“If it is not right, do not do it; if it is not true, do not say it.”*…
Stoicism is having a moment. The estimable Timothy Snyder considers the events of the day in the light of Marcus Aurelius‘ thoughts– and actions…
As Donald Trump announced his whimsy war in Iran, I was reading about another imperial campaign, long ago, against an Iranian people.
In the late second century AD, the Roman Empire confronted armies that had crossed the border at the Danube River and even broached the Alps in northern Italy. Among them were the Iazyges, speakers of an Iranian language, who hailed from the Ukrainian steppe.
In Ukraine this February, I was learning about an archaeological find which reveals the interactions of the Romans and the Iazyges, which included alliance as well as enmity. The Roman war against the Iazyges allies was commanded personally by Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who spent the years between 171 and 180 AD at the front. During that time he kept a philosophical diary, probably written at night in his tent. Discovered after his death, that text, known as the Meditations, is a great work of Stoic philosophy.
I turned to the Meditations to see if I could learn anything that would help me to understand the work of Ukrainian archaeologists about the interactions between Romans and Iazyges. I found something else: perspective on the wars of today, and a sense of why, beyond his obvious incompetence in military matters, Trump had to lose his.
It was shaming to read the bombast of Trump: (”no president was willing to do what I have done tonight”) alongside the reflections of Marcus (“when things have such a plausible appearance, show them naked, see their shoddiness, strip away their own boastful account of themselves.”) Trump broadcast his arrogance to millions of people; Marcus wrote for himself.
Despite the fact he was commanding an army at the front, Marcus never mentioned the war in his Meditations. War was simply something he had to do; he had no difficulty seeing the other side as people, or understanding their motivations. He mentions the Iazyges only once in the text: to make a broader point about hubris, to suggest that it was wrong for Romans to take pride in taking a prisoner of war.
Although Marcus did not broach the subject of my interest, I could not stop reading his Meditations. The contrast with Trump’s utterances was astounding, and vertiginous. The one could spend nine years in command and write a philosophical diary in which he did not even mention the war; the other immediately leapt to praise himself for a war he would lose in weeks…
[With an focus on the “adventure in Iran,” Snyder elaborates the (painfully unflattering) comparison…]
… The American leaders had no idea of who they were or what they wanted, aside from the satisfaction of their emotional needs by the killing of others. They were unable to imagine that people on the other side might have ideas about their own interests and plans for their own behavior. The could not see the world, even in its plainest representation as geography; whereas Marcus exploited a bend in the Danube River to tactical advantage to win a battle; Trump chose to ignore the physical limit the Straits of Hormuz can place on world trade. As soon as the war began, the Iranians did the obvious: they responded to American long-range attacks with the same; and they blocked the Straits.
Because the Americans were operating without a sense of themselves, of the world, or other people, this came as a surprise. Marcus Aurelius offers this mild comment: “How absurd — and a complete stranger to the world– is the man surprised at any aspect of his experience in life!”
The Americans, strangers to the world, reacted to their feelings of surprise with fantasies of destruction. The pleasure they took in killing became a vision of annihilation. Rather than confront the errors they made about war, the Americans leapt to visions of violence in which no one would ever have to think again. Trump lost control on Easter Sunday when he tweeted: “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell.” He then promised that he would bomb Iran “back to the Stone Age, where they belong” and said that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” In our modern legal and ethical language, this is of course genocidal language. The American bombast was followed by American surrender.
Marcus Aurelius won his war against the Iazyges. He combined victory and prudence, and for this he was and will be remembered. The defeated Iazyges returned to their previous role as Roman clients, offered thousands of cavalrymen as soldiers of Rome, and opened trade routes to the east. Marcus’s philosophical diary has been read for the better part of two millenia; so long as we are present as a literate civilization, it will be read. Despite Marcus’s certainty that we will all be forgotten, others built a victory column in his honor after his death; it still stands in Rome, more than one thousand eight hundred years later.
