Open Orientation

Derren Brown takes Book Three of Marcus Aurelius's Meditations as a portrait of what a Stoic might actually be like among other people. He starts with Marcus's test: could you say out loud, without embarrassment, what you're thinking right now? Brown notices the contradictions too, kinship on one page and contempt for the 'polluting company' people keep on the next, and reads them as a toolkit rather than a doctrine. Give the man a break: wars, plague, and the pressures of being emperor.

The turn is Jonathan Haidt's elephant and rider, which Brown uses to admit the rational mind steers less than it thinks, and to argue that the Stoics knew it. From there he lands on the idea he calls a wonderful antidote to modern optimism: lower your expectations, keep your intentions high, and add 'Deo volente' to your plans. Who told you the other drivers would be well-behaved?

Transcript

Right, Book Three. So you are in now, and you've been introduced to these ideas, and some of them may seem a little strange. But Book Three will continue in much the same vein. I think one thing we can pull out of Book Three as a sort of loose theme is the character of the Stoic and what that means. Now, one thing that's pretty much unique about Marcus, and I think the reason why I love this book so much, is Stoicism can be a bit bloodless and concerned with such abstract ideals when you read the other Stoics. And Marcus is the only Stoic really to give us a sense of how we're supposed to live with other people and that we might feel kindly towards them. And all those virtues that he lists at the beginning in Book One, they're all tied to real people and human beings. And that's a nice thing I think that comes out of this book. We get a real sense of what a Stoic person might actually be like in the real world of other people. This is unusual for Stoics.

So Book Three, there is this social mode that he's talking about. One of the questions that he asks is, you wanna live so that if somebody said to you, what's on your mind right now, the answer that you would give in that moment wouldn't be embarrassing, that actually it would be something you could feel perfectly happy with saying, honestly, what was in your mind at the moment. So we are talking about, this is where Stoicism happens, really. It is in our thoughts, and it's a certain deliberateness in terms of how we're gonna live and what we're gonna think about and where we're gonna direct this all-important rational mind. So I think that's an important thought. If you were asked now, what are you thinking about, you'd be able to talk about that honestly, without embarrassment.

He talks a lot about kindness, being kindly orientated towards other people and this affinity with other people. And it's really important remembering this, because there's a caricature of the Stoic as being so removed, so disengaged from other people, like other people are just another source of disturbance, of emotional disturbance. And I love the fact that Marcus keeps bringing it back to living in this easy relationship with other people and not just living in your head. Having said that, there also seems to be quite a lot of contempt for other people as you read. And again, it's just what he needs in the moment. If people have bothered him, if he's clearly suffering at the hands of other people's unbearable attitudes, then he needs to find a way of dealing with that. So sometimes you see the opposite. Sometimes you do see, people are terrible, here's how I'm gonna have to just navigate my way through that. He says, don't waste your time scrutinizing the opinions of other people, which doesn't seem to sit very well with this idea of kinship. But then he also says, just think about how they are, how they must be with the polluting company that they keep, or how they are when they're at home and when they're eating and getting on with these sort of horrible lives that they must live if they're that unpleasant. All of this is scrutinizing those other people and their thoughts. There's a real mix of potentially quite conflicting ideas as he's navigating his way through. You know, give him a break: wars, plague, and the pressures of being emperor.

But again, it's a lovely thing in Stoicism, because you're not just being given this set of ideas, go out and live them. It's a toolkit. I think it's the sort of philosophy you might dip in and out of in order to deal with things very pragmatically in the moment. And sometimes that will be about a feeling of compassion, openness, and gratitude and kinship with people. Sometimes that's exactly what you want. And sometimes it is gonna be, every day I'm gonna meet people that are gonna annoy the heck out of me, and I'm just gonna be prepared for that and try and deal with it graciously. But it happens. It's kind of nice. It's an encouraging, pragmatic, life is difficult and here's how you navigate that kind of philosophy. There's a sort of cheerful independence, I think, that brings it all together. I think that's the sort of mood that he's going for. Independent of other people, but I'm cheerful with it.

