My new book, Wisdom Takes Work, comes out in a few weeks. Get signed & numbered first editions here!

I have a hobby and it’s weird. 

It started in a pretty normal way. 

I’d always liked taking walks and then I had young kids. 

Because it was often the only way I could get them to sleep–or to keep them out of the house so my wife could sleep–I would spend hours and hours walking on the rural country road that we live on. 

It is unpaved and unmaintained by the county or the state, lined with trees, and more frequently crossed by deer and jack rabbits than people. We’d do miles and miles, first in the baby bjorn, then the single stroller and then the double stroller. We see the sun come up or the sun go down. We crunch the frost and the mud. We’d do it in the heat and the cold, on ordinary days, for the interminable months of the pandemic, weekdays and weekends, rain or shine.

It’s a throwback to an older, simpler way of life.

It’s also a throwback to a scene I’ve always remembered from Mad Men, where Don Draper and his family finish their roadside picnic and then nonchalantly throw all their trash into the grass below.

Only out here, because the police don’t seem to mind or our local government is non-existence, they dump tires and old mattresses. They dump debris from construction sites. They dump beer bottles and candy wrappers. They dump out of season deer kills and for some inexplicable and alarming reason, a lot of dead dogs.

At first, this just pissed me off—especially because the nails kept giving me flats. It would make whole segments of the road unwalkable with the kids because of the stench. I tried calling the police and animal control and my local politicians—of course, they did nothing. I put up fake cameras which did nothing to deter. I thought about moving.

But then one morning on my walk with my kids, a thought hit me that was both freeing and indicting. How many times do I have to walk past this litter, I thought, before I am complicit in its existence? Why do I keep expecting someone else to do something about it if I won’t? So I started cleaning it up…and I actually enjoyed it. We started cleaning it up. 

I have a bag, one of those sticks with a spike on it, and I go up and down the country roads where we live. I have a claw and gloves (I have gone through many many pairs of gloves). I go down in the gullies by the side of the road picking up soda bottles, plastic bags, food wrappers, nails, and screws. I have disposed of dumpsters worth of garbage over the years. I have loaded tires into the back of my truck and paid to have them properly recycled. (I’ve even paid a contractor to come out with a tractor for some particularly heavy stuff). I have put on face masks and scooped up dead goats,  dead calves  and dead dogs which I burned or took to the back of my ranch to decompose in a less disruptive place. I have paid my children an ungodly amount of bribes to get them to participate too.

I don’t just do it at home either. I do it when we go to the beach. I do it when we go on hikes. I do it when I’m pacing in a parking lot, taking a phone call. I think I’d want someone to grab this if they saw it, so I’ll do the same. 

Does it make a difference? In the big scheme of things, no. Does it create a moral hazard? Maybe. Perhaps word has gotten out—dump your stuff down here because it mysteriously disappears a few days later. 

I’m not sure my neighbors have noticed. In fact, one time, as I loaded up a mattress in my truck, someone who lives down the road accosted me, thinking I was the dumper. Honestly, the only time anyone has ever said thanks happened in another country. I was in Greece this summer and I passed a flattened water bottle in the street, which I reached down and grabbed and tossed in a nearby trash can. An old man sitting in a cafe stood up and began clapping and bowing and shouting in unintelligible Greek. I assume he was saying thanks, but maybe he was making fun of me. 

I’ll tell you it doesn’t earn you karma, not at least during this lifetime. Despite all the work my wife and I still get a flat tire every month or so. 

But that’s not why I do it.

I do it for me. 

In a world where everything seems to be falling apart and so much is beyond my control, there is something deeply empowering about this simple, weird act. I can see the difference every time I drive home—the road is cleaner, safer, more beautiful. I’m outside instead of stewing indoors. I’m moving instead of scrolling. I’m solving a problem instead of complaining about it.

There is a Mr. Rogers quote I love. “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news,” Rogers said, “my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’”

We decide what we look for in life—do we get mad at the people making the mess or do we look towards the people cleaning things up? We decide whether to despair or find hope and goodness.