Another legacy of Marcus’s victory also touches the center of what we think of as Western culture. As part of the peace accord, he dispatched 5,500 Iazyges cavalrymen, taken into his service, to the north of what is now northern England, to defend the Roman border at Hadrian’s Wall. Their first commander was a man named Arthur, and it is possible that the Iazyges and some of their Iranian-speaking kin incorporated his name into stories of their own — of a lady in the lake, of a sword in a stone, of a quest for a golden cup — which, with time, became the legend of Christian chivalry. That is another story, and one worth telling.
But it is also part of the story of Marcus Aurelius, which, despite the fact that he chose not to tell it himself, or rather precisely for that reason, is instructive about our predicament today. Stoicism is a way not to be a stranger to the world; it can protect the powerful from vanity and folly. To fall into a stupor of self-absorption, as Trump has done, is to flee from reality. Few wars are worth fighting; those that are fought can only be won in the world, and not within the tortured confines of estranged minds. Trump hastens now towards our shared horizon of death, seeking honors that only posterity can accord and will not…
On what Trump could– and should– learn from Marcus Aurelius: “Of Stoicism and Stupor,” from @timothysnyder.bsky.social.
“We are the other of the other”
“Ask yourself at every moment, ‘Is this necessary?”
“Kindness is invincible.”
– Marcus Aurelius
(TotH to MKM)
* Marcus Aurelius
###
As we barrel back to basics, we might recall that it was on this date in 1956 that Elvis Presley, working for the first time with backing vocal group the Jordanaires, recorded “Don’t Be Cruel,” which had been written by Otis Blackwell.
The single was released on July 13, 1956, backed with “Hound Dog.” Within a few weeks “Hound Dog” had risen to No. 2 on the Pop charts with sales of over one million. Soon after it was overtaken by “Don’t Be Cruel,” which took No. 1 on all three main charts; Pop, Country, and R&B. Between them, both songs remained at No. 1 on the Pop chart for a run of 11 weeks. “Don’t Be Cruel” was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2002. In 2004, it was ranked No. 197 in Rolling Stone’s list of 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.
“Most things are never meant”*…
From Dan Russell‘s nifty (and in this instance, all-too-appropriately-named) newsletter, Unanticipated Consequences, an “appreciation” of a gentleman into whom (Roughly) Daily has run before (e. g, here)…
If you set out to design a supervillain to destroy the biosphere, create a jovial, optimistic mechanical engineer from Ohio who wanted to make the world a slightly more convenient place. Thomas Midgley Jr. was not a mad scientist plotting global ruin from a diabolical evil-genius lair, he was an enthusiastic tinkerer, and as a friend once commented, had “ten ideas a minute, nine of them screwy, but the tenth a lulu.” He wrote light verse, loved music, and held over a hundred patents. As a teenager, he used elm-tree juice instead of spit to throw unhittable curveballs. He was, by all accounts, a charming guy who merely sought practical solutions to the day’s pressing technological annoyances. What could go wrong?
Yet, by the time his career was over, Midgley had introduced two of the most globally destructive chemical compounds in human history. He became, as one historian aptly put it, a one-man environmental disaster. His legacy is the ultimate cautionary tale for the modern innovator: a masterclass in the massive, terrifying, and utterly unanticipated consequences of design choices…
[Russell tells the stories of Midgley’s pair of consequential inventions: the additive “lead” (tetraethyl lead, a neurotoxin) in gasoline and the refrigerant CFC (the use of which ripped a hole in the ozone layer). He recounts Midgley’s death (literally) in the grip of another of his inventions, then concludes…]
… What do we do with the ghost of Thomas Midgley? It is easy, with a century of hindsight, to look back at the millions of cardiovascular deaths, the plummeting IQs, and the shredded stratosphere, and label him a monster. But that ignores the fundamental mechanics of innovation. The Midgley story is a stark reminder of the massive delta between human intent and ecological reality.
When we invent, we are almost always trying to solve a local, immediate pain point. Engines rattle and refrigerators explode. Midgley looked at these problems and offered brilliant and simple solutions. But biology and atmosphere are deeply intertwined and heavily networked systems. The consequences of introducing synthetic compounds into these systems don’t spool out in days or weeks; they unfold across generations.
