I found out a few days ago that a friend caught the virus.

I was worried. I felt sorry for them. I was also frustrated. Because it wasn’t COVID they had been infected with, but a different virus related to it: the virus of conspiracy. 

Its symptoms presented almost immediately. Along with delusions were the corresponding symptoms of callousness and selfishness and deliberate ignorance. 

I was sad. 

This was a smart person. A good person! 

But here they were, telling me suddenly about their doubts on the efficacy of masks and sending me links to some discredited COVID denier. Over the coming weeks, I would watch them become increasingly radicalized and disconnected from reality; a process that while thankfully not nearly as deadly as COVID, was equally merciless and unstoppable. 

This idea that there are other forms of contagion to be worried about during a pandemic is, unfortunately, not a new one. Two thousand years ago, Marcus Aurelius, in the middle of the Antonine Plague, would say that “an infected mind is a far more dangerous pestilence than any plague. One only threatens your life, the other destroys your character.”

It strikes me that the last several months have revealed a few different forms of mental infections. 

The first, of course, is conspiracy theories. When we are overwhelmed, hurt, and scared, we tend to grasp for something, anything, that explains the unexplainable. There is a simplicity to the idea that the pandemic is really a hoax, or that 9/11 was an inside job. Somehow it’s actually less scary to believe that it’s all made up, or that your own government is out to get you, than it is to grapple with the idea that they fell down on the job. A world with a cabal of child traffickers operating in plain sight is somehow actually less terrifying than a world of senselessness and chaos and horrible things that happen for no reason. 

Are there such things as real conspiracies in the world? Of course. I wrote a book about an actual one! But I love the meme designed around a cartoon from the great Hugh MacLeod: 

Another common virus is the virus of radicalization. It is this insidious process, initiated by some foreign outside influence, by which we’re drawn into an increasingly opaque world of ideas—one video, one book, one sermon after another. It starts small, a couple of tweets here and there. But then they converge, like cells forming a tumor, and before you know it that tumor is cancer and it’s metastasizing. It’s attacking our body. It’s using our own brain against us. Suddenly, the information that contradicts what we’ve picked up is confirmation of it. They say sunlight is the best disinfectant, but now if you see the sun is shining it’s only proof that the darkness is everywhere. 

And so one conspiracy theory leads to another and another and the next thing you know, you’re a raving asshole at best, or worse, a dangerous lunatic. 

The irony should not escape us: In the early 2000s, after the heinous attacks of September 11th, the radicalization of young men and women by their exposure to extremist Islamic views became a major topic of discussion at Senate subcommittee hearings and on cable news roundtables. Today, radicalization has come home—brought ashore by our own technologies and media—and it’s just as close-minded, extreme, and violent. 

It’s also created people who are totally unreachable. That is how powerful cognitive dissonance can be—impervious to reason, to evidence, to moderation, to critics, to friends and family to get back to the real you. What started as a question or two becomes an elaborate universe, a false reality we inhabit. Some people end up so brainfucked, it’s likely we’ll never get them back. 

The problem with conspiracy theories and their radicalizing effect is how related they are to another infection—in fact, they are often comorbid with each other. I’m talking about the infection of cruelty and callousness. 

The cancer starts intellectually, but it does its real damage emotionally…

One would think that people who believe that COVID-19 was a biological weapon unleashed upon us by the Chinese would then be taking the risks very seriously, but somehow it’s the opposite: these are also the anti-maskers. (“But it’s uncomfortable!” “But I’m in good shape, why do I have to be inconvenienced?!” “You can’t make me!!!”) These are also the people trying to squint at the numbers to explain away the death toll. These are the ones saying, “Oh, but a lot of these people would have died anyway. They were old, you know.” 

Just open everything back up, they say, let the virus run its course…a course that will include many more freezer trucks full of bodies, that will include the preventable losses of so many loved ones. It’s insidious how the virus works, no matter the situation. Show somebody a video of a black man being gunned down in the street and instead of the normal, human reaction of pain and compassion, the mind now plugs in reasons they don’t have to care. What about black-on-black crime? Blue Lives Matter too! But did he have a criminal record?!

It’s the certainty. It’s the closed-offness. Just as COVID can take away your ability to taste or smell, others among us lose their ability to feel.

