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Welcome to the Daily Stoic podcast each day. We bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics

Illustrated with stories from history

Current events and literature to help you be better at what you do and at the beginning of the week

We try to do a deeper dive setting a kind of Stoic intention for the week something to meditate on something to think on

Something to leave you with to journal about whatever it is you happen to be doing

So let's get into it

There are no banned books one way to get a sense of how powerful something is is how scared people are of it

Why have governments gone to such troubles to ban various books over the years?

Why do people try to censor things they disagree with because they're scared of meeting ideas on an open playing field?

Would not see asm or Stalin's communism or even slavery in the American South have been possible if people had more access to

Information possibly but it would have been harder. There's a reason they tried to keep

Contradictory books out of the hands of people today most of us don't live in totalitarian regimes

And if you did you probably wouldn't be listening to me right now

But that doesn't mean that these forces of censorship don't still exist indeed

That's the plot of Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 in it fireman burn books in that novel at the request of people

Because no one wanted to be offended or to offend anyone in America this trend continues

The left wants to ban certain books or certain ideas for being politically incorrect

For supposedly being racist or from being from racist eras for expressing dangerous ideas

The right gets upset when books are immoral or transgressive or when they are critical of power

The stoic must have the courage to resist both these impulses whatever their political persuasion

Think of Seneca reading Epicurus like a spy in the enemy's camp

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