Midgley did not want to poison the world. He wrote poetry about human dominance over the Earth, genuinely believing that science could only make the future better. If forced to concede the environmental damage of his inventions, he likely would have plunged headlong into the lab to invent safe substitutes. But he lacked the conceptual tools, the time horizon, and the humility to imagine that the very things that made his inventions magical—the cheap and effective solution of lead and the unyielding stability of Freon—were exactly what made them apocalyptically awful for humanity.
The history of Thomas Midgley is a brilliantly clear, slightly horrifying reminder: sometimes, the most dangerous things in the world are brought to us by a friendly guy with a periodic table in his pocket, just trying to stop that really annoying noise in his car…
The bane of unintended consequences: “New Ways to Poison an Entire Planet: The Legacy of Thomas Midgley, Jr.”
* Philip Larkin, “Going, Going“
###
As we consider consequences, we might acknowledge that there are some consequences ourecall that on this date in 1908, at around 7:15 am, northwest of Lake Baikal, Russia, a huge fireball nearly as bright as the Sun was seen crossing the sky. Minutes later, there was a huge flash and a shock wave felt up to 400 miles away. Over Tunguska, a meteorite over 50-m diameter, travelling at over 60,000 mph penetrated Earth’s atmosphere, heated to about 10,000 ºC and detonated 6 to10 km above the ground. The blast released the energy of 10-50 Megatons of TNT, destroying 830 square miles of forest and leaving almost no trace of life. (As the area was essentially unpopulated, estimates are that only three people died.) The Tunguska rock came from the Taurid Meteor storm that crosses Earth’s orbit twice a year.
Midgley’s story is a reminder that we need to take all of the care we can to protect ourselves from unintended harms that we might inflict on oursleves. A meteor strike is, of course, not the product of a human choice– and in 1908, outside our control. But today, there is something we can do: check in with the B612 Foundation.
“Our country is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit: by consolidation of power first, and then corruption, its necessary consequence”*…
Scheduling Note: as a consequence of long meetings scheduled to start very early, (Roughly) Daily will be off tomorrow/Monday and Wednesday. There should be a post on Tuesday, and regular service should resume on Thursday…
Corruption in the U.S. has a long and costly history, intertwining both government and corporations. Our current moment is feeling especially “dirty“– and disfunctional— at both levels.
Eric Ries was a founder of the Lean Start-Up movement and the founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange. His new book, Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad (highly recommended), tackles the issue head-on. Here, a short excerpt, explaining why…
Not all forms of making money are equal. Some create wealth; others destroy it. Over the centuries, when people have gone searching for the moral logic of capitalism, they always hit this same bedrock principle: Fully informed, uncoerced, voluntary transactions create surplus value because both parties end up better off.
Think about your last genuinely good purchase. You valued the product more than the price you paid, so you are better off. But the seller, too, is better off (otherwise they would not have sold). Both parties are wealthier. When this happens, it’s a bit of a magic trick. In an instant, new value exists that did not a moment before. This wealth was not stolen; it was generated.
But this only works when the exchange is truly voluntary and informed. Remove any of these conditions and the mechanism breaks.
This is why embezzlement, coercion, fraud, bribery, and deception are wrong. It’s not only because they are illegal or even immoral. It’s because they corrupt the fundamental premise of our entire economic system. They transform transactions meant to create value into ones that destroy it.
This trajectory is so common these days that we hardly know what to call it. The answer is simple. Since every version of it shares the same value-destroying logic, regardless of whether the violation is illegal or even immoral, we should use the same word to describe them all: corruption.
Our modern sense of “corruption” has become catastrophically narrow. What I’m talking about is something much broader than bribery or embezzlement. (After all, the Latin corrumpere means “to break completely.”) Corruption breaks the logic of capitalism itself.
Every Ponzi scheme, every hidden externality, every unit of extracted value is a drag on our whole economy’s potential. These corruptions don’t just harm their immediate victim; they erode trust, increase transaction costs, and destroy the civic infrastructure that makes efficient markets possible. The hidden economic costs are staggering. The truth is that capitalism succeeds not because of these widespread violations but despite them…
As the “father of capitalism” himself, Adam Smith, said: “Justice… is the main pillar that upholds the whole edifice. If it is removed, the great, the immense fabric of human society… must in a moment crumble into atoms.” (Theory of Moral Sentiments, Chapter III)
Diagnosing the disease that threatens us: “Corruption, Defined,” from @ericries.bsky.social.
