Breakfast with Seneca: A Stoic Guide to the Art of Living

CHAPTER 9

Vicious Crowds and the Ties That Bind

Do you ask what you should avoid most of all? A crowd.

—Seneca, Letters 7.1

TIME FOR A BIT OF THROAT-SLITTING

When Seneca told Lucilius that he should avoid crowds, Seneca had just returned from the gladiatorial games. There he watched and listened to the crowds cheer for other human beings to be killed, right before their eyes, as a form of entertainment.

So when Seneca said we should “avoid crowds,” he wasn’t just referring to large groups of people in general. He was speaking about mobs or vicious crowds, which can have a terrible effect on our inner character, especially if we get swept away by the crowd’s emotions. As he wrote to Lucilius,

Contact with a crowd is harmful to us: there is no person who doesn’t recommend some vice to us, transmit it to us, or smear it on us while we remain unaware. Without fail, the greater the mob we mingle with, the greater the danger.

But nothing is so harmful to good character than to take a seat at the public games, for then the vice creeps in more easily during the course of our pleasure. Do you understand what I’m saying? I come home more greedy, more conceited, more self-indulgent—and worse than that—I return home more cruel and inhuman, just because I have been around other humans.1

Seneca explains that he was expecting some “fun, wit, and relaxation” at the games, but it turned into slaughter when someone drove condemned criminals into the arena. In Seneca’s graphic account, “The previous combats were exhibitions of mercy. But now the pretense was over, and it is pure murder. The men have no protective armor. Their whole bodies are exposed, and no one strikes a blow in vain. Every fight ends in death, carried out by sword and flame.”2

At one point, the mob was getting a bit rowdy, screaming, “Kill him! Whip him! Burn him!” and so on. “And when the games stop for an intermission, someone announces: ‘Time for a bit of throat-slitting, now, to keep the action going!’”3

Seneca brings this up to make a significant point: Our characters are deeply influenced by the people who surround us in daily life. People are also strongly affected by those around them when they are part of a crowd at political rallies, sporting events, religious events, or gatherings that turn into riots. But the ways in which others affect us, whether in our day-to-day lives or in a crowd, are largely the same: “A single example of self-indulgence or greed does much harm. A close friend who is overly pampered weakens and softens us. A rich neighbor inflames our greed. A mean-spirited companion rubs off his spite, even on a sincere and spotless fellow.”4

Seneca uses the story of his trip to the games to bring up the idea that the quality of the people we surround ourselves with is essential in terms of improving our character. We’ll explore Seneca’s thoughts on this shortly, but let’s first take a look at how emotions and behaviors “go viral” in large groups, a notable feature of our own Internet age. Surprisingly, this idea that human behavior can be “viral” or “contagious” was clearly described by Seneca, two thousand years ago.

WHEN THINGS GET CONTAGIOUS

Using a metaphor from medicine, Seneca explains that we can become “infected” with the bad qualities of others. In a plague, he noted, we can catch a disease by merely being “breathed on,” so we must choose our friends with great care, based on the health of their character. “Make an effort to take on the least infected,” he wrote, because “it’s the beginning of disease to expose healthy things to sickness.”5

Significantly, this isn’t something Seneca only mentions once. As he writes in another work, “We pick up habits from those around us, and just as some diseases are spread through physical contact, the mind also transmits its ills to those nearby.” For example, a greedy person can transmit his infected character to his neighbors. Fortunately, though, “It’s the same thing with virtues, but in reverse.” So while people with flawed characters can transmit their bad habits to us, people with good characters, who befriend us, can make us better human beings.6

What Seneca was writing about would now be described as a form of unconscious influence. And in order for us to be unconsciously influenced, it doesn’t matter if it’s a large group, a small group, or just another person. The process is similar in all cases.

