Learning to Desire Each Thing as It Happens

The person who is getting an education ought to approach this process with the following aim:

How can I follow the gods in everything, how can I be content with the divine administration, and how can I become free?

Well, you are free if nothing happens that conflicts with your will and if no one is able to obstruct you.

What does that mean? Are you telling me that freedom is madness?

No, of course not. Freedom and madness don't go together.

But I want my every wish to come to pass, however crazy that may seem.

You really are mad, you are raving. Don't you know that *freedom is something fine and wonderful? To be so happy-go-lucky in one's wishes as to want every whim fulfilled is tantamount to being the reverse of fine — utterly shameful in fact. Think how we proceed in the case of the alphabet. Do I want to write the name "Dio" in whatever way I like? No, I am taught to like it the way it should be written. How is it in music? Just the same, and so it is quite generally wherever some skill or expertise is involved. Otherwise, if knowledge were adjusted to everyone's individual whims, there would be no point in learning anything.

Is it only here, then, in the case of the greatest and most important thing, freedom, that I am allowed to be happy-go-lucky in my wishes?

Not here, least of all! Because education is precisely learning to want all individual things to happen just as they do happen. And how do they happen? In the way that the one who has arranged them has arranged. He has arranged for there to be summer and winter, plenty and dearth, virtue and vice, and all such opposites on behalf of the harmony of the universe. And he has given each of us a body and bodily parts and property and fellow human beings.

Mindful thereafter of this arrangement, we should proceed to education not in order to change the conditions (for this is not granted to us nor would it be better) but in order that, with things about us as they are and as their nature is, we may keep our minds in harmony with what happens. Tell me then.

Is it possible to escape from people?

How could that happen?

But is it possible to change them by being in their company?

Who gives us that option?

What else is there, then, and what resource can we find for dealing with them?

The sort of resource, whereby they will do what seems good to them, but we shall just as surely be in harmony with nature. Yet you are unhappy and discontented. If you are alone, you call it isolation, but if you are in company, you call people schemers and robbers. You even find fault with your parents and children and brothers and neighbors. But when you are alone, you should call it peace and freedom and liken yourself to the gods. And when you are in a group, you should not call it a crowd and a mob and an unpleasantness, but a party and a festival, and so accept everything cheerfully.

What, then, is the punishment for those who don't accept?

To be just as they are.

A man doesn't like being alone.

Let him be in isolation.

He doesn't like his parents.

Let him be a bad son and moan.

He doesn't like his children.

Let him be a bad father.

Throw him in jail!

What jail? You mean where he is now. For he is there against his will, and wherever someone is against his will, there he is in jail. That's how Socrates was not in jail because he was there willingly.

Freedom from Emotional Distress

What is the fruit of these [Stoic] doctrines?

The very thing that has to be the finest and most fitting outcome for people who are getting a real education — tranquility, fearlessness, and freedom. For on these matters we should not trust the many people who say that education is only available to the free, but rather the philosophers who say that only the educated are free.

What do you mean by this?

Well, ask yourself about freedom in this time of ours; doesn't it consist simply in the power to live as we wish?

Absolutely.

Tell me then, you people, do you wish to live in error?

We do not.

That's right; no one is free who is in error. Do you wish to live in fear and sorrow and disturbance?

Certainly not.

So, no one who is fearful or sorrowful or disturbed is free, but the person who is relieved of sorrows and fears and disturbances is relieved of enslavement by the very same process.

Freedom from Subservience

Do you think freedom is something great and noble and valuable?

Of course.

Is it possible to be submissive if you obtain such a great and valuable and noble thing?

It is not.

So whenever you see someone groveling to another person or flattering him insincerely, you can confidently say that this man also is not free, and not only if he is doing it for the sake of a meager meal but even if he is hoping for a governorship or a consulship. Call people who act like this for small things petty slaves, and call the others, as they deserve, slaves on the grand scale.

You are right again.

Do you think freedom is something in one's own power and self-determined?

Of course.

You can confidently say, then, that no man is free if someone else has the power to obstruct and compel him. And don't consider his family tree, or investigate whether he was ever bought or sold, but if you hear him say, "Yes sir," within himself and with feeling, call him a slave even if he is preceded by a consular retinue. And if you hear him say, "Poor me, what things I suffer," call him a slave. In short, if you see him wailing, complaining, and unhappy, call him a slave in official dress. If, however, he does none of these things, don't call him free yet but examine his judgments to see whether they are in any way subject to compulsion or obstruction or unhappiness, and if you find him to be of that sort, call him a slave on vacation at the *Saturnalia, and say that his master is away. Soon he will come back, and then you will learn the nature of this man's sufferings.

Who will come back?

Everyone who has authority over anything that the man wants, either to get it for him or to take it away from him.

Do we have so many masters then?

Oh yes! Prior to people we have masters in the form of circumstances, and there are lots of those. For this reason, then, everyone with authority over any of our circumstances is bound to be our master. Caesar himself, you see, is not...