Socrates

In Euthyphro (written by Plato), Socrates claims to descend from the lineage of Daedalus, the mythic sculpture who created statues that, when completed, would begin to move in all directions, evading the grasp of the people. When someone would try to approach these statues, they would run away and disappear as if they were ghosts.

This story makes Socrates’ affinity with Daedalus revealing about how he sees himself (as written by Plato,of course): a personality that cannot be captured in a simple idea or definition, illusive like a ghost but filled with tantalizing beauty.

Socrates saw ideas very much in the same light as Daedalus’ statues. He felt that ideas that were written down died. As he tells Phaedrus:

I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the appearance of life, and yet if you ask them a question, they preserve a solemn silence

Source: Phaedrus.

In the writings of Antisthenes, Plato, Euclides and Aristippus Socrates presents himself as a complex, contradictory character. The minute you think you understand him, you lost him. A true offspring of Daedalus.

Perhaps that is why that Alcibiades tells us is in Symposium that

none of you knows Socrates

A man few liked: Socrates as a ridiculous character

As the comedian Aristophanes’ summed up Socrates’ personality in The Clouds (a play written during Socrates’ life, when the philosopher was middle aged):

A bold rascal, a fine speaker, impudent, shameless, a braggart, and adept at stringing lies, and an old stager at quibbles, a complete table of laws, a thorough rattle, a fox to slip through any hole, supple as a leathern strap, slippery as an eel, an artful fellow, a blusterer, a villain a knave with one hundred faces, cunning, intolerable, a gluttonous dog.

Socrates was disliked by many and liked by few. Alcibiades portrayal of Socrates in Symposium is telling:

[Socrates] spends his whole life playing his little game of irony and laughing up his sleeve at the world.

Diogenes Laertius writes:

Frequently, owing to his vehemence in argument, men set upon him with their fists and tore his hair our; and for the most part he was despised and laughed at, yet bore all this ill-usage patiently.

The problem is, it never works. Anger is never a way that gets others to call down, consider your arguments and change their opinions. What really is happening is that the emotional temperature is now raised on the other side as well.

What if we decide that righteous indignation is simply not an option, much like such other outdated attitude much like cannibalism.

We all have to deal with a lack of fairness in the world, and we all should organize ourselves far more and be far more proactive in creating a world that works for us, instead of one that is handed down from above by governments and corporations. But the short burst that simply leads to anger is proven not to work, and instead labels US as the jerk.

They know the chances of winning are infinitely small. And they know that millionaires don’t have necessarily better lives in the conventional meaning of the word, they aren’t happy and lottery winners keep buying lottery tickets.

What you get what you buy a lottery ticket is the thrill, the reward that comes with anticipation, the same thing that happens more or less with first dates, a new job, planning a trip. You know it probably won’t change your life or put you in a new direction – but for a brief moment, it might!

Hopscotch

We feel bad when we have to tell someone that the project isn’t going anywhere and that we will have to go back to square one.

Why do we dread this phrase, or this stage in life and work? What would the alternative be? To march headstrong forward in a direction that has no hope?

Our culture has cultivated the message of winning. But sometimes we get blinded by the idea of winning – no-one can win all the time. Losing isn’t bad – it is part of the process. Admitting that you are lost and returning to square one can be the most productive thing you can do that day. The alternative is becoming a modern day Don Quixote, fighting phantoms and winning illusionary battles…

So Square One isn’t such a bad place after all, nor should we dread returning there…

The line between good and evil is permeable and almost anyone can be induced to cross it when pressured by situational forces.

- Philip Zimbardo

Nothing is easier than to denounce the evil doer; nothing more difficult than understanding him.

- Dostoevsky

(Click image to enlarge) Some see angels, some see demons in this illustration by MC Escher, a modern day Ying Yang.

Privileged people tend to think of good and evil as separate worlds, but Zimbardo argues that the boundaries between the world of good and evil is far more gradual.

Zimbardo notes that the prerequisite to evil is power – without it, evil cannot exercise itself and as a result rarely manifests in human behavior.

Three things appear to need to happen before evil can truly present itself in the general healthy human: permission (from group or higher authority), ability (power and a lack of fear of retaliation), an ‘us against them’ philosophy (dehumanization). Given these three conditions, the actor might not even view his or her behavior as evil, and be completely unaware of acting outside of a higher moral standard that is more inclusive of all beings.

The human capacity for evil deeds

Zimbardo illustrates his hypothesis by pointing at various psychological experiments.

The Milgram Experiment

First, he shows us the research of Stanley Milgram in 1963. Milgram wanted to find out if the holocaust could occur again in America. The question he asked was: “would you electrocute a stranger if Hitler asked you to?”

Disguising his research as an experiment to test peoples abilities to memorize, he published an ad and accepted 1,000 ordinary people to take part.

Milgram’s original ad:

A experimenter is asked to administer a shock to a student for each question he gets wrong.

In each session, three people take part in the experiment: the “experimenter”; the “learner” (“victim”); and the “teacher” (participant). Only the “teacher” is an actual participant, i.e., unaware about the actual setup, while the “learner” is a confederate of the experimenter. The role of the experimenter was played by a stern, impassive biology teacher dressed in a grey technician’s coat, and the victim (learner) was played by a 47-year-old Irish-American accountant trained to act for the role. The participant and the learner were told by the experimenter that they would be participating in an experiment helping his study of memory and learning in different situations.

