Review: Right Thing, Right Now by Ryan Holiday
Good Values. Good Character. Good Deeds. (The Stoic Virtues Series)
Right Thing, Right Now: Good Values. Good Character. Good Deeds, published in June 2024, is the third book in Ryan Holiday's Stoic Virtues series. The first two books deal with the virtues of courage and discipline, while this one is about justice.
I want to begin at the end, as it were, by highlighting the afterword, in which Holiday discusses his personal journey with Stoicism. He notes that he was initially drawn to the philosophy because of its psychological benefits, such as developing self-discipline and emotional resilience.
“Like most people, when I was first drawn to Stoicism, I was attracted to what it could do for me. I was looking for stuff I could use. My Stoicism was largely a stern one, about treating the body rigorously, as Seneca said. Getting up early. Running. Fulfilling your potential. Conquering your emotions. Discipline. Fortitude. Grit.”
This, he says, was a more self-centered version of Stoicism, where the priority is to maintain your own equanimity by ignoring things that you believe are none of your business. Over time, he says, the "deeper message” of the Stoics sunk in, and changed him. He came to care much more about the social aspects of the philosophy, and its emphasis upon social responsibility and the common welfare of mankind.
“The reason I walked away from marketing instead of becoming an edgelord is because Stoicism had given me the clarity to realize that that was not who I was meant to be. That was not a good direction to take one’s life, no matter how rich or powerful it might make you.”
In short, Holiday describes how Stoicism led him on a journey of personal transformation. He says he became a better person through his study of it and by trying to follow its teachings in daily life. Stoicism opened his eyes, in particular, to the importance of doing things that make the world a better place, if we want to live a truly meaningful and fulfilled life.
Holiday is right that if you read Marcus Aurelius enough times, you should notice how frequently he refers to the common good. (More than eighty times, by his count.) It’s baffling that people can read Meditations, claim it’s one of their favorite books, and yet seem oblivious to one of the most prominent themes. On more or less every page, Marcus refers to justice, kindness, natural affection, the brotherhood of humankind, cosmopolitanism, and other concepts related to social virtue.
Yet some people still claim to find in Marcus Aurelius a self-centered and hard-hearted version of “Stoicism” that encourages indifference toward the rest of humanity. That’s the opposite of what I think he, and indeed the other Stoics, actually meant. In reality, many of the famous Stoics were very active in politics, and some famously risked, and even lost, their lives standing up against despots — look up the “Stoic Opposition” for some examples. When I come across Stoicism being interpreted as a philosophy of moral indifference, therefore, it reminds me of William Blake’s saying: “Both read the Bible day and night, But thou read'st black where I read white.”
The sort of people who like to think of Stoicism as a form of hard-hearted individualism are probably going to be surprised that Holiday has written a book about justice. If they do acknowledge that justice is a virtue, in my experience, they often tend to think of it as somehow divorced from qualities such as compassion and kindness. Perhaps that’s because most people today think of “justice” primarily as a sort of principle of fairness, of the kind supposed to be enforced by the law.
Ancient philosophers, such as the Stoics, speak of dikaiosune, which is traditionally referred to in English as the cardinal virtue of “Justice”—but it’s not a very good translation. In the past, the word “righteousness” was sometimes used instead because dikaiosune implies doing what is morally right, as well as what is fair or just. Crucially, it encompasses acting with the virtue of kindness, something that’s too often lost in translation. Holiday, though, is aware that we’re talking about social virtue, or morality, in a broader sense. He has therefore filled this book with examples of individuals he views as exemplifying the virtue of justice in action, through their moral integrity and fairness in dealing with others, but also their humanity, compassion, and kindness.
Right Thing, Right Now opens with the famous allegory known as The Choice of Hercules—in a section preceding the introduction. In Xenophon’s Memorabilia of Socrates. It’s the story of a young man who finds himself at a fork in the road, at which he must make a profound decision, choosing between the path of virtue and the path of vice—an existential choice that will shape his character for the rest of his life.
Hercules, of course, chose virtue, although it meant enduring great hardship, in the form of the “Twelve Labors.” Holiday presumably has experiences from his own life in mind when he cites this allegory, but he is sharing it with us because it relates to an almost universal human experience. To some extent, we are all confronted with moral decisions that shape our lives. This decision can be made somewhat easier if we have good role models, such as friends or family members, whom we trust and admire, and whose examples we’re confident that we can follow. It becomes a major crisis, though, if there’s nobody we can turn to for direction.
Since the early days of Stoicism, people have been attracted to the philosophy because they believed it offered a remedy for troubling emotions, such as anxiety and depression, and a method of building greater emotional resilience in the future. Spinoza expressed this uncertainty and craving for happiness very dramatically in an unfinished manuscript when he describes how bouts of “extreme melancholy” drove him, as a young man, on a quest to procure a philosophical balm for his troubled mind:
“I thus perceived that I was in a state of great peril, and I compelled myself to seek with all my strength for a remedy, however uncertain it might be; as a sick man struggling with a deadly disease, when he sees that death will surely be upon him […] is compelled to seek such a remedy with all his strength, inasmuch as his whole hope lies therein.” — De Intellectus Emendatione, 4-5
In one of his private letters, Marcus Aurelius, in his mid-twenties, seems to describe going through a similar crisis. Fortunately, though, Marcus could turn to the two men that he most admired: his adoptive father, the emperor Antoninus Pius; and his Stoic mentor, Junius Rusticus.