For example, when I was growing up, I never liked being around people who smoked cigarettes. In fact, when I was a youngster, I decided to never go down the road of becoming a smoker. But in my late teens I was surrounded by coworkers and friends who smoked frequently. When we’d go out to lunch, they’d light up while drinking coffee, before and after a meal. Sure enough, it wasn’t long before I took up smoking too. After a while, things got worse. Eventually, the smoking habit turned into a pack-a-day addiction. At age twenty-four, though, I quit. Smoking and its effects became too terrible to endure. I even developed a persistent pain in my left lung. Nicotine, as scientists point out, is as addictive as heroin. Quitting was extremely difficult, but after being free from cigarettes for a month, I started to feel normal again.

Similarly, around the same age, my best friend was very smart but also incredibly sarcastic. Sarcastic comments rolled off his tongue in the same way that water pours from a fountain. Unfortunately, through unconscious imitation, I picked up this behavior from him, which ended up being an unpleasant character trait. Some years later, I made an effort to eliminate it.

While Seneca spoke about the dangers of crowds and how habits are contagious, today we talk about things “going viral” on social media, which has become our modern-day locus of crowd behavior. If Seneca was right about the dangers of crowds and how they can adversely affect our mental well-being, perhaps we should be more careful about going online. Hypnotic images, raw emotions, and rage often seem to cascade through online networks and take on a life of their own. With the full-blown development of the Internet, the print era’s more serious journalism largely went into eclipse. Unfortunately, the online reporting that has replaced it is often designed to cause outrage, get clicks, and go viral. This cannot possibly be good for us as individuals or as a society.

Back in the 1800s, the social psychologists Gabriel Tarde (1843–1904) and Gustave Le Bon (1841–1931) initiated the study of crowd psychology, which has since become a significant field. Tarde and Le Bon introduced the idea of herd mentality, also known as mob mentality, which Seneca had written about two thousand years earlier. Scientific studies have shown how people are naturally prone to imitate the behavior of others, both in the real, physical world and online.7

But scientific studies aside, any careful observer can see how individual behavior can often become governed by herd psychology on social media. One example of this is how groups respond to news stories with outrage even before the facts are fully known. In some ways, “Twitter mobs,” when gripped by an emotional contagion, are no less dangerous than physical mobs. When outrage spreads online, the resulting desire for mob or vigilante justice overthrows the need for due process, which real justice always requires. There are now countless examples of death threats posted publicly online (or privately by email) and people trying to “cancel” the careers of people they feel offended by. Since anyone can get caught up in an emotional contagion, this behavior is not limited to either side of the political spectrum.

In his classic book on herd psychology, The Crowd (1895), Gustave Le Bon noted,

The most careful observations seem to prove that an individual immerged for some length of time in a crowd in action soon finds himself—either in consequence of the magnetic influence given out by the crowd, or from some other cause of which we are ignorant—in a special state, which much resembles the state of fascination in which the hypnotized individual finds himself in the hands of the hypnotizer.8

When the group mind emerges and takes over, he wrote, “An individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will.”9

As Gabriel Tarde also noted, the fact that people unconsciously imitate one another accounts, at least in part, for herd behavior and the emergence of the group mind. And as a more recent thinker, Tony D. Sampson, points out, it’s because of the hypnotic power of imitation that emotions and feelings spread virally across digital networks to infect others.10

TAKING A LOOK AT INVISIBLE INFLUENCES

Seneca’s interest in how other people influence us is related to socialization, a term that became popular in the 1940s. Socialization is the process through which people become assimilated to society’s values or to the norms of a smaller subgroup.

Much socialization is intentional and deliberate, like when parents teach their children to be polite, play nice, and follow rules—all important life skills. However, other forms of socialization are more invisible and unconscious: for example, the way people absorb beliefs and behaviors through media, advertising, and peer groups. Because of this, people who study socialization refer to deliberate socialization and unconscious socialization.

