Heck, any chance you've got the full comic that panel is from? I've been looking for it for a while now, actually.
Took a little google-fu, but this should be the source:
Edit for moar specific:
I'm always a little bummed when stoicism comes up. For some reason people always characterize it as "try not to feel things". But first, that's kinda twisting the intention. And second, it's only a third of the whole philosophy.
Everywhere, at each moment, you have the option: to accept this event with humility [will]; to treat this person as [s]he should be treated [action]; to approach this thought with care, so that nothing irrational creeps in [perception];
The serenity prayer more closely resembles the core idea than what most people focus on. Compare the above quote with it.
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.
If something is outside of your control, don't let it turn you bitter. If there is action you can take to treat those around you justly, you must do so. And then to do these things effectively takes knowledge, wisdom, and (I would argue) empathy.
But nah. Modern take: stoicism = real men shove emotions down. Bleh.
Yeah I like to describe it to people as “do what you can and know you did what you could”
Say to yourself in the early morning: I shall meet today ungrateful, violent, treacherous, envious, uncharitable men.
Aurelius must have had a meeting with Trump.
I found Meditations to be a fascinating read but as a lot of comments here pointed out, Marcus Aurelius came from a position of extreme privilege and misogyny, so maybe don't rush to build your entire life around stoicism.
that is just privilege speaking about it's own privilege...
it's unbelievable how bad the patriarchial matrix we now live in has twisted human norms over the course of a couple thousand years
A guy comes along and tells us that we should have some self control, patience and a tempered response to difficult situations instead of jumping straight into anger and fury, and your take is that this concept is just privileged sexism?
Weird o.O
well, yes.
what this guy says is basically gaslighting emotional people.
also, he doesnt say "yo, if you have a bad day, just chill" he condones the angry and complaining. that is a call to discipline. from a roman emperor.
i dont understand how this could be seen as self help advice.
if you are angry, be. if you have things to complain on, do.
and if you see someone else being angry and or complaining, how about not labeling them anything? we are all angry from time to time. and complaining about unfairness is our first nature. not acting on your complaints wont get you anywhere, but you do stay productive. not acting on your anger will keep you a nice fellow, but do consider who you want to be a fellow with.
also, i didnt say sexism. because it isnt. it's just denying certain emotions due to them being inconvenient in a "civilized" society. emotions caused by unfair, but "civilized" actions and norms.
i mean, i dont know exactly what he had in mind when writing that, but, like, there are only so many things that concern an emperors mind.
i mean, i dont know exactly what he had in mind when writing that, but, like, there are only so many things that concern an emperors mind.
It's an excerpt from Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. Aurelius was a philosopher in addition to an Emperor, and his writings are excellent-but-pretty-orthodox expressions of Stoic doctrine of the time.
The big three surviving philosophical schools of the time all had a very "Look inwards" worldview - Stoicism claiming that we decide ourselves how the outside world pains or does not pain us; Epicureans claiming that it is by learning to appreciate the simple pleasures of life that one achieves contentment with life; and Cynics claiming that mankind is happiest in a state of nature, and that the constructs of human society are window dressing at best - as such, one should act according to one's 'gut' in any given situation.
i still cant take it for what you say it is.
there was/is this dude (perhaps a journalist) who coined a question to ask oneself as a reader.. "who? says what? to whom? with what purpose? using what channel?"
something like that. and since being able to read/write wasnt as common as today, i can only read this as "to whoever wants to be a good citizen: beware" coming from a ruler, and pointedly not "how to be a happy human on earth <3"
but that is just me. and i only replied again because iheartneopets replied, but he basically says what you were saying... so i feel like you deserve my response more.
sorry if you were hoping lecturing me was over :P
No, no, I enjoy discussing such things!
Marcus Aurelius's Meditations were not released during his lifetime - they were his, well, private meditations. It wasn't a call for the citizens of the Empire to be obedient - there is a fascinating tradition of Emperors doing that, but it uses very different phrasing and is typically divorced from the Greek philosophical tradition that Aurelius drew upon when writing the Meditations. You find many other Emperors exhorting the citizenry to be dutiful and loyal to the Roman state, but Aurelius and Julian the Apostate are the only ones with serious philosophical inclinations that they express in their writings. I don't think it's too bizarre to think that, out of some 500 years of rulers, two were genuinely interested in and proficient with philosophy.