When Marcus Aurelius was talking about destroying your character, this is what he was talking about. To me, the people ranting at city council meetings, screaming at cashiers, or making up fake doctor’s notes to get out of wearing a mask seem far sicker to me than most of the people I know who have caught the virus. I have a friend whose husband, being overheard expressing some caution about COVID, had his face licked by a colleague who believed the whole thing to be a hoax. You know who does that? A sick person. A person who has not only been infected in a way that has made them deranged, but whose insecurity about that has turned them into a bully. 

That was the saddest thing about hearing that my friend had suddenly become an anti-masker. This is a good person. A decent Christian who has always been generous, kind, respectful. Yet they had picked up some beliefs—been corrupted—by something that now violates the most essential teaching in their religion: the commandment to love our neighbors. To love them as we love ourselves. To protect the sick and vulnerable and the meek.

Do not think you are exempt or immune from this corrupting virus. If ordinary people living on the same block as you can be radicalized by falling down internet rabbit holes, if the toxic media (and social media) culture we’re in can nurture and feed unfathomably dark and awful views, then what do you think it’s doing to you? Do you think you yourself might be getting radicalized by your own filter bubble? Are you doing a good enough job holding up every impression and opinion to be tested? Or are you, too, in a less dangerous way, being swept up in the passions of the crowd, however fringe or alt or mainstream that crowd may be?

Radicalization is the scourge of our time. Ordinary people who share an enormous amount in common are being turned against each other. People who are polite and friendly and would help a stranger change a tire on a rainy night on the side of the road are being turned into weapons in a war that helps no one but advertisers and trolls and power-hungry populists.

Of course, most of us are smart enough or emotionally stable enough that we can’t be deceived by the most absurd propagandists. There’s no spiritual hole in us, so we can’t be manipulated by an Alex Jones or whomever, right? Good. But there is another mental virus out there—one that the pandemic has brought out in otherwise smart and rational people. 

When things are hard, when things are scary, when we’re tired, when we’ve had a run of bad luck: magical thinking kicks in. 

This will all be over soon, we convince ourselves. This one thing will solve all our problems. Our ex is going to walk through the door any minute now. The pandemic will just disappear because we want it to. This kind of thinking makes us feel better, sure, but…that’s just not how it works.

Just ask Chris Christie. He knew he had a lung condition. He knew that testing was not perfect. He knew he should have been wearing a mask at the big White House event. But he told himself, “No, this is a safe space.” Like a lot of people, he probably thought, “This is important, I’ll make an exception.” Or he thought, “I don’t want to deal with the hassle or the awkwardness—I’ll just hope it works out.”

And for Chris Christie and the White House Rose Garden party, we can plug in: “But I really want to see my folks for the holidays.” “It was just a small get together with friends.” “But my kids miss going to school.” “I really want to believe that racism is a thing of the past.” 

Well, that’s not how it works. 

The last few months have been a great example of the costs that come when magical thinking doesn’t materialize and the chickens come home to roost. When hope is your strategy, you get caught unprepared. When you expect problems to solve themselves, you are disappointed. When you don’t listen to advice because it’s unpleasant or comes with difficult obligations, when you focus on short-term solutions or disregard risks, you’ll find even bad situations can be made worse.

I love this little video: Just because you’re over it, doesn’t mean it’s over yet. 

Marcus Aurelius reminds us that we have to see not what the enemy wants us to see, but what is really there. He works through, in Meditations, stripping things of “the legend that encrusts them,” of removing the magical thinking that distorts our picture of the world. You can’t go around expecting Plato’s Republic, he said—the world is harsh, problems are real and no amount of hope makes it otherwise.

We must be on guard.

Not just against COVID-19, but of the other illnesses that its stresses and uncertainty can bring about. What good is surviving the virus—and most people will survive COVID-19, thankfully—if the cost is being a horrible person? If, in so doing, you blatantly rejected your obligations as a human being? If you mocked and dismissed the suffering of the people who are not as fortunate as the rest of us? You think you’re dunking on the other side… really, you’re dunking on yourself. 

We have to be kind. We have to be thoughtful. We have to see through the haze. 

We can’t deny it, either. Or else we won’t be able to protect ourselves. 

Exciting news! We have signed and personalized copies of my books available in the Daily Stoic store. We’ve also got the leatherbound edition of The Daily Stoic back in stock, too. Check out my original trilogy on Stoicism, my latest bestseller Lives of the Stoics, and all the others.

