Awful people have always been with us. Rome had its Neros and its Caligulas and Tiberiuses and Commoduses. Cruel people have always been with us. Incompetent leaders have always been with us. People have always been trying to undermine our institutions, trying to turn us against each other, fill the hole in their soul with power or fame or influence.
And there's no question these people do enormous damage in the process. Rome burned under Nero. Catiline sent a mob to try to overthrow an election he lost. These people kill and destroy and waste. So yeah, that makes us angry. It worries us. It consumes a lot of our attention and energy.
But it's worth pointing out that these people, whom we spend so much time thinking about, don't spend one second of their lives thinking about us. Do you think Nero even knew Epictetus existed? Certainly he did not spend his dinners saying "Can you believe what this Epictetus guy is doing?" Certainly he did not gossip or speculate or complain about him. Which is why Epictetus understood that the key to his sanity, his freedom—and in the end, triumphing over someone like that—meant focusing less on them and much more on himself.
His critical question resounds to us today: Is this something that's up to me? Or not?
This isn't to say that Epictetus or any of the Stoics were apathetic, it's just they knew the trap of confusing emoting about a problem with doing something about a problem. They knew how easily bad people could consume our every waking second…at the expense of both our happiness and our effectiveness. Much of what happens in politics, in empires, in the world, is not up to us. Our opportunity to influence it—in the modern world at least—comes during elections, at protests, etc. Day to day, it's only our individual actions that are up to us: how we treat people, how we run our businesses, what we think about.
We must make sure that we are not allowing bad people to make us bad people. Governments can take a tyrannical turn, but we do not need to cede control of our thoughts and moods.
Let them be awful. Let them waste the opportunities they have to do actual good in this world. Just don't let them waste your opportunities, too. Our power lies in the agency we have over the only empire we control—ourselves.
P.S. Whether you're newer to Stoicism or a longtime student or practitioner, it's worth familiarizing yourself with the works of Epictetus. We highly recommend Epictetus: Discourses and Selected Writings, edited and translated by Robert Dobbin (who says Epictetus's ideas are resonant even today because they're "grounded in common experience and common sense," and we couldn't agree more). Get your copy here, and you can bundle it with our How to Read Epictetus Digital Guide (save when you purchase both together) for a self-paced course that will help you better understand and retain his teachings.
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