Socratic State of Mind Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

Virtue without power is benign, but power without virtue tears lives and civilizations apart. 

So it’s a pity good people often don’t understand how power works, and what people holding the levers of power are up to. Part of wisdom is understanding that ignorance of reality leaves us susceptible to manipulation by those who lack scruples, and less effective in doing good.  

If the United States broke any ground with its constitution, it was in assuming saints wouldn’t be elected — that politicians would in fact possess numerous vices. Alexander Hamilton correctly intuited that counterbalancing vice with vice would keep America on the rails while planning on angels showing up would lead to catastrophe. 

Hamilton and the founding fathers had an unusually high degree of power literacy, probably because they’d read Plutarch and studied classical history. For instance, John Adams was a vocal fan of Machiavelli, the famous political realist.

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On the other hand, most communist governments were built with starry-eyed optimism about the type of people who’d live in and lead them. The results are predictably lackluster. 

Power literacy for the wise and the just isn’t about manipulation, and is largely defensive and preventative in nature. Someone with high power literacy will: 

* Be able to spot the power games played around them and respond appropriately.  

* Understand that power is amoral, but its execution always has moral implications.

* Understand human nature and how it’s manipulated.  

Power Literacy at Home:

Most of us don’t design governments, but power literacy helps us act appropriately in the local arenas we find ourselves in.  

If you’re a good person, you may not realize the extent to which an entire class of people sees our world through a zero-sum lens, and views relationships and institutions as vehicles for personal gain. The world throws around clinical terms like sociopath and psychopath, but many are simply power-literate people who lack a strong moral foundation and introspection. When backed into a corner, they pull the puppet strings they intuit will help them get their way. Good people often have strings that are very easy to tug on. 

Isn’t it yourself you should reproach—for not anticipating that they’d act this way?—It was you who did wrong by assuming that someone with those traits deserved your trust.” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 9.42

It’s only when we understand the power games they use so successfully — in the home, in petty work disputes, and at the highest levels of government — that we can protect ourselves and effectively pursue worthwhile goals. A significant part of humanity won’t play by the rules, and good people need to act like it. Any community built without power literacy degrades over time because bad actors take advantage of it. You’re probably part of such a group right now.

A Classic Manipulation

There are countless power games, but a basic two-step manipulation looks something like this: 

* Disorient a person and knock them off balance. Using a person’s emotional responses against them is a strategy as old as time. Fear is the classic tool, but other emotions, such as greed and anger, are also viable. If a manipulator can make you fear for your life, your family, your livelihood, or your reputation, for instance, they’ll often have you. And people goaded into anger become stupid, stop thinking clearly, and make mistakes. If you’re disoriented and reeling, you’re going to be easier to manipulate.  

* Apply external pressure. Disorienting people with anger, fear, or other strong emotions may be enough. If it isn’t, external pressure may cause them to dance to someone else’s tune. Can a friend be turned against them? Can they be blackmailed or make you look bad in front of their boss? Where might some adroitly-planted gossip turn the screws?

Resisting Manipulation:

Some people are hard to knock off balance with emotional manipulation. They might also stand up to external threats with unusual resilience. Why? 

Power literacy helps us keep our balance when someone is playing a game with us because we see what they’re doing. If you’ve inculcated an understanding of how politicians manipulate people with fear and anger, and look for instances of them doing it, you probably won’t be tricked next time “your side,” points out something worthy of scorn.  

But there’s no better way to resist manipulation than a philosophic practice. The two-step manipulation above threatens externals that Stoics discount. If you care more about doing the right thing (virtue) than reputation, wealth, or anything else, you become very hard to manipulate.

Virtuous people with power literacy tend to get left alone by sociopathic types. If initial probing fails to make you dance, bad actors often look for easier targets unless you pose an existential threat to them or their power base.  

Increasing Power Literacy: 

Experience may be the most effective way to understand power and its abuses. If you spot manipulation in progress or retrospectively retrace how you were manipulated, you’ll probably never be fooled in the same way again. 

But books are safe and provide far more examples than you’ll come across yourself.  

Plutarch’s Lives 

Plutarch was incredibly popular in Colonial America. His mini-biographical pairings of one prominent Greek and one prominent Roman show leaders possessing virtues and vices in equal measure. Plutarch details some of the successful manipulations used by his subjects.

An in-depth study of business tycoons and politicians from other eras may yield similar insights and help you to see people for what they are. 

