How To Love Your Country Without Lying About It | Ty Seidule
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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.
What is the significance of Juneteenth in American history?
Today, the United States celebrates Juneteenth, the commemoration of the emancipation of slaves in America. Two years after President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation and nearly 90 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, U.S. Army troops deployed to Texas, the only state of the Confederacy still with institutional slavery. "'The people of Texas are informed,' ordered a Union general, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, "'All slaves are free.'" There's no question that that military order deserves celebration. It asserted absolute equality and began the liberation of hundreds of thousands of human beings. And Marcus Aurelius would write in meditations that his stoic role models taught him to conceive of a society of equal laws governed by equality of statute and speech.
and of rulers who respect the liberty of their subjects above all else." It's as beautiful a sentence as any written by Thomas Jefferson, but of course, a long way from Epictetus' personal experience. This kind of freedom that Marcus was talking about would have been something inconceivable to the early Stoics who themselves lived in a slave society and tragically did very little to stop it. Like Jefferson's writings, Marcus Aurelius' passage was just that, an idea, not a reality. In 1910, Theodore Roosevelt would remind his fellow citizens of the critical distinction between words and deeds. In name, we had the Declaration of Independence in 1776, he said, but we gave the lie by our acts to the words of the Declaration of Independence until 1865.
And he said, words count for nothing except insofar as they represent acts.
How do memory and nostalgia differ in the context of history?
This is true everywhere. Or, as the Latin expression goes, acta non verba, deeds not words. It's wonderful to celebrate these principles from the Stoics and the Founders. It's wonderful to note the moments of historical progress like Juneteenth. But we have to remember that beautiful language pales in comparison to beautiful acts. We have to turn these words, these ideas, into deeds. We can't just talk about them. We have to be about them. And not living up to them or doing something about them, as was the case with slavery in Rome and America, is ugly. Marcus knew this, but fell short, damning himself with his own words and meditations that you can commit an injustice by doing nothing also.
What role do words and deeds play in understanding freedom?
We must make sure today that we are not guilty the same.
Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to the second half of this episode. That was our Juneteenth-inspired Daily Stoic email. I didn't really know about Juneteenth until I moved to Texas. I mean, I'd heard of it, but I moved to East Austin about 15 years ago, and my house was right near this park that a Black citizens of Austin had purchased it. Originally, Juneteenth was celebrated in another part of Austin. And then when the city was segregated in the late 1800s after Reconstruction, they weren't allowed to celebrate there anymore. And so this group of people decided they wanted to buy land. They wanted to be able to celebrate Juneteenth on Black-owned property. And that became what was known as Emancipation Park.
And I remember I came out of town, I came back one day, and it was just like Bedlam in East Austin. I was like, what is happening?
How can we turn historical words into meaningful actions?
What is this? It was the Juneteenth celebration. And that was right around the time I started studying the Civil War and I was reading all these books. I was just blown away by it. And it's a beautiful, inspiring moment. thing. But in honor of this incredible holiday and this incredible day, I wanted to do a little deep dive into it and how it ties into stoicism. And it's funny, actually, we talked about Juneteenth when Chet Garner from The Day Tripper, who's a great Texas historian and travel guide, he was on the podcast, he and I talked about it.
We would have tons of civil war sites in Texas that we don't have because of this.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–0:15
2
What is the significance of Juneteenth in American history?
0:15–2:05
3
How do memory and nostalgia differ in the context of history?
2:05–2:55
4
What role do words and deeds play in understanding freedom?
2:55–4:04
5
How can we turn historical words into meaningful actions?
4:04–7:10
6
What personal experiences shaped the host's view on Juneteenth?
7:10–12:14
7
How does Ty Seidule address the issue of Confederate monuments?
12:14–15:12
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from The Daily Stoic
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