But I actually think we can go further. Do we decide to BE one of the helpers? Do we decide to pick up the trash? Do we take ownership of the things within our control? 

That’s what makes the difference…and life better for everyone, but especially you.

***

For the past six years I’ve been lavishing all my working hours on the Stoic Virtues series and I can honestly say Wisdom Takes Work, the fourth and final book in the series, is the culmination of my life’s work.

Wisdom Takes Work is a book about the work of our lives: the work it takes to acquire wisdom. The book is filled with the example and insights of some of history’s wisest people, and how we can follow in their footsteps.

It comes out on October 21st, but is available for preorder over at dailystoic.com/wisdom. Each time I release a book, I like to do a run of preorder bonuses like signed and numbered first editions, early access to the introduction, bonus chapters, and even an invite to a philosophy dinner at my bookstore, The Painted Porch. 

Check out all the bonuses here!

Before we get into it…with the upcoming release of ​Wisdom Takes Work—the fourth and final book in my Stoic Virtues series—we’re doing a collector’s set of all four books. There’s a limited run of these, so pre-order them here today. I’m also giving a talk in San Diego in February about applying the Stoic virtues to modern life and modern problems. Grab seats and come see me!

On the night of April 4, 1968, Robert Kennedy, then running for president, was about to give a speech in inner-city Indianapolis when he got the news that Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated.

It had already been a grueling campaign. It had been a painful few years. And now, another murder, more violence.

Kennedy was the one who had to break the news to the milling crowds that King, their leader, was dead. The crowd, roiling with anger and despair, was on the verge of riot.

His prepared marks woefully insufficient for the moment, Kennedy began to riff. It was a crossroads moment, he said: “In this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in…You can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in great polarization. Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love.”

To those tempted to move in the direction of hatred and revenge, Kennedy said, “I can only say that I feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling,” for his own brother had been struck down the same way just five years earlier. But he also knew personally what a dark and empty road that was. “We have to make an effort in the United States,” he said, “we have to make an effort to understand, to go beyond these rather difficult times.”

Then, he drew on a line from one of his favorite books, The Greek Way by the classicist Edith Hamilton. On a ski vacation four years earlier, Kennedy was loaned a copy of the book and ended up spending most of the trip holed up in his room, absorbed in Hamilton’s wonderful discussion of what made the Greeks so special, what they can teach us, and how they thought about life. It was from her book that he had read a line by the ancient Greek poet Aeschylus that stayed with him. And there in Indianapolis, from memory, he recited it:

“In our sleep, pain, which cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”

“What we need in the United States is not division,” Kennedy explained. “What we need in the United States is not hatred. What we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness. [What we need is] love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.”

He urged the attendees to return home and to pray, and offered them an alternative, a chance to take meaning from this terrible experience. “Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago,” Kennedy said, “to tame the savageness of man and to make gentle the life of this world.”

All over the country similar crowds erupted into mobs, which turned into deadly riots. But in Indianapolis that night, largely because of Kennedy’s words, the people chose peace and restraint over rage and violence.

The reality is that political violence is not unprecedented in American history. It has always been there, lurking beneath the surface of our democracy. In fact, if you’ve read Bryan Burrough’s Days of Rage (or listened to my conversation with Bryan), the statistics are staggering—in 1968 alone, there were over 2,000 terrorist bombings in the United States. The FBI reported more than 2,500 bombings on U.S. soil between 1971 and 1972, an average of nearly five explosions per day. As Burrough put it, perhaps the only thing more startling than those numbers is how completely they have been forgotten by the American public. 

If we go back even further, and if you want a really terrifying look at how political violence can consume a republic, I highly recommend Mike Duncan’s The Storm Before The Storm, about Rome and the hundred years of political dysfunction that preceded Julius Caesar. In the book (and in our podcast episode together), Duncan chronicles how the normalization of mob violence, the normalization of assassinations, people breaking the rules, politicians demonizing their opponents, politicians trying to overthrow elections, people thinking that they alone were the solution to the republic’s problems led to the republic’s fall. 