Machiavelli's The Prince 

Machiavelli suggests leaders try to be effective rather than good. Drawing on examples from antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the early Renaissance, he shows how this can be done. Don’t study The Prince to learn how to manipulate, but rather to understand how power games are played by those without scruples. 

Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power

What if Machiavelli had access to far more information from which to draw conclusions? Perhaps he would have ended up with something like this book. Some of the laws contradict each other, but that’s not really the point. Greene shows us the levers by which humans are manipulated, and the psychological landscape of the worst of us. 

Perspective 

“That to expect bad people not to injure others is crazy. It's to ask the impossible. And to let them behave like that to other people but expect them to exempt you is arrogant—the act of a tyrant.”

―Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 11.18

We must understand what’s in our power and what isn’t. It’s foolish to think sociopathic types can be kept from positions of influence and power, or that we’ll “defeat” them. 

Nero and other despotic Roman emperors were surrounded by depraved courtiers mirroring imperial vices, ancient historians tell us. And yet Emperor Marcus Aurelius complained of people pretending to be philosophers because his interest in Stoicism made the topic en vogue. Vice “was out,” and virtue was “in,” and yet sociopaths appear to be prominent in both types of courts. The morally flexible will discover what it takes to have influence and contort themselves into the required shape, regardless of how good the person at the top is.  

As Marcus would put it, don’t expect Plato’s Republic, or even Plato’s softball team. 

Yet remaining ignorant of the way the game is played leaves you naive and open for manipulation. Neither is virtuous, and a wise person learns how power works. 

The Wooden Beam In Your Eye

“Why do you notice the splinter in your brother's eye, but do not perceive the wooden beam in your own?”

The biggest risk in power literacy acquisition is distraction from our own faults. We may even manipulate others in a half-aware fashion, engaging in small vices while pointing fingers at others.

“You yourself have many faults and are no different from them,” Marcus Aurelius reminded himself. “…You are not even sure that they are doing wrong. Many things are done as part of a larger plan, and generally one needs to know a great deal before one can pronounce with certainty on another's actions.”

So yes, acquire an understanding of human nature and power, but don’t forget that we mostly need to pay attention on ourselves and the few things that are totally within our power.

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Early in his career, the famous actor Sir Michael Caine struggled with an errant chair disrupting a scene. It blocked the doorway he was supposed to enter through, and his teacher gave him a piece of advice that stuck with him:

 “Use the difficulty,” Caine said. “If it’s a comedy, fall over (the chair). If it’s a drama, pick it up and smash it…Now I took that and I used it in my own life...There’s never anything so bad that you cannot use that difficulty. If you can use it a quarter of one percent to your advantage, you’re ahead.” 

1,800 years ago, the Roman Emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius used the same strategy to rule an empire and himself — he turned obstacles into assets. 

“Our actions may be impeded…” Marcus wrote, “but there can be no impeding our intentions or dispositions. Because we can accommodate and adapt. The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle to our acting. The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”

Marcus explains: “If you accept the obstacle and work with what you’re given, an alternative will present itself—another piece of what you’re trying to assemble. Action by action.”

Any obstacle can be a whetstone to sharpen our character.  If we embrace impediments they leave us better people: better able to endure in the face of setbacks, to offer kindness in the face of hostility, to be disciplined in the face of distraction.

Artists have long found that channeling creativity within the hard limits of a self-imposed medium or style makes them more creative. The constraints force them to reach deeper and find something transcendent. 

So too do hard limits and setbacks make us great because in reaching past them and using them to our advantage we find what is truly great in ourselves.   

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Stoics try to be prepared for life. To best way to prepare is to train yourself a react to everything with equanimity or indifference while seeking to respond with virtue. 

* Imagine different “disasters” that might befall you today or in the future as if they’re happening. Imagine your initial reaction (probably overblown), and see yourself pull back from it so you can take a more critical look.

* Practice removing value judgments from your “disasters”, looking at them as simple facts, and realizing that they’re not good or bad in and of themselves — “It is what it is.” 

* As you imagine these “disasters”, ask yourself, what would be totally up to me at this point in terms of my response? What would be not up to me? Practice refocusing on the things that you have total control over. Make sure your responses are in line with the virtues of wisdom, justice, courage, and moderation.

* Imagine how an experienced religious figure, philosopher, or another person you admire would react to the “disasters” you’re imagining. What would they do differently?

“What is quite unlooked for is more crushing in its effect, and unexpectedness adds to the weight of a disaster,” Seneca says. “This is a reason for ensuring that nothing ever takes us by surprise. We should project our thoughts ahead of us at every turn and have in mind every possible eventuality instead of only the usual course of events…”

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Practicing philosophy and living by our values can leave us looking strange and out of touch. 

The Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau thought we should embrace this. “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer,” he wrote in Walden,  “Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”

But your out-of-step marching may well attract attention, which we have to steel ourselves for.

“If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid with regard to external things,” Epictetus told his students. “Don’t wish to be thought to know anything; and even if you appear to be somebody important to others, distrust yourself. For, it is difficult to both keep your faculty of choice in a state conformable to nature, and at the same time acquire external things. But while you are careful about the one, you must of necessity neglect the other (Enchiridion 13).

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It seems like a paradox— Stoics want to be relaxed and at peace, and yet dedicated to achieving things.

How can we be serious about justice or reaching a business or personal goal if we have to also be relaxed about it? A serious drive to achieve anything seems to sabotage peace of mind.  

The answer is simple but not easy — as Epictetus says, “Make the best use of what is in your power, and take the rest as it happens.”

So we dedicate ourselves to doing what we have control over while writing off the results as unimportant. Nothing can impede our intentions and goals, but the external outcomes are ultimately out of our hands. 

You can be relaxed and dedicated. 

Just because you worry more, doesn't mean you care more. 

So relax, and set your mind on what’s under your complete control. The rest will take care of itself.

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As artillery shells exploded on the beach around him, Theodore Roosevelt Jr. knew he had a problem. 

The vanguard of the allied attack against Nazi Germany, which Roosevelt was leading, had come ashore far from its target. His soldiers were pinned under heavy fire and panicking.  

The 56-year-old son of President Teddy Roosevelt was the oldest man on Utah Beach that day. He walked with a cane and was battling a heart condition. Yet he calmly ignored the bullets and shrapnel, drew his pistol, and limped off to find his target. 

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He returned to his panicking troops soon after and calmly explained that everything would be fine. He’d located the causeway that was their target and devised a plan. 

"We'll start the war from right here!" he cheerfully told them.

Each regiment coming ashore was welcomed by a barrage of enemy artillery and a calm, smiling Roosevelt, who recited bits of poetry, cracked jokes, and directed them on their way.

It’s an approach to life that the Stoic philosopher and emperor Marcus Aurelius would have appreciated.

“The cucumber is bitter? Then cast it aside,” he wrote. “There are brambles in the path? Step out of the way. That will suffice, and you need not ask in addition, ‘Why did such things ever come into the world?” (Meditations 8.50)

Have you washed up broken and battered, far from your original goal? Do you lack the required expertise, or feel like your years weighing you down? 

That’s ok. We can only, as Roosevelt knew, start from where we are.

Wherever you’ve washed up, take a moment to get your bearings, check to see what’s in line with your values, and then launch the war you need to wage from right there. 

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Journaling is, on its surface, pretty easy: Get a notebook. Get a pen. Write about your life. Done.  

But not all journaling is created equal. One of the most powerful journaling techniques is simply talking to yourself the right way — like a philosopher.

What does a person gain from practicing philosophy? Antisthenes, one of Socrates’s students, had a strange answer to this question. He said he gained, “The ability to converse,” with himself.

Why would we want to talk to ourselves? Isn’t that the domain of crazy people and eccentric cranks? 

Talking to ourselves, particularly through a certain kind of journaling, can make us wiser, calmer, more at peace with our lives, and better at conflict navigation — exactly what philosophers try to achieve. 

That’s not only my conclusion from journaling this way for many years, but that of a lot of psychological research.

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Illeism and Perspective

The kind of journaling that stands out is ‘Illeism’, which simply means that you’re taking on the detached perspective of an outsider and referring to yourself with second or third-person pronouns. 

So I’d write ‘Andrew ate dinner”, or  — my personal preference — “you ate dinner”, instead of “I ate dinner.”

That sounds like a minor change, but it creates enough distance between us and our egos that we can assess situations more objectively and look at our emotions rationally rather than letting them cloud our thinking. 

This technique isn’t new. In fact, some of the wisest men and women in history have used it gain perspective on their lives. 

Marcus Aurelius’s Journal

Perhaps the best surviving example of ancient illeism is “Meditations,” the journal of the Roman Emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius. 

If you read the book, you’ll notice that he uses the second-person pronouns “you” and “your” most frequently. 

