Latest / The Stoic Handbook with Jon Brooks / Donald Robertson on Illusion of Mastery, The View from Above, and Time Travelling Stoics

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Donald Robertson on Illusion of Mastery, The View from Above, and Time Travelling Stoics · The Stoic Handbook with Jon Brooks

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Over the years in researching Stoicism, I've seen great stoic educators get asked the question what is your stoic daily routine?
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: Or how do you practice stoicism?
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: What kinds of thoughts or meditations or journaling prompts do you use on a daily basis to live wisely with virtue?
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes I hear the surprising response of, oh, I actually don't practice stoicism.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: I know a lot about it, but I don't practice it at all.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: You see individuals who claim to be a practicing stoic but don't really present any evidence that they are practicing it.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe they say that occasionally they have certain stoic thoughts, you know, like one or two a week.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: But the question is, is that stoicism?
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: And is there a difference between learning about stoicism in a textbook versus actually practicing it, training with it like a skill?
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: And that's something that I wanted to ask Donald Robertson, author of Stoicism and the Art of Happiness, Eurythemus, How to Think Like a Roman Emperor, and other amazing Stoic works.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: So check out the question that I asked Donald here and his following response.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: I think you'll find a lot of wisdom and insight in what he says about this important topic.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: Do you think that there's a difference between someone who uh just knows a lot about Stoicism from someone who is a practicing stoic?
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: You know, because you know you sometimes I've seen speakers and they they you know they studied Stoicism, they give a lecture on it, but then someone asks them, like, do you practice it?
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: And they're like, Oh, actually, no, not at all.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so uh, you know, what what's going on there?
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_01: I like um I think maybe I mentioned that when I first started, my my first degree is in philosophy, and so when I first got into stoicism, I was kind of reading books by academic philosophers, and gosh, it seems this seems really weird to me now, right?
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_01: Because the culture over the space of 20 years has completely changed in relation to Stoicism.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_01: So there was a time where it was mainly academic philosophers that wrote about it, and they would happily say that they just read the books and it never actually occurred to them to I've I've spoken to professors, like senior academics, who said it never occurred to me that anyone would try and actually put this into practice, which seems really weird given that the Stoics go on and on and on about how you're supposed to put it into practice, and that you know Epictetus in particular rants at his students about how they're not to be um pen and paper philosophers and that they should actually be living the philosophy, otherwise, what's the point of it?
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_01: So, how is it that someone could spend a career studying this and then think, I didn't think he meant that literally?
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_01: Or so I don't know, it seems really weird.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_01: But now it I think it it's become uh fairly common for like most academics now, I think, actually realize that that's absurd.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it's taken them 20 or 30 years, but they they they they're now going, oh, there are loads of people that actually put this into practice.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_01: So it does seem a bit ridiculous to say that you would just read it and not do it.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_01: So sometimes people do still say that, but it's become less common.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, like you know, on the one hand, everybody that's into stoicism pretty much now is trying to put it into practice.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_01: On the other hand, I'm also kind of surprised.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_01: I think they they a lot of most people don't know how to put it into practice.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_01: So, like, um the stoics have many psychological exercises and practices that they use, and so I see there are like thousands and thousands and thousands of people around the world trying to follow Stoicism, but if you ask most of them what they actually do, they're usually that they're not really using the contemplative exercises or the techniques that much, um, which still kind of surprises me.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's some it's kind of like they want to put it into practice, but they're still not really sure exactly how to do it.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_01: There's loads of resources explaining it, you know.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_01: Stoic week, we run every year, and like 20,000 people or something, I think, have done that so far.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_01: And it tries to really guide people through and explain like this is stuff that you would do every day if you were a stoic.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_01: You'd do the view from above and contemplate your own mortality, ask yourself these questions, and like there's you know, like a bunch of specific things that Stoics would do to try and train their minds.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I think that's the next stage in evolution of stoicism is that people start to kind of really uh become a lot bit more kind of structured in the way that they put it into practice, and they're more aware of the actual exercises that they could be doing.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, for sure.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: I see that as uh as something that is is kind of missing myself, and that like for some I'm a constant like experimenter and I'm always trying to kind of do things myself, and I'm definitely the type of person to like sit down and try and write like a routine and use your view from above meditation.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: But some people they they they just have a few books and they kind of get stuck on it.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_01: Marcus Aurelius says he does the view from above every day, and like uh I I thought about this a lot.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_01: Like the first book I wrote in Stoicism, The Philosopher of CBT, I tried to list all the psychological techniques, and there are about 18 like different, distinct psychological techniques that they describe repeatedly.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_01: There's like a whole toolbox of different techniques, but I mean that's too much, right?