So again, political violence has always been there. And it can continue to be there, if we let anger and hatred take more and more of us in their direction. We can follow Rome’s path toward the normalization of brutality, where every act of violence is met with more violence. Or we can choose to go the way Kennedy talked about that night in Indianapolis—the harder path of understanding, compassion, and the ancient wisdom that teaches us to find meaning in our suffering rather than let it consume us. We can choose, as he said, to try to tame the savageness of man. 

Look, pluralism is not some nice idea. It is a technology. It was invented out of the hard-won wisdom that Aeschylus talked about, largely by the American pilgrims and then the Founders, who looked backwards at centuries of religious violence. They understood that in a winner-take-all system, people would always be fighting. But in a system that allowed for a multitude of views, for freedom of expression and protecting minority views—even abhorrent ones—where the government did not pick sides, then people of all faiths and beliefs could co-exist. 

I do not mean to be kumbaya about this. I also don’t want to dance around the brutality of what happened to Charlie Kirk—a father of two was gunned down by a high-powered rifle on a college campus, bleeding out before he even knew he was dying. I also won’t refrain from denouncing the inane, trollish, and stupid positions he often espoused. Charlie Kirk was a bigot and a misogynist and a homophobe. He also celebrated and encouraged political violence—not just perpetuating the lies about the 2020 election but proudly busing hundreds of people to the Capitol on January 6th, an event that erupted into an insurrection on par with Catiline’s (which he then pleaded the Fifth about in front of Congress). 

No one deserves to die. George Wallace did not deserve to be shot. Neither did Martin Luther King Jr or Robert F. Kennedy. Neither did Brian Thompson, the CEO of United Health. (I was incredibly disappointed to see that the murderer Luigi Mangione had once retweeted something I’d said. Talk about missing my message!) Assassins threaten not only individual lives but the very concept of pluralism and free expression. They steal from all of us. Because now we question what we say, we question whether our rights will be respected, we question whether this project–that is to say democracy–will keep working. 

We all deserve better than the level of discourse that Charlie Kirk practiced, which was the classic toolkit and style of a demagogue, but discourse is better than murder. Virtue (and just plain human compassion) also demands better than the insensitive and cruel responses to his murder…as well as the anti-democratic and authoritarian rhetoric that politicians have thrown about after. It’s shameful what people have been doing and saying…it’s essential that each of us makes the choice to not be implicated or participate in that ugliness. 

I’m reminded of a recent conversation I had with Dr. Laurie Santos on the Daily Stoic podcast. She talked about an essay by the anthropologist Sarah Hrdy, who studies primates and primate interactions. In the essay, Hrdy describes the familiar experience of being crammed on a long, delayed flight filled with dozens and dozens of strangers, all cranky, tired, hungry, and irritable. “And she’s like, ‘if this was any other species,’” Dr. Santos said, “‘they’d be killing each other. No one would leave with their testicles.’ It’s amazing that we get to be in one of the few species where all that happens is somebody says a nasty thing to the flight attendant.”

What keeps us from tearing each other apart on an airplane or in society or in the middle of intense disagreements about religion or policy or events isn’t biology. It’s the social technologies we’ve developed over the past 2,500 years. It’s the political process. It’s rules, the norms, the shared agreements about how we behave and coordinate and cooperate with each other. None of which are guaranteed or permanent or self-sustaining. 

They require constant work, constant vigilance, constant choosing.

They require, as Kennedy said, that we make an effort. An effort to love, to understand, to have compassion toward one another, to treat our fellow human beings like fellow human beings. 

We desperately need to make that effort. We desperately need to put the genie of political violence back in the bottle. 

Because once it gets out, once that Rubicon is crossed, history shows it’s incredibly hard to tame the savageness of man.

I’m giving a talk in Austin next week (only a few tickets left) and San Diego in February. Grab seats and come see me!

My study of history has led me to believe that there is a kind of dark matter inside the human race. 