And then the other big part of this book, which we start to get a sense of, is what is the good life? What does that actually mean? He talks about virtue a lot. What are the virtues, and what is it, deliver a good life? He is clearly saying that we want to put first and foremost our rational mind in front of us. And again, this, the divinity within us, this link to God that we have, which again is just our rational selves. That's our first thing to place first and foremost. And it does sound like, and it can sound like with Stoics, they're saying we are just purely rational creatures, which of course we're not. And something to bear in mind is most of life, and a writer called Jonathan Haidt, who has this idea, is so the opposite, that actually he describes we're on an elephant. We're riding an elephant, and us riding the elephant, that's the rational mind. But the elephant that we're on is everything else. It's our unconscious. It's our emotional life. And what actually happens is the elephant starts to steer one way, and we are of course following. We're being pulled. This rational mind is being pulled, but it's doing all the work, it's thinking, it's steering the elephant, that actually it's the elephant that's doing all the steering. So probably that's a closer picture of what our relationship is between our rational mind and our emotional mind. And that does sound at odds with the Stoic mode. I think it's really important to remember that the Stoics, I don't think they were, if they were under any illusions, there'd be no need for this philosophy. The point is, we are rational creatures living with difficult emotions, living with this elephant steering us one way or the other. And they're just saying, if we can honor and revere the rational mind in such a way that we can just find recourse to it, that we can retreat to it sometimes and have strategies and tools there, that that's the best way forward, as opposed to just living out our emotional states and trusting in that.

He talks in this book about how we would live without any, we wouldn't be avoiding or pursuing anything in particular. There's a sort of, again, quite Buddhist sort of detachment from things that would have a claim on us. So we wouldn't pursue certain desires. We wouldn't be frantically trying to avoid people or seeking out crowds. There would be, again, this cheerful independence, a lack of craving. And that would extend to how long our life is. He comes back to that one as well. A sort of indifference. He's trying to convince himself as he gets older that whether you live a short life or a long life shouldn't really be of any particular concern either. Again, that's a bigger one to swallow. He talks about what virtue would you bring to this situation? What can I bring to it? And he talks about gentleness, and he talks about simplicity, courage. So again and again, these very human, quite simple modes of being are being used to not make other people feel better necessarily, but just to create an easy accordance with life. Life's difficult. So how do you navigate it? These are all strategies to do that. He talks about tasks, things that you find yourself doing, to do them deliberately and with a certain mindfulness.

So many of our frustrations come from expectations that are too high. Who told you that the other drivers would be well-behaved? When you're trying to get somewhere, people are cutting you up on the roads. Who told you that the contract that told you the job would be ready by Tuesday was wrong, and it's gonna take another few weeks? Who told you these things? Your expectations that these things would fall into place just turned out to be unrealistic. And a big Stoic idea is lower your expectations. It's such a great thought in this world where we're supposed to be setting our expectations very high, setting our goals way up there and visualizing ourselves winning. The Stoics say, no, don't. They had a little get out clause, "Deo volente", which just means God willing, which they put on the end of all their plans. So yeah, I'll do this, God willing. It really works. It really works to remind yourself that the things you're planning to do, even just during the day, you may not get round to doing, or they may not turn out in the way that you want. For me, there is nothing more frustrating than knowing I need to do something during the day and I've got that in my mind, I'm gonna sit down and do this work or whatever it is, and just one by one things are getting in the way and stopping me from doing that. Drives me mad. But actually, it's just that expectation was too high. So their expectations, but high intentions are fine. It's not about complacency. It's just about managing the bit you're not in control, which is how things are gonna turn out. And you do that by managing and lowering your expectations. And that is such a wonderful antidote to this optimistic mantra that we are supposed to set our expectations really high and visualize ourselves winning and have extraordinary success. Because then what happens when we don't? What happens when that doesn't work out? We failed.

And finally, the final thought that I think is coming through in the character of the Stoic is about acceptance, about not complaining about our lot. The sense that this is what our life is, this is what destiny, the thread of destiny, has spun for us. And that we can accept that and we can live again in this easy accordance with fortune, that they used to revere a lot more than we do nowadays. So what we're getting from this book is, amongst other things, a sense of what the character of the Stoic might be. And bear in mind, it's quite unusual in Stoic literature that we're getting such a sense of a real human being and not just some ideal that we're supposed to aim towards.