The subject was given the title teacher, and the confederate, learner. The participants drew lots to ‘determine’ their roles. Unknown to them, both slips said “teacher”, and the actor claimed to have the slip that read “learner”, thus guaranteeing that the participant would always be the “teacher”. At this point, the “teacher” and “learner” were separated into different rooms where they could communicate but not see each other. In one version of the experiment, the confederate was sure to mention to the participant that he had a heart condition.

The “teacher” was given an electric shock from the electro-shock generator as a sample of the shock that the “learner” would supposedly receive during the experiment. The “teacher” was then given a list of word pairs which he was to teach the learner. The teacher began by reading the list of word pairs to the learner. The teacher would then read the first word of each pair and read four possible answers. The learner would press a button to indicate his response. If the answer was incorrect, the teacher would administer a shock to the learner, with the voltage increasing in 15-volt increments for each wrong answer. If correct, the teacher would read the next word pair.

The subjects believed that for each wrong answer, the learner was receiving actual shocks. In reality, there were no shocks. After the confederate was separated from the subject, the confederate set up a tape recorder integrated with the electro-shock generator, which played pre-recorded sounds for each shock level. After a number of voltage level increases, the actor started to bang on the wall that separated him from the subject. After several times banging on the wall and complaining about his heart condition, all responses by the learner would cease.

At this point, many people indicated their desire to stop the experiment and check on the learner. Some test subjects paused at 135 volts and began to question the purpose of the experiment. Most continued after being assured that they would not be held responsible. A few subjects began to laugh nervously or exhibit other signs of extreme stress once they heard the screams of pain coming from the learner.

If at any time the subject indicated his desire to halt the experiment, he was given a succession of verbal prods by the experimenter, in this order:

1. Please continue.
2. The experiment requires that you continue.
3. It is absolutely essential that you continue.
4. You have no other choice, you must go on.

If the subject still wished to stop after all four successive verbal prods, the experiment was halted. Otherwise, it was halted after the subject had given the maximum 450-volt shock three times in succession

The study is all about the power of institutions. What if all authority was handed to an authoritative few, how many would follow him?

Results of the Milgram Experiment

Before conducting the experiment, Milgram polled fourteen Yale University senior-year psychology majors as to what they thought would be the results. All of the poll respondents believed that only a few (average 1.2%) would be prepared to inflict the maximum voltage. Milgram also informally polled his colleagues and found that they, too, believed very few subjects would progress beyond a very strong shock.

In Milgram’s first set of experiments, 65 percent (26 of 40) of experiment participants administered the experiment’s final massive 450-volt shock, though many were very uncomfortable doing so; at some point, every participant paused and questioned the experiment, some said they would refund the money they were paid for participating in the experiment. Only one participant steadfastly refused to administer shocks below the 300-volt level.

Milgram summarized the experiment in his 1974 article, “The Perils of Obedience”, writing:

The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects’ [participants'] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects’ [participants'] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.

Quoted from Milgram, Stanley. (1974), ”The Perils of Obedience.” Harper’s Magazine. Abridged and adapted from Obedience to Authority.

The BBC reprised the Milgram Experiment:

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Milgram Experiment in popular culture:

Derren Brown subconsciously influences middle management business men and women with no previous criminal record to pull an armed robbery without ever directly mentioning the idea to them.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Stanford Prison Experiment

The Stanford prison experiment was a study of the psychological effects of becoming a prisoner or prison guard, conducted by Zimbardo himself in 1971. Twenty-four undergraduates were selected out of 70 to play the roles of both guards and prisoners and live in a mock prison in the basement of the Stanford psychology building. Roles were assigned at random.

The “prison” itself was in the basement of Stanford’s Jordan Hall, which had been converted into a mock jail. An undergraduate research assistant was the “warden” and Zimbardo the “superintendent”. Zimbardo set up a number of specific conditions on the participants which he hoped would promote disorientation, depersonalisation and deindividualisation.

The researchers provided weapons—wooden batons — and clothing that simulated that of a prison guard—khaki shirt and pants from a local military surplus store. They were also given mirrored sunglasses to prevent eye contact.

Prisoners wore ill-fitting smocks and stocking caps, rendering them constantly uncomfortable. Guards called prisoners by their assigned numbers, sewn on their uniforms, instead of by name. A chain around their ankles reminded them of their roles as prisoners.

The researchers held an “orientation” session for guards the day before the experiment, during which they were told that they could not physically harm the prisoners. In The Stanford Prison Study video, quoted in Haslam & Reicher, 2003, Zimbardo is seen telling the guards, “You can create in the prisoners feelings of boredom, a sense of fear to some degree, you can create a notion of arbitrariness that their life is totally controlled by us, by the system, you, me, and they’ll have no privacy… We’re going to take away their individuality in various ways. In general what all this leads to is a sense of powerlessness. That is, in this situation we’ll have all the power and they’ll have none.”

The participants chosen to play the part of prisoners were “arrested” at their homes and “charged” with armed robbery. The local Palo Alto police department assisted Zimbardo with the arrests and conducted full booking procedures on the prisoners, which included fingerprinting and taking mug shots. At the prison, they were transported to the mock prison where they were strip-searched and given their new identities.

The experiment quickly grew out of hand. Prisoners suffered — and accepted — sadistic and humiliating treatment from the guards. The high level of stress progressively led them from rebellion to inhibition. By the experiment’s end, many showed severe emotional disturbances.

