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Welcome to the Daily Stoic 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 DailyStoic.com.

What did the Stoics think about politics?

So before you get mad before I've even started, relax. The Stoics lived 2000 years ago. They had little in the way of policy beliefs that are relevant to us today.

Even of the modern Stoics, it's clear that Stoicism is not about specific issue-based opinions. Admiral Stockdale ran for Vice President as an independent. General James Mattis is a longtime Republican.

Ariana Huffington is a proud liberal. A Stoic is political. The philosophy obligates us to be. But it doesn't force us to align with one party or another.

What Stoicism does, however, is provide a framework for seeing the world that should shape our beliefs. The history of Stoicism guides us there highlighting what is worth fighting for, living for, and even dying for.

For instance, Cato was deeply committed to the idea of Roman libertas. Yet equally fervently, he cherished the idea of moderation, the natural and obligatory but self-imposed check on freedom.

Seneca believed in kindness and mercy and tippeter and diogenes believed in sympathy or interconnectedness, but also in the self-correcting mechanisms of the market in a way that predicts the later Stoic writings of the economist Adam Smith.

And it was Marcus Arelius who inspired by Thrasia and Hilvidius came to believe in a society of equal laws, of free speech, and most importantly of a ruler who respects their subjects.

We can belong to any party. We can look for ourselves to decide what we're going to decide about this issue or that issue. What we can't do is disengage because we think it's somebody else's problem. What we can't do is give into partisan radicalization, the silly team-sport mentality that has consumed American politics along with many other countries.

Finally and most importantly, what we have to demand from ourselves and our leaders more than anything else is character and competence.

Because the policy doesn't matter if it's advocated for a bad or a selfish person. In fact, if it is, it should make us question our support for that policy and that party in the first place.

So it's funny sometimes we do write about politics here or I do, or my personal seven people get really mad.

But what's so funny about this is that if you actually look at the Stoic's, which we did in the new book, Lives of the Stoics, the Art of Living from Zenit and Marcus Releas, literally every single Stoic was political, if not an actual politician.

So it's a silly argument, but again, we're trying to zoom out, not say, hey, vote for this, vote for that. We are trying to say you have to apply Stoic virtues to whom you vote for and the policy's due support.

So let's chew on that today.

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