ACFM Microdose: Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations

**Nadia Idle** (0:02)
This is Acid Mad.
Hello, and welcome to ACFM, the home of the Weird Left. I'm Nadia Idol, and I'm joined as usual by my friends, Keir Milburn.

**Keir Milburn** (0:29)
Hello.

**Nadia Idle** (0:30)
And Jeremy Gilbert.

**Jeremy Gilbert** (0:31)
Hello.

**Nadia Idle** (0:33)
And today, we are reading from Meditations, the philosophy classic by Marcus Aurelius. So guys, how do we want to start? Do we want to do a bit of an introduction about why we're doing this before we actually start doing readings from the first few books or chapters?

**Keir Milburn** (0:52)
We're doing a little reading group. We're going to read through this text, and we've done these before. We've also advised you to go and find a version, perhaps on the internet, or you can probably get a cheap version in text, although that will delay your listening, won't it? Just go and find it on the internet, and you can sort of read along. Perhaps also we should just have a little explanation of why we are doing this. This is not like a left-wing classic, it's not like the Communist Manifesto, which you'd expect acid communists to be reading.
This is the writings of a Roman emperor from the second century AD. It's a bit of an unusual path to take. So why are we doing this, Jem?

**Jeremy Gilbert** (1:27)
Well, because we've decided to go into corporate leadership training. We're going to be setting up a program.

**Keir Milburn** (1:33)
Stoicism for tech leaders.

**Jeremy Gilbert** (1:35)
Yeah, that's going to be the first course we'll be offering. Well, because we recorded an episode on resilience, and we partly did that because resilience had become a corporate and organizational buzzword, and initially it was a joke.
We said as a joke, we should do Marcus Aurelius, because he's become really popular with tech leaders who regard themselves as sort of philosopher kings of their corporations. It's become part of that sort of culture, reading and quoting Marcus Aurelius. But then, having said it as a joke, we started to think it was collectively was actually a good idea. It would be interesting, partly because we wanted to talk about Stoicism for quite a while. Stoicism is a sort of philosophical tradition that has lent its name to a kind of general disposition which people still use that word to refer to.
We think it's an interesting topic to think about in relation to the question of resilience and I think it's an interesting phenomenon in itself. These supposed classics of like pre-modern thought, like Sun Tzu's Art of War, the Tao Te Ching. I think we were talking on a recent episode about how the era of corporate Taoism in the late 90s and loads of people were reading the Tao Te Ching and this Marcus Aurelius. It's an example of a book. You can pick it up and it seems to be quite easy to read. Obviously, it's translated from the Greek. But it also has that kind of history. It has a history going back hundreds, I guess, really thousands of years actually of people. So picking it up, you fancy the idea of reading something thoughtful and philosophical by a guy who was really top of his field but not a professional philosopher.

**Keir Milburn** (3:26)
But it's also, I think that this idea of Stoicism has come up a lot of it when we've done ACFM in the past. This idea of how do we maintain some sort of adherence to the movement in its long trajectory, the movement towards communism, perhaps we'd say, and not get distracted by the vagaries of the present. That sort of idea, how can we have an adherence to this project, project of reason I'd probably say, which is the project of socialism and communism, et cetera. How can we maintain attachment to that when we have these crises and the world seems to be falling apart, et cetera. We have these setbacks and how can we overcome these setbacks, not get attached too much to any one particular organization or moment, et cetera. These things seem things that some idea of some sort of left stoicism could help us with. So perhaps it's not just a critique of the tech bros. Perhaps we are also leaders in our fields, the emperors of socialism that can resort to these self-help books to get us through the hard times.
Nadia?

**Nadia Idle** (4:37)
Yeah. Well, I probably have all of that. All of that is right and correct and good. I have a slightly different thing to add as well, which is that I was involved in the whole online personal development world around the time of the pandemic. Critically, of course, but a lot of it was very useful. And apart from characters like Jordan Peterson, who I don't approve of, there was also a lot of reverence that was given to Marcus Aurelius and the kind of stoic philosophy. And I guess I'm interested in how that applies to us as left-wing thinkers and as people who want to see a kind of progressive shift in society, both in terms of, like you guys said, how it applies to us in groups and this philosophy to groups and group behavior and organizing and going to social change in the direction we're interested in. But also what kind of resilience it can give us, any learnings from Marcus Aurelius' work, and how we can think about where we can put our energy.