After a relatively uneventful first day, a riot broke out on the second day. The guards volunteered to work extra hours and worked together to break the prisoner revolt, attacking the prisoners with fire extinguishers without supervision from the research staff.

A false rumor spread that one of the prisoners, who asked to leave the experiment, would lead companions to free the rest of the prisoners. The guards dismantled the prison and moved the inmates to another secure location. When no breakout attempt occurred, the guards were angry about having to rebuild the prison, so they took it out on the prisoners.

Guards forced the prisoners to count off repeatedly as a way to learn their prison numbers, and to reinforce the idea that this was their new identity. Guards soon used these prisoner counts as another method to harass the prisoners, using physical punishment such as protracted exercise for errors in the prisoner count. Sanitary conditions declined rapidly, made worse by the guards refusing to allow some prisoners to urinate or defecate. As punishment, the guards would not let the prisoners empty the sanitation bucket. Mattresses were a valued item in the spartan prison, so the guards would punish prisoners by removing their mattresses, leaving them to sleep on concrete. Some prisoners were forced to go nude as a method of degradation, and some were subjected to sexual humiliation, including simulated sodomy.

Zimbardo cited his own absorption in the experiment he guided, and in which he actively participated as Prison Superintendent. On the fourth day, some prisoners were talking about trying to escape. Zimbardo and the guards attempted to move the prisoners to the more secure local police station, but officials there said they could no longer participate in Zimbardo’s experiment.

Several guards became increasingly cruel as the experiment continued. Experimenters said that approximately one-third of the guards exhibited genuine sadistic tendencies. Most of the guards were upset when the experiment concluded early.

Zimbardo argued that the prisoner participants had internalized their roles, based on the fact that some had stated that they would accept parole even with the attached condition of forfeiting all of their experiment-participation pay. Yet, when their parole applications were all denied, none of the prisoner participants quit the experiment. Zimbardo argued they had no reason for continued participation in the experiment after having lost all monetary compensation, yet they did, because they had internalized the prisoner identity, they thought themselves prisoners, hence, they stayed.

Prisoner No. 416, a newly admitted stand-by prisoner, expressed concern over the treatment of the other prisoners. The guards responded with more abuse. When he refused to eat his sausages, saying he was on a hunger strike, guards confined him in a closet and called it solitary confinement. The guards used this incident to turn the other prisoners against No. 416, saying the only way he would be released from solitary confinement was if they gave up their blankets and slept on their bare mattresses, which all but one refused to do.

Zimbardo concluded the experiment early when Christina Maslach, a graduate student he was then dating (and later married), objected to the appalling conditions of the prison after she was introduced to the experiment to conduct interviews. Zimbardo noted that of more than fifty outside persons who had seen the prison, Maslach was the only one who questioned its morality. After only six days of a planned two weeks’ duration, the Stanford Prison experiment was shut down.

The Stanford experiment ended on August 20, 1971, only six days after it began instead of the fourteen it was supposed to have lasted. The experiment’s result has been argued to demonstrate the impressionability and obedience of people when provided with a legitimizing ideology and social and institutional support. It is also used to illustrate cognitive dissonance theory and the power of authority.

In psychology, the results of the experiment are said to support situational attribution of behavior rather than dispositional attribution. In other words, it seemed the situation caused the participants’ behavior, rather than anything inherent in their individual personalities. In this way, it is compatible with the results of the also-famous Milgram experiment, in which ordinary people fulfilled orders to administer what appeared to be damaging electric shocks to a confederate of the experimenter.

The entire experiment was filmed, with excerpts soon made publicly available, leaving some disturbed by the resulting film.

Correlations with terror in Abu Ghraib

When the Abu Ghraib military prisoner torture and abuse scandal was published in March 2004, many observers immediately were struck by its similarities to the Stanford Prison experiment — among them, Philip Zimbardo, who paid close attention to the details of the story. He was dismayed by official military and government efforts shifting the blame for the torture and abuses in the Abu Ghraib American military prison on to “a few bad apples” rather than acknowledging it as possibly systemic problems of a formally established military incarceration system.

I must say, when I saw those pictures on 20/20—on 60 minutes, I, excuse me, the pictures of the abuse. I was shocked the way most people are. Of course I saw the parallels immediately with the Stanford Prison Experiment, visual images. And immediately what happened was, what always happens when there is a scandal in police departments, or in the military, they blame the individual, it’s a few bad apples. The fact that the Head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or I guess General Myers said we know it’s not systemic. Well, so I said maybe it’s not bad apples, maybe these are really good American soldiers and they were put in a bad barrel, but how would I know?

When I was invited to be on Chip Frederick’s Defense council—team, it meant I had access to him, I could find out everything there was to know about this young man, everything there was to know about the place and the psychological dynamics of the prison. I had access to all the investigative reports. And so in The Lucifer Effect, I have two whole chapters on what Abu Ghraib really was like and what the situation was like. What was the system? What was the military and Bush administration system that created those horrendous conditions? And so, I testified, essentially talking about how the situation he was in and the other seven soldiers were in, in the basement of that dungeon, how that corrupted him and made him lose his moral compass.

He was dishonorable discharged, he got eight years in prison, they send him to Kuwait in solitaire confinement. They took away 22 years of his retirement pay. This is an all American, super patriotic soldier; he had nine medals and awards, which he really prized. And they stripped him publicly to humiliate him. He’s now in a prison in Leavenworth.