* Thomas Jefferson
###
As we grapple with graft, we might recall that on this date in 2002, three days after being found guilty of obstruction of justice for shredding the thousands of documents and deleting emails and company files that tied the firm to its audit of Enron, accounting firm Arthur Andersen was preparing its appeal.
Legal department member Nancy Temple and David Duncan, the lead partner for the Enron account, were cited in the legal action as the responsible managers in the scandal because they ordered subordinates to shred relevant documents. Duncan himself pleaded guilty in federal court in Houston to obstruction of justice on April 10, 2002, saying that he had ordered the destruction of documents and also personally destroyed documents.
The conviction was later overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court (on the grounds that the jury had not been properly instructed on the charge against Andersen). The Supreme Court ruling theoretically left Andersen free to resume operations. However, the damage done to the Andersen name was so great (not just from the Enron scandal but also from others involving Andersen accounting malpractice, such as WorldCom a year after Enron) that it did not return as a viable business even on a limited scale in the years after the ruling.
Although only a small number of Arthur Andersen’s employees were involved with the scandal, the firm was effectively put out of business; the SEC is not allowed to accept audits from convicted felons. The company surrendered its CPA license and 85,000 employees lost their jobs.
“Paper is to write things down that we need to remember. Our brains are used to think.”*…
Henrik Karlsson argues that it can be more symbiotic than that…
Every few months I will read a tweet, or have a conversation, that makes me feel this is important, I must remember this. Often, these epiphanies are accompanied by a sense that I actually know this already, it had just somehow slipped my mind.
And for a few days, I do remember: my life shimmers with a new intensity, and I live the truth of what I grasped. But then, inevitably, the conveyor belt of things to pay attention to keeps churning, and my mind gets filled with small problems I need to solve, or new epiphanies or random noise, like news, and the shining fades from my eyes—I regress to being the same person as ever.
The Latin word for the tendency to lose track of what matters in the cacophony of things that attract our attention is stultitia. “Stultitia,” writes Michel Foucault in “Self-writing,”
is defined by mental agitation, distraction, change of opinions and wishes, and consequently weakness in the face of all the events that may occur; it is also characterized by the fact that it turns the mind toward the future, makes it interested in novel ideas, and prevents it from providing a fixed point for itself in the possession of acquired truth.
You can’t just read a blog post about high agency, get filled with a sense of possibility, and become, from then on, an agentic person. As John Gray puts it in his monograph on J.S. Mill, our character is “a cluster of habitual willings.” For changes to our behavior to become permanent, we must become different people.
In the same way that it is not enough to make a resolution that you will learn the piano, it is not enough to realize that when the kids act out, you shouldn’t lose your temper but slow down, listen, and regulate their nervous systems with the help of yours. Imagine how good a person I would be if having insights were enough! But reacting to the frustrations of your children with calm and curiosity is a skill as much as playing the piano is—and as with the piano, the act of learning it requires rewiring your nervous system through sustained attention and practice. Realizing the value of acting in a certain way might give you a temporary motivation to do it. But in order to actually live in accordance with what you believe in long-term, you must make it a habit.
And this is much harder than making a habit out of playing the piano. When you’re trying to make something like piano practice a habit, the standard advice is to chain it onto some already existing habit—to practice immediately after you brush your teeth in the morning, for example, or after you change out of your work clothes in the afternoon. Chaining the new habit to an already existing one provides a predictable trigger that helps remind you to practice. But the habits that make up our characters often do not follow a predictable schedule like this. I never know, for instance, when our children will act out (except that it will usually be when I’m least capable of handling it with grace—whenever both they and I are unusually hungry and tired). The conflicts seem to come out of nowhere, so I have to, somehow, always be ready to act in the proper way. I need to have the right reaction “ready at hand” (procheiron), as the Greek-philosopher-Roman-slave Epictetus put it. If Johanna and I talked about how we want to deal with the kids’ conflicts the night before, I will nearly always handle the situation well. The problem is to keep it top of mind.