The modern practice of this Thanksgiving holiday here in America is that we are supposed to take the time to think about what we’re grateful for. And the candidates are usually pretty obvious: We should be grateful for our families, for our health, that we live in a time of peace, for the good laid out in front of us. All the usual suspects.

I agree, these are important things to recognize and appreciate. It’s also good to have a specific day dedicated to that occasion. So by all means, celebrate.

But over the last few years, I have come to practice a different form of gratitude. It’s one that is a little harder to do, that goes beyond the cliche and perfunctory acknowledgment of the good things in our lives, but as a result creates a deeper and more profound benefit.

I forget how I came up with exactly, but I remember feeling particularly upset—rageful if I am being perfectly honest—about someone in my life. This was someone who had betrayed me and wronged me, and shown themselves to be quite different from the person that I had once so respected and admired. Even though our relationship had soured a few years before and they had been punished by subsequent events, I was still angry, regularly so, and I was disappointed with how much space they took up in my head.

So one morning, as I sat down early with my journal as I do every morning, I started to write about it. Not about the anger that I felt—I had done that too many times—but instead about all the things I was grateful for about this person. I wrote about my gratitude for all sorts of things about them, big and small. It was just a sentence or two at first. Then a few days later, I did it again and then again and again whenever I thought about it, and watched as my anger partly gave way to appreciation. As I said, sometimes it was little things, sometimes big things: Opportunities they had given me. What I had learned. A gift they had given me. What weaknesses they had provided vivid warnings of with their behavior. I had to be creative to come up with stuff, but if I looked, it was there.

A few months later, I came across a viral article about a designer who had gone through a painful divorce. Prompted by his work computer to change his password every 30 days, he decided to use this medium as a chance to change his life. The password he chose: [email protected] And at least once per day for the next month, often multiple times a day, he found himself typing in that phrase over and over. Each time he got to work, each day when he got back from lunch, when his computer would go to sleep while he was in a meeting or on the phone: Forgive her. Forgive her. Forgive her.

It struck me that there was something similar about my gratitude exercise and the small success I had. It was easy to think negative thoughts and to get stuck into a pattern with them. But forcing myself to take the time not only to think about something good, but write that thought down longhand was a kind of rewiring of my own opinions. It became easier to see that while there certainly was plenty to be upset about, the balance of the situation was still overwhelmingly in my favor. Epictetus has said that every situation has two handles; which was I going to decide to hold onto? The anger, or the appreciation?

Now in the mornings, when I journal, I try to do this as often as I can. I try to find ways to express gratitude not for the things that are easy to be grateful for, but for what is hard. Gratitude for that nagging pain in my leg, gratitude for that troublesome client, gratitude for that delayed flight, gratitude for that damage from the storm. Because it’s making me take things slow, because it’s helping me develop better boundaries, because some flights are going to be delayed and I’m glad it wasn’t a more important flight, because the damage could have been worse, because the damage exposed a more serious problem that now we’re solving. And on and on.

Donald Trump once tweeted “Happy Thanksgiving to all–even the haters and losers!” I’m not a fan, but I must admit that he has a point. We should be giving thanks, even to the “haters and losers.” Actually, that’s who we should be thanking in particular. It’s the “haters and losers” who point out our flaws, keeping us humble if we have the sense to listen. It’s the “haters and losers” whose examples we heed, even if only as guides for what not to do. The point is: There is something to be thankful for in everything and everyone. Even the life of Donald Trump, itself filled with a lot of hating and losing, offers lessons to us all. Mostly, what kind of person not to be. What kind of person to raise our kids not to be. 

This is part and parcel of living a life of amor fati. Where instead of fighting and resisting what happens to you, you accept it, you love it all. It’s easy to be thankful for family, for health, for life, even if we regularly take these things for granted. It’s easy to express gratitude for someone who has done something kind for you, or whose work you admire. We might not do it often enough, but in a sense, we are obligated to be grateful for such things. It is far harder to be grateful for things we didn’t want to happen or to people who have hurt us. But there were benefits hidden in these situations and these interactions too. And if there wasn’t, even if the situations were unconscionably and irredeemably bad there is always some bit of us that knows that we can be grateful that at least it wasn’t even worse.