I still have personal contact with him and his family. The sad thing is, the day before he went down to that prison, from everything I know, he was normal, healthy, exactly like one of the good guards in our study. Within a few days, maybe a few weeks actually, he and the other military army reservists. Now, these are not real soldiers, these are military police, these are army reservists, who have no mission specific training, they are not trained to do this job.

He was a guard in a small prison in the states. He now is in charge of a thousand prisoners. Sixty Iraqi police men who are smuggling in weapons, the place is under constant bombardment. Soldiers are dying, prisoners are dying. He’s working a 12-hour shift, seven days a week, 40 days without a day off. Incredible. How could anybody, how could any system allow American soldiers to be under that kind of stress? He and the other soldiers just gave in to the horrors of that situation.

Philip Zimbardo

Environmental conditions and personal responsibility

My analysis is, individuals are always ultimately personally responsible. He and most of the other military police said, I’m guilty—well, they had to say it, because they’re in the pictures, what I call the trophy photos. He is willing to accept punishment. The situational analysis says, we should limit the extent of the punishment, because these are extreme mitigating circumstances. And what I do in The Lucifer Effect, and I have a wonderful website, we just put up called www. lucifereffect.com, we put the system on trial. To say, if you’re going to put these soldiers, these good American soldiers on trial for what they did, my argument has been, the people who create this corrupting situation, they have to be put on trial, too. So, I have a virtual voting booth in which I put George Tenant on trial, the former Head of the CIA, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and President Bush. Because, in various ways, they created that situation which corrupted these good American young men and women.

Understanding How Good People Turn Evil

Zimbardo outlines the 7 social processes that grease the slippery slope of evil:

• Mindlessly taking the first small step
• Dehumanization of Others
• De-individuation of the Self (anonymity)
• Diffusion of Personal Responsibility
• Blind obedience to authority
• Uncritical Conformity to group norms
• Passive tolerance of evil through inaction or indifference.

These 7 elements were applied in Abu Ghraib, and according to Zimbardo it can come as no surprise that the abuses occurred. They are applied in almost every major war.

He uses the Stanford Experiment to illustrate the point:

Well, there are two things about a prison. One is the physical aspects of it. So we took a basement, which were offices that students usually used. We took off the doors, put new doors on with bars. Took a closet and converted it to solitary confinement, meaning a small, tight, dark space, which had a label on “The Hole”. We had quarters where the guards came and changed. I was the superintendent of the prison. We had a warden, David Jaffe, a student in his office. We had a place where visitors could come. We had a place where we would have parole board hearings.

So we created a very—simulated physical environment. And at one end of the hall we had a little window that we could look through watching what was happening with a TV camera. It was covered with theatrical scrims, so they never knew when they were being observed and when they were being filmed. The psychology—psychological aspect of a prison is more subtle.

Before I began the experiment, I taught a summer course at Stanford called, The Psychology of Imprisonment with Carlo Prescott, he was both the consultant to my study and a young man who had just been released from prison after 17 years. So, he was our consultant, but also he was the head of the parole board. Ironically his parole had been denied for 17 previous years.

And what we wanted to do was create essential psychology of imprisonment, and that’s all about power. Every prison is about power. Guards have to assume more and more power and domination, and prisoners have to have their power stripped away. And so that is the ultimate evil of prison. It’s all about power, dominance, and mastery. And that was the same thing we found in Abu Ghraib prison.

But also—so the way that power evolves is, the prisoners have to be ultimately dehumanized. You have to think of them as not your kind, not your kin, as—ultimately you end up thinking of them as animals. And the guards have to be impersonal, distant. Whatever humanity they have when they are home, when they are with their families, that has to be suspended, put on a hook. Because, what they have to do is treat other people in ways that they don’t treat anyone else, those are the people being prisoners.

And so, we’re talking about playing a role, anonymity, dehumanization, and then of course there’s things like being a team member, the guards have to develop a sense of camaraderie. Most of the evil of the world comes about not out of evil motives, but somebody saying get with the program, be a team player, this is what we saw at Enron, this is what we saw in the Nixon administration with their scandal. And I think you are seeing it now, with the current administration.

So, it’s that set of social psychological variables. Oh, the key one is of course diffusion of responsibility. When a person feels, I am not personally responsible, I am not accountable, it’s the role I’m playing or these are the orders I’ve gotten, then you allow yourself to do things you would never do under ordinary circumstances.

So, it’s that mix of the physical environment, psychological environment, which came to be overwhelming. By overwhelming, I mean that, each day the guards would escalate their level of abuse, so that initially it was doing push ups, waking prisoners up in the middle of the night, long counts. Then it got to be personal humiliation. Cursing the guards, and having them curse each other, then finally it devolved into sexually degrading games.

Conclusion: Are humans good or evil?

The answer, as you might suspect, is neither. Apart from a tiny few with criminal or psychopathic tendencies, we all live within a social norm that deeply affects us. Some humans are better at withstanding social pressures to commit evil acts, such as the soldier who finally informed the media about the abuse in Abu Ghraib.

We cannot be good and moral beings if we don’t question who we are and question the values that society places upon us. Do these values truly deliver good results, or can they be oppressive onto others? This takes a lot of introspection, and the training of an eternal muscle that can withstand peer pressure.

Nor can we build a society of morally enlightened people if we don’t question the systems that creates attitudes and maintains them.

