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That's when you see it, that purple pay button that has all of your information saved, making checking out as simple as a simple tap of your screen. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world, from household names like all birds and skims to brands just getting started. Shopify is your commerce expert with world-class expertise in everything from managing inventory to international shipping to processing returns and beyond. And what if I get stuck? Shopify is always around to share advice with their award-winning 24-7 customer support. See less cards go abandoned and more sales go with Shopify and their shop pay button. Sign up for your $1 a month trial today at Shopify.co.uk slash stoic. Go to Shopify.co.uk slash stoic. That's Shopify.co.uk slash stoic. Welcome to the Daily stoic podcast. Designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. Seven or eight years ago, it was late at night. I was driving home from the airport just trying to get home and I got pulled over in rural Texas where I lived. It was a weird experience. I get pulled over, I get to the side of the road and the cop walks up and as he walks up to my car, he sees me immediately relaxes and then basically lets me go. And it wasn't because he recognized me or anything like that. And I didn't quite understand why I'd been pulled over or why I was let go. Until a few months later, I read an article that was about traffic stops here in Bastrop County where I live. And it turns out that our sheriff had been doing targeted traffic stops, basically tic-tac violations to try to catch Latino immigrants who were then detained and eventually deported. And this was a major news story and I didn't realize until I read it that I had been caught up in exactly that. Now you might say that this is an example of what we call privilege, right? I got off because I'm privileged and people who didn't get off were not privileged. But I actually think, and I wrote a piece about this not long after the murder of George Floyd and then of Amade Arbery that privilege is precisely the wrong way to think about this. Because what I experienced was not privilege. What I experienced was my constitutional rights. Actually, it's more than a constitutional right. According to the Founding Fathers and many philosophers before and since, the rights to life and liberty and property are beyond constitutional. They are inalienable. The right not to be harassed, the right not to have some goon demand to see your papers, not being strangled to death for suspicion of some minor crime, the right not to be tear gas or thrown to the ground for monitoring the police, the right not to be murdered, to not be menaced by people with guns, to not be targeted or exploited or incarcerated unfairly to speak your mind to pursue your religion for your home to be a safe haven. These are not things that the governments give to their people. These are things that God or generations of evolution and progress were endowed to us at birth. And then we in turn give to the government to protect. We give them the power to protect that right for us and for all of our fellow people. Right? All of us, whether we're black or white or rich or poor or young or older, whether you're a Republican or a Democrat, whether you're a socialist or a communist, even if you're an annoying obnoxious idiot. And the point we have to understand is that if these basic rights are threatened for one person, for one community, then it's threatened for all people. But now, and I've been seeing them on my social media feeds constantly, people will say, oh, but some of these people came here illegally or oh, what about all the people that the Biden administration deported or that Obama deported? They say, oh, but some of these people are criminals to which there is an obvious reply. And that reply is due process, due process, due process. That is the answer to every one of those objections, even a serial killer is lawfully entitled to their day in court. Look, I don't know how to say this to people, but the punishment for filming ice is not summary execution. And the punishment for fleeing in your vehicle is not extra judicial murder, even if that federal agent thinks you're a fucking bitch. And look, being shot in the face three times is not punishment for hitting a federal officer with your car either. I think it's worth saying, right? The punishment for coming to the United States illegally for whatever reason, the punishment for overstaying your visa or honestly for any kind of violation of immigration laws is not and never will be and certainly never should be a trip to an El Salvadorian torture prison. And look, I get it. Immigration is a complicated issue. Maybe it doesn't affect you personally. Maybe you think we should have a lot less immigration, right? Maybe you've got a lot of problems going on in your life and you don't understand why this is such a big deal. I also get that crime is complicated, right? And law enforcement is complicated. My dad was a cop for 20 years. I understand it is a hard job, but this, this is not complicated, right? Heavily armed masked agents should not be storming American streets demanding to see people's papers. They should not be harassing citizens. They should not be making arrests and sorting things out later. They should not be harassing people because they don't look like or sound like citizens. They should not be entering schools or hospitals or court houses or churches to try to take people away. They should not be controversial to say. And in fact, it's our job as human beings and certainly as Stoics to say this, to say it over and over and over again, because callous indifference to suffering, suffering at the hands of authorities towards minorities or the poor or the voiceless. This is not just like a lamentable fact of modern life, just a status quo reality. No, it's an active crime and it's one that we are complicit in if we rationalize it or ignore it. If you're selling online or out of a storefront full-time or a side hustle, you know it's a challenge. People got to find you, you got to wait for them to walk in. Well, today's sponsor what not flips that? 