Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues,

courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

Today, the United States celebrates Juneteenth, the commemoration of the emancipation of slaves in America.

Two years after President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, and nearly 90

years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, U.S. Army troops deployed to Texas,

the only state of the Confederacy still with institutional slavery.

The people of Texas are informed, ordered a Union General, in accordance with a proclamation

from the executive of the United States, all slaves are free.

There's no question that that military order deserves celebration.

It asserted absolute equality and began the liberation

of hundreds of thousands of human beings. And Marcus Aurelius would write in meditations that

his stoic role models taught him to conceive of a society of equal laws governed by equality

of statute and speech and of rulers who respect the liberty of their subjects

above all else.

It's as beautiful a sentence as any written by Thomas Jefferson, but of course, a long way

from Epictetus's personal experience.

This kind of freedom that Marcus was talking about would have been something

inconceivable to the early Stoics, who themselves lived in a slave society and tragically

did very little to stop it. Like Jefferson's writings, Marcus Aurelius' passage was just that,

an idea, not a reality. In 1910, Theodore Roosevelt would remind his fellow citizens of the

critical distinction between words and deeds. In name, we had the Declaration of Independence

in 1776, he said, but we gave the lie by our acts to the words of the Declaration of

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