If we want to become well-developed human beings, socialization is essential. But how we are socialized can be for good or ill. For example, parents might socialize a child to be honest and fair, but another family might socialize a child to hold racist views. In Seneca’s world, the bloodthirsty crowd he saw at the games, chanting for death and destruction, had been socialized to revel in violence. Put in modern psychological language, as the crowd chanted for death it had become a group mind in the grip of an emotional contagion. Seneca was one of the first to notice how emotions can be contagious, now a scientific field of study. For example, researchers have found that yawning is not only contagious among humans. It’s even contagious across species: dogs and chimpanzees can catch yawns from human beings.11 This kind of contagious imitative behavior must be very deep-seated indeed.

While all of the Stoics believed that false beliefs or opinions cause human suffering, some of them also realized that we absorb those beliefs through training.12 For example, many parents teach their children that money is an unconditional good. But Seneca, who had the most profound psychological insight of all the Stoics, realized that something deeper was happening. We can see this from his repeated use of metaphors about invisible influences, which he applied to human psychology—“invisible infections,” “plagues,” and “contagious habits,” which, when transmitted “without our awareness,” can affect our character. Today, we can now see these descriptions as metaphors for “invisible” or unconscious socialization.13

Psychology has taught us that some emotions, ideas, beliefs, and behaviors can have a “magnetic quality” and be transmitted without conscious awareness. As we’ve also learned from hypnosis, imitation and suggestibility are among the most potent psychological phenomena. Even though imitation and suggestibility work in largely unconscious ways, they are primary factors in making mental states contagious. Psychologists also note that social customs and behaviors are largely adopted through unintentional or unconscious imitation.14

While Seneca was perhaps the first thinker to describe this, his insights are even more relevant today. Through mass media and social media platforms, the influence of crowd psychology and emotional contagion has extended far beyond anything Seneca could have imagined. To make things worse, entire industries like advertising and online media actively attempt to manipulate people’s feelings, beliefs, and behaviors on a mass level. Unfortunately, this is not a half-hearted effort: it’s approached with scientific rigor and based on “measurable results.” Each time we click on a viral link or outrage-inducing headline, someone somewhere—or some machine—is keeping track of that link’s popularity score.

How Seneca would respond to this brave new world strikes me as clear. He would tell us, “Don’t be antisocial, but do take a step back” from anything that resembles crowd psychology or groupthink. Certainly, we should take a huge step back from anything that resembles psychological manipulation. When he said, “Avoid crowds,” Seneca didn’t imply we should avoid people in general. He did mean, though, that we should be on guard about the influences to which we’re exposed. If Seneca could have used our modern terminology, he would have said, “Don’t let your thoughts, or your mental autonomy, be swayed by the hypnotic power of the group mind.” From a Stoic perspective, the only antidote to unconscious social conditioning is to safeguard our autonomy as rational human beings. And to do that, we must engage in critical thinking.

In this way, Seneca was correct: crowds can be dangerous.

THE SEARCH FOR GOOD COMPANY

We should choose a healthy environment not only for our body but for our character too.

—Seneca, Letters 51.4

If crowds tend toward infectious, unhealthy behavior, what’s the alternative? After describing the violent, jeering behavior he saw in the amphitheater, Seneca advised Lucilius, “Spend time with those who will make you better, and welcome those you can improve. The process is mutual; and people learn while teaching.”15

If people with unhealthy characters surround us, the first and most crucial step is to escape from their presence. “A large part of sanity,” Seneca explains, “consists of letting go of those who encourage insanity and getting far away from a companionship that is mutually harmful.”16 The second step is to surround ourselves with people who have good characters, even if it’s a tiny group or a single person. That’s because virtuous people can influence us just as strongly as vicious people, but in reverse: “Just as poor health improves in a good location and a healthy climate, it is equally beneficial for a mind, lacking in strength, to associate with a better crowd.”17 In the same way bad qualities can be virally transmitted, good qualities can be contagious too. Seneca would have agreed, at least in principle, with the famous saying of business writer Jim Rohn, “You’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with”—so we should choose those people with care.