“Let us accept it,” Marcus Aurelius wrote to himself in his own journal some two thousand years ago, “as we accept what the doctor prescribes. It may not always be pleasant, but we embrace it —because we want to get well.” The Stoics saw gratitude as a kind of medicine, that saying “Thank you” for every experience was the key to mental health. “Convince yourself that everything is the gift of the gods,” Marcus said, “that things are good and always will be.” This isn’t always easy to do, obviously, we should try to do it because the doctor asked us to try this experimental procedure—and because the old way isn’t working well either.

I’m not saying it will be magic but it will help.

So as you gather around your family and friends this Thanksgiving or Christmas or any other celebration you might partake in, of course, appreciate it and give thanks for all the obvious and bountiful gifts that moment presents. Just make sure that when the moment passes, as you go back to your everyday, ordinary life that you make gratitude a regular part of it. Again—not simply for what is easy and immediately pleasing.

That comes naturally enough, and may even go without saying. What is in more desperate need of appreciation and perspective are the things you never asked for, the things you worked hard to prevent from happening in the first place. Because that’s where gratitude will make the biggest difference and where we need the most healing.

Whatever it is. However poorly it went. However difficult 2020 has been for you. 

Be grateful for it. Give thanks for it. There was good within it.

Write it down. Over and over again. 

Until you believe it.

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It was a dark time for the Republic. 

Institutions had stopped working. Interminable foreign wars dragged on. Norms—the old way of doing things—seemed to have broken down. There had been election fixing and the passage of preposterous legislation. Corruption was endemic. 

So when a certain popular politician reached out to a senator on the other side of the political aisle to dangle an offer that might make both of them more powerful, it might have seemed like more of the same. 

Not to Cato, a philosopher-cum-politician. He wanted nothing to do with the powerful general Pompey’s attempt at an alliance via marriage—perhaps to Cato’s daughter or niece. Although the ladies of Cato’s household were excited at the prospect, Cato was decisively not. 

“Go and tell Pompey,” he instructed the go-between, that “Cato is not to be captured by way of the women’s apartments.” 

It’s one of those moments that seems admirable through its purity, and high-handedness. Politics shouldn’t be done that way; good for him for staying above it. Yet on closer inspection, it’s one that leaves the historian with considerable doubt. It was principled, but was it politically wise? Was it effective?

Humiliated and angry, Pompey turned to Julius Caesar, who received him with open arms. United and unstoppable, conjoined through marriage to Caesar’s daughter Julia, the two men would soon overturn centuries of constitutional precedent. Civil war soon came. 

“None of these things perhaps would have happened,” Plutarch reminds us, “had not Cato been so afraid of the slight transgressions of Pompey as to allow him to commit the greatest of all, and add his power to that of another.” 

Rome during this storm is an increasingly cliché reference point these days, but we turn to it because the parallels are there. Thousands of years have passed, and people are still people. Politics is still the same business. Cato remains, as he was then, a complicated figure who should both inspire and caution us. 

Cato was a pioneer of the filibuster, blocking any legislation he believed contrary to the country’s interests—blocking even discussion of it. He condemned his enemies loudly and widely. He refused even the slightest political expediency. Cicero observed that Cato refused to accept that he lived amongst the “dregs of Romulus.” 

His overweening purity became a vice unbecoming of a philosopher. 

It also backed Caesar into a corner. It gave him the very evidence he needed to make his argument: The system isn’t working. I alone can fix it. 

Politics can sometimes seem, especially from a distance, like a Manichean struggle between good and evil. In truth, there is always gray—and the good, even the Catos, are not always blameless. Cato’s inflexibility did not always well serve the public good. 

At the same time, Cicero, a peer of Cato, provides an equally cautionary example. He was a believer in the republic, but he was also ambitious. He struggled to balance his personal ambitions with his love of Rome’s institutions. In politics, he said, it’s better to stand aside while others battle it out and then side with the winner. Yet he abhorred violence and corruption. After one brave citizen, an artist, stood up to Caesar’s face during a performance, Cicero offered to make room for him in the good seats. “I marvel, Cicero,” the man retorted, “you should be crowded, who usually sit on two stools.” Cicero tried to play it both ways and in the end, accomplished less than Cato—and still died just as tragically. 

