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Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom every day life.

Each one of these passages is based on the 2000 year old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more you can visit us at DailyStoic.com.

Face what's in front of you first. It's attempting cognitive bias but ultimately apparelizing one.

Of course, it is often complicit in very preventable evil. We've talked before about what aboutism. But lately we've seen a new strain of this moral false equivalency dubbed preemptive what aboutism by pundits.

And actually, it's not even new. We can imagine Seneca doing it.

Yeah, sure, Nero is really bad. He told himself, yes, it's bad that he killed his brother and his mother and utterly neglects the business of state. But if I leave, what about the evils of the next emperor?

So Seneca stayed rationalizing his service to a deranged tyrant with the uncertain, unprovable assertion that the alternative might be worse.

We can see how tempting this logic is but how cowardly it turned out to be. Seneca was declining to face the problem that was actually in front of him by focusing on a potential problem that may or may not have occurred in the future.

He was also missing the point. It's true that Nero's successor theoretically could have been worse. But that didn't change the fact that Nero was really, really bad right then.

And can we really accept Seneca's fanned care about this future problem when he was neglecting the present one?

We are seeing this play out right now. There are radical extremists on both sides of the political spectrum in the United States.

There are dishonest politicians on both sides, people who have fallen down on the job.

And yet whenever leaders are given a chance to do things about this, they talk themselves out of it by focusing on imaginary boogie men of what the other side might do in response.

Voters have been guilty of this too. Yeah, sure. I don't like the craziness on my side. They said, but what about my exaggerated fears of what will happen down the line if I express even the slightest weakness in purging these bad actors?

No, you got to do what's right. Workers really said the rest doesn't matter. You got to focus on the ethical concern in front of you right now.

Not the next one or the one after that or the one totally in your head. You got to deal with this. You got to deal with it right.

Hey, it's Ryan. Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoke podcast. Again, if you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day.

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