How to Think Like a Roman Emperor by Donald Robertson

1. Marcus Aurelius was a Stoic philosopher and Roman Emperor.
2. He used Stoic teachings as a mental toolkit through which to live a resilient, content and virtue-driven life.
3. Cognitive distancing is the most powerful of Stoic teachings & the underpinning of modern cognitive behavioral therapy. It involves creating space between you & your thoughts.

Marcus the man

• The origins of Stoicism - shipwreck of Zeno of Citium
• Marcus’s youth, “the most truthful child in Rome”, penchant for plain speaking
• Saw himself as a Stoic first, emperor second
• Repeatedly told himself that the goal of his life is action, not pleasure
• When he wrote Meditations, was far away on fronts of Macromannic Wars
• Tells himself that resilience comes from his ability to regain his composure wherever he finds himself. The inner citadel he can retreat to, even on frigid battlefields
• Repeatedly warned himself not to become distracted by reading too many books, instead to remain focused on the practical goal of living wisely.

The Stoic Goal of Life

• Defined as ‘living in agreement with Nature,’ synonymous with living wisely and virtuously.
• The 4 cardinal virtues: wisdom, justice, courage, temperance
• The goal is not to seek external advantages, but to use whatever befalls us wisely
• Health, wealth status are preferred vs. not preferred, but never at the expense of virtue
• Human nature is to desire things - reason allows us to assess if that’s actually good for us. Wisdom allows us to judge value, it’s the source of everything else’s value.
• Transient pleasures never lead to true happiness, even though they’re natural.
• We should undertake any action while calmly accepting that the outcome isn’t entirely under our control.

How to Speak Wisely

• The key ideas:
• Concise
• Objective
• Plain, simple terms
• Appropriate to the needs of the listeners. Considerate, tactful.
• Living wisely more important than speaking wisely, but manner of speaking can influence your thoughts and actions
• Avoid strong value judgments and emotional rhetoric
• “This job is complete bullshit!” - perpetuates your own negative emotions, overrides rationality
• “Better to trip with the feet than with the tongue” Zeno

How to Live by Your Values

• Achieving wisdom = prioritizing your character dev & seeking help from others with similar values
• Really hard to find your own faults - so find a mentor, living or dead, or invent one
• Write down the virtues possessed by this person

• Reflect on your values each day & try to describe them concisely
• Morning: prepare yourself for the day - “what would my role model do?”
• Day: Try to be mindful, as though they were watching you
• Night: Review how the day went

How to Conquer Desire

• Evaluate if your habits & desires contribute to long term fulfillment
• Stoics did not avoid pleasure, they avoided excess

• If your cravings, desires stand in the way of virtue:
• Try to visualize consequences of the behavior
• Try replacing the desire with gratitude via negative visualization
• Cognitive distancing - see things objectively as an outsider, use objective descriptive language (e.g. act of sex)
• Consider voluntary discomfort
• Epictetus “It’s not things that make us crave them but our judgments about things.”

• Temperance over excess pleasure. It is is a virtue. Virtue is its own reward.
• Think long term fulfillment.
• Story of Hercules (choosing challenge, adversity, pain vs. cheat codes).
• Parallel for Marcus vs. Lucius Verus, co-emperor. Who had the better life?

How to Tolerate Pain

• Pain is just a sensation, we can choose our response
• If we can withhold judgment that pain is terrible, it’s much easier to be indifferent about it
• Marcus: the demands they place on our attention are for a limited time only, life’s short

• Inevitable in life, is actually an opportunity to practice virtue, develop strengths
• "Pain and discomfort can become advantages in life if they provide opportunities for us to develop our strengths."
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• Coping:
• Perform cognitive distancing to separate yourself from the pain
• Remember that fear of pain often does more harm than fear itself
• View bodily sensations objectively (nerve endings, electrical signals, pressure), avoid emotive language ("feels like I'm dying")
• View the sensation as limited in time, transient:
• If it’s severe, it won’t last long
• If it’s chronic, it could be much worse
• Let go of your struggle against the sensation, release resentment or emotional struggle (pain becomes more painful when we struggle against it mentally, whereas acceptance can produce some relief)

How to Relinquish Fear

• Fear is future focused
• Premeditation of adversity works very well for inoculation
• Builds emotional resilience
• Alignment with clinical research about exposure

• Most of the time, fear does us more harm than the thing we fear.
• Much of the time, the things we fear won’t matter in the long run (20 years from now)

• Being cautious is not the same as being fearful.
• Be cautious of many things
• Be fearful of nothing

• Marcus: zero military experience, had to command 140k men
• “We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more from imagination than from reality” Seneca

• The Stoic Reserve Clause
• "In essence, it means undertaking any action while calmly accepting that the outcome isn't entirely under your control."

• The Premeditation of Adversity
• Stoics prepare themselves to cope with adversity by patiently visualizing every type of misfortune, one at a time, as if it were already happening to them -- poverty, death, illness

1. Emotional habituation - anxiety naturally wears off over time
2. Emotional acceptance - where we gradually reduce our struggle against unpleasant feelings such as pain or anxiety, come to view them with greater indifference, and learn to live WITH them. Paradoxically often greatly alleviates emotional distress.
3. Cognitive distancing - when we increasingly view thoughts and beliefs with detachments, we begin to see its not things themselves that upset us but our judgments about them
4. Decatastrophizing - where we gradually reappraise our judgment about the severity of a situation, of how awful it seems - downgrading from “what if this happens, how will I cope?” To “so what if this happens, it’s not the end of the world”
5. Reality testing - where we reappraise our assumptions about a situation to make them progressively more realistic and objective, for example re evaluations probability of the worst case scenario or that something bad will even happen at all.
6. Problem solving - where repeatedly reviewing an event leads us to creatively figure out a solution to some problem facing us, perhaps like Marcus and his generals idea to march into ambush to spring trap
7. Behavioral rehearsal - where our perception of our ability to cope improves as we practice in our minds eye, applying skills and coping strategies in an increasingly refined manner - ex mentally rehearsing ways to deal with unfair criticism until we are confident about doing so in reality (could take form of modeling behavior of others we admire - how would they act? Then picture us doing something similar).