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_01: So the problem is there's too many.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_01: So I would say you could choose different ones to focus on.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_01: Like I would say cognitive distancing, in a sense, is the most fundamental.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_01: But I I my experience has taught me that probably the view from above is the thing that people kind of find easiest to do on a regular basis.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_01: And I think like for most people who are like not really sure how to follow stoicism more systematically, what it says just to just maybe do the view from above every day or like every every few days, like because that alone actually is going to help you make a lot more sense out of a lot of the other aspects of the philosophy.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, like that's probably a kind of good enough starting place for the majority of people.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_01: It's fairly I mean, you can even just listen to a recording, right?
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_01: Or you know, pretty quickly once you've got the idea of it, you you could just shut your eyes and and think about the concept for a couple of minutes.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_01: Like every day, you know, it gets actually much, much easier with a week or two of practice, like most of these psychological techniques.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_01: So I think that's kind of maybe we've overcomplicated it for people by kind of giving them too many options.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_01: We should just say, just do that.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_01: Just do that, buddy, you know, like just to kind of get started.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_01: Like you can't go too far wrong.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um are you familiar, I'm presume you are, with the John Ver Veki video, view from above that he used your meditation as like the the source for that?
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't know that.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_01: But I've met John Ver Veki and uh we he spoke at our conference in Toronto.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_01: He's uh uh psychologist at the University of Toronto, and uh we did I did the view from above kind of guided meditation um at the con maybe it's uh is that is it the conference recording that you've you're talking about, or is it in another video?
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: I just I he's got a video that is like titled The View from Above.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: So he's talking specifically about that, and then he I think he links to your meditation.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I like it.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_01: I should probably watch it.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think yeah, if you if you haven't seen that, you can check it out.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_01: He's he completely like he understands the the psychological significance of it.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_01: I mean it's a really weird thing.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_01: When I first started talking to therapists about stoicism, the thing they were most interested in was a view from above.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_01: And it I guess it's kind of hard to explain exactly why, um, but the only way I can put it very simply like this: that the view from above it is really easy to do, and it clearly has a psychological effect.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_01: So psychologists love that because they think that there's got to be it looks like it the sort of thing that should have some kind of therapeutic effect.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_01: It looks like a no-brainer, to put it very crudely, that you should be able to do some kind of outcome study on this.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_01: Like out of everything and stuff, something you think this is all we have to do is make a recording of this, get a bunch of people to listen to it, compare it to a control group.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: Like, this is like a this should be a piece of cake, like to do an outcome study.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_01: So I think whenever you're talking to like CBT practitioners or psychologists, uh they they immediately kind of get interested in it and their eyes light up.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_01: And also they're kind of thinking, how come we haven't already done research on this?
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_01: Like, so I don't think it'll be that long before we see there already are studies being done on it.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um that it's funny because a lot of therapists and philosophers will say, like Freudians for ages used to say, Oh, you you can't research this stuff, it's too, you know, like they'd be talking about Freudian analysis or Jungian analysis, and they'd be like, it's too subtle, it's too subtle, it can never be measured, it can never be quantified.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, you know, good on you, buddy.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_01: You know, but you sometimes you kind of need to know whether something works or not.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_01: And some things are cool and philosophical and also stupidly easy to test.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_01: Like the view from above is like a godsend to psychologists because they're like clearly if you visualize things from an elevated perspective and stuff like that, that's a learnable skill, and it clearly changes your perspective dramatically.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_01: So it's got to do something.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it either it's gonna kill you or it's gonna cure you, right?
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_01: It's gonna do something.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_01: So psychologists are like, you know, it's one or the other, like let's start testing it and find out which it is.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_01: So it really appeals to them.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, luckily, like anecdotally, and then what from what little evidence we have, it looks like it's beneficial, like the Stoics thought it was.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, I guess almost more importantly, it's it's easily testable.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so I and weirdly, it's not part of CBT really.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_01: Like, you know, there are some kind of indirect or like things, but one of the things that surprised me when I was talking to therapists, they'd say, no, you're you're right.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_01: Like many of the things we do in Stoicism are identical to or very similar to things that we would do in broadly CBT-based therapy.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_01: But there are there aren't really, there's not a common technique that we use in therapy that closely resembles a view from above.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_01: It's like a major, it's like a gap in the market.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_01: Like, you know, that there's an obvious gap there in terms of the repertoire of modern therapy.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_01: And all the therapists I know are like, how come we're not doing this?
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_01: Like, you know, it's definitely got to be worth a try.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_01: So I I guess it's an exciting concept for psychologists and psychotherapists.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um so final question for you.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so if Epictetus, Marx Aurelius, Seneca, the the ancient Stoics were transported into the the current era.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: If they were just to look at the kind of culture of modern stoicism, not any particular author or or work, but just the kind of the overall landscape of modern stoicism, do you think there would be any things that they would kind of disagree with or think that people are doing well or would want to inject more of something else into it?
