Welcome to the Commune podcast and to the fourth installment of this series on stoicism.

My name is Jeff Krasno.

Across this series, I have introduced a collection of specific stoic contemplations designed to augment your life with enhanced powers of perception,

with more gratitude, and better perspective.

Each podcast episode has featured a number of lessons and practices,

and let's face it, we're living in an extremely complex and stressful moment in human history,

and these practices can really equip you with the tools for

remaining centered and for living a good life. There's also an accompanying written series over on

substack at jeffcrasno.substack.com. Any video course on commune, which you can access for free

at one commune.com forward slash stoic.

Okay, today's episode is a deep dive into the four core virtues of stoicism. I'm talking about

moderation, courage, justice, and wisdom. So let's begin with a quote from Epictetus. The chief task in life is simply this,

to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself, which are externals not

under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually do control. Where then do I

look for good and evil? Not to uncontrollable

externals, but within myself to the choices that are my own. So a central tenet of stoicism,

as we've learned, is the acknowledgement that we don't control the world around us. We can only

control how we respond. And our response to the course

of human events should be guided by four primary virtues, wisdom, justice, courage, and moderation.

This session is an introductory exploration of these core stoic virtues. The contemplation of

wisdom, justice, courage, and

moderation could be a whole encyclopedia. Defining and embodying the qualities of wisdom,

...