figured that out for themselves. They're all reading the Stoics since the beginning of the pandemic. I think a big ... there are many aspects that are relevant, and one of them is, um, I think ... I mean, maybe I'm wrong about this, but ... well, there's a couple of things. First of all, a lot of people have had to simplify their lifestyle during lockdown and so on. I feel like when ... you know, there are several ways in which we're not going back to normal after this. Uh, you never go back. Like, so after this pandemic ends, I wonder how many people are gonna think, "I s- maybe I don't need to go back to eating out in expensive restaurants all the time." Like, you know, m- the amou- the amount of money that people blew on entertainment in the city where I lived, in Toronto, that's, you know, it's full of expensive bars and restaurants and stuff.
- CWChris Williamson
Well, you won't ... You may not know this, but my industry of 14 years, I've been a club promoter, one of the biggest in the UK-
- DRDonald Robertson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... um, and this is something that I am- I'm concerned about for our industry. People s- used to go out to the same venue on the same night of the week-
- DRDonald Robertson
(sighs)
- CWChris Williamson
... and then a different venue on a different night of the week-
- DRDonald Robertson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... every single week, and that's where we made our money.
- DRDonald Robertson
It's not so good for you. Like, maybe it's a bit, but it's ... can also breaking that, it's a habit, right? For a lot of people.
- CWChris Williamson
Correct.
- DRDonald Robertson
Like, it's just what they do-
- CWChris Williamson
100% correct.
- DRDonald Robertson
... they get, get a bit agitated if it gets to Friday night or whatever, and they're like, they're stuck at home, they start pacing up and down. Like ... but, uh, once the habit is broken, like after a few months, they might think, "Well, I don't like, don't need to go out as often." I mean, it might not take some people that long to get back into it, but I think some people, like, will reevaluate their expenditure and reevaluate their lifestyle. I mean, I've spoken ... you must have met a lot of people who ... everyone's changed their daily routine, so a lot of people are suddenly doing yoga and going for walks in the park and all that, and I think a lot of people might think, "Maybe I'll carry on doing yoga and going for walks in the park even after the, the pandemic is finished." You know, 'cause maybe they, they realized that it's healthier than what they were doing before, and maybe they're actually ... a lot of people are happier. Not everyone. Some people are really struggling psychologically, but a lot of people actually feel that they're better off. Like, it's, you know, it's improved their mental health having to do with the lockdown. And, again, one of the paradoxical aspects of that is coming to terms with your own mortality. You know? The, the thing that, again, isn't really talked about that much in self-help art- life hack articles and, uh, whatnot. Um, I wrote an article about this recently where I thought, "I'm gonna do the opposite and just really get into the guts of this whole 'Everyone is gonna die' thing." Like, 'cause I, I really believe it's, it's liberating. When I was a young guy, I was quite reckless, and, uh, you know, a couple of times, I, I got into situations where I thought, "Oh, geez. Maybe my, my time is up. This is it, buddy." Um, you know, just 'cause I did stupid things when I was a teenager, and then, and, you know, maybe people have health scares and stuff. I gave a talk once when asked, "How many people in the audience, put your hand up, have ever had a brush with death, either through health scare or a dangerous situation?" And it was about two-thirds of the audience. Like, which kind of surprised me. And I said, "Was it what you thought it was gonna be like? Like, were you scared?" And a lot of people, they had a bit of a chat about it, and what, what emerged was a lot of people said, "Well, in a- in an emergency, often you don't really have time to feel scared." You, you're more just kind of, like, focused on getting out of there or, or dealing with the situation or whatever, and sometimes you feel incredibly calm when you, you think, like, "Maybe this is it." It's not what people imagine it to be necessarily. Uh, I think it's just different for everyone, but, um, for me, also being bereaved and losing someone close to you can have a similar effect, I think, of making you reappraise your values.... and think, look back on your- 'cause it makes you look at your life, if you have time, right, and, and think, "Oh, geez, you know, like, was it worth it?" Like, you know, "If, if I, if I, if I dodge this bullet and I get another chance, should I go right back on Facebook or watch another season of Friends or whatever?" Like... And so, it makes you really think, "Those things I was doing, were they just like ways of killing time, or were they actually kind of meaningful and fulfilling things?" One of the things we learned from modern psychotherapy, evidence-based psychotherapy, cutting edge-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- DRDonald Robertson
... of evidence-based psychotherapy for clinical depression, we used to think, uh, people with clinical depression weren't doing enough enjoyable things. (clicks tongue) So A- Aaron Beck, the founder of cognitive therapy, his big innovation was, uh, part of it was to, uh, do activity scheduling and get people to do more pleasurable activities during the day. Actually, like he didn't invent that technique. It was a guy called Peter Lewinson that doesn't get credit for it, that, that invented that technique. But Beck was wrong anyway. So we, we now know that that's slightly off. It's not pleasurable activities that, that help people with depression. It's meaningful activities. Like, there's a subtle difference between something that makes you feel happy, like it gives you a kind of warm glow, and something that actually makes you feel fulfilled in a deeper sense, right? So maybe eating a chocolate, you know, or having sex, or watching a, a comedy kind of makes you feel good, but, like, it's not necessarily gonna make you a more fulfilled person in the long term, like, if the rest of your life is kind of pointless, like, and you don't feel that you've got any direction. And so, what really seems to emerge pretty quickly, just once you start asking people the right questions, is that again, where we started, buddy, is people don't know what their values are. And so, if you don't know what your real values are in life, then how do you know what it is that you should be doing all day long every day? And, you know, a sudden brush with the grim reaper might be what it takes, like, for people to suddenly think, "Maybe I need to figure out what I actually value in life," right? What... You know, no one has ever had on their tombstone, engraved, "I wish I'd spent more time on Facebook," or, "I wish I'd watched more Netflix," right?
