As Seneca told Lucilius, no one can truly be happy until they’ve risen above wealth. Consequently, those who possess wealth must convince themselves that they would be happy without it. They should view wealth as something that could disappear at any moment.30 In other words, if you possess wealth or any gift of fortune, you shouldn’t become attached to it.
Seneca’s most compelling argument for the value of wealth is that a wealthy person can use his financial resources to practice virtue. In other words, people with wealth can use it wisely to benefit others and society.
When I lived in the United States, my next-door neighbor Fred was just such a person. Fred and his daughters own an engineering company that was doing $220 million in sales at the time. While he was wealthy, he was also down-to-earth, easy to talk with, and never once showed the least bit of arrogance or extravagance. In fact, despite being successful in business, Fred’s main interest in life was helping other people and trying to improve society. His family’s foundation had given millions to the local community. But one program he created, and was understandably proud of, trained thirty people with the skills they needed to get off welfare. When they completed the training, he gave them all permanent jobs—a feat the government had been unable to accomplish.
One day I was over at his house, which had a beautiful view of the countryside but an unassuming, rustic-style interior. As we sat there sipping coffee, he confided to me, “I love working on these projects to make things better. The most interesting problem, which I think about often, is how to eliminate poverty.”
Once, when I experienced a personal tragedy, Fred walked over to my house to see how I was doing. When we talked, he said, “When something like that happens, I think you can only put it in God’s hands.” While Fred was a Christian, those words have a very Stoic ring to them. For as the Stoics said repeatedly, “Some things are not up to us.”
In any case, Fred is a perfect example of what Seneca had in mind when saying that if you possess wealth, you have a fabulous opportunity to practice virtue.
When Seneca addressed his critics, who accused him of hypocrisy for being wealthy, he delivered a perfect, stinging response, which makes me feel a sense of delight whenever I read it. “If my wealth flows away,” he wrote, “it will only take itself. But if you lose your wealth, you will be in shock, and you’ll feel as though you’ve lost your very self. For me, wealth has a place, but for you, it holds the highest value. In the end, I own my wealth, but your wealth owns you.”31
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.