Welcome to the Commune podcast. My name is Jeff Krasno. If you listen to this show or read my articles with any frequency, you know that I am profoundly concerned with the depth of our current sociopolitical polarization. And we have drifted into this

place of binary opposition on so many issues that not only could, but should unite us, including

the viral pandemic. Now, obviously, there is political tribalism at play here, but there is a deeper epistemological

riddle to solve here as well. And this episode is an attempt to diagnose some of the root causes of this

division. And it's an exhortation as to how each one of us individually can be a force for cooperation

and moderation to pull together opposites.

So this is a one take, admittedly espresso-fueled stream of consciousness soliloquy that meanders into some technical territory at times, but hopefully

it makes the overarching point of how important it is for us to delineate between healthy

skepticism and bad faith questioning designed to undermine our most important, albeit flawed institutions.

Off we go.

Okay, here we are. January 17th, just a couple weeks into 2022. And I suppose it's only natural to pin our hopes for a improved human condition on top of a new orbit around the sun, as arbitrary as that might be.

Personally, I'm taking a page out of Reinhold Niebuhr's book and focusing on the things that I

can control in my own life.

That's a very stoic notion.

In fact, stoicism had a great influence on Christian theologians like Niebuhr.

Stoicism is really a philosophy of personal ethics that through the practice of virtue, one can live a good life, or what the Greeks called eudaimonia.

So I've doubled down on stoicism in a variety of different ways and combined it in this strange

elixir with Buddhism. Stoicism and Buddhism actually, I find to be quite similar in many ways, though I would say

stoicism is slightly more concerned with ethics than wisdom, though wisdom is a core virtue

in stoicism.

And I would say Buddhism is more concerned with wisdom than ethics, though five of the steps of the eight full

noble path are concerned with ethics.

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