I'm going to concentrate on a major mind game today: Stoicism. Its seeds were planted in fourth century (B.C.) Athens, as a backlash against Plato's preoccupation with inuring everybody to the perfect society.
Diogenes of Sinope, a friend of both Aristotle and Alexander the Great, (they all knew each other and all died within a two-year period), struck out on his campaign, not to conquer the East as did Alexander, not to stamp out ignorance as did Aristotle, but to do something about man s condition as a cowed citizen of a city state, without anything to believe in that could defuse the inner fears and desires which continually obsessed him.
Man had to take command of his inner self, control himself. The Stoic goal was not the good society, but the good man!
—from James B. Stockdale, The Stoic Warrior's Triad
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