210205