We Have to Care About the Little Guy | A Stoic Reset for Right Now

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. We have to care about the little guy. Cato was powerful. Cato was a traditionalist. Cato was conservative. In many ways, he was an elitist. But the most important thing about him is that from an early age, he hated bullies. As we talk about in Lives of the Stoics, at a birthday party for a friend, a group of boys were playing a Roman version of the game cops and robbers. One of the younger boys was caught and shut into a dark chamber by one of the older boys. Scared, the child called for Cato who threw aside the boy blocking the door and took the scared child home to his parents. As a teenager, Cato was invited with his tutor to the house of Sulla, who then ruled Rome as a cruel dictator. As the tutor explained to Cato, everyone feared Sulla, and he watched as Cato's entire countenance changed. Why then don't you give me a sword? Cato said outraged, so that I could free my country from slavery? And as he got older, maybe that's why Cato hated the corruption in Rome's provinces, because it victimized the inhabitants who deserved better. Cato and many of the Stoics had a North Star that pointed them into opposition to anyone who tried to intimidate them or take away their rights. This is the stoic virtue of justice. They hated those who abused power and wielded it against the weak. In fact, the expression, sic semper tyrannis, thus always to tyrants, traces all the way back to Scipio Aemilianus, one of the great stoic generals before the turn of the millennium. George Washington modeled himself on Cato his entire life, but his view on justice, on the goal of good government on a just world, was captured in a line that he borrowed from the scriptures. Everyone shall sit in safety of his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid. His vision of America gave bigotry no sanction, he said, and persecution no assistance. Here, Washington is talking about tolerance. He's talking about freedom and love and hope. He was talking about sticking up for the little guy. Now Washington and the founders, nor the stoics, were perfect at this, slavery being the foremost of the examples. They fell short, but they set down a powerful ideal for us to aspire to today. As Marcus Aurelius writes, it was from the stoics, Thrasya, Helvidius, Cato, and Brutus that he learned the importance of a society of equal laws governed by equality of status and speech, and of rulers who respect the liberty of their subjects above all else. Tyrants, bullies, and jerks are the enemies of justice. They cannot be accepted. They cannot be accommodated. Whether it's an online mob or an economic system that exploits the …