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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ryan Holiday
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June 30 - July 5, 2024
Justice, you might say, is a team sport. Very few of us are able to do much alone.
Some thought women deserved complete equality, others just the right to vote. But they were all smart enough to see they could go further together for the time being. You help others. They help you. You are better together. That’s how it works. That’s how justice gets done. Still, there is a part of this that can make people uncomfortable. Again, we think that being right is enough. We think merits mean something. Maybe on paper, but not in the arena!
Stalin was not a good man. He was a necessary ally to win World War II—as the United States understood. Hitler learned this the hard way, driving Russia into the arms of Britain and America—the Allies—when he broke the nonaggression pact with Stalin and invaded his former ally. The side with the most allies usually wins. It’s a simple as that. If we’re too pure for this, for friends, for compromise, if we can’t keep our word, if we prove too corrupt or selfish or indecent to partner with, then someone else will fill that void—then they’ll use that power to advance their interests and not ours,
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The Stoics would say that we were put here to work with other people—that the ability to collaborate and connect and compromise is in fact one of the things that makes us human. No one is saying this won’t be infuriating. That it won’t require immense discipline and self-control even to be in the same room with people you’ll have to work with—but that’s the point, you’ll be in the room, working. Not outside, yelling.
to get good things done, you’ll have to come together. That’s a fact. It’s also a fact that you will come to love some of the people you thought you would hate. Or better, that you might convert to love some of the people who were previously driven by hate. That’s the wonderful thing, by allying, by coming together, we are bringing justice in the world.
Let’s destroy our enemies by converting them into friends. Let’s get enough friends to make it impossible for anyone to destroy us. We can make the world better by coming together. By coming together, the world is better.
Churchill reminds us, “There is only one thing worse than fighting with allies, and that is fighting without them.”
Power rules the world. It is very hard to achieve justice without it. It’s very hard to stop injustice without it. It’s very hard to do anything without it.
It is never preordained that justice will prevail. It is, however, almost certain that justice will not prevail without power. Good ideas, good causes, fair notions—they are not just adopted automatically. More often than not, they have to be rammed down people’s throats. Leverage must be acquired. An overwhelming coalition of allies must be assembled. Walls have to be breached. Resistance has to be crushed.
you needed competence to execute…and you needed friends in high places. You needed funding. You needed public support. You needed to be able to force it through. Most of all, you needed power. Too many activists think there is something noble about being outsiders. They think the whole system is corrupt. They think the system is the problem. They’re not wrong—there are real problems. But because of their idealism and purity they’re not able to do anything about those problems, and so they themselves are part of the problem all the same. It’s very hard to change that system from a distance.
“Power per se is nothing bad. It is necessary,” Angela Merkel would explain. “Power is ‘to make’—to do something. The opposite of power is powerless. What’s the use of a good idea if I can’t execute it?” The opposite of power is powerlessness.
The question to ask is: Who does not having power serve? What good does that do? Anyone who wants to do good in this world must be a student of power. Anyone who wants to do something other than sit around and wait for change must read Machiavelli and Robert Greene. They must study the campaigns of the great leaders who got things done…as well as the demagogues and tyrants who did evil things. They must know how to effectively gain and use power as well as how to defend against it. How to acquire allies, how to use them, how to get things done over objections and entrenched interests. In fact,
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Power corrupts, as we know. It’s a dangerous tool. We can’t covet it for its own sake…but we also can’t ignore it and hope for the best.[*]
Could he have accomplished more if he’d been a little more pragmatic? A little less idealistic? Could he have played the game a little better? The reality is that people who get things done have to be both.
That’s one of the ways you get allies—by looking like someone they can do business with. You could argue that this is unfair, that appearances shouldn’t matter, that people should be able to dress and behave however they want, that the only thing that should matter is a person’s character and the righteousness of their cause. And guess what? In arguing this you are proving the very real need for pragmatism. Because we’re not talking about how things should be. We’re talking about how they are.
