Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 6.27

How cruel it is not to allow men to strive after the things that appear to them to be suitable to their nature and profitable! And yet in a manner you do not allow them to do this, when you are vexed because they do wrong.

For they are certainly moved towards things, because they suppose them to be suitable to their nature and profitable to them.

“But it is not so!”

Teach them then, and show them without being angry.

—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 6 (tr Long)

I am unfortunately a man disposed to melancholy. I suspect I was born with the disposition, and a chain of bad experiences never made it any better. Accordingly, I instinctively see what is dark and disturbing before I can bring myself to see what is bright and uplifting. Whenever I confront greed, malice, thoughtlessness, or betrayal, I find it hard to simply take it philosophically. I am inclined to take it very personally.

This makes it all the more important for me to get my house in order. I actually have a very long fuse, but when that fuse finally runs out, after I’ve sat there quietly for ages and minded myself in silence, I can suddenly blow up. An Irish temper is not a pretty thing.

My anger arises from a sense of despair, and my despair arises from a sense that the world is just plain wrong. I am mistaken, of course, because the world will be exactly as it will be. The world is never really the problem. My attitude about the world is the real problem.

I will see something I think is wrong, and I will become indignant. Not righteous at all, but self-righteous. I will boil and bubble, and even as I am convinced I am in the right, my reactions will too readily be in the wrong.

Most of us can quite easily succumb to the temptation of rage. Friends have been lost, families broken, and wars waged to the bitter end. Hatred can seem so powerful.

But love is more powerful, and only love ever wins a battle. The battle is never against another, but always against ourselves.

I have sat there, in those very early hours of the morning, when any decent man should be asleep, and I have stewed in my own resentment. Then there will be that moment of realization, where I understand that I am only destroying myself. He passed you over? She broke your heart? They treated you like garbage? They all did so because they thought, in whatever way, that it was right.

Now how does my frustration change any of that? It never makes anyone else better, even as it always makes me worse. Hatred only breeds hatred.

A man may hurt me, and my instinct is to hurt him right back. But what was the cause of his actions? He believed, for his own reasons, that he was doing something good. Was he mistaken in this?

Perhaps. If he was, my own vengeance compounds the problem. When I meet the abuser, I need not myself become an abuser. When I meet the scoundrel, I need not myself become a scoundrel.

There is only one thing I can do to make it better. Teach, by word and, most importantly, by example. There is a very good reason Socrates was the honorary grandfather of Stoicism. He taught about right and wrong, but never forced others into his sense of right and wrong.

Written in 3/2007

IMAGE: Nicolas Guibal, Socrates Teaching Pericles (1780)