They Have Been Misled | The Road Trip That Put Stoicism To The Test

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. They have been misled. Why do they do it? Why do they support those policies, condone such things, shrug their shoulders at such injustices? It could be because these people are evil and awful.

It could also just be because they don't know any better. It could be that they don't know any better because someone told them much worse. Mark Twain grew to hate slavery in those who support it, but his mother, whom he loved and knew as a sweet and wonderful person, grew up as a participant in that system. So how did he square those two contradictions? As he reflected, kind hearted and compassionate as she was,

I think she was not conscious that slavery was a bald, grotesque, and unwarranted usurpation. As far as her experience went, the wise, the good, and the holy were unanimous in the belief that slavery was right, righteous, sacred, the peculiar pet of the deity, and a condition which the slave himself ought to be daily and nightly thankful for. In other words, she had been taught to see slavery as something other than what it was. The church, the government, her parents, her neighbors all told her it was right. And like most people at that time she found it easier to accept what everyone around her believed than to question it for herself, than to see it with her own eyes.

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