Moral good comes from two directions: from the top down and from the inside out. If the two forces aren’t somehow aligned, something will break along the line, and evil will manifest itself.

Compassion for ‘evil-doers’ becomes something entirely different in this light: it is the courage to hold people responsible for their acts, while taking them out or changing an environment that negatively affects them. Compassion then becomes giving them a chance, literally ‘changing their lives’ by changing their environment through our actions.

Zimbardo in his own words:

This dark talk might lead us to believe that humans are somehow twisted, but the truth is that we no longer amuse ourselves with gladiator games and instead have found less destructive entertainment.

Tomorrow, a blog post of hope, as we analyze what we can learn from the most peaceful period in human history.

Peace, it seems to me, is the calm in the storm, a moment of respite in an avalanche. It is a state that can last but a moment.

The same can be said for a peaceful soul: it isn’t that the life of a man at peace doesn’t experience the humdrum of daily life, but that the peaceful man resists being taken on a ride on the tiger’s back, and instead focuses with great clarity on the peace he wants in his life, eventually creating  it, moment by moment, despite the humdrum. In as such, it is an inner state that can project itself upon the world around us.

Christmas reminds us that we all should be seeking peace and stability, seek to bring the chaos around us to its natural conclusion, whatever that may be. It reminds us that we are the masters of our lives and should not be set adrift by the constant changes around us, but instead work hard to understand the nature and stages of the things around us and bring it to a state that can endure: peace.

Theodore Roosevelt

Why do we look up to great men, why do we read the great books? Ultimately, as the Greek Philosopher Epictetus said, we do this to answer the question: ‘how to live our lives’?

How to live our lives?

Rome 65 AD – 4 miles outside of Rome, in an elaborate, lush estate, Lucius Seneca, 69 years old, notes that he is about as old as his hero, Socrates, when he was forced to drink a cup of poison to ‘atone’ for his ideals. And here, today, Seneca also faces the prospects of his own death because he refuses to abandon his ideals.

Lucius Seneca

Seneca is probably the most famous man at this point, after Nero, the Emperor. Seneca has lived a life of power, glory and immense achievement and had worked himself up to become the second most powerful man in the Roman Empire.

Yet today, he waits, stoically, at his home, for his death to arrive in the form of Nero’s soldiers.

A quick history to put things into context

In these days, Rome stretches from the shores of Britain to today’s Iraq, from the North Sea to the Saharan deserts. Rome has brought prosperity and peace across most of the know world, united under one language, one currency and one law.

Seneca was born in 4AD, in Cordoba, Spain, in a wealthy, influential family. Seneca was sent off to study in history and became a student of Stoicism. He was thought in the market places of Greece, by professors who gave their lessons from a porch, as was the habit of the day.

Seneca came back to Rome, and became a famous writer. He wrote a series of tragedies and was part of the revolutionizing of the Roman literary tradition. Tragedies were rewritten and updated for Roman sensibilities. Shakespeare borrowed a lot from their innovations, although he did not know it. You can see the influence of the Roman writers of Seneca’s time in Shakespeare’s melodramatic endings, murders on stage and even the inclusion of ghosts as main characters. Because of his importance to the revitalization of Roman literature, Seneca won great fame.

This at a time when the political landscape of Rome had experienced great changes: Julius Caesar had recreated the Rome as a dictatorship, and his heir to the throne, Augustus Caesar had decided that the only way to insure Rome’s prosperity and strength was to create a dynasty. Augustus saw to it that all his imperial powers were passed to his son, Tiberius.

It pretty soon became clear that once you give power to a dictator, it is hard to lose it again. The Roman people, at least those in power, were smitten with all the rights and power they had gained without having to be responsible for any of them.

However, Tiberius turned out to be a cruel despot, suspicious and greedy. His heirs to the throne, Caligula and Claudius were truly wicked despots.

Claudius ruled Rome as an evil bureaucrat: jealous, suspicious, lending his ear to informants with their own agenda, the Roman people suffered under the emotional up and downs of their emperor.

It was in this court that Seneca became part of public life, at 45 years of age. He found himself quickly outwitted by the intrigues at court and was forced into exile on Corsica.

Seneca was returned to Rome by Agrippina, wife of Claudius and master intrigant. She had been born with a lust for power and tried to gain her power through influence over Claudius. She managed to have Claudius divorce his wife and marry her. They had a son, Nero, which she wanted to be the new emperor, although that place was reserved for Claudius’ first son, Britannicus.

Seneca felt that Britannicus would be a bad emperor for Rome and aligned himself with Agrippina, in an effort to get Nero placed as the next emperor of Rome.

Here a truly downwards slope starts: It was decided that Britannicus was to be poisoned. But Britannicus, aware of the intrigue at the court was a suspicious man (it isn’t paranoia if they are really out to get you) and had all his food tasted by others. Agrippina devised a clever gambit. She brought Britannicus an apple and cut it in half. She proceeded with eating one half, and Britannicus, satisfied, ate the other. He didn’t kno that Agrippina had laced the half of the knife facing Britannicus with poison. Britannicus died, officially of stomach indigestion.

Claudius was also in Agrippina’s sights, and was served poisoned mushrooms. Claudius struggled for his life, but didn’t appear to be dying. Agrippina quickly gathered her wits, dipped a feather in poison and stuck it in his throat, telling bystanders she was trying to open his airways to help Claudius breath better.

