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

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

They have been misled.

Why do they do it?

Why do they support those policies, condone such things, shrug their shoulders

at such injustices? It could be because these people are evil and awful. It could also just

be because they don't know any better. It could be that they don't know any better because someone

told them much worse. Mark Twain grew to hate slavery

in those who supported, but his mother whom he loved and knew as a sweet and wonderful person

grew up as a participant in that system. So how did he square those two contradictions? As he

reflected, kind-hearted and compassionate as she was, I think she was not conscious that slavery was a bald, grotesque, and unwarranted usurpation.

As far as her experience went, the wise, the good, and the holy were unanimous in the belief that slavery was right, righteous, sacred, the peculiar pet of the deity, and a condition which the

slave himself ought to be daily and nightly thankful for. In other words, she had been taught

to see slavery as something other than what it was. The church, the government, her parents,

her neighbors all told her it was right. And like most people, at that

time, she found it easier to accept what everyone around her believed than to question it for

herself, than to see it with her own eyes. And so it has always been thus. In meditations,

Marks Reelis talks about how people who do evil often have had their souls cut off from truth.

They do not mean to be awful or evil.

They were misled.

We should remember this today and always, especially if our goal is to bring those people around.

We almost certainly are not going to change their minds by arguing with them,

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