This again highlights why friendships and meaningful relationships are crucial in Seneca’s philosophy. Spending time with people who possess good characters will help us make progress. “Good people are mutually helpful because they exercise each other’s virtues.” Even a Stoic sage “needs his virtues activated: for just as he exercises himself, so too is he exercised by another wise person.” In the same way that wrestlers and musicians practice and train, wise people need others to practice with and learn from.18 If we want to be wise and have good characters, we need to have those qualities “activated” in us by another person. And in order to activate another person’s good character, we must activate our own.

ONE HUMANITY: BELONGING TOGETHER VS. TOXIC TRIBALISM

Remove fellowship and you will tear apart the unity of the human race on which our life depends.

—Seneca, On Benefits 4.18.4

With their belief that humanity is one due to the spark of reason or logos we all share in common, the Stoics made a monumental contribution to the development of human rights. Stoic ideas contributed to ending slavery and ensuring the equality of women in the Western world and on a global basis.

While Aristotle had many fine philosophical ideas and helped to lay the foundations for scientific research, some of his ideas were flawed and damaging. Specifically, Aristotle believed that only men fully possessed reason. In comparison to men, women possessed a lesser degree of reason, while “natural slaves” and “barbarians” (or non-Greeks) lacked reason altogether.19

The Stoics, by contrast, believed that all people possess reason in exactly the same way. In other words, everyone who is a human being—including men, women, slaves, and people from every country—all possess reason, and the human soul is “always and everywhere the same.”20 The early Christians adopted this idea from the Stoics. As the Christian writer Lactantius wrote, “Wisdom is given to humankind, it is given to all without discrimination . . . The Stoics understood this to such an extent that they said that even slaves and women ought to do philosophy [emphasis added].”21 To put it differently, in the same way that all human beings are born with muscles, all humans are born with reason, too. How we will then develop these gifts is up to us.

While not a Stoic philosopher, the Roman statesman and writer Cicero (106–43 BC) studied Stoicism carefully and was very deeply sympathetic to many Stoic ideas. As a political philosopher, Cicero adopted and developed the Stoic idea of natural law, which would have a long and significant history.22 Natural law is based on the Stoic idea that the laws of nature are rational and that our human rationality, also, originates from nature. Based on these premises, Cicero thought our human laws should be self-evident to reason: ultimately, they should be based on the kind of rationality we see reflected in nature, in the cosmos, and in our own moral sense. As a political philosopher, he defined law as “right reason in harmony with nature.” If we could see things clearly, Cicero thought, we would want the laws to be identical in Rome, Athens, and every other city because they should be founded on universal reason.23

In other words, natural law is universal: it is not invented by humans. Rather, it is discovered. It ultimately comes from Nature, Reason, or “God”—three terms that were synonymous for the Stoics. According to natural law, all people have inherent rights, or natural rights, which are intrinsic to human nature.

Fig 6: The long development of human rights, from the Stoics to the United Nations.

While our modern idea of “universal human rights” did not exist in the ancient world, the seeds of these ideas did exist in the Stoic idea of natural law, championed by Cicero.24 The Stoics had already set forth the concept of human equality. Then, over the centuries, natural law gave birth to the idea of natural rights, which in turn gave rise to the modern notion of human rights (see figure 6).25 In essence, natural rights are human rights.

The Stoic ideas of natural law, as expressed by Cicero, informed Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke (1632–1704) and deeply inspired the Founders of the United States.26 For example, Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), who wrote the first draft of the Declaration of Independence, was, like other Founders, thoroughly familiar with the ideas of Seneca, the Stoics, and Cicero.27 Jefferson’s own concept of natural law was Stoic.28 And when Jefferson wrote the words, “All men are created equal,” it mirrored the Stoic idea of human equality.29

Cicero had explained that a primary function of government was to protect the life, liberty, and property of its citizens. Centuries later, John Locke identified “life, liberty, and property” as among the most fundamental natural rights of people. When Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration, he transformed the natural rights described by Locke into “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” As Jefferson put it,

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

For Jefferson, the rights he listed were “self-evident” to reason, and aspects of “Nature’s Law.” These rights are both natural rights and human rights. And as historian Joseph J. Ellis has noted, Jefferson’s lines in the Declaration are “the most quoted statement of human rights in recorded history.”30

This, then, is the historical trajectory linking Stoic ideas with the development of modern human rights: from the Stoics and Cicero on natural law; through John Locke and the other Enlightenment philosophers; to Thomas Jefferson who drew on them all in his proclamations on human rights.

