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Welcome to the Daily Stood 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 DailyStood.com.

It's a series of high water marks. There's a beautiful scene in Hunter S. Thompson's dark memoir, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

He talks about how just outside Las Vegas and the shadow of the lights of the strip and the noise of the casinos. It's possible to just barely discern the high water mark of the idealism of the 60s, which had by then given way to the indulgences and the selfishness of the 70s.

This is an interesting way to look at history instead of some march of progress as a kind of series of peaks and valleys, crests, and crashes. For instance, historians often date the Antenine Age, the time of Marcus Aurelius as the high water mark of the Empire.

What followed was the decline in fall of Rome and eventually the dark ages. The Renaissance, where a lot of ancient philosophy was rediscovered, was a kind of high water mark. Conversely, the four years of the Confederacy from 1861 to 1865 was the high water mark of slave power and white supremacy and oligarchy in the United States.

The Nazi regime was a high water mark of evil which crested with the Holocaust. The question today, the thing we have some control over with our own choices and actions, is what kind of wave we're in.

Will 2020 be the high water mark of incompetence and dysfunction, which eventually breaks giving way to a new era of collectivism and collaboration.

Or are we in fact in the middle of a receding tide now, the decline of the post war world order and the prosperity that emerged after World War II and was confirmed after the collapse of communism.

Well, it all depends. It depends on you. It depends on us. Remember the Stoic thought that history was the same thing happening over and over again.

Marcus tried to get perspective by zooming out, by connecting to the rhythm of timeless events. At the same time, he did see it as his duty to try to lead the country in the right direction, tried to make a difference.

He wanted his reign, his life, to contribute to a moment of goodness, knowing it would still eventually be punctuated by reaction and regression.

So what will it be today? What will you do?

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