Happy Thanksgiving and Best Wishes From all of us at the Daily Outsider.
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Seneca thought he knew Nero. He was confident in his ability to teach or contain or even control him. Other Stoics knew better. Thrasea (whose story we tell in Lives of the Stoics) opposed him from the start. Agrippinus (another fascinating Stoic in Lives) wouldn’t even attend Nero’s parties, because it was clear to him that the man was a tyrant.
Surely these men (and women) communicated their concerns to Seneca. Surely people raised questions. But Seneca thought he knew better. He was also paid so handsomely by Nero, was so powerful as a result of his position as Nero’s teacher and advisor, that it became hard for him to see what was there. It was a classic case of that problem outlined by Upton Sinclair many centuries later: It’s very hard to get someone to see something that their salary (or status or identity) depends on them not seeing.
We all have blindspots like this. Some are more forgivable than others (Marcus Aurelius with his stepbrother Lucius Verus…ahem and recent presidents and their children). The reason we have trouble seeing what is so obvious to everyone isn’t just that we’re close to these people, it’s that we don’t want to admit we’re wrong. We don’t want to hear what we’re being told because it would mean changing our minds, having tough conversations, making painful decisions.
Yet even Marcus Aurelius would write in Meditations that false friends should be avoided at all costs. He spoke of needing to understand the true character of those we’re dealing with. This doesn’t mean we have to cut everyone who isn’t perfect out of our lives. It doesn’t mean we have to betray them (although in Seneca’s case, Nero did need to be conspired against and eventually Seneca did). But it does mean we can’t be naive. We can’t deny what is obviously true…or that will cause us and others we love even more trouble. It’s only delaying the inevitable, only deferring the painful choices (or consequences) we’ll inevitably face.
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Oscar Wilde was the victim of a terrible tragedy and a terrible injustice. At the height of his artistic powers, he was thrown in jail–an awful prison which contained the germs that later killed him. It was intolerance and tyranny, plain and simple. Everything he cared about was taken from him.
His family. His freedom. His work.
As he sat in that dark cell, rotting, festering, angry, he had a kind of slow but life-changing spiritual awakening. Coming out of his resentments and fear and despair, gifted with some paper by a sympathetic politician, he decided that his position would, “force on me the necessity of again asserting myself as an artist, and as soon as I possibly can. If I can produce even one more beautiful work of art I shall be able to rob malice of its venom and cowardice of its sneer and to pluck out the tongue of scorn by the roots.”
As it happens, that very sentence was part of that beautiful work, a fascinating and brilliant book called De Profundis (which is full of Stoic themes). He was taking the same path that Admiral James Stockdale outlines in his famous Stoic paradox–that he had to unflinchingly accept the reality of his situation while simultaneously asserting, “I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.”
Neither Wilde or Stockdale deserved what happened to them, just as most of us don’t deserve the misfortune we find ourselves in. Yet we have the power, as they had the power, to make good of it, to rob adversity of his malice and venom. This is what Marcus did during the Antonine Plague, what Seneca did during exile, and how Epictetus was able to rise from slavery and disability. If they can pluck out the tongue of scorn in far worse situations than us, then certainly we can. We need to channel this energy, assert ourselves as artists–in whatever it is that we do–and create just one beautiful thing out of this moment.
Or better, many beautiful things.
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