During the first two centuries of the Roman Empire, there spread a practice known as hypomnēmata, a type of notetaking system, used as a tool for meditation, in which the writer would store quotes from books they had read. Each day, often in the morning, the notetaker would open their notebook and look for a passage relevant to something they were struggling with, and then they would meditate on that—unpacking it, making the idea top of mind, ensuring it was alive in them. If they needed courage, for instance, they could meditate on an anecdote that made it real for them what it meant to act bravely. The idea was that over time, the insights they gathered by reading would be transformed into character, something deeply ingrained in their way of thinking and seeing and acting.
This was, as I understand it, an exercise designed to combat the problem I outlined above. Meditating on what matters is a simple habit, which you can chain onto your morning routine, but it reinforces the habits you can’t plan, the habits that make up your character. It was, in the words of the French classicist Pierre Hadot, a spiritual exercise—an exercise because it required work and discipline, spiritual because it engaged the whole person, not just their intellect, but their emotions and their moral character. It was an attempt to treat the formation of character as a skilled practice, as something you can deliberately train and improve through targeted exercises…
…
… I have often noticed that my experience of reality improves if I write and think about something.
But it strikes me now that the practice Foucault wrote about was probably more transformative than what I’ve ended up doing. Essay writing is incredibly time-consuming, and a lot of that time is spent on things that aren’t self-transforming: I spend less time reshaping my mind than I spend solving literary-technical problems that help me write more functional and beautiful essays, for the joy of the craft and for the benefit of readers. Another limitation of my practice is that when an essay is done, I move on. The ideas—though they have been much deepened and more firmly lodged in my mind—fall out of attention and start to fade.
There is an element of self-deception involved here. I like to write essays, so it is comforting to think of it as a powerful practice, something that helps me live more fully and grow as a person. But if I look at it soberly, it is clear to me that essay writing is not a practice that is ideal for the purpose of ethopoiesis.6 It is common to think that what we do achieves what we want it to achieve, even if there is no evidence for it. There are many practices that promise to transform and improve us—therapy, meditation, psychedelics—, but that branding doesn’t mean that they actually do much for us: it is common to see people use these techniques for years without any obvious progress on their problems. If you want to achieve a particular outcome, it is important to start from that goal and evaluate which practices actually help you.
The most important ideas we need to return to weekly, even daily. Essay-writing, then, is not a functional substitute for having a practice that keeps the important truths top of mind, day after day. But it did help me reach that conclusion…
On a particular kind of commonplace book and staying centered: “How not to forget what matters,” from @henrikkarlsson.bsky.social.
* Abert Einstein
###
As we contemplate contemplation, we might that it was on this date in 1949 that the first science fiction series debuted on American television, the DuMont Network’s Captain Video and His Video Rangers. Written by such luminaries as Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, James Blish, and Jack Vance, it was– even in its time, when early television productions often were thrown-together affairs– considered crude, owing much to the fact that the daily show was done live on a meager budget. Indeed, the actors were paid so little they actually made more money from appearing in character at supermarket openings, county fairs, and the like than they did from their salaries.
Still, it ran for a total of 1,537 episodes, and quickly spawned competitive sci-fi offerings like Tom Corbet, Space Cadet and Space Patrol.
For episodes on YouTube, see here.
“The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is.”*…
Thinking– worrying– about the future occupies more and more of our mindshare. How do we ready ourselves for the impacts of the playing out of the myriad uncertainties we face? Your correspondent’s approach-of-choice has been scenario planning (see, e.g., here and here), a method of thinking through and making sense of those unknowns. But as we do that, we have to think against the backdrop of “pre-determined elements”– forces that are going to accrue no matter how the uncertainties resolve, no matter which scenario unfolds.