Jefferson was obviously an important but transitional figure in ending slavery. On the one hand, many believe that he did not fully live up to his high ideals (he was, after all, a slaveholder, and thus at odds with his own moral principles). On the other hand, his commitment to end slavery was profound: he consistently advocated for the elimination of slavery, proposed practical schemes for emancipation, and even enacted a law, while serving as president of the United States, that banned the international slave trade. As Martin Luther King Jr. famously said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” While slavery did not end in Jefferson’s lifetime, the lengthy historical arc of eliminating slavery originated from, and was inspired by, Stoic ideas of natural law and human equality. Jefferson made those ideas central in the public mind and vigorously advanced the cause of abolition.

IF THE STOICS WERE correct, and the entire human family is one, why is there so much division and polarization in the world today? The short answer is that these divisions have something to do with our biological history as tribal animals. Belonging to a group or a tribe is a natural human need. By definition, people who don’t feel a sense of belonging experience loneliness and alienation. Things become problematic, though, when tribalism becomes toxic.

For roughly the last two hundred thousand years, we Homo sapiens have lived as tribal creatures. Because of that evolutionary history, tribalism is almost impossible to eliminate. But as the physicist and philosopher Marcelo Gleiser observes, “A tribe without enemies is, almost by definition, not a tribe. As a consequence, tribal dispute and warfare is part of what defines humanity.” As he goes on to note,

The biggest enemy we have to fight against now is our tribal past. What served us for so well for thousands of years is now an obsolete concept. It’s no more about the survival of this tribe or that one, but about Homo sapiens as a species. . . . For the first time in our collective history, we must think of ourselves as a single tribe in a single planet. . . . We are a single tribe, the tribe of humans. And, as such, not a tribe at all.31

The Stoics were the first to spell out this idea fully: we’re all members of a cosmopolis, they said, a worldwide, interconnected community of human beings. In other words, we are citizens of the entire world. Seneca, like other Stoics, taught that human beings should desire to benefit all of humanity, the cosmopolis as a whole. Without the mutual support of others, society would collapse. “We are all parts of a great body,” he wrote. “Our companionship is like a stone arch, which would collapse if the stones did not mutually support one another.”32

A sense of belonging is essential, but toxic tribalism tears people apart and goes against the prosocial vision of the Stoics. In Seneca’s words, “You must live for another if you would live for yourself.”33 At its worst, toxic tribalism can lead to the demonization of others, violence, and even genocide. Because of their belief in human unity, if they were alive today, the Roman Stoics would be vigorously opposed to modern identity politics in all its forms, because identity politics divides people into different subgroups, based on traits like gender, race, or sexual orientation. It then encourages those groups to compete against one another for special status or power, as if group identity were more important than our fundamental status as human beings. By taking a “divide and conquer” approach, and by fragmenting the human family into competing groups, identity politics represents the ultimate form of toxic tribalism in our time. Its approach increases social division and risks tearing society apart. As Seneca warned, “Remove fellowship and you will tear apart the unity of the human race on which our life depends.”34 For Stoics, humanity is one: we are all brothers and sisters. Rather than dividing society into warring tribes, we should recognize our common humanity and support one another.

THE TIES THAT BIND: FEELING AT HOME WITH EVERYONE ELSE

All human beings are born for a life of fellowship, and society can only remain healthy through the mutual protection and love of its parts.