What you’re doing is important—important enough that you have got to be pragmatic about it.
Justice can be beautifully articulated by a moralist. It is unlikely, however, that they will ever be able to bring such a thing about. What justice needs is not only the honesty and incorruptibility of Harry Truman, but also his ability to survive inside the machine, to get things done. There is a tension between these ideas, to be sure, as Truman well knew.
Pragmatism without virtue is dangerous and hollow. Virtue without pragmatism is ineffectual and impotent. Charles de Gaulle explained that it wasn’t just raw courage that was required to lead, but that a statesman “must know when to dissemble, when to be frank…. Every man of action has a strong dose of egotism, pride, hardness and cunning. But all those things will be forgiven of him—indeed they will be regarded as high qualities—if he can make them the means to achieve great ends.”
He was also a realist and he understood that the good, matched as they were against evil, would need to be both a lion and a fox if they would have any hope of bringing good into the world. That is, brave and savvy.
The ends don’t always justify the means…but what does failing to achieve your ends justify? Is that justice? The reality is that injustice and inhumanity often have an economic logic to them. They have interests behind them. The triumph of the good cannot be left to the ineffectual, the unrealistic, or the naive. Not when the enemy is evil, aggressive, protean, and indefatigable.
An idealogue or a philosopher can be pure. A leader has to make decisions. A leader has to take action. They must be an idealist as well as a realist. Because they have things they have to protect. They can’t turn up their nose at a crumb—not when their people are hungry. They can’t afford to judge a potential ally or insist on perfect messengers. They must take the world, the situation, as it is, not as they would like it to be—especially if they want to change it. They can’t let a hypothetical interfere with an opportunity to help, right here, right now. The fact that they can’t solve all
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Politics, building things, making things happen—it’s dirty, dusty business. We cannot wait for perfect men, nor can we pretend to be pure ourselves. Doing good in this world is not going to be easy. It will not be without its opponents or obstacles. We can call them names. We can despair. We can blame. Or we can get to work. Non angeli sed angli. Stop looking for angels. Start looking for angles.
A more accurate picture of Nightingale would show her as a stern teacher of other nurses—a trainer who developed a generation of talent so they could treat and comfort the wounded.
More than devotion, she understood that patients needed clean beds. More than self-sacrifice, they needed nutritious meals and working heaters. Instead of asking her nurses to be angels, Nightingale studied the traffic flow of the hospital and designed a better communication system—using a series of bells so patients could ring for help—that meant less time running up and down stairs and thus more time providing care. She fought for better ventilation. She brought in donations from the public by the thousand. And then with this money, she was a diligent and skilled steward.
What justice needs is time, money, leadership. What they need is someone who knows what they’re doing.
Competence is not a birthright, nor does it automatically attend a cause just because the cause is right. Compassion is necessary but not sufficient in the pursuit of justice. Courage and discipline too—necessary but pointless without aptitude.
Pragmatism is competence. So is determination and delegation. Competence is competence and there is no substitute for it.
It doesn’t matter that the writer has something important to say, what counts is whether they have the chops to communicate it to the reader. It doesn’t matter that a politician has all the right positions. Do they know how the system works, do they have the staff, do they have the relationships to get it done? It doesn’t matter that the lawyer is willing to take the case. Can they win it? It doesn’t matter that someone feels bad for the vulnerable or the afflicted, or even that they work really hard on their behalf. What counts is whether this effort is actually alleviating that suffering,
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Nor is justice simply about political acumen and people skills. Strength is important too—raw physical power, resources, the ability to win.
Who will stand up to them? Who is strong enough to stop them? We can’t just mean well. We have to be able to do well. What does it say about humanity that effective altruism is a new concept? Every problem must be studied. Every skill must be practiced.
