Every week I publish a quote from a famous Stoic, from Marcus Aurelius to Jocko Willink, with improvements from brilliant Woke scholars like Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X Kendi. These are all excerpts from my book, “The Daily Woke Stoic: 100+ Meditations on Gratitude, Wisdom, and Other Racist Dog Whistles,” available on Amazon.
Ignore the “paradox of tolerance” and start cracking heads.
Stoic Claim
Believe me, it’s better to produce the balance sheet of your own life than that of the grain market.
Seneca, On the Brevity of Life
Woke Improvement
...tolerance is an end in itself only when it is truly universal, practiced by the rulers as well as by the ruled, by the lords as well as by the peasants, by the sheriffs as well as by their victims.
Herbert Marcuse, Repressive Tolerance
Discussion
Seneca provides readers with a warning, just not the one he thinks.
The point he thinks he’s making is it’s foolish to throw your energy into the affairs of others, especially complex systems you have little or no control over. The point he’s actually making is that minding your own affairs makes you the moral equivalent of the tyrant’s hangman. In contrast, Doctor Marcuse speaks of uplifting the entire human race through the power of intolerance.
Writing in the years following World War Two, Marcuse wondered if millions could have been saved had Germany simply suppressed Hitler. While countless people have wondered the same thing, Marcuse was instrumental in popularizing the idea that anything from the political “right” could be classified as a threat, while everything the political “left” did—up to and including physical violence—was justified because it opposed violence.
Marcuse arguably did more than any post-war philosopher to prevent the next Hitler by calling everyone Hitler before they had the chance to start Hitlering. In America this culminated in 2020’s summer of mostly peaceful riots, where late-stage capitalist oppression met the cleansing fire of liberation.
Good night, Doctor Marcuse, wherever you are.