—Seneca, On Anger 2.31.7

Seneca’s idea that we belong to a global community of human beings, united through reason and friendship with others, strikes us as modern. Because we now live in a planetary civilization, connected by worldwide trade and communication networks, global fellowship is part of our daily experience.

But how is it that human society, and even global society, comes into being in the first place? If the instincts of tribalism alone governed things, the world would be much more dangerous and polarized than it actually is.

The Stoics had a beautiful explanation for this. It’s known as okeiōsis, and seems to go back to Zeno, the founder of the school.35 The term comes from the Greek word oikos, which means “house” or “family.” Okeiōsis refers to the sense of kinship or being at home that we feel toward other people—the human affinity we feel for others—and it’s the ultimate source of all Stoic ethics. Okeiōsis allows us to see other human beings as near and dear to us, even if we’re not directly related to them. Marcus Aurelius frequently wrote about our kinship with all human beings and how that kinship forms the basis of society. As he put it, “All rational creatures are born for the sake of one another.”36

The most thorough explanation of how natural human affection gives rise to society appears in Cicero’s writings, and the basic idea is simple. “The Stoics,” he says, “think that nature itself causes parents to have affection for their children,” and this parental affection is “the source from which developed the common fellowship of the human race in communities.” This parental affection for one’s offspring is rational and part of natural law. It’s even found in other species. When we see the great effort that even nonhuman animals spend on caring for their young, Cicero says, “we seem to be hearing the voice of nature itself.”37 For the Stoics, he explains,

It is also clear that we’ve been impelled by nature herself to love those to whom we have given birth. From this impulse arises a common attraction that unites human beings as such; based on our common humanity, we feel kinship with others.38

While animals, like bees, work in harmony with one another, “With human beings, these bonds of fellowship are far more intimate. Thus, by nature, we have been fitted to form unions, societies, and states.”39 Further, as we grow older and our reason develops, okeiōsis extends our feelings of kinship to others. Through the use of reason and understanding, the kind of natural affection we feel toward our family members becomes applied to society as a whole.

The Stoics had another way of illustrating okeiōsis, the ties that bind us together with other human beings. This was explained by the Stoic philosopher Hierocles, who lived around the time of Marcus Aurelius. In one of his writings, Hierocles described the circles of humanity of which we’re part (see figure 7), and why “we are eager by nature to win over and make a friend of everyone.”40

The innermost circle is where we stand as individuals. It represents our individual self. The next circle is that of our immediate family, parents, siblings, spouses, and children. The third circle contains more distant family members: aunts and uncles, grandparents, and cousins. The next circle contains citizens in our local communities and then fellow countrymen. Finally, the largest, outermost circle contains humanity as a whole. Many modern Stoics, including myself, would draw a larger circle yet, representing nature or the living biosphere, of which we’re all a part. But this idea is not modern. It’s part of the ancient Stoic tradition. As philosophy scholar John Sellars notes,

Fig 7: Simplified version of the circles of humanity from the Stoic philosopher Hierocles.

The process of widening one’s circle of concern should not stop once it encompasses all human society. . . . Eventually, one’s okeiōsis should extend to include the entire cosmos, generating a concern for the preservation of all human beings and the natural world. . . . When we reach this widest possible circle of concern we shall become cosmopolitans—citizens of the cosmos.41

The wise person, Hierocles suggests, will try to pull in the outer circles in toward the center, or compress them, so that we will feel kinship with all of humanity and not just those who are closest to us. While he admits that a “difference in blood” will remove some affection for those who are farther away, the Stoic goal is to feel affection for humanity as a whole, and not just a sense of kinship for those with whom we’re closest.

In this way, as we progress down the path toward becoming wiser and more complete human beings, we won’t ignore the needs of those who are nearer and closest to us. Instead, we’ll recognize all of humanity and nature as part of the wider, living community of which we’re all a part. We’ll then see those greater circles, from which we’ve all emerged, as indispensable for our well-being and flourishing.