Seneca was aware of all these plots. But after a life of intrigue at the court, he had decided that the goal justified the means: one has to accept the lesser evils to achieve the greater good. Why Seneca believed that aligning himself with power-hungry murderers might somehow benefit the Roman Empire is unclear, but we do know that Seneca had a hunger for power himself, having once tasted its glory and then felt the bitterness of losing it in exile.

Still, Seneca told himself that he had aligned himself with the powers of good, and that somehow this intrigue was necessary to put himself and his allies in a position where they could rule Rome and steer it in the right direction.

Nero was young and inexperienced. He lacked statesmanship, and recognizing this, Seneca wrote the speech to be delivered in the Senate that was to confirm him as the next emperor. Today, this seems to us as no big deal, all great leaders have their speeches written for them, but in that day, all emperors wrote their own speeches. And even today, great leaders still direct the spirit and content of their speeches.

All the betrayal at court, all the murders seemed to pay off . Under the rule of Nero, with Agrippina and Seneca tucking at the cords behind the scenes, a golden age settled over Rome: the informers who had lead a series of anonymous accusations were put behind bars, lowering the emotional temperature and division within Roman public life, courts were again held in public, the economy was put in order, a strong foreign policy improved Rome’s standing in the world and an the empire was administered in a more effective, more transparent manner. For 5 years, Rome thrived and all the dirty deeds had somehow whitewashed the political life of Rome.

But young Nero began to rebel more and more against the influence of his mother. Nero had his own ideas, and felt he had a greater destiny than being an emperor, he felt he was also an artist. He felt constrained by the duties of office. He was frustrated by the power sharing with his mother, that went as far as having to share his portrait with that of his mother on the Roman coins. He decided that he had to break free. And the only template for such a move he knew from his youth, and perhaps the only real option left to him, was to kill his mother. Freud would have a field day with this one.

Nero, after another bitter quarrel with his mother, invited her over to a makeup dinner and at the end of it, offered her a yacht as a present. The yacht was especially designed to collapse when it exited the bay. And so it did, but Agrippina managed to swim away, even escaping the murderous attempts of the sailors who tried to beat her on the head before she could escape. Nero, gripped in fear about this turn of events, sent loyal soldiers to her home to finish the job. When the soldiers arrived, Agrippina put her hands on her stomach and said: “Here, strike my womb, for it is my son that is killing me.” The soldiers ‘obliged’.

With his mother out of the way, Seneca was summoned to write a speech for Nero, to explain the death of Agrippina to the Roman people.

And so Seneca was the speech writer, advisor and spin master to the court of Nero. Seneca took on this task with dread. After all, by doing his job, he became more and more a liability to Nero, being the keeper of all Nero’s guilty secrets.

Seneca, at the age of 66, asked for permission to retire and was granted this but asked to always stay near…

What is good, what is evil?

Sometimes we find with men who have achieved great power and fame, that their mind closes off to the alternative lives they could have lead, instead, coming to justify the course they have taken as the righteous one, one of difficult decisions, agonizing trade-offs that somehow created the virtuous world we live in today. That path was more or less closed off to Seneca, who had placed himself in great peril due to the choices he had made in his life.

We also often see that rich, influential people become to question their legacy in the zenith of their lives, and become champions for social change, immersing themselves in moral lecturing, charitable causes and what more. They abandon the naked strive for power and instead start to use their influence to create a ‘better’ world for all, to somehow come at peace with their legacy.

Perhaps these forces drove Seneca on his dangerous path.

Seneca, a disillusioned old man, having achieved wealth, power and fame, became to pounder his life and wrote his thoughts down in a series of dialogues. He invoked the memories of the young man he once was, full of ideals.

Seneca judged his life as an error in believing in situational justice: that the world is only a place of trade-offs and that sometimes wrong deeds should be carried out for the greater good. Instead, Seneca started to believe in ‘absolute justice’. That some things are wrong in all circumstances.

How Seneca developed his philosophy

He started with God. Does God exist, he asks himself? Yes, is his resounding answer, and he offers the world, the immaculate beauty of the order of nature, the consistency of the universe as proof. To Seneca, how else could this vast world follow its orderly existence, if not guided by the invisible hand of God?

His next question was: is God ‘good’. Again, the answer is a resounding yes.  How could he not be, having created all this beauty and wonder?

And if God is good, than why does evil exist in sickness, loss and injustice? Confronted with this age old question, compounded when one believes that the Gods aren’t fickle, but fundamentally good, Seneca expresses his belief that God has created the universe as a test to mankind. Adversity is God’s lessons, to teach us like a good father about right or wrong. We cannot fully be human nor achieve our potential if we aren’t truly tested to the core.

Borrowed from Socrates’ apology

This idea was borrowed from Socrates’ apology. When Socrates spoke to his accusers who demanded his death sentence. he stated in his address that he did not hate his accusers, that he accepted their actions as being part of a universe that puts him to the test, as a necessary stage in his life.

Socrates went on to explain that all he had ever control over was his own mind. Hate would destroy this power. Socrates argued that if he were to make the mistake of trying to invoke ‘a greater truth’ where his accusers were absolutely wrong and he was absolutely right, he would fall in a mental ‘trap’, because it would ultimately divorce himself from the reality of his own being. All he could be was himself, and the only way to stay in touch with himself was not to judge, but to carry on being who he was, in the face of adversity, in the face of his own death. The true test was not about the nature of the world, about seeing right or wrong, but about remaining firmly who he was, even in the face of the absolute price. This was the test of (the) God(s), Seneca argued.

