Can Stoicism Fight Modern Corruption?
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.
How widespread is modern corruption and what contemporary examples open the episode?
We are living in a moment of immense and pervasive corruption. The president of the United States is enriching himself to the tune of billions and billions of dollars. A high ranking member of his administration was seen literally accepting a bag of $50,000 cash. His teleprompter operator was caught using inside information from his speeches to bet and make money in prediction markets. And it's not just political corruption. A few years ago, there was a major scandal where actors and actresses and entrepreneurs and investors were bribing and cheating their kids into elite universities. We have college athletes and professional athletes and coaches and executives who are not just betting on games, but perhaps even
throwing games a special forces operator made a bet worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in prediction markets using information on a raid he was participating in and while all of this is unprecedented and modern in one sense in another sense it's the oldest story in the world it is unfortunately a timeless story. Rome was an incredibly corrupt and dark and twisted and depraved place as well. Elections were bought and sold. Human beings were bought and sold. Conflicts of interest were everywhere. People enriched themselves, stole from the public, and the Stoics were there in the ancient world in the thick of it. And I don't mean they were complicit in it. I mean, they resisted it. They exposed it.
They tried to reform and change it, which is what we're going to talk about in today's episode. How do you resist corruption? How do you stay good and decent when it is commonplace? How do you maintain your integrity, your honesty, your goodness when very few people around you seem to want to do the same? We should be clear that there are multiple forms of corruption. There is the corruption of bribery, of incentives. And then there's also the most basic form of corruption expressed in that famous line that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. This is what makes Marcus Aurelius so fascinating. Here we have someone who is given absolute power and not only is he not corrupted, it seems to make him better.
So what can we learn from the exception that proves the rule? Well, Marcus Aurelius was conscious about this very idea. In fact, he speaks about it in his famous meditations. He says, be careful that you are not imperialized, that you are not stained purple. He didn't want the position to go to his head. He didn't want it to make him worse the way that it had made some of his predecessors worse, the way that it had made Tiberius had retreated into pleasure and cruelty, the way that Nero had descended into insanity. Marcus Aurelius tried, he said, to fight to be the person that philosophy tried to make him. Now, it's easier to do this when you're a regular person, when you don't have enormous amounts of stress on you, when there's not crises happening all the time, when people aren't trying to kill you and when people aren't trying to get stuff from you.
So what we should understand is that the reason Marcus Aurelius isn't corrupted by power, at least as much as some of the cautionary tales of history, is that he really worked for it. Although other people couldn't hold him to account, he could hold himself to account every day as he sat down and looked at the pages of his philosophy texts and the pages of his journal. He kept going to see his philosophy teachers. He reminded himself that he didn't know everything. He reminded himself that he wasn't a god, that he couldn't take this money with him when he died, that it wasn't about creating this legacy so future generations would have to admire all of his accomplishments, right? He tried to remain centered.
He tried to remain humble. Human, he tried to remain. Sane, he tried to remain good. He said, the whole point of life is to have good character and do acts for the common good.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00β0:15
2
How widespread is modern corruption and what contemporary examples open the episode?
0:15β8:18
3
How did the Stoics view political and social corruption in ancient Rome?
8:18β13:17
4
How did Marcus Aurelius resist being corrupted by absolute power?
13:17β29:14
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from The Daily Stoic
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