Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

We are all kings now. For most of human history, somebody else, a king, a lord, a tyrant, a chief, was in charge.

In ancient Rome, that was the emperor. Marcus Aurelius was the most powerful man in the world.

He could do anything he wanted. No one could tell him what to do or not to do. This was not all

fun in games, of course, since this not only

presented him with incredible amounts of temptation, but also an enormous amount of responsibility

and stress. He had to make a lot of decisions for both himself and for other people.

As we've said many times, in light of the checks and balances, Marcus Aurelius had to turn to philosophy.

He had to fight to be the person philosophy tried to make him, as he said in meditations.

That's a lot to ask of a person. That's a lot to put on a person.

And this is ultimately what makes the decision that the founders made 250 years ago

in America so radical. They were essentially putting that on every person. What the founders were

attempting was an extraordinary historical break, a nation where people were free to be in charge

of themselves, and where the people were

responsible for their own government. It's a republic, Benjamin Franklin famously said on the

final day of the Constitutional Convention in September 1787, if you can keep it. The founders themselves were under no illusion about what they were asking.

Such an experiment could only work if checked by private virtue.

Without citizens willing to do the private work of getting command of themselves,

their impulses, their emotions, their passions, their fears, their appetites.

Without this, freedom would collapse into chaos.

You are the king now.

The republic is in your hands.

...