Does that mean it’s hopeless? That the path for politicians or disgusted citizens is either martyrdom or Vichy-like collaboration?

No, and although we tend to see philosophers as abstract or theoretically thinkers, in fact the Stoics who would come to lead Rome in the years to come learned much from this turbulent period. 

Marcus Aurelius, who would step into Caesar’s shoes several generations later, wrote to remind himself that one could not “go around expecting Plato’s Republic.” He knew that it was essential to compromise and collaborate. For example, he historian Cassius Dio compliments Marcus Aurelius for his ability to get the best out of flawed advisors and reach across the so-called aisle to get things done. 

Arius Didymus was the Stoic entrusted with advising Caesar’s heir, Octavian. A key element of his instruction was in the virtue of moderation. Although we tend to see “moderate” as a political slur today—just as Cato sometimes did—in truth, it is the key to successful leadership. Moderates are the grease that the wheels of government depend on, and their ability to compromise and accomplish things prevents the ascendency of fringe groups from seizing power for their own ends. 

Seneca took this balancing act to even higher levels, managing to hold his nose well enough to get five productive and peaceful years out of the Nero regime. Nothing about that situation pleased him, yet it’s hard to argue that the period of Quinquennium Neronis, those first five years of Nero’s reign, wasn’t the best possible outcome of a bad situation. 

George Washington, who took Cato as a personal hero, worked hard to manage his temper better than his idol. The job of a leader, he said, was not simply to follow rigid ideology, but to look at all events, all opportunities, all people through the “calm light of mild philosophy.” This phrase, despite being a phrase from a play about Cato, was quite difficult for the real Cato to follow. It was key to Washington’s greatness, however. His moderation and his self-restraint were what guided America through the revolution and its first constitutional crisis. In a single, tumultuous two-week period in 1797, historians have pointed out, Washington quoted that same line in three different letters. And later, in Washington’s greatest but probably least known moment, when he talked down the mutinous troops who were plotting to overthrow the U.S government at Newburgh, he quoted the same line again, as he urged them away from acting on their anger and frustration.

Unfortunately, we have lost our ability to speak to and study this kind of wisdom. The last time Stoic philosophy was brought to the public political stage, by the brave Admiral James Stockdale, it was all but laughed off for not playing well on television. Today, leaders and the social media mob have absorbed Cato’s stridency without his principles, not realizing what fodder this is for the Caesar’s and would-be Caesar’s of our own time. 

It has been exciting to me to hear that a number of high ranking political leaders have been exploring Stoicism again. Former Secretary of Defense Mattis is said to travel with a copy of Meditations. I’ve been fortunate to discuss Stoicism with a number of senators in the Senate dining room and in the halls of Congress. But clearly, we remain amongst the dregs of Romulus, without a Washington or a Marcus Aurelius to lead us. 

Philosophy in the ancient world was not something distinct from politics, nor should it be today. Philosophy, properly seen, is a framework to help guide politicians and leaders through the trying, difficult profession upon which so much depended. Stoics advised kings and held public office. They led armies and argued cases in front of high courts. 

But who advises our politicians today? What code do they consult?

The Stoics in Rome and Greece experienced all the civil strife and difficulties that we are experiencing now (including, in Marcus Aurelius’s case, a decade and a half of a global pandemic). They didn’t always succeed, but they tried and they tried to learn from history—they studied history so they could better practice their philosophy with the lessons learned from the actions of others. 

“It shapes and builds up the soul,” Seneca writes of philosophy, “it gives order to life, guides action, shows what should and shouldn’t be done—it sits at the rudder steering our course as we vacillate in uncertainties… Countless things happen every hour that require advice, and such advice is to be sought out in philosophy.” 

Now, more than ever, what Stoicism can teach us is that art of moderation. 

We can seek progress without being perfectionists and we can be pragmatic without being unprincipled. 

It’s not an easy task, but lest we go the way of Rome, we’ll need the calm, mild light of philosophy to guide us.

My new book, Lives of the Stoics: The Art of Living from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius, is a debut #1 best seller at The Wall Street Journal and New York Times. Check it out if you want to learn not only why we should not cancel the Stoics, but how urgent their lessons are to us in modern times.

If you do, I’ll still send over these pre-order bonuses which include three extra chapters I couldn’t fit in the book.

Thank you!