BONUS: Toxic Masculinity, Cancel Culture & Politics

Ryan Holiday (0:00)

Welcome to The Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice and wisdom into the real world.

SPEAKER_2 (0:14)

Hi, Ryan. I want to say that your book, Obstacles the Way, helped me finish my master's thesis. Oh, congratulations. Thank you for that.

I want to ask you about when you know something or someone is like annoying you or whatever, but you can't accept that they don't maybe agree with you, how to kind of have peace with that and not let it kind of take your own piece away.

Ryan Holiday (0:41)

One of my favorite quotes from the Stoics, it's in Meditations. Marcus Aurelius says, Remember, you always have the power to have no opinion. He says, Things are not asking to be judged by you. Now, imagine this is being said by a person whose opinion was literally law. He had the life and death power over people, and here he is reminding himself to live and let live, that he doesn't have to let things bother him, he doesn't have to try to change everything, he can just let some things be. Now, this sounds like not much of a power, you always have the power to have no opinion. But how many people do we know that have no such power, right? I mentioned Elon Musk earlier. Elon Musk is an incredibly powerful, incredibly wealthy person, but has he ever had an opinion he was able to keep to himself? Not that I know of. It's a hard thing to do to just shut up, to just focus on your stuff.

That's what I try to do in my life as best as I can. Something I'm going through with my kids, I'll be like, oh wait, I don't need to have an opinion on whether this show is good or not. You like it. I like that expression, you don't have to yuck someone else's yum.

You like it, so it's good to you. It's not something I need to convince you of otherwise. Having fewer opinions is something I'm trying to practice and will be forced to practice over the next few years, I suspect.

SPEAKER_3 (2:01)

Great question. As a father of two young boys like yourself, I'd just be interested on your thoughts and insights, particularly on the rise of what we call toxic masculinity, the likes of your Andrew Tate's and Matt Walsh's, Ben Shapiro's, etc.

Ryan Holiday (2:18)

Yeah.

SPEAKER_3 (2:18)

Particularly their negative attitudes towards women and how you guide, let's say, your sons on the appropriate actions with the fairer sex.

Ryan Holiday (2:28)

Yeah, it's a great question. One of the reasons I feel so strongly about this and why I talk about these things is, I have two young boys and I also just so frustrated with the way that people who have platforms and influence over young men have decided to deploy those platforms, to use it to call out and inspire the worst in people. Look, if you want to use your platform to tell people to get active, to read great texts from history, to aspire to do things, to be ambitious, take care of yourself, to make your bed, all that's awesome, right? And I think young men are especially are desperate for that advice and desperately need positive outlets and role models because there are not enough of them out there. You know, being a young man is hard. Being any kind of person is hard, right? And when you look at the stats, young men are struggling. In the United States, two-thirds of college graduates are women. Just young men are struggling across the board. And I think because of that struggle, it makes them a very ripe target for sort of reactionary figures to pander to them. And as all sort of cultures have struggled over the years, to take those disaffected young men and weaponize that disaffection to say it's this group's fault or it's this part of society's fault or to direct it at a common enemy. That's what like demagogues do and have always done. So I think that's why I feel so strongly about talking about some of this stuff and talking about it in a positive way. Cause I feel like I'm one of the only people that has a, not a mostly male audience, but has a male audience that hasn't gone in that direction. There's definitely a few exceptions. I think Rich Roll does an incredible job. There's a bunch of people I like, but I think this space is failing young men particularly. I just find in, in The Stoics that I admire a strong social conscience. And that to me, that strong social conscience has to also include equal treatment for all people, all genders, all orientations. And to really sincerely care about that, as if it as is important to you as your own equality and success. To me, that's just part and parcel of being a decent human being.