i found the first mention of rome in that book and basically, speaking about societies that didnt write (like the celts and uh germanics) the authors cite another book by some jack goody saying something like (im translating a german book here citing an english author... oh well, good night. as we say in german:) regarding their gendernorms we have little more than observations from roman authors like tacitus, which often - partly due to ignorance and partly to make a political statement in rome - seemed to talk not about real people but ideal types. greek and roman authors who spoke about wars, wrote that women were allegedly present on battlefields, cheering on their men and caring for their wounded. In extreme cases, as plutarch wrote women too would wield axes or swords. but it is questionable as to how reliable these depictions are, or whether the authors wanted to point out how "barbaric" it was outside of the male dominated culture of the roman empire.
the authors of "the good book of human nature" then state "it is difficult to make a statement about how women fared in the script free europe." it then blames a disinterested and long time male dominated archeological field. apparently archeologists kept finding rich burial sites from iron age women in middle europe, but the scientists didnt question their roles in day to day goings. graves of rich women were apparently as lavish as their male counter parts, but even worse than ignorance, some graves were attributed wrongly to men, like the "Fuerstin von Vix" discovered in 1953, they thought she must have been a man, since such riches were unimaginable to have belonged to a woman. died 490 bce and some analysis showed she was female... while typing i realize some problem.... anyway. i think this could explain why i assumed the role of women was what i said... not much info and it was bad later, so why shouldnt it have been bad before there already?
i guess patriarchy was mostly monotheistic religion's fault
edit: clarifying last line, and some grammar in the middle
He wrote this for himself in his Meditations. So he wasn't telling this to anyone but himself, therefore not 'gaslighting' anyone. Beyond being a roman emperor, he is also a pretty respected philosopher, and that generally doesn't happen without having something interesting to say on the subject.
I kind of understand the objection, though. It's a short step from "it isn't manly to be enraged" to "just pull yourself up from your bootstraps." I don't think that's what Marcus Aurelius was saying, but I can see how someone might read it that way.
Great advice if your goal is to be destructive to yourself and others. I am recovering from abuse and can for sure say that nothing good has ever come from, or will ever come from anger. We're all angry from time to time. And it's still destructive as its only quality. Being violent in thought or action is not useful. Ever. Only apologists hiding from reality will say that being angry was good. Every scenario you can pose is better met with good temper. Even under actual physical attack, a calm collected response leads to superior outcomes. There is no real world use for anger. It is a remnant hunter gatherer feature.
a man talking about how men should behave in a society that only had room for women as breeding stock and only if they secured your throne.
While Roman society was MUCH more sexist than anything we would regard as acceptable in modern society, women had many rights at the height of the Roman Empire that later European societies would not keep. The right of women to own property was so strict that gifts from a wife to a husband were not legally recognized - if they divorced, claims that any property of the wife was a gift to her husband would not be recognized, and would be returned to the newly-divorced wife. Women often held significant amounts of property and ran businesses in their own name, and there is ample evidence for women as independent workers in skilled and semiskilled professions.
There is considerable writing at the time discussing the role of women in society, and while the opinions of Roman men are very far from 'enlightened', they also quite clearly regard women as more than breeding stock. The Roman author Musonius Rufus even advocated for women to be trained in the arts of war, and posited than any job a man could do, a woman could do also.
Women could divorce their husbands without need for any deeper cause beyond "I don't want to stay in this marriage anymore", and domestic abuse within marriage was grounds for civil lawsuits. All rape of freeborn persons (within the context of Roman governance; foreigners being conquered were less lucky) was subject to the death penalty. Bloodline descent ('breeding stock') was considered much less important, as Romans placed a higher value on a cultural/loyalty familial system in which adoption was widely accepted and direct descent was less important (though not nil) to being recognized as part of the descendants of the family. The idea of 'securing the throne' was not really applicable until later in Roman society when the norms of the city of Rome began to be eroded in favor of a more 'cosmopolitan' and universal imperial culture.
/Romaboo moment over
in the mean time i checked which emperor i was thinking of, and apparently i was thinking of about 150 years later, when christianity began to take root there. which apparently is attributed to constantine, but actually it was the guy before him who stopped persecuting christians.
perhaps rome at aurelius' time was a wee bit more moderate, but i would not expect that to stay true farther away from the capital.
thank you for your time writing all this, it was very interesting.
perhaps i can interest you in the book that triggered my response in the first place? it tries to shine a light on what happened to drive men away from women, i.e. how the patriarchy came to be (probably) the english title is "the good book of human nature" ... the mind boggles as to why the author shies away from just calling it "the truth about eva" which would be the direct translation from german, i can only assume it's to not cause to big an upheaval among religious folks...
perhaps rome at aurelius’ time was a wee bit more moderate, but i would not expect that to stay true farther away from the capital.