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: Like how do you think they would interpret it?
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_01: I think they'd they'd wonder they'd want there to be more graphic novels.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I agree.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know, I've no idea.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_01: That would blow their minds, I think.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_01: They'd be like, what is this thing?
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um I'm not sure what they would make of that.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_01: Although, weirdly, as an aside, one of our main historical sources for Marx Aurelius is a thing called the Aurelian column, which is a huge column that has this circular um frieze that goes around spirals around it.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_01: And uh that's sequential art, it's like a precursor of modern graphics.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_01: So they are like, you know, actually, that kind of exist in Marx Aurelius' time.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_01: They would look at us it's a real that's a big question and a really interesting question.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um I think that there are a lot of things with modern society they would find kind of weird.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_01: I think they would think that we're very sheltered uh from our own sense of mortality.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_01: But it's hard to know what to pick on, so there's so many things.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_01: So I think one of them is that they would they would probably say, you guys don't really uh live sheltered lives.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_01: Like, you know, you don't really um see people die, you don't look after your dying relatives, you don't you you're like you know you're not seeing infant mortality like we did, you're not serving in the military like uh at close quarters like we did, you know, like you you guys are really sheltered from anything that reminds you of your own mortality.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_01: And I I think that in that respect they would think that we were um missing something um that we were um naive in that regard.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_01: They thought their contemporaries were naive in terms of burying their head in the sand about their own mortality.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_01: They're gonna think we're far worse in that respect, for the most part, I believe.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um they would also think that we're um stupid, uh and they'd be right because for a reason that's you know this idea of the Dunning Krueger effect, yeah.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_01: Like that in some areas people don't know how stupid they are or how little they know because they don't have the technical knowledge to be able to appraise their lack of knowledge.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_01: So like someone who doesn't know how to do basic arithmetic is not even gonna understand when someone explains to them how they're getting sums wrong, because they're like, I don't even understand the explanation, you know, I don't know how to do addition, like I'm just guessing the numbers, and and someone tries to explain how they get these calculations wrong, but like even the explanation's gone over my head.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_01: So that they don't even know how little they know, and it's hard to ex it's hard to explain to them sometimes.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_01: Like, so we know in modern society, compared to an educated an educated Greek or Roman, um where most of us are woefully ignorant and uh about rhetoric and logic, and uh like they would think we're kind of thick as two short bricks in that regard, frankly.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_01: Like they um they'd be like, do you guys not understand common informal fallacy?
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_01: Like you guys keep on the they'd look at us on the internet and they'd think you guys are making the same child like errors of reasoning over and over again.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_01: Like um, you know, they'd think our political debates are infantile.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um I mean that these things happened in their time, but educated people were more cognizant of what was going on.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_01: So like ad hominem fallacies, overgeneralization, causal fallacies, um, modal fallacies, like you know, they knew how to reason, like technically, in the same way that we know how to do a divid division and multiplication and stuff, that they knew how to use logic.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_01: And they they'd look at like what we were doing and think, you guys are like don't even understand like how to think straight.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_01: Like, it's shocking.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_01: They look at they'd have a field day with podcasts like um I I think Mark Aurelius, Joe Rogan did a podcast recently about how he loves Marc Aurelius.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_01: I think if Mark Aurelius watched Joe Rogan's podcast, he he'd he'd it would make him weep, like the the level of stupidity on show, and like you know, crass ignorance and just like absurd, like illogical like reasoning on display, and r constant head banging against the wall, abuse of the causal fallacy when talking about things like research and COVID vaccines.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, Marcus really doesn't even know anything about scientific life, but he'd understand that the you know the the sort of shoddy reasoning that's on display immediately, I think.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um ancient philosophy Epictetus, like ancient philosophers studied dialectic, they they trained, Marcus spent decades training in rhetoric.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_01: And so when you train in rhetoric, you you you understand you learn how to manipulate people.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_01: And rhetoric and and logic are two sides of the same coin.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_01: So you you when you learn logic, you learn how to spot logical fallacies.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_01: And when you learn rhetoric, you learn how to exploit logical fallacies.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_01: Like, you know, it's the the two sides of the same thing, right?