It’s some combination of evil, cruelty, ignorance, cowardice, mob-ness. It is a kind of dark oppositional energy that goes from issue to issue, era to era. It’s rooted in self-interest, self-preservation, in fear, in not wanting to be inconvenienced, not wanting to change, not wanting to have to get involved. It manifests itself a thousand ways, but once you recognize it, you spot it everywhere. 

It’s there in some of our oldest stories. Written in 430 BC, Euripides’ The Children of Hercules is about the plight of the refugee, and how a society is judged by how it treats the weak and vulnerable. The young children of Hercules are driven to the Temple of Apollo in Marathon by a bounty hunter from an angry king, who demands they be handed over to be punished. “They are suppliants and strangers,” the Athenians reply, “Who look to our city for help. / To reject them is to defy the gods.” But the king, obsessed with his vendetta—his goons following his orders—will risk war rather than let these vulnerable people have some measure of peace or safety.

This energy was the motive force behind s the great cruelties of history and the great backlashes too: the Inquisition, the Holocaust, the Confederacy, the exploitation of colonialism, the thwarting of Reconstruction, collaboration in Vichy France, the excesses of the Red Scare and McCarthyism, Apartheid in South Africa, the Rwandan Genocide. And it’s there in modern moments too, big and small, mundane and outrageous: the NIMBY neighbor at a city council meeting to block desperately needed housing, the bullying of librarians, the shrug at another mass shooting, the mob on Twitter gleefully destroying someone, backlash against immigrants (especially when they look different than you), now the backlash vaccines and wind energy, the endless debates (and excuses) while Gaza descends into humanitarian catastrophe.

Gandhi was once asked what worried him most. His reply? “Hardness of heart of the educated.” 

When I look around right now, I think of this hardness of heart as one of the big problems of our time. And the way, in the face of it, good people can become utterly exhausted and detached, worn down by years of resisting this energy.

In my book Right Thing, Right Now, I write about Raphael Lemkin, who spent the first half of the twentieth century trying to wake the world up to the atrocities in Armenia and then in Europe.

No one listened. Even as his own family was being murdered in Poland.

So he backed up and decided to start very small. Part of the problem was that new technology had made violence possible on a scale beyond words. “As his armies advance,” Churchill said of Hitler in 1941, “whole districts are exterminated. We are in the presence of a crime without a name.”

Churchill almost always had the right words. Here, he did not.

That’s what Lemkin solved first.

Because the crime had no name, people excused it, denied it, or looked away. In 1943, Lemkin coined the word “genocide” to describe the deliberate destruction of a people. Added to Merriam-Webster’s dictionary in 1950, the word changed the moral arc of the universe.

There it was. It could not be denied.

Lemkin then fought to codify the word into law. At Nuremberg, he all but slept in the hallways as he lobbied for a UN declaration. He hounded reporters, mailed research to politicians, buttonholed diplomats, wrote op-eds. It was good trouble for a good cause. After four years of relentless work, in 1948 the UN passed a unanimous treaty banning genocide—the nameless crime that had claimed Lemkin’s mother. All he could do was weep.

But the fight was only beginning.

The United States refused to ratify the treaty for decades. In 1967, Senator William Proxmire picked up the baton. “The Senate’s failure to act has become a national shame,” he declared. “From now on I intend to speak day after day in this body to remind the Senate of our failure to act and the necessity for prompt action.”

This was not empty virtue signaling. Genocide was happening at that very moment in Nigeria. Soon it would be Bangladesh. Then Burundi. Then Cambodia. And on and on.

Proxmire’s first speech wasn’t successful. Neither was his tenth. Or his hundredth. But he refused to give in to indifference. Across two decades he gave more than three thousand speeches, patiently making trades and deals, steadily winning over the sixty-seven senators he needed.

Finally, in October 1988—twenty years after he began, forty years after Lemkin—Proxmire gave his last speech on the subject, his 3,211th. This time, he could announce victory. The treaty had passed. The world had, at last, a tool to fight humanity’s most nameless crime.