The philosophical implications

Seneca moved to a philosophy where he is ultimately responsible for his thoughts and actions. He does not blame Nero for his situation, because Seneca states that everything he does, everything he is, everything he thinks belongs only to him, and the situation he finds himself in is presented by God. His reactions are not and never could be governed by the actions of another, no matter how wicked, because he is the only master of his soul, the only person that can give it direction. It would be wrong to blame circumstances for how Seneca has lived his life, because nobody can force him what to think.

Seneca believes that as long as he does not return evil with evil, then he will not be conquered.

He also believed that no person truly suffers evil: evil, adversity, is simply a test, to help us become ourselves, our highest ideal. Without it we would be impotent to achieve our potential. The only evil that we can inflict on ourselves is that of abandoning ourselves. All the rest are milestones on our road.

On to the end

Nero, worried about Seneca’s state of mind and the potential consequences of his writings, sent his soldiers to order Seneca’s suicide. It was a rather protracted affair  that I will not describe here, suffice to say that Seneca eventually, after numerous suicide attempts, drank hemlock, and finally died.

Seneca's last moments

A life of absolute responsibility

A mantra you hear often today is ‘If I don’t do it, somebody else will’ or ‘I am just doing my job.’ According to Seneca, saying this does not only surrender all control over the little difference you can make in this world, it also means surrendering control and responsibility for your own actions. Seneca would argue that losing your job because you acted according to your own convictions is not hardship: it is simply answering with the potential of your full being to ‘God’s test’ (in the terms of Seneca). Not taking full responsibility of your actions, and instead rationalizing ambiguous actions by arguing that it wouldn’t make a difference, because ‘if I don’t do it, somebody else is sure to do it’ is relinquishing the only control you really have: that over your own actions. This, argues Seneca, is the only evil that can truly befall a man.

Why we surrender responsibility as a society

Of course, we live in more practical, more secular times. Idealism has often been replaced by collective goal setting and metrics within corporations and societies. It is ironic that in a time people believe more than ever in the power and existence of the individual, more individuals believe their own small existence has little capacity for making difference. Our highest value is not to change the world, but to be happy, to take care of the small nucleus that is our family – we have, as individuals, somehow given up control over our societies and the forces that drive it, whether it is corporate, religious, political or any other earthly force. Sure we vote, sure we try to do the best job we can, but somehow we are no longer responsible for the overall result, all those little compromises we made, all the judgments we make without adequately informing ourselves first, all the votes we cast without having educating about the issues, none of these contribute to the overall result. Somehow, individuals today live in a world where they believe they can have their cake and eat it too, somehow aligned with the forces of good while others are mysteriously to blame for the current state of the world.

Of course, I express things rather black and white, but upping the contrast on the issues can sometimes reveal the inconsistencies that somehow slip between the cracks.

The only way to be fully human

But Seneca’s prescription for a good life is simply this: to never absolve ourselves of responsibility. It is not wrong to compromise because compromise is an essential tool in creating consensus and direction. Seneca offers two addendums to compromise: once you compromise, you cannot say the situation made you do so. No, you saw the situation, and made a conscious decision to act or not to act, and you own that decision. And you cannot divorce yourself from the result, even if you are only partially responsible for it or had no power over it at this point. You nevertheless remain in relation with your environment, and always responsible for how it is. He beckons us not to see our limited power as a reason to absolve ourselves of responsibility for the overall result, but to see our limited power as a clear call to action, a call to work harder to make a difference.

And Seneca also offers the ideas that there are some absolute wrongs and absolute rights. That if you conspire with murderers to help them to the throne, can you expect less then murder from the throne? To not tell ourselves fairy tales that if a creature is one day today it might be different tomorrow. Instead we should take the long view, and help the right powers to take hold in society over a longer period of time, instead of going for the quick fix and helping the wrong powers achieve position with the wrong actions – as if somehow, once in position, they would magically change…

Seneca in our own time

Of course, when one centers his debate on the nature of God and why God created the universe the way it is you are bound to get in a sticky argument, exactly because anyone can pretty well make up his answer whether God exists or not and what exactly God’s intentions might have been.

But stripped from the more numinous arguments, Seneca’s observations hold one important truth for our time:

If we don’t take responsibility for the world, we cannot blame the world for what it is today. No matter how small, we are all cogs inside a giant machine, and we perpetuate it, no matter how small, through our own actions. We can play the game, but then we should own the problem. Or we can instead choose to stand up for our ideals, and then we have to work tirelessly to become an answer to the problem. But the idea that we are somehow not connected, somehow have no bearing on the end result, that is simply not a true idea.

Theodore Roosevelt and the practical application of Seneca in our time

Roosevelt on campaign

Theo Roosevelt inspired America with a powerful call to action, telling each individual that action, not inaction is what will make America strong. Not to shirk responsibility, but to take more of it, and to lead ‘clean, vigorous, healthy lives’, both spiritually and physically.

In the age of consumerism, we often see our role as simply being a cog in a giant machine, but Roosevelt says we are more than that:

No country can long endure if its foundations are not laid deep in the material prosperity which comes from thrift, from business energy and enterprise, from hard, unsparing effort in the fields of industrial activity; but neither was any nation ever yet truly great if it relied upon material prosperity alone.

