And Justice for All
Sweet Bites for June 28, 2024
Hi all,
Welcome to another edition of Sweet Bites, Mind Candy’s bite-sized newsletter with thought-provoking finds to send you into the weekend with.
This week we rounded out our monthly theme of Virtue with an exploration of the virtue of Justice (links below).
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Choose Your Dessert for the Week
📖 Story
The Sacrifice of One for Many
As World War II raged on in Europe, a small resistance group grew in Poland. Known as the Secret Polish Army (SPA), these veterans worked to undermine the advance of the Nazi regime.
Soon, the SPA got word of a camp where thousands went but no one returned.
The camp was known as Auschwitz.
One of the SPA’s members, Witold Pilecki, recommended the SPA infiltrate the camp as the Allies had no information on it. For months his superiors refused until finally they relented and allowed Pilecki his mission.
I’m order to infiltrate Auschwitz, Pilecki allowed himself to be captured after curfew by SS soldiers. Once there, he was subjected to manual labor, beatings, and starvation. Yet he found a way to sneak messages out of the camp and back to the SPA.
But then something changed, suddenly, the camp was being populated with thousands of Jews. Worse, they were being killed in the thousands per day.
Pilecki continued to send messages, now frantically, to the SPA advising of the horrors he was witnessing. He told them they needed to send help, they needed to move this up the chain, they needed real reinforcements.
But his messages went unanswered. His memos got all the way up the chain to Eisenhower and Churchill but no reinforcements came.
After two years, he came to the stark conclusion: no one was coming to save them. The man who broke into Auschwitz would now have to find a way to break out and tell the world of the horrors he witnessed.
Faking an illness, he got out of work and went to the medical bay where he told them he worked as a night baker in the camp. The doctors released him back to the bakery and he was able to switch into other clothes and slip out a door where he ran over a mile to the closest river and escaped to safety.
Pilecki had sacrificed his life to save others and it was through his first-hand knowledge of the horrors that the Allies came to know of what the Nazis were doing.
Justice is not an easy thing, it is not the same as the law. Justice is deeper, it blossoms from the core of our existence, it comes about through an understanding of our shared existence and the need to protect this existence. Justice is about seeing outside of the self and about taking actions to ensure we’re all able to co-exist.
At the end of his life, after continuing to fight for Poland and its people in different capacities, Pilecki was captured by the Communists who had risen to power.
Held to on trumped up charges and awaiting execution, Pilecki was given a chance to state his case. He simply said:
“I have tried to live my life such that in the hour of my death I would feel joy rather than fear.”
📰 Article Worth a Read
Why Some People Choose Not to Know: Altruists seek to understand how their actions will affect others—whereas willful ignorance can free people to act selfishly by Linh Vu and Margarita Leib
🦉 Wisdom
“No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands, and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are obstructions.”
Marcus Aurelius
Source: Meditations 2.1
📚 This Week’s Monday Meditation
🍰 Mini Bite
The Freedom to Accept Feedback
The blogger Tim Urban once discussed how he tested some book chapters of What's Our Problem? on his audience and how one reader helped him better the book through constructive feedback.
“Okay. And it doesn't feel good. You'd rather everyone love it. But it's important to read those [critical comments] and to reflect on them, especially if this is a topic you're going to either write about more in the future, or in my case, if you're about to turn this into a book. That's gold.”
Each time he would post a new article, one specific reader articulated in clear and structured thought why Urban’s arguments were flawed and proposed counter arguments that showed the gaps.
“I was like, "This guy's annoying me because his comments are really like they're on point and they're long and they're thorough."
Annoyed him that is until he realized what a gift it was. Rather than block the reader or degrade him, he privately reached out when the time was right and asked him to read a copy of his book and provide feedback.
I said, "Are you interested in potentially reading the draft of this book for feedback?" And he was so down to do that and wrote back with extremely thorough comments. And the book is better because of him. I'm extremely grateful.”
Decisions aren’t made in a silo, bad decisions are. We learn to make the right decisions by having our beliefs and thoughts questioned, by trying to figuring just the right approach.
“I think if someone has a very thoughtful critic who's, in the end, doing you a service by putting all this time into giving these comments, this is a service, take it.”
🛠️ Tactic
Those who accomplish great things in life understand that no one has the right answer for the problem from the beginning. Much of life is filled with fumbling around in the dark, even for the most successful, trying to figure out how best to accomplish the task at hand.
Jeff Bezos’ method to solutioning is based heavily on the art of wandering. He doesn’t stack meetings because his meetings always run over, and they run over because he allows time for him and his team to wander.
Wandering is the art of exploring different paths, weighing pros and cons, as you try and find the best possible solution to the problem. There is intrigue and excitement in wander. It allows creativity to flow, to mentally think through different options and see where they could end up. These types of brainstorming sessions allow for people to think through their thoughts and see where it could succeed and where it could fail. Just because part of it doesn’t work doesn’t mean the entire idea won’t.
“It will be easy to find objections,” Bezos sagas to his team, “but work with me, there’s something there.”
✏️ This Week’s Wednesday Wisdom
📖 Book Recommendation
Right Thing, Right Now by Ryan Holiday
Ryan Holiday is best known for bringing Stoicism to a broad audience with his book The Daily Stoic as well as The Obstacle is the Way, The Lives of the Stoics, and now, his Stoic Virtues series (Courage is Calling, Discipline is Destiny).
In his latest book, he explores the virtue of Justice and how it is needed now more than ever.
Favorite Passages:
“Are we going to be perfect? Get it right every time? Doubtful. We will lose our bearings in this life. We will be tempted off the path… But when we falter, when we get lost, we can look up at that celestial point. We can check in with our conscience. Follow it, and we'll get where we need to go.”
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“Each of us is capable of taking a step. Each of us can do a little good... and this little good adds up.”
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“What is surprising, or rather, disappointing, is to find out that you did it for the wrong reasons. That you were more self-involved than selfless. That it didn't come from a place of strength and generosity but of insecurity or thirst. There is nothing more desperate— and calculating—than a person who goes around thinking about "legacy." (As if anyone is around to enjoy posthumous fame.)”
📖 Monthly Recap
Wisdom
Courage
Temperance
Justice
Until next time,
D.A. DiGerolamo
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