Epictetus, Discourses 1.19.4

“Do you pay no heed?”

 

No, I pay no heed.

 

“I will show you that I am master.”

 

How can you? Zeus gave me my freedom. Or do you think that he was likely to let his own son be enslaved? You are master of my dead body, take it.

 

“Do you mean that when you approach me, you pay no respect to me?”

 

No, I only pay respect to myself. If you wish me to say that I pay respect to you too, I tell you that I do so, but only as I pay respect to my water pot.

 

This is not mere self-love: for it is natural to man, as to other creatures, to do everything for his own sake; for even the sun does everything for its own sake, and in a word so does Zeus himself. 

 

But when he would be called “The Rain-giver” and “Fruit-giver” and “Father of men and gods”, you see that he cannot win these names or do these works unless he does some good to the world at large: and in general he has so created the nature of the rational animal, that he can attain nothing good for himself, unless he contributes some service to the community. 

 

So it turns out that to do everything for his own sake is not unsocial. For what do you expect? Do you expect a man to hold aloof from himself and his own interest? No, we cannot ignore the one principle of action which governs all things—to be at unity with themselves. 

—from Epictetus, Discourses 1.19 

 

I could go on for pages with unpleasant memories of various tyrants, from playground bullies to pompous bureaucrats, though I am just likely to get myself riled up. It is enough to review them in my own mind sufficiently, to recall an important lesson on the sort of person I should desperately avoid becoming. 

 

The key to recognizing a tyrant is in how his behavior shifts according to his feelings of vanity. Does he open doors for you when you flatter him? Does he block your way when you have wounded his pride? If so, it’s a fairly safe bet that you are dealing with a narcissist, big or little, and you should be wary of allowing him any influence over your will. 

 

“What’s so bad about looking out for oneself? Don’t we all do that?”

 

Yes, but what matters is in what we mean by taking care of our own interests. I ought to distinguish between self-respect and arrogance, between caring for myself through a care for others and caring for myself at the expense of a care for others. 

 

False humility can be just as harmful as false pride, and no good will come from believing my own needs to be irrelevant. My primary calling is to take up the responsibility for myself, and to think and act in such a way as fulfills my nature. 

 

“See, once you scratch the surface, its selfishness!”

 

Not at all, unless there is a catastrophic ignorance of who I am made to be. As a creature of reason and will, my good is rightly expressed in cooperation with the good of all other creatures. There is no conflict, since understanding and love join things together instead of breaking them apart. When I choose to complete myself by acting with the whole, not against the whole, my motives are hardly selfish. 

 

Like so many other false dichotomies, the opposition arises from too narrow a perspective. Providence or freedom? Duty or happiness? My benefit or your benefit? “Yes!” is the answer to all such misleading challenges. 

 

Considering God, or however you wish to name the ultimate measure of Reason, it would be selfish of me to say that God is good because He does good things for me. No, God does good things because He is already completely good in and of Himself. By analogy, let me have no shame in advancing myself, for I must thereby inevitably also advance others. 

 

I love that closing line: I am, above all, called to be at unity with myself. This, in turn, brings me into unity with everything else around me. The self-centered tyrant does not grasp this, since he isolates himself as a special case. 

—Reflection written in 2/2001