[…]

A mere life of ease is not in the end a very satisfactory life, and, above all, it is a life which ultimately unfits those who follow it for serious work in the world. – Theodore Roosevelt

In our next entry we’ll speak about Theodore’s practical solutions for our time, and how he envisioned individuals could take ownership of today’s problems, through living the strenuous life:

I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, of labor and strife; to preach that highest form of success which comes, not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph. – Theodore Roosevelt

Happiness is a sense of being in harmony with our world. We have what we need, there are no threats looming, we have achieved our basic goals, and the body rewards us with a sense of contentment.

Happiness exists by having some basic requirements fulfilled, and a notion that the situation as it is is good.

Our societies aren’t particularly happy. The reason why is what we desire.

In my profession, marketing, we try to persuade the world that it wants our products, and the message is blasted over TV, Radio and all other media, trying to create a desire, whether the recipient of the message can afford our products or not.

It is not an attitude confined to marketing. Teenagers peer pressure each other to get certain labels, magazines and toys. Students are pressured for great grades, even in studies that will only lead to a job for 10% of them. We motivate our employees to compete for a promotion, we also know that only 1/100 will get one. Patients are told they want new tests by doctors who want to avoid being sued by lawyers who want the work.

Desire is created – often by others, for their own gain.

And there is nothing inherently wrong with that. Studies show that some of the happiest societies are the simplest ones. Perhaps the price of happiness is a lack of innovation. Perhaps being happy and fulfilled doesn’t push us to exceed the needs our current environment puts upon us. But with a world that eventually will run out of some of its resources, it is good to start working beyond the current demands of our environment, to feel the urge, to want to work harder.

But there is no need to get depressed either.

In the end, it always comes down to us: be aware of the desires within you created by others, and be the captain of your own heart. Don’t drink the kool-aid of others and always take the long view…

Further reading: You are what you choose

You are what you choose

In “You Are What You Choose”, Hamilton and de Marchi discuss the six core traits that shape our decisions.

The six TRAITS attributes are:

1. Time:  Do you have a shorter term view or a longer-term view of life? Scoring high on the “Time” trait means that you forgo short-term gain for long-term value.
2. Risk:  A lower score on the risk attribute means that you are more risk averse, while a higher score means that you can tolerate more risk.
3. Altruism:  To what degree are your decisions driven by your focus on the welfare of others? A low score means that you may simply have a lack of action or low interest in charitable activities and a high score means that you are “other centered.”
4. Information:  If you are an information junkie, then you probably score high on this trait.  A lower score means that you do not seek out as much information to drive your decision-making.
5. MeToo:  A high score on this attribute puts you in a sort of “status-seeker” category. Think in terms of “keeping up with the Joneses.” A low score means that you are more individualistic about your choices and not so influenced by what others are doing or not doing.
6. Stickiness:  This attribute measures what role loyalty plays in how you decide. A high score in this area points to being loyal to a brand or value while a low score means that you can switch easily to an alternative. Think about being in a restaurant and having the waitress as “Is Pepsi OK?” If you score high on Stickiness and love Coke, you might answer “NO! Get me a Coke!”

(If you cannot see the video, click here.)

So if positive thinking is such a powerful force, why do so many people think negative? What could they hope to achieve?

Well, the truth is, we don’t always confront a challenge feeling effective and empowered. Perhaps we’ve been battered by events, bad luck or things simply got away from us. So we confront the world with a sense of vulnerability, a sense of our own very real ability to fail.

Here’s the trick: no matter what happened a minute or a day before the challenge presented itself, the challenge is an isolated incident, unaffected by past events. Our effectiveness to deal with it therefore isn’t at all compromised by the challenge (we either CAN or CANNOT overcome it) but rather by our own inner state at the moment of the challenge.

Negative thinking at the moment of the challenge is a natural event. When the caveman saw yellow and black stripes in the bushes, he or she naturally feared the object might be a tiger. In its evaluation whether it was a match for the tiger or not, the caveman couldn’t be faulted for negative thoughts – flight is the right response.

Fear an negative thoughts are our friend: they aim to prevent us from entering in a harmful situation. The real trick is to separate our realistic negative thoughts from the ones that we have because of the context we have created for ourselves, such as a feeling of ‘not being strong enough’; ‘deserving something better right now’ or wanting to sooth an existential pain by simply blaming the world for being too difficult. Our reasons for being passive and avoiding facing pertinent challenges are endless.

When we recognize our negative thoughts as being void of realism, as wanting to label ourselves or the challenge in terms that are purely subjective, terms that either sell us short or compound the challenge, that’s when we have to fight like lions. Because at that moment, it is not the challenge that might beat us, it is that we might beat ourselves.

Real negative thoughts keep us safe. They tell us when to flee and when to preserve our strength for another day.

False negative thoughts make us avoid the challenges that we need to grow. Instead, we shrink in our ability to overcome life’s demands. As we shrink, smaller challenges become harder to conquer.

The power of positive thinking is relative to the challenge. Some challenges we can win, some we can’t.  But positive thinking is invaluable when it comes to evaluating ourselves: who we are, how much we can change and how strong we are.

In that respect, positive thinking is always related to action: how far did you push yourself? It is useless to judge ourselves for every short coming we have right now: we can’t change a thing about that. But we can change where we’ll be in a year. That’s the test and also the endless opportunity. To challenge ourselves for more growth. Every sin can be forgiven at an instant: the moment a real change affects the person, so the wrong can never happen again.

That is why positive thinking is hard, because it requires constant action to grow. But it is worth it…