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We get to see them up close. We see how they treat people. We see what their values are. We see how it always goes. Then what do we do? We tell ourselves it will go differently for us. “It is almost incomprehensible that after 8 years of working for him writing every word he publishes, keeping his secrets…” a young Eisenhower would write of his boss, General MacArthur in 1935, “he should suddenly turn on me, as he has all the others who have ever been around him. He’d like to occupy a throne room surrounded by experts in flattery.” Except it was perfectly comprehensible as his own sentence reveals. If MacArthur eventually turned on everyone around him, why would he not eventually turn on his most trusted aide? Seneca watched as Nero slowly eliminated every rival and relative—it was so bad that Seneca had to remind his student that it was impossible to kill every successor. Yet Seneca stuck with him, even as Nero killed his own mother! When Nero’s goons came to demand Seneca’s suicide years later on their boss’s order, Seneca acted like he knew this was unavoidable. He consoled his friends that he was not surprised by it, but of course, that’s not true. Seneca could have done something earlier. At some level, he must have expected he’d somehow be the exception, that he’d find a way out. That’s why he kept working for him, right? That’s why he kept writing for Nero and teaching him, well after it must have been clear that the man was deranged and unstable. When people show us who they are, we need to believe them. We cannot indulge the fantasy that they will treat us differently than they treat others, that the wicked will not ultimately bring their wickedness down upon us. It’s impossible for them not to do so, Marcus Aurelius reminds us. Expecting otherwise, to steal a phrase from Epictetus, is like expecting figs in winter!  |
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