Of course, it would be wonderful if the world were naturally just, if people were automatically good. But they aren’t. It would be wonderful if this was the end of genocide, but obviously, it is isn’t. Terrible war crimes are being committed right now, not just in the Middle East but also in Ukraine and in Sudan. One of the most heartbreaking truths of life is that people not only fail to do the right thing, they often persist in error or evil even after every argument has been made, every procedure followed.

They dig in. They don’t let go. 

That was the Southern strategy during segregation—make it so difficult, so painful, so nasty that the North would eventually give up, as it had after Reconstruction.

Which is why the civil rights movement was more than marches. It was endless court cases that took years to be heard, years to win, and were often ignored by Southern officials. When James Meredith sought to integrate the University of Mississippi, Justice Department lawyer John Doar filed hundreds of motions, sat before judge after judge, appealed and appealed again.

“You’ve just got to keep going back,” Doar said. It didn’t matter if an injunction went against them, if governors defied rulings, if mobs surrounded them, if no one cooperated. There was always another motion, another venue, another appeal.

The main thing was that the good guys didn’t quit. They refused to be discouraged. They believed they could—and would—prevail. They stayed with it. They just kept going back, until finally, eventually, they made the tiniest bits of progress.

And the thing about this dark energy is that once it is beaten down somewhere, it finds a new place to pop up. It’s like water: it just pools and then seeks a new outlet. After the famous Brown decision, the Southern energy went into founding Christian “segregation academies” or private white-only schools—effectively creating the Religious Right. Although many modern political issues are complex, when you zoom out, you often see how simple they are: This is somewhere that that energy has found an opportunity to go. 

This is an exercise I often do. I mentally put all the specifics aside and I think: What would the people who shouted slurs at Ruby Bridges (or Ernest Green, who I’ve interviewed) as she walked into school for the first time feel about this issue? Or, what about the oligarchs who controlled the levers of power until the Civil War, then fought social reformers during the Gilded Age and then resisted the social safety net during the Great Depression and then fought tooth and nail for isolationism in the run up to WWII (and after too, which is why many senators refused to sign the UN Genocide treaty), what stance would they be drawn to here?  I try to think about where the darkness would go—or how it would be rationalized—and I try to go the other way.

In his private writings, we see Marcus Aurelius doing something similar, constantly reminding himself during his own dark and ugly times: Don’t become implicated in the ugliness. Don’t let it infect you. Don’t become cynical or bitter. “Take care,” he writes in Book 7 of Meditations, “that you don’t treat inhumanity as it treats human beings.” Or to put it a more colloquial and modern way: Don’t let the sonsofbitches turn you into a sonuvabitch. Don’t let bad times make you a bad person.

I’m reminded of Montaigne, who, as we have talked about before, faced what might have been even darker times than our own: mass executions, religious wars, persecution, demagogues, bandits, riots, conflict, thousands of people burned at the stake for mostly imagined crimes. He was aghast at the way people treated each other, especially people they disagreed with or didn’t understand. Yet for all the cruelty around him, Montaigne would not be sucked in. As Stefan Zweig would write in the biography I turn to whenever the world seems dark, Montaigne remained human in an inhuman time. He would not get sucked into the dark energy. He would not let inhumanity drive him away from humanity. He would not let the sonsofbitches turn him into a sonuvabitch.

“No one can stop you from that,” Marcus writes. Because, he added. No one can make you do that. It’s a choice. There’s a fountain of goodness there inside us, inside the world. It is up to each of us to make sure that fountain keeps bubbling up. No matter how much shit and evil people try to dump on it. 

Don’t let the darkness make you dark. 

Don’t let inhumanity deprive you of your humanity.

Don’t equivocate. Call a spade a spade. Condemn evil, cruelty, and injustice. 

And keep going back to that fountain of goodness within. As long as you keep going back, “and as long as you keep digging,” Marcus wrote, “it will keep bubbling up.”

No one can stop you from that.