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Something like 2000 years ago, Mark Serely, is right in meditations that it's also possible to commit an injustice by doing nothing by turning away. The Stokes believed that to harm one person was to harm all persons. You can see in meditations that some early antecedents of that idea from Martin Luther King about how injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. King said that we are caught up in an inescapable network of mutuality said we're tied in a single garment of destiny that whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. I mean, that could be in Marcus Aurelius' meditations. I could put them side by side and you would not know who said it. And I get you might not want to think about this. I get that you might not want to hear about this right? I write and talk about self improvement. I write and talk about philosophy. I write and talk about history. I write and talk about books. That's true. But what do you think all of that is for? What do you think the reading is for? The study is for the thinking is for. Right? It's not so you can make a little bit more money. It's not so you can live in your own bubble or have interesting dinner conversations. No, it's so you can be better. It's so you can be a better human being. So you can do the right thing when it counts. So you can see through the spin and lies and propaganda. So you are not complicit in injustices that are happening around you. We have to realize that if the state can find ways to deprive someone of their rights, then they can find ways to deprive you and me of hours. That's what I realized there by the side of the road that this could have gone very differently for someone else. But if you could go differently for someone else in other circumstances, it could go very differently for me. If they can get away with brutalizing one group eventually, they'll brutalize you. And in fact, this is an inexorable law of power that you realize when you study history, when you study different regimes and administrations that whether power is held by segregationists or Stalin bureaucrats following orders or malevolent demagogues, when you give power an inch, it takes another when you allow evil to happen because it doesn't affect you or people that look like you, it will eventually find its way to you. If not to you, then to someone you love or to your great, great grandchildren, when you allow in your name, evil to be done in far away places or out of sight, it eventually comes back to you. There's actually a concept that I learned about recently that explains this, it's called the colonial boomerang that actually much of the destruction that is visited on Europe during World War II was just a more modern version of what they had themselves visited on peoples in the new world in Africa and in other places all over the world as colonial powers. Again, you think it doesn't affect you, but it does. That's what Martin Nemellers famous poem First They Came is about. You've probably seen it or heard the refrain you just maybe didn't know it was from a poem, it goes like this, he says, first they came for the socialist and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak for me. Nemellers words, they're not theoretical. He had tolerated even complied with policies that he didn't agree with during the Nazi Reich. He had rationalized them. He had assumed that his Christian church would be protected, that he was part of the in-group and for a while it was, but in the end he found himself in a concentration camp where he nearly died. Someone later asked him how he could have been so self-absorbed, how he could have been silent when it mattered. He didn't try to excuse any of it. He said, I'm paying for that mistake now and he said, and not me alone, but thousands of other people like me. It's essential that we see not just this situation in front of us this way, but all kinds of injustices because when you do, you realize that injustice affects you period. It affects everyone. Again, even if it's far away, even if it's affecting a group you don't like or disagree with, it affects you. It matters. It matters directly. It matters urgently. There is no such thing as an injustice that doesn't affect us, that doesn't matter. We're all bees of the same hive, Marx really writes, in meditations. And there is no injustice far away enough, no victim different enough or unsympathetic enough, no rationalization clever enough to make us exempt from that hive that we share. And again, the issues at hand may be complicated, but our obligations aren't. We have to care. We have to speak up. We have to try to stop them. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it and I'll see you in the next episode. Online in person and on the go. Shopify's made for entrepreneurs like you. Sign up for your $1 a month trial at Shopify.com slash setup.
