this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2024
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A guy comes along and tells us that we should have some self control, patience and a tempered response to difficult situations instead of jumping straight into anger and fury, and your take is that this concept is just privileged sexism?
Weird o.O
well, yes.
what this guy says is basically gaslighting emotional people.
also, he doesnt say "yo, if you have a bad day, just chill" he condones the angry and complaining. that is a call to discipline. from a roman emperor.
i dont understand how this could be seen as self help advice.
if you are angry, be. if you have things to complain on, do.
and if you see someone else being angry and or complaining, how about not labeling them anything? we are all angry from time to time. and complaining about unfairness is our first nature. not acting on your complaints wont get you anywhere, but you do stay productive. not acting on your anger will keep you a nice fellow, but do consider who you want to be a fellow with.
also, i didnt say sexism. because it isnt. it's just denying certain emotions due to them being inconvenient in a "civilized" society. emotions caused by unfair, but "civilized" actions and norms.
i mean, i dont know exactly what he had in mind when writing that, but, like, there are only so many things that concern an emperors mind.
It's an excerpt from Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. Aurelius was a philosopher in addition to an Emperor, and his writings are excellent-but-pretty-orthodox expressions of Stoic doctrine of the time.
The big three surviving philosophical schools of the time all had a very "Look inwards" worldview - Stoicism claiming that we decide ourselves how the outside world pains or does not pain us; Epicureans claiming that it is by learning to appreciate the simple pleasures of life that one achieves contentment with life; and Cynics claiming that mankind is happiest in a state of nature, and that the constructs of human society are window dressing at best - as such, one should act according to one's 'gut' in any given situation.
i still cant take it for what you say it is.
there was/is this dude (perhaps a journalist) who coined a question to ask oneself as a reader.. "who? says what? to whom? with what purpose? using what channel?"
something like that. and since being able to read/write wasnt as common as today, i can only read this as "to whoever wants to be a good citizen: beware" coming from a ruler, and pointedly not "how to be a happy human on earth <3"
but that is just me. and i only replied again because iheartneopets replied, but he basically says what you were saying... so i feel like you deserve my response more.
sorry if you were hoping lecturing me was over :P
No, no, I enjoy discussing such things!
Marcus Aurelius's Meditations were not released during his lifetime - they were his, well, private meditations. It wasn't a call for the citizens of the Empire to be obedient - there is a fascinating tradition of Emperors doing that, but it uses very different phrasing and is typically divorced from the Greek philosophical tradition that Aurelius drew upon when writing the Meditations. You find many other Emperors exhorting the citizenry to be dutiful and loyal to the Roman state, but Aurelius and Julian the Apostate are the only ones with serious philosophical inclinations that they express in their writings. I don't think it's too bizarre to think that, out of some 500 years of rulers, two were genuinely interested in and proficient with philosophy.
i found the first mention of rome in that book and basically, speaking about societies that didnt write (like the celts and uh germanics) the authors cite another book by some jack goody saying something like (im translating a german book here citing an english author... oh well, good night. as we say in german:) regarding their gendernorms we have little more than observations from roman authors like tacitus, which often - partly due to ignorance and partly to make a political statement in rome - seemed to talk not about real people but ideal types. greek and roman authors who spoke about wars, wrote that women were allegedly present on battlefields, cheering on their men and caring for their wounded. In extreme cases, as plutarch wrote women too would wield axes or swords. but it is questionable as to how reliable these depictions are, or whether the authors wanted to point out how "barbaric" it was outside of the male dominated culture of the roman empire.
the authors of "the good book of human nature" then state "it is difficult to make a statement about how women fared in the script free europe." it then blames a disinterested and long time male dominated archeological field. apparently archeologists kept finding rich burial sites from iron age women in middle europe, but the scientists didnt question their roles in day to day goings. graves of rich women were apparently as lavish as their male counter parts, but even worse than ignorance, some graves were attributed wrongly to men, like the "Fuerstin von Vix" discovered in 1953, they thought she must have been a man, since such riches were unimaginable to have belonged to a woman. died 490 bce and some analysis showed she was female... while typing i realize some problem.... anyway. i think this could explain why i assumed the role of women was what i said... not much info and it was bad later, so why shouldnt it have been bad before there already?
i guess patriarchy was mostly monotheistic religion's fault
edit: clarifying last line, and some grammar in the middle
He wrote this for himself in his Meditations. So he wasn't telling this to anyone but himself, therefore not 'gaslighting' anyone. Beyond being a roman emperor, he is also a pretty respected philosopher, and that generally doesn't happen without having something interesting to say on the subject.
I kind of understand the objection, though. It's a short step from "it isn't manly to be enraged" to "just pull yourself up from your bootstraps." I don't think that's what Marcus Aurelius was saying, but I can see how someone might read it that way.
Great advice if your goal is to be destructive to yourself and others. I am recovering from abuse and can for sure say that nothing good has ever come from, or will ever come from anger. We're all angry from time to time. And it's still destructive as its only quality. Being violent in thought or action is not useful. Ever. Only apologists hiding from reality will say that being angry was good. Every scenario you can pose is better met with good temper. Even under actual physical attack, a calm collected response leads to superior outcomes. There is no real world use for anger. It is a remnant hunter gatherer feature.
Delete because better response already written in meantime
based