Epictetus, The Handbook 50: Fearing Rebuke

When you do a thing because you have determined that it ought to be done, never avoid being seen doing it, even if the opinion of the multitude is going to condemn you.

For if your action is wrong, then avoid doing it altogether, but if it is right, why do you fear those who will rebuke you wrongly?

—Epictetus, The Handbook, Chapter 35 (tr Matheson)

I’ve long been used to the idea of acting rightly in private, quite often very deliberately, so that I will not be tempted to make my deeds dependent upon anyone’s approval.

Yet the opposite is just as true, that I should not fear acting rightly in public, and for exactly the same reason. I shouldn’t wish you to see it, or also not to see it. I should hardly care whether others recognize how I live, or do not recognize how I live, because their awareness, and their respect or dismissal, should have nothing to do with my sense of what is good.

A desire to crave popularity can be strong, and a desire to avoid unpopularity can be just as strong. I have been struggling to teach myself that I must shun both desires.

Since I first started earning any income, however meager, I have quietly tried my best to share what little I may have. I confronted a new obstacle, however, when one of those small gifts became public knowledge. Someone deeply unpopular with the usual crowd of busybodies had recently been fired, and I had just wanted to help him out. I can hardly complain about unfairness if I can’t be bothered to be fair myself.

“Did you hear that someone else paid his rent for the month? I have no idea who it was, but I’d like to slap that jerk in the face!”

I’m swallowing gravel at this point, because I was the jerk that paid his rent for the month. “Whatever you may think of him personally, we all need help sometimes. How is that a bad thing?”

“Some people don’t deserve help, and some people just need to get with the program before I’d even think about helping them.”

“But his program might not be your program. I paid his rent for this month, because he’d have been homeless otherwise. He’s a person, not your puppet.”

“Well, you can go to hell!”

They say that no good deed goes unpunished, but I suppose all of that depends on what we may consider a reward or a punishment. It felt deeply unpleasant to show my cards, and the consequences felt even more unpleasant. I was shunned, with many people walking past me in the halls and looking the other way. The story lacks a usual happy ending, because I left that job a while later as hated as the fellow I’d tried to help.

I just need to grow up, and realize that my popularity and my character are not interchangeable. Many of us, I suspect, are convinced that if we are liked by others, we also have power over others. In fact, we have no power over them at all. We have freely given them power over us.

I do enjoy having friends, and I am grateful if I am appreciated. I have learned, however, that the more I try to impress others, or conversely the more I try avoid offending them, the more I am also a slave, and not my own master.

I should choose to always offer kindness and friendship, but I should never choose to offer subservience to the will of the mob. 

Written in 12/2006

Image: The Rejection Scene for The Admonition Scroll (4th c. BC)