Holiday observes, however, as many people have, that a growing number of angry and discontented young men, lost souls, as it were, seem to be looking for self-improvement online because they have no one to whom they can turn. For some reason, they’re no longer getting what they need from their parents or teachers. Ironically, Stoicism often appeals to them not because it advocates social virtue and commitment to the common welfare of mankind, but rather because they associate it with a sort of hard-hearted individualism and emotional toughness.
“We have a generation of lost young men. Women are thriving in school, in higher education, and in the workplace in encouraging and inspiring ways. Men in America and in many other countries, the statistics show, seem to be in a kind of doom loop. They’re struggling. They’re angry. They’re angry that on top of their own struggles, they’re supposed to care about other people who are struggling for different reasons. That they have to consider other people’s disadvantages, other injustices than the ones they’re dealing with.”
The causal relationship here is obviously circular: our personal suffering makes us angry, our anger alienates us from other people, and this alienation merely causes us even more suffering.
By contrast, one of the fundamental goals of Stoicism is to achieve a sense of harmony, or unity, within ourselves and with the world around us, but also with the rest of humanity. That’s the foundation of the Stoic cardinal virtues. Marcus Aurelius, for instance, constantly warns himself about allowing himself to feel inherently separate or alienated from the rest of mankind. These young men, though, feel absolutely alienated from others. Their obvious discontentment is like blood in the water, attracting online sharks, in the form of particularly cynical self-improvement influencers who seek to exploit this very weakness for their own ends.
“It shouldn’t surprise us that demagogues and grifters would step into this void, playing off these insecurities, offering (mis) guidance as well as grievances. They’ve taken the tenets of Stoic philosophy, perverted it, mixed it with equal parts toxic masculinity and ressentiment [...]. This is clearly good business, as some of the massive online audiences of certain controversial figures indicate. They are speaking to people who were ignored and feel mistreated, and perhaps it was inevitable that someone would step in to meet this demand. All I know is that I won’t be one of those people.”
A lot of young men, perhaps inevitably, feel most insecure about their masculinity. That’s the point at which their sense of self is weakest and most vulnerable. Today, they often complain that they’re receiving mixed messages from society, which confuses them even more about the values and goals that they’re “supposed” to have. Real men, they’re told, get married and have kids, or maybe they’re players who go around having sex with as many women as they please. Real men are also supposedly tough-minded and even aggressive in defending their interests. Anger, not kindness, often seems like a virtue to vulnerable young men because they’re led, by influencers in the so-called “manosphere”, to associate it with power. Just scroll through the rabid comments, though, on YouTube videos published by some of the most prominent influencers appealing to this demographic. Ask yourself: are the young men consuming this content becoming less angry or more angry as a result? You don’t need to be a psychologist to realize that it’s doing them more harm than good — that much is pretty obvious to most impartial observers.
These contradictory values create an obvious problem for young men: anger, as research consistently shows, tends to be associated with social isolation. Their “masculine” role models often seem to be encouraging, and even modeling, precisely the antisocial qualities that lead to deeper alienation. These attitudes prevent lasting and fulfilling relationships from being formed with anyone, especially members of the opposite sex. As is often the case when people find themselves in a state of desperation, the “solution” they keep reaching for often just makes their problem even worse.
“A branch cut off from the adjacent branch must of necessity be cut off from the whole tree also. So too a man when he is separated from another man has fallen off from the whole social community. Now as to a branch, another cuts it off but a man by his own act separates himself from his neighbor when he hates him and turns away from him and he does not know that he has at the same time cut himself off from the whole social system. Yet he has this privilege certainly from Zeus, who framed society, for it is in our power to grow again to that which is near to us, and again to become a part which helps to make up the whole. However, if it often happens, this kind of separation, it makes it difficult for that which detaches itself to be brought to unity and to be restored to its former condition. Finally, the branch, which from the first grew together with the tree, and has continued to have one life with it, is not like that which after being cut off is then ingrafted, for this is something like what the gardeners mean when they say that it grows with the rest of the tree, but that it has not the same mind with it.” – Meditations, 11.8
Anger, in other words, divides us not only from the person with whom we’re angry but from the whole of mankind. That’s because anger isn’t just an attitude, it’s a whole state of mind, and perhaps even becomes a way of life for some people. Whether you’re outraged by “cultural Marxists,” “radical feminists,” “MAGA lunatics,” vegans, drag queens, or some other group of bogeymen or scapegoats, you place yourself in a condition of “temporary madness” that will inevitably come to infect your relationships with everyone else. One minute you’re yelling at the television, the next you find yourself snapping angrily, for no reason, at your best friend. (Your girlfriend has already left you!) Anger corrodes the very fabric of society in this way.