• Inner Citadel
• Marcus tells himself he doesn't need to get away from it all because true inner peace comes from the nature of our thoughts rather than pleasant natural surroundings. He tells himself that resilience comes from his ability to regain his composure wherever he finds himself.

Life allotted to you is short, so “live as though on a mountain top retreat” regardless of circumstances - everything that troubles us now is just as it would anywhere in the world - what matters is how we choose to view it.

To achieve peace, Marcus tells himself to retreat to his own faculty of reason, thereby rising above external events and purifying his mind of attachment to them. To do this, he must reflect on 2 concise and fundamental stoic principles:

1. Everything that we see is changing and will soon be gone, and we should bear in mind how many things have already changed over time, like the waters of streams flowing ceaselessly past. The contemplation of impermanence.
2. External things can not touch the soul, but disturbances all arise from within. Things don’t upset us, our value judgments about them do. We regain composure by separating our values from external events using cognitive distancing.

6 Greek words: the universe is change, life is opinion.

Cognitive distancing: can be employed during real world or during imagined premeditation. Habituation reduces anxiety, but our real goal is to change our opinions about external events. Gaining cognitive distance is most important aspect of stoic anxiety management. “Life is opinion.”: Quality of our life is determined by our value judgments because those shape our emotions.

When we deliberately remind ourselves that we project our values into external events, and that how we judge those events is what upsets us, we gain cognitive distance and recover mental composure.

Decatastrophizing and the contemplation of impermanence. Former - downgrade to more realistic level. Again can be applied in both real and imagined. Ex: worried about failing exam.

Write down a description of a scene and review later. Write a page. Read aloud, then try to visualize it. Leave out emotive language or value judgments m, stick to facts. Ask yourself “what next?” At most distressing scene to fade catastrophic appearance.

Why shouldn’t I view it as trivial today if I will in the future?

Worry postponement - what if thoughts, chain reaction, feeding one another, fueling anxiety. It’s a conscious and voluntary type of thinking, but people sometimes don’t even realize it’s worrying. They confuse it’s problem solving. Ironic contrast between trying too hard to take care of involuntary aspects of the anxiety emotion while neglecting voluntary. Initial is natural, voluntary thoughts later are on you.

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How to Conquer Anger

• Anger stems from the perspective that an injustice has been committed, it is a desire for punishment
• Initial feelings are instinct, natural
• What matters is if we let it modify our behavior

• Stoics believe no one does wrong willingly
• They’re either ignorant or they think they are doing right
• Their intentions may actually be noble
• If someone believes they’re doing the right thing or an OK thing, why should you be upset?
• If someone does something purely to upset you, all the more reason to ignore it
• Consider someone's character as a whole - imagine the person who annoys you eating dinner, sleeping, etc, remembering that they're people & no one is perfect (including you).
• "The Stoics believed that vicious people fundamentally lack self-love and are alienated from themselves. We must learn to empathize with them and see them as victims of misguided beliefs or errors of judgement, not as malicious."

• Anger does more harm than good.
• When you detect a perceived injustice, it is an opportunity to exhibit virtue
• Anger often coincides with surprise, as we seldom expect to feel slighted.
• Consider negative visualization to anticipate injustices, thereby reducing its power.

• The prescription for anger is similar to that of desire: self monitoring to detect anger, cognitive distancing, postponement (walk away for a while), model virtue from a role model, then imagine following the consequences of your anger (e.g. what will happen if you just yell).
• Remember also that we're all going to die - both you and the person you're angry with will eventually be dead & forgotten, so it isn't worth getting flustered by people's behavior - nothing lasts forever.

How to Prepare for Death

• Death is certain
• It comes for Alexander the Great and his mule driver.
• We are all the same underneath.

• Death is natural
• Return from whence we came.

• Fear of death does us more harm than death when it turns us into cowards.
• To learn how to die is to unlearn how to be a slave.

How to Accept One’s Fate

• The wise man loves life and is grateful for the opportunities it gives him, but he accepts that everything changes and nothing lasts forever.
• Practiced calmly imagining change and loss, like a river gently flowing past, carrying things away.
• Think of Nature as a physician and challenges as the painful remedies which improve our character
• Don’t fight the moment, accept and embrace - amor fati

• “The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.” Marcus
• “One is only unfortunate in proportion as one believes one’s self so.” Seneca

Misc

Of fundamental importance to the development of the idea of natural rights was the emergence of the idea of natural human equality. As the historian A.J. Carlyle notes: "There is no change in political theory so startling in its completeness as the change from the theory of Aristotle to the later philosophical view represented by Cicero and Seneca.... We think that this cannot be better exemplified than with regard to the theory of the equality of human nature."[13] Charles H. McIlwain likewise observes that "the idea of the equality of men is the profoundest contribution of the Stoics to political thought" and that "its greatest influence is in the changed conception of law that in part resulted from it."[14] Cicero argues in De Legibus that "we are born for Justice, and that right is based, not upon opinions, but upon Nature."[15]

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