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_01: And Marcus had trained for decades with the leading thinkers of his era in logic and rhetoric.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_01: So these guys are way ahead of us, like in terms of you know, it's funny because we normally think of progress in the sciences, yeah.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_01: But like, I mean, even if you're a philosophy graduate, you you know, you do like you know a few classes in logic and you you you employ the Socratic method and philosophical reasoning at kind of like for a few years and seminars and stuff like that, nothing like the the level at which ancient Greek uh and Roman philosophers were doing it on a daily basis for decades of their lives, they would wipe the floor with us um easily in that regard.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_01: And they would watch Joe Rogan and they would watch CNN and Fox and all the other garbage that we consume and think that it was amazing that we'd taken such a step backwards and were now reasoning like you know, we like idiots, like they'd they they'd think we'd regressed compared to them and had become imbeciles.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_01: Like on that's my honest opinion.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_01: I really honestly if Mark Swiss was here today, he'd look he'd look at the internet and think, how did we end up being so stupid?
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_01: Like, how come these people can't spot like you know the the the use of sophistry?
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_01: Like, don't has nobody taught them like you know how to spot overgeneralizations and arguments and black and white reasoning and you know all these kind of things?
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_01: We the internet's full of people like using the ad hominem argument and stuff like politicians do it all the time, like but uh Greeks and Romans would just laugh at that.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_01: Like, but we we've fallen, we've regressed back into like being duped by it.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_01: So they they need to logic needs to come to our rescue.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_01: Like, you know, that that really is one of the main weaknesses in modern society.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I think everyone's aware that political discourse is is like a uh a car crash, right?
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_01: It's got a dumpster fire, right?
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_01: On social media, um I think it's fair to say.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um American political and in Britain, most countries, not uh maybe not everywhere in the world, but like political debate is farcical.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um I you know, I I think like the ancient Greeks and Romans would have a lot to say about that.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_01: I mean they they had to deal with these things, but they they understood what was going on around them.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_01: Like they weren't as gullible as they think were gullible by comparison, I'm sure of that.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_00: Well, yeah, I feel both uh dumb but also very inspired to go and start looking at logic and rhetoric.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_01: So we the the basic thing, the the starting point, I think, it's almost like logic, I think, is taught a little bit back to front.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_01: Like we just need to learn about common fallacies.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_01: Like most people actually are in start looking at philosophy, learn about things like the ad hominem fallacy.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_01: So you see in debates, people will go, somebody will follow an argument and they'll go, well, that guy's a Nazi.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_01: Like, and you'll think, well, hang on a minute, that doesn't mean to say that the thing that he said, like whether or not that's true.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_01: Or nowadays it's like that politician's a like a paedophilia or something like that, or like whatever.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_01: Like, so insults are thrown, accusations are thrown at people that detract from the content of what they're actually saying.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: Like, and people will reject an argument based on who said it, rather than whether or not the thing that they say is logical or there's evidence for it.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_01: Like that's the autonomous, right?
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it's all over the internet, like on a like hour-by-hour basis.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_01: Like, so I think you know, just kind of spotting stuff like that is more important.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_01: Like the help, by the way, medical, like any cognitive therapist, we it's evidence-based practice.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_01: We so we're trained and we we have to read research studies.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_01: Like the media exploit a fallacy called the causal fallacy every day in reporting uh medical research.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, like that, they um they confuse correlation and causation, like it's their favorite thing to do over and over and over again.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_01: I as an aside, I say to people, look at like look up causal fallacies and and look at the fallacy of confusing correlation and causation.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_01: It's fairly simple, like, but and then you'll see like that a lot of the health reporting, like the reporting of medical research, is garbage, like, and it's just it's distorting and exploiting information in order to freak people out.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_01: It's a big problem for public health in our society.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_01: But I don't think the ancient Stoics would have understood that because this is a problem more prominent uh in relation to modern scientific research, but it's a big problem in our society.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_01: Like um we're we're we're being fed uh not just misinformation, but like like it's like these guys are saying one plus one equals three or something, like the stuff they're saying is just completely nonsensical, but it happens over and over and over.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_01: Joe Rogan has a career built out of doing this, pretty much.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_01: Like, you know, he's not the only one, he's picking on him because he's the the biggest one, right?
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_01: But like there's loads of other people, the media is full of it.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_01: Like, you know, tabloid newspapers have been doing this for decades on a huge scale, but it's time that people became more educated about basic misinformation and and health research.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I think so.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_01: That's one of them, like you know, that people should arm themselves for the Stoics thought we have to study logic in order to defend ourselves against misinformation, like that was their argument for it.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_01: The cynics didn't study logic, and then the Stoics' argument is no, well, the thing is if you don't study logic, then you're vulnerable like to people uh manipulating you with like rhetoric, like you know, you're you fall prey to sophists, then like so at the very least, you you need to understand enough to protect yourself.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um that's really part of what ancient philosophy was about, but that aspect of it uh is kind of almost defunct now.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_00: I love that frame, logic is sort of psychological self-defense.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_00: That's uh really powerful one.