When the more inward-looking emotions, such as anxiety and depression, dominate, they typically manifests as worry, guilt, and self-recrimination over our inability to secure for ourselves the things we desire. (That’s because externals are never entirely under our control.) For the angry young men who proliferate on the Internet, however, it takes a different form. Anger is an externalizing emotion. The angry typically blame other people, both individually and collectively, for their problems. As such, it’s the emotion perhaps furthest removed from a state of mind in which we take genuine ownership and moral responsibility for our lives. That makes it even more remarkable when some of those claiming to be experts on self-improvement appear to do everything in their power to stir up outrage among their followers, and to fuel their hatred and anger toward others.
What the Stoics meant by “justice” (dikaiosune) encompassed the virtues of both fairness and kindness. Kindness is the polar opposite of anger. In anger, we desire to get revenge on others by harming them. In kindness, we seek to help them progress toward wisdom and virtue. Anger is also contrary to fairness because when we are angry we lack empathy and understanding, and do not treat others as we would wish to be treated by them, if the tables were turned. The angrier someone becomes, the more they tend to believe their anger is justified and righteous. As anger grows among us, justice truly withers and dies. Holiday’s book encourages its readers to think more deeply about the true meaning of justice, and what it looks like in real life. The Stoics believed that our own anger does us even more harm than the people with whom we’re angry. Likewise, true acts of kindness potentially do us even more good than they do the people to whom we’re being kind.
Holiday opens this book by saying that “The clearest evidence that justice is the most important of all the virtues” comes from the fact that the other virtues seem worthless, or even downright bad, without it. I agree, and it seemed to me, therefore, that this came across, in a sense, as being the most important of his series of books on the cardinal virtues. Wisdom without justice seems self-centered; courage without justice sounds like the boldness of a criminal; self-discipline without justice likewise sounds like it could be the mark of someone cruel and dangerous. We could perhaps go further and wonder whether some individuals who believe they are engaged in self-improvement but who ignore or oppose social virtue may inadvertently end up training themselves in vice. As we’ve seen, there are definitely well-known self-improvement influencers, with huge numbers of followers, who encourage misogyny and other qualities that many impartial observers consider the opposite of virtue.
Fortunately, there is much that can be done to help those who feel lost and are sincerely looking for ways to better themselves. Holiday mentions the Golden Rule in his introduction. This really does offer an important ethical guideline. It helps address the common complaint that philosophy is too complicated or ambiguous to offer any answers that might be of practical value.
“That’s the golden rule, right? Treat others how you would want to be treated. And who wants to be treated any way other than kindly? With respect? With fairness? It’s not just a rule, it’s a way of living. The Stoics said we should try to see every person we meet as an opportunity for kindness. This is a wonderful change in perspective. It transforms daily life, as challenging and noxious as it can be, into a series of chances, one after another, to be nice, to do something nice, to be considerate, to make a positive difference.”
The Golden Rule might not be comprehensive, but it’s easy to understand, and countless people have found it valuable over the centuries. If you’re confused about the difference between right and wrong, at the very least you can probably start with the observation that almost everyone hates moral hypocrisy. Justice must be fair, and it cannot be fair if it is based on a double standard. The Golden Rule therefore provides a useful heuristic method for applied ethics—it represents a sort of moral baseline. You’ll find, I believe, that the most cynical and exploitative influencers in the self-improvement field don’t even pass the smell test in this regard.
Right Thing, Right Now contains many anecdotes from a wide variety of historical figures, from Harry S. Truman to Florence Nightingale and Mahatma Gandhi. Holiday refers to either Stoic philosophy or Marcus Aurelius nearly a hundred times by my count, explicitly maintaining the Stoic theme of the series, although Stoicism is implicit throughout. Like his previous books, it’s a joy to read. It’s not a theoretical treatise on Stoic philosophy but a moral exhortation, by means of exemplary biography, in the tradition of Plutarch’s Lives. For that reason, it’s likely to reach, and benefit, a much wider audience than a dry academic work on Stoicism.
Right Thing, Right Now gives its readers numerous examples to contemplate and potentially emulate. If there’s one abiding impression in particular worth taking from it, however, I think that would have to be the realization that justice is something we all have a responsibility to pursue, both for the sake of others and for our own sake. Ultimately, what I do to others, I do to myself. If I wish only to help them rather than harm them, I will help myself in the process, and that is what I call the royal road to self-improvement.
You hit the nail on the head with this review. I really feel it’s Holiday’s best work. As an educator, I see what is happening with many young men and it motivates me to continue to work in the field as I move into my 60’s.
I buy extra copies of his books and of yours Mr. Robertson to give to young folks in hopes of making a difference.
Once again, Ryan Holiday provides us with clear, timely, and persuasive teachings about the importance of virtue in human life!
And also here, “icing on the cake” - a truly brilliant, comprehensive, and mind-boggling book review/essay by Donald J. Robertson!