Rational Harmony

Halfway through, and Derren Brown wants to lower the pressure. Other Stoics held up the sage, the impossibly perfect figure tranquil under torture; Book Six of Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, Brown says, settles for good enough. He pairs it with Donald Winnicott, the English pediatrician who told post-Freud parents that good enough was enough. Then he unpicks the word virtue, which he says you should read as emotional resilience, and Marcus's test for it: a chair is a good chair if it holds you, and a human is a good human if it exercises reason.

The turn is domestic. Brown asks what a good partner is made for, and answers with the chair: someone who co-runs a household and does that job well rather than resenting it. He closes on Marcus's three motivations, the lover of glory, the hedonist and the wise man who finds his good in his own actions, and asks where on that spectrum you'd place yourself.