Friday, April 4, 2025

The Bottom line: Courage

The ELEPHANT in the room, bottom line, MUST BE to have the courage to make GOOD TROUBLE!

Lincoln Project's Rick Wilson, who calls himself a practicing Stoic makes a solid case in this video today for why the Stoic virtue of courage is the most important. Without courage, there can be no other virtue.


On March 3, 2020, DailyStoic.com made the same claim.

The Stoics believed that a life well lived was one which always countered adversity with virtue. And they believed in four aspects of virtue: courage, temperance, justice, and wisdom. Each and every situation calls for one or more of these four Stoic virtues, and nothing in life exempts us from their power.
 
Today, we begin with one of the most important: Courage.

If you’ve read Cormac McCarthy’s dark and beautiful novel All the Pretty Horses, you’ll remember the key question that Emilio Perez asks John Grady, one that cuts to the core of life and what we all must do to live a life worth living.

“The world wants to know if you have cojones. If you are brave?”

Americans in this era of having to cope with Trump in his second term as president, gravely face the same question. If you've been paying attention, I don't need to make an argument for it. Trump is the argument. Unless the collective WE (the PEOPLE) RISE UP (and I am confident that WE WILL), Trump has already made short work of undermining the Constitution. 

Each of us can only answer it for ourselves. 

 

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