Old friend and colleague Art Kleiner has dropped a thoughtful– and provocative– reminder of just how important understanding pre-determined elements is…
Pierre Wack, the scenario pioneer who built Royal Dutch Shell’s celebrated foresight practice, sometimes explained his methods by talking about the Ganges river in northern India. If there are heavy monsoon rains over the Himalayan headwaters, you can tell with certainty that there will be a flood five days later at Allahabad, which is 650 miles downstream. Five days after that, he said, the floods would reach Benares.
“Now the people down here in Benares don’t know that this flood is on its way,” he said, “but I do. Because I’ve seen it! This is not fortune telling. This is not crystal-ball gazing. This is merely describing future implications of something that has already happened.”…
… Most of us, peering ahead, fix on anxieties and uncertainties that may or may not happen: elections, technologies, and potential crises. We imagine what might happen, and get into the habit of thinking that our fate depends on this contingency. For instance, we pin our hopes on a particular candidate getting into office.
An alternative [your correspondent would suggest: “a critical complement”] is to look at the predetermined elements in our world as the playing field. When we recognize the true certainties, we can leap ahead to framing our choices and modulating our expectations. For example: We know it will take a long time to mitigate the effects of the climate crisis, so we invest accordingly in renewable energy. We also know our efforts to manage artificial intelligence need to happen practically overnight, so we work to rapidly build the necessary skills.
There are two kinds of predetermined elements. The first-order trends are basic and happening now. They follow directly from events that already took place — children already born, tons of carbon already in the air, debts already incurred. The second-order ones arise from the combination of first-order forces. Their effects are less predictable, but we can’t avoid the pressures they will place on us.
Taken together, they tell us the world of the 2030s will be markedly different from today and from most predictions being made today. For system leaders, a good list of predetermined elements gives you a start on developing scenarios that help you move to a creative orientation: creating the future you want.
I do a lot of work with scenarios, particularly at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, where I teach a graduate-level course on the future of media and technology. Here is my list of predetermined elements facing us today…
[Art shares a meaty– and bracing– list of both first- and second-order “pre-determineds.” He concludes…]
… The persistence of the ordinary. Against all the above sits the most underrated predetermined element of all: most people, most days, will live recognizable lives. The school, the clinic, the shop, and the family table endure because institutions change far more slowly than the forces acting on them. This is not complacency; it is the buffer that keeps the surprises survivable — and the reason that system leadership is generally local.
It’s as if we’re all driving down a treacherous highway. We notice the accidents and cars being towed off the shoulder, and the road rage as cars cut each other off. We don’t pay attention to all the drivers who stay in lane, leaving enough space between themselves and the car in front of them. Many of those drivers have experienced past accidents; they don’t want any more. If there were more of them, the road wouldn’t be nearly so scary. Uncertain: the prevailing attitudes and what it takes to bring people to a more system-oriented perspective...
[He then turns to the implications of his insight…]
… The discipline of scenario thinking is a discipline of attention. It tells us where to pay attention. Which predetermined elements affect us most? Which opportunities should we focus on? And which changes do we care about most urgently?
It is humbling and steadying at once: humbling because so much of the future is already decided, steadying because so much of it depends on what we do together.
The predetermined elements provide a working map. The first-order forces — the aging, the warming, the sun, the grid, the genome, the debt — are the ground on which the next decade must be built. The second-order combinations — cities, pressures, robots, possible relief — are where our work takes place…
Art’s conclusion is worth underling: first-order predetermineds are the terrain on which we will have to build our future; second order-pre-determineds are (a large part of) the agenda of issues we’ll have to address as we do; uncertainties are the unpredictable “weather” in which we’ll have to do that– guided throughout by our values and the hope that powers them. As Dennis Gabor said: “The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented.”
We already know much of what’s coming in the 2030s: “The Futures We Can’t Avoid.” Eminently worth reading in full.
* Tom Stoppard
###
As we buckle up, we might recall that it was on this date in 1927 that “The Cyclone,” a wooden roller coaster in Luna Park at Coney Island, opened to the public. It wasn’t the first roller coaster at Coney Island; but with total track length of 2,640 feet, a maximum height of 75 feet, and cars that reached 60 miles per hour on a ride, The Cyclone became a signature attraction. Operating still, it was declared a New York City designated landmark in 1988 and was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1991.
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