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- DRDonald Robertson
So, I think the pandemic has forced a lot of people to have that existential crisis-
- CWChris Williamson
(dog barks)
- DRDonald Robertson
... and, uh, reappraise our values. And, you know, we need to... I think we should- need to push people further in that direction, you know, to question those values, and then start actually putting them into practice more. And then maybe we wouldn't have as many riots and stuff.
- CWChris Williamson
One of my favorite passages, in fact probably my favorite passage from the entire book, I'm just gonna read it out here, "Looking back, it seems more obvious to me now than ever before that the lives of most men are tragedies of their own making. Men let themselves either get puffed up with pride or tormented by grievances. Everything they concern themselves with is fragile, trivial, and fleeting. We're left with nowhere to stand firm amidst the torrent of things rushing past, there's nothing secure in which we can invest our hopes." What's that mean?
- DRDonald Robertson
Exactly what we've been talking about. Like, when you do, um, behavioral analysis with clinically depressed clients, what emerges from it is a lot of the things... The more depressed someone is, the more time they're gonna spend doing avoidant behaviors. So, if, if you say, "What did you do all day yesterday?" Eh, often, it's mainly things that just help them to avoid feelings of boredom, feelings of anxiety, like, "I drank, I took drugs, I-"
- 1:14:10 – 1:16:21
Humor, favorite Stoic lines, tattoos, and Robertson’s “rebuild Plato’s Academy” project
- CWChris Williamson
It is. Do you think that the Stoics had much of a sense of humor?
- DRDonald Robertson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Because it's easy to hear this is very serious talk, "I'm going to bed contemplating death. I'm waking up contemplating death." Everything is about death and being serious and avoiding emotion, you know?
- DRDonald Robertson
They had a sense of like... I think there, there's a couple of ways of refuting this idea. Uh, number one is Socrates is the godfather of Stoicism. Like, you know Epictetus saying, you know, "We, we love Socrates. You should emulate him"? No one in their right mind would say that Socrates was like Mr. Spock of Star Trek. They're not two people that you would ever confuse. If you met Mr. Spock in your nightclub or whatever, would you look at him and think, "Is that Socrates?"
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs) I'd think, "What's up with his ears? That's an interesting set of ears."
- DRDonald Robertson
It'd be like, "How many drinks have you had?"
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
- DRDonald Robertson
Like, they're not, they're not two people that you would ever c-... Socrates is, has got, is very humorous. Um, he's very charming, he's witty, like, and that ma- that makes him come across as a more rounded and, uh, emotional person. And the Stoics wrote books. Like, the Stoics wrote satires. We have a bunch of Stoic satires from Persius, the, uh, he was a friend of Seneca. And, uh, Seneca has a, we've got a stupid satire that, that Seneca wrote called The Pumpkinification of Claudius that still survives today. And, uh, Chrysippus, uh, the third head of the Stoa, wrote about jokes, and he actually died laughing at one of his own jokes about a donkey. Which also reminds me-
- CWChris Williamson
What, he got like a, a heart attack or something?
- DRDonald Robertson
Yeah. Like, it's like, have you seen that Monty Python sketch about the joke in the First World War, like, that's so funny that everybody that hears it dies?
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- DRDonald Robertson
Have you never seen that? Everybody s-... Uh, you, right, you need to look that up a-
- CWChris Williamson
Everyone else will have done. I'm getting abuse-
- DRDonald Robertson
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... in the comments for that one, yeah.
- DRDonald Robertson
So the, the, the government, the British government in the First World War, they say, "Well, it's so dangerous, we had to translate it into German. But we, we'd only give each person one word so that nobody knew the whole joke, like, because if they heard it, they would die laughing at it." And then they started, they trained these guys, like they're, you know, like they're, they're, they're, they're putting, um, earplugs in and they're shouting it out, uh, uh, like along the trenches at the Germans. So dead- like it's a deadly weapon-
Episode duration: 1:32:37
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