The Terror of Knowing What The World Is About | Try The Other Handle
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Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. The terror of knowing what the world is about. There is a burden to the study of history.
It not only takes a lot of work, it's heavy. Knowing what people have done to each other, knowing what they do to each other, making sense of the contradictions, the failures, the stupidity, does not exactly fill one with hope for humanity. And perhaps this explains some of the weariness in Marcus Aurelius' meditations. Marcus was not just a student of history, but an aspiring historian, even working on, at one point, a little book called Deeds of the Ancient Greeks and Romans.
He knew that history was so often the same thing happening over and over again. He knew it was cruelty and awfulness. It was bloody and pathetic. There is no escaping the terror of knowing what the world is about, except perhaps not knowing.
And ignorance, however soothing, is unfortunately a vice. It is a violation of our responsibility to seek wisdom.
And it is also a childish luxury that people involved in public life do not get to indulge.
What burden does the study of history impose on us?
So yes, you will have to face facts. You will have to get uncomfortable. You will have to take up the burden of history. And this will not always be fun.
It will strip you of some of your illusions.
It will also, it should be said, make you stronger and wiser and ultimately more just, will make you great, as it did for Marcus Aurelius, who, despite his understanding of the world, still strove to be good and decent, refused to give in to despair or cynicism, and did his damnedest to be the exception to history's rules.
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How does Marcus Aurelius exemplify wisdom despite historical knowledge?
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Chapters
4 chaptersSpeakers
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