There were actually drastic changes between Constantine and Marcus Aurelius. The Empire effectively fell apart in the 3rd century AD, and was cobbled back together by warlords. By the time of Constantine, between changing norms and the weakening of Rome's (and Italy's) position as central to the Empire led to Constantine being able to push through changes like turning "Death penalty for anyone raping a freeborn person" to "Any woman who is raped is put to death if she doesn't scream loud enough" (itself a violation of one of the oldest norms of Roman society regarding rape which dates back to the founding of the Republic). Christian values!
The provinces of the 1st and 2nd century AD were still heavily influenced by traditional Roman values, especially in the Western half of the Empire. And some of those provinces were more female-friendly than Roman traditions were. We have evidence of Roman businesswomen acting in their own names as far east as Syria and as far west as Britain.
thank you for your time writing all this, it was very interesting.
Anytime! Rome is a personal obsession of mine, lol.
perhaps i can interest you in the book that triggered my response in the first place? it tries to shine a light on what happened to drive men away from women, i.e. how the patriarchy came to be (probably) the english title is “the good book of human nature” … the mind boggles as to why the author shies away from just calling it “the truth about eva” which would be the direct translation from german, i can only assume it’s to not cause to big an upheaval among religious folks…
I've not heard of that book in particular, but I've read numerous articles in academic journals about how patriarchy arose in various societies. Ugly stuff.
cant remember what this book said about pre constantine, as it was mostly concerned with how the patriarchy developed beginning about 8000years ago, so nonsurviving cultures arent that interesting, except to highlight that indeed we could have been equal all along, if not for the rise of monotheism and then christianity.
the book also highlights how the teachings of jesus were perverted by the church to suppress women from having a say in anything. not only that, it also changed how i see this no-nut bullshit. i used to see it as a silly practice some silly men would do. but now i see it as the continuation of demonizing sexuality. (granted, if you got a problem then you got a problem, but the solutionis to go seek help, not to maim a beautiful woman, thinking she's a demon (as was pretty common in the past, thanks to christianity)) and how religion is basically just politics moved into the clouds, and how monotheism fueled tyrants..
it is funny how it was all basically already there, in stories and films, but seeing it all connected hits hard
"If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment."
-Marcus Aurelius
Maybe follow that one
Marcus Aurelius is a privileged aristocrat speaking blasphemy.
Also, we've totally twisted human norms from the [perfect] society we had thousands of years ago.
Ok.
well, agriculture is a relatively fresh discovery. as hunter/gatherers we relied on one another, the concept of one human being having authority over another only developed when we "finally" had something to fight over: fertile land. game used to be divided freely prior to that
Almost all predator animals have a territory and they will fight for that territory to keep others out. Chimpanzees and other great apes have clan wars over territory. And they have social hierarchies where some get more food than others.
There is a 100% chance early humans were fighting each other long before the invention of agriculture.
we used to be much more like bonobos actually... at least sexually.
and last time i checked we aren't predators, wrong teeth.
anyways, i can see that there could have been fights. but killing other humans in wars became a thing only much much later, when game wouldnt be so readily available, the first large settlements formed and already made some people leave them to find better luck elsewhere.
the objectification necessary to enslave other humans came pretty much along with it. after all, a dead enemy is just a thing. so a living enemy could also be just a thing...
i wasnt trying to romanticize the era of hunter gatherers, but while rome might have been quite moderate at that time, practically everyone else were already patriachial to a point where most women would be second class citizens with little economic freedom, or economically free but sworn to celibacy, and their profits would return to their fathers
i wasnt trying to romanticize the era of hunter gatherers, but while rome might have been quite moderate at that time, practically everyone else were already patriachial to a point where most women would be second class citizens with little economic freedom, or economically free but sworn to celibacy, and their profits would return to their fathers
Many Celtic and Germanic tribes were still relatively gender-egalitarian (moreso than Rome, in many cases), as were many Berber and Arab tribes of the period, and Nubian/Ethiopian kingdoms, India, and the Scythians of Central Asia.
They were mostly still patriarchal, but less patriarchal than the European and Islamic civilizations that would later emerge where we get our 'clearest' view of Patriarchy from.
the book concentrated a lot on the bible probably as that is the most likely thing a reader might know. me attacking aurelius like that might be ill advised, but seeing a man talking about which emotions are acceptable and which not, makes me itch
you sound like a pleasure to be around.
there are no walmarts in this country and also: sugar is the true enemy
i'd also rather be with my family than at work, but yeah...
and i think this is exactly what marcus meant by "the complaining": suck it up, do your work. which is why i cant see this as "be mindful and chill" but only "shut up and be a man"/"boys dont cry"
it's toxic.
i do mourn a certain type of cereal though... but that's long gone