How should I think about others?

"Do not waste the remainder of your life in thoughts about others, when you do not refer your thoughts to some object of common good. For you lose the opportunity of doing something else when you have such thoughts as these: what is such a person doing, and why, and what is he saying, and what is he thinking of, and what is he contriving, and whatever else of that kind makes us wander away from the observation of our own ruling power.

"We ought then to check in the series of our thoughts everything that is without a purpose and useless, but most of all the over-curious feeling and the malignant; and a man should use himself to think of those things only about which if one should suddenly ask, 'what have you now in your thoughts?' With perfect openness you might, immediately answer, This or That; so that from your words it should be plain that everything in you is simple and benevolent, and such as befits a social animal, and one that cares not for thoughts about pleasure or sensual enjoyments at all, nor has any rivalry or envy and suspicion, or anything else for which you would blush if you should say that you had it in your mind."

---Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 3 (tr Long)

The Emperor-Stoic reminds us to not get caught up in thinking about others. Does he mean that we should have no care, interest, or concern for others at all, or is he perhaps asking us to consider more carefully precisely how we should relate our good to that of others?

Just as it very easy to surrender our lives to be be tossed and turned by our social nature, and to allow our own sense of value to depend to easily on the estimation of others, it can be just as easy to fall for the other extreme, of turning away and rejecting other people entirely. As is so often the case, there is the moderate and reasoned middle ground.  As a being of Nature I am called to love my neighbor, and to seek our shared good together, but this does not mean that I define myself by his view of me.

In the simplest sense, I should think of another when I seek to live well, but I should never think I live well by what he thinks of me.

All the manipulations and machinations of gossip, slander, and jockeying for social position serve no purpose beyond defining our lives through honor and reputation. The Stoic should have no place in it, because he knows that a man is never measured by his status but rather only by his character. Choose to be well, regardless of whether you are though of as being well.

So, I often remind myself that I should think about another when I ask how I can help both him and myself to live well, but I should never  think about another if I'm asking how he can be used as a means to improve my own power and position.

This reduces, in the end, to the basic Stoic truth that I must always find my fulfillment in my own thoughts and deeds, never relying for my happiness upon the thoughts and deeds of others.

Written on 7/28/2009

Image: Eugene von Blaas, Gossip, 1903