Musonius Rufus, Lectures 6.8

 

And yet, in spite of understanding this, because of the depravity which has become implanted in us straight from childhood and because of evil habits engendered by this depravity, when hardship comes we think an evil has come upon us, and when pleasure comes our way we think that a good has befallen us; we dread death as the most extreme misfortune; we cling to life as the greatest blessing, and when we give away money we grieve as if we were injured, but upon receiving it we rejoice as if a benefit had been conferred. 

Similarly with the majority of other things, we do not meet circumstances in accordance with right principles, but rather we follow wretched habit. Since, then, I repeat, all this is the case, the person who is in training must strive to habituate himself not to love pleasure, not to avoid hardship, not to be infatuated with living, not to fear death, and in the case of goods or money not to place receiving above giving.  

“Oh, it’s not so bad! I just need to make a little alteration here, and adjust a bit of something over there, and it will all be fine. Maybe I should rethink the charities I contribute to? Or will that be too much? Let me ask my wife first, we don’t want to get our bosses and friends upset, after all!”

No, that won’t be enough, I’m sorry to say. Reforming a life is bigger than going to a new yoga class, or using paper instead of plastic. Driving a hybrid Toyota is really no different than driving that diesel Volkswagen. Sending your children to a politically correct private school is ultimately no better than sending them to that run down public school down the street.

Will volunteering for the annual pro-life supper at the Catholic parish be better than running in that diversity love-a-thon for the Unitarians? No.

Don’t you see it? You’ve been duped, played with, lied to. You have been told that you must play a game, that you must appear to others as glorious, that you must strike a pose. Yet you don’t need to do any of that.

I had the blessing of a family that taught me to care for virtue first, but from the earliest age other people told me that virtue wasn’t nearly enough. The question was always about what my future job might be, not what my future character might be.

Imagine if, in the second or third grade, I had said that I wanted to be a janitor. How I would have been ridiculed, both by my peers and by my teachers! They would never have thought about whether I was going to be a kind, a committed, or an honest janitor, and would only have cared about what a lowly status that would be.

How funny, I suppose, that Bruno, a janitor at my own school back then, was one of the few people to pay attention to me, to encourage me, to even give me the time of day. He’s long gone now, but he sticks in my memory more than any of the progressive teachers, who told me I needed to be a doctor, or a lawyer, or a congressman.

The bad habits were deeply ingrained from the beginning. Grades mattered. Why? To get into a good college. Sucking up mattered. Why? To get a good job. Getting an even better job mattered. Why? So I could finally be someone.

Who is that someone now?

It has been beaten into me for so long, and I must struggle to think otherwise. You can also see it within yourself. You were raised to win by taking things. You were actually bred, just like an animal, to produce more for your masters.

Yes, that offends you. I understand. It offends me too, because I somehow fell for it.

Look at all the assumptions we make. A rich man is a success, so he must have done the right things. A poor man is a failure, so he must have done the wrong things. They drilled that into our heads from the beginning, and it’s hard to get it out of our heads.

“I really like that Stoic thing you do, it’s really great, but I have a mortgage to pay.”

There you have the priorities.

Watch any show on television, and observe the values you see. Our characters win when they defeat someone, or have sex with someone. Power and lust. Then watch the advertisements during the show, which now take up a third of the hour. We are all supposedly happier when we own more and when we have greater luxuries.

We think of pain as a bad thing, and of pleasure as a good thing. We think of dying as a curse, and we do anything we can to extend our lives. We will scramble to make money, and we will shun those who have little or no money at all.

And we are completely mistaken. The very fact that the drones think this claim to be insane is the very proof of how deeply we are stuck to those depraved habits.

Train to be a human being, not a machine made to produce and consume this or that product.

Train to think, not to conform to anyone else’s thinking.

Train to decide, not to have everything determined for you.

Train to bear suffering, to accept death, to embrace poverty.

Train to give first, and to care nothing about what you receive.

Old habits will die hard.

Written in 7/1999