“…it is not the thing itself that troubles you,” he writes, “but your own judgement about it. And this you have the power to eliminate.” (Meditations 8.47)

And “The things you think about determine the quality of your mind. Your soul takes on the color of your thoughts.” (Meditations 5.16)

And on another occasion, “Just that you do the right thing. The rest doesn’t matter.” (Meditations 6.2)

Clearer Thinking Through Illeism

Modern researchers have found that Marcus’s way of journaling changes how we think.

In this study of the “Distanced-Self-Reflection Diary Method,” researchers asked 555 participants to reflect on their daily struggles in a month-long diary. Half were told to use the third person, which the researchers called distanced self-reflection. The other half wrote in the first person. In a second study, participants were given no specific instructions about how to write, and served as a kind of control for the other two.

All the assessed forms of wise reasoning, such as intellectual humility, open-mindedness about how situations can unfold, and consideration for diverse viewpoints were improved among all the participants who journaled. But they improved most in the third-person group.

“Utilizing the ancient practice of distanced self-reflection, we demonstrated that referring to oneself in the third person during repeated reflections on daily events affords a more expansive self-focus, which in turn facilitates wiser reasoning,” the researchers wrote. “The results from two field studies suggest that training people in distanced self-reflection can bolster wise reasoning in everyday life.”

Several dozen other studies have found similar improvements to a wide range of psychological issues when switching to the second or third person, including social anxiety and post-event worry,

So simply writing about your life and stressful events in the second or third person is likely to make you psychologically healthier, but there’s a way we can take this a step further.

What Would Rusticus Do?

We might ask why Marcus journaled in the second person to begin with. Yes, it was a longstanding philosophical tradition. 

But in, “How to Think Like a Roman Emperor,” author Donald Robertson suggests “Meditations” may have started as an attempt by Marcus to replace the counsel of his philosophy teacher, Junicus Rusticus, who’d recently died. 

Well into adulthood, Marcus relied on Rusticus’s perspective. He’d tell his old mentor what he was struggling with, and Rusticus replied with sound advice grounded in philosophy. 

When Rusticus’s died, Marcus needed to become his own teacher. He already knew the precepts of Stoic philosophy, but externalizing that knowledge and passing it back to himself as though through another person made a big difference.

If you study a religion or philosophy, or simply have someone you look up to and admire, you can start any journaling session by asking yourself what advice or perspective your exemplar would give you. You likely already know what their more expansive view entails, so pass the advice back to your conscious mind to help clear the fog.

If you’re looking for powerful topics to use this technique with, death and fate are two good options.

Until next time, keep journaling. 

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If we don’t know what we value, how can we know how to live?  

One of Socrates’s aims was to clarify what was actually good and truly important so he could live up to those values. 

Therapist and author Donald Robertson suggests one surprising way to find our values: Look for what we despise.  

If you dislike a politician because they’re a hypocrite, it implies you value integrity. “You’re projecting your values left, right, and center,” Robertson says.

Once we see this connection, we should ask if we’re living out the opposite of what we despise.

How well did you live up to your values this week on a 1-10 scale? If you score low, ask yourself how you can take one step up the ladder in a single value over the next week.

More integrity is just one action away.

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“This is not the body your mother gave birth to,” the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote in a seemingly strange entry in his journal. 

But wasn’t he right? Our cells are constantly being replaced. The childhood you, physically and psychologically, is, in a sense, dead. Today’s you will be gone before long. You’re not the person you were yesterday.  

It’s as the philosopher Heraclitus said: “No man steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man.” 

If we’re always dying and being reborn, and never truly do the same thing twice, there’s only sane one response: don’t miss a moment of it.

This may be your last time to experience this as you are, so don’t let it slip away while you’re distracted. Live well while you have life.  

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If you opened this article, it implies you care about finding passion and a meaningful path forward. Congratulations! You now have at least one thing you know you care about. Until something else lights a fire under you, I suggest you organize your life around the goal of gaining further clarity about what’s really important to you.

* If you want passion and purpose, ask yourself what you’re trying to avoid by seeking them. Why do you want to avoid these end states? Be persistent and dig deep. 

* Consider people you admire and dislike. What traits and values do the best and worst of them have? This week, can you take one step toward living up to the values of those you admire, and one step away from those you dislike?

* Most of us abhor contradictions, and can’t stand them when they find them.  Look for contradictions between your thinking and your actions and begin to remove them. What you find will imply values you can build a life around. 

* If you’re not spending at least a few minutes a day probing why you don’t have passion and what might help you find it, you’re probably not giving the question the attention it deserves. There are a lot of distractions in our world. Don’t let them keep you from what matters most.