A Birthday for a Philosopher-King
Sweet Bites for April 26, 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 explored the theme of disgust and its usage in society (link below).
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🦉 Wisdom
Today is Marcus Aurelius’s birthday. In honor of the Philosopher-King, here are 5 quotes on living a good life, even in tough times.
“Nothing has meaning to my mind except its own actions. Which are within its own control. And it's only the immediate ones that matter. Its past and future actions too are meaningless.”
“Someone despises me. That's their problem. Mine: not to do or say anything despicable. Someone hates me. Their problem. Mine: to be patient and cheerful with everyone, including them... As long as you do what's proper to your nature, and accept what the world's nature has in store - as long as you work for others' good, by any and all means - what is there that can harm you?”
“Don't be ashamed to need help.”
“Four habits of thought to watch for, and erase from your mind when you catch them. Tell yourself:
-This thought is unnecessary.
-This one is destructive to the people around you.
-This wouldn't be what you really think (to say what you don't think - the definition of absurdity).
-And the fourth reason for self-reproach: that the more divine part of you has been beaten and subdued by the degraded mortal part - the body and its stupid self-indulgence.”
“That every event is the right one. Look closely and you'll see. Not just the right one overall, but right. As if someone had weighed it out with scales.”
✏️ This Week’s Wednesday Wisdom
As a reminder, I have been posting Wednesday Wisdom’s via Substack Notes for our trial this month.
This week, our Wednesday Wisdom revolved around the philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s analysis of disgust.
You can download the app below if interested and follow all the Notes I post.
📰 Article
Incitement to violence is rarely explicit – here are some techniques people use to breed hate by H. Colleen Sinclair
In this article, Sinclair dives into some of the rhetoric and tactics people use to assist in mass manipulation that help to divide individuals from one another.
As we discussed throughout the week, anger and disgust go hand-in-hand. As I said in the Wednesday Wisdom, “Disgust becomes most prominent within a culture when fear does. Fear gives rise to anger, and anger is then manipulated into disgust.”
Quote I’m Reflecting On:
“To build a “story of hate,” a good guy is needed to counter the villain. So whatever dehumanizing quality is present in the outgroup, the opposite is present in the ingroup. If “they” are the Antichrist, “we” are the children of God.”
📖 Book Recommendation
Just Babies by Paul Bloom
Paul Bloom is a Yale psychologist who has written on several topics of living a more fulfilled life in works such as How Pleasure Works, The Sweet Spot, and Against Empathy.
in Just Babies, Bloom argues that from birth, we humans are built with some sense of moral framework.
Favorite quotes/passages:
“What we do see at all ages, though, is an overall bias toward equality. Children expect equality, prefer those who divide resources equally, and are strongly biased to divide resources equally themselves. This fits well with a certain picture of human nature, which is that we are born with some sort of fairness instinct: we are natural-born egalitarians.”
—
“Some of us are tempted to cheat and kill and succumb to selfish impulses, and for the rest of us to survive in the presence of these individuals, we need to make this bad behavior costly.”
—
“Babies make distinctions between familiar and strange people almost immediately. Newborn babies prefer to look at their mother's face rather than at a stranger's face; they prefer their mother's smell; and they prefer her voice.”
🕺🏼 Experience
Robert Sapolsky is a famous scientist who has written such works as Behave, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, and most recently Determined.
In the video below presented by BigThink, Sapolsky breaks down the evolution of the brain and how disgust evolved from its evolutionary origins to how we use it today.
“Hey when you get to humans, this part of the brain that detects toxins on your tongue does moral disgust as well.”
📚 This Week’s Newsletter
Until next week,
D.A. DiGerolamo
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