Every variable necessary for success—allies, funding, public support, power—must be cultivated. Impact must be measured. Decisions must be optimized. People must be held accountable. We have to hold ourselves accountable—that’s how we get better.
It will require courage, discipline, and wisdom.
If change, if being of service was easy, everyone would do it. If problems solved themselves, there wouldn’t be problems. The world would be fair and wonderful and the right people would always be in charge. Until then? Until then we have to be smart and capable and competent.
If you’ve been blessed, be a blessing.
Kindness is a form of generosity we can always afford.
How are you doing? Do you need anything? Great job. I appreciate you.
you look at your career, it bears asking: Who have you given a shot? Who have you helped get ahead? More revealing, how similar to you or unlike you were these people?
By supporting, encouraging, and influencing others—including our own children—our efforts can live on. Mentor. Patron. Sponsor. Ally. Teacher. Master. Guru. Inspiration.
what matters is that we are the candle that lights another, which lights another, which lights another. Because through this whole worlds are illuminated, delivered from darkness.
Cato and many of the Stoics had a north star that pointed them into opposition to anyone who tried to tell them or anyone what to do—anyone who abused power and wielded it against the weak. In fact, the expression sic semper tyrannis (thus always to tyrants) traces itself all the way to Scipio Aemilianus, one of the great Stoic generals before the turn of the millennium.
George Washington, who modeled himself on Cato his entire life, tried to look at every situation with Cato’s dispassion, through the calm light of mild philosophy. But his view on justice, on the goal of a good government, a just world, was captured in a line that he borrowed from the scriptures: “Every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.”[*]
tyranny is tyranny. It puts us all at risk.
The Stoics say we build a life, create change, action by action, step by step. “No one can stop you from that,” Marcus Aurelius wrote in Meditations. There’s a fountain of goodness there, inside us, in the world, Marcus wrote. We must make sure it keeps bubbling up. No one can make you give up on your cause—that’s the one thing you control. They can shower you with curses. They can erect countless obstacles. They can attack you with knives and fists (as happened to people like John Doar and James Meredith). They can bury you in paperwork. They can slow-walk you into near insanity. But the
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As we face them, we must keep going. We put one foot in front of the other. We follow the process, make the progress that we can. We built momentum. We keep going back. And eventually, inevitably, someone—we or someone carrying the torch we helped light—succeeds.
The work of our lives is to go from this dependence to dependability, from being taken care of to being a caretaker—but not just for our own children if we choose to have them, but for others, for ideas, for causes, for justice itself.
A Stoic named Hierocles famously illustrated this as a series of concentric circles. Each individual, he said, was born at the center of these circles, primarily concerned with ourself. With time, we expand our circles of concern or compassion to the people we love, the people who live around us, the people like us. But beyond these inner rings lies a larger world, composed of our fellow human beings spread out across the world, the environment, animals, even future generations we will never meet. The work of philosophy, he said, of justice, was the process of pulling these outer rings closer
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The power of the dollar doesn’t work against people who prize only what is free and naturally theirs. “Be careful in dealing with a man who cares nothing for sensual pleasures, nothing for comfort or praise or promotion, but is simply determined to do what he believed to be right,” a British scholar had warned of Gandhi. “He is a dangerous and uncomfortable enemy because his body which you can always conquer gives you so little purchase of his soul.”
In October 1947, as he said goodbye to his grandson, he handed him a small slip of paper that listed the seven blunders of humanity. Wealth without work. Pleasure without conscience. Knowledge without character. Commerce without morality. Science without humanity. Religion without sacrifice. Politics without principle.
…high standards of personal conduct …friendship and tolerance …lifting up the unfortunate and vulnerable …virtuous pragmatism …the transformative power of nonviolence …forgiveness and love …and more love and more love and more love.
man must go down fighting,” Percy wrote. “That is the victory.” To not let them break you. To keep going back. To focus on the progress that has been made, that is the victory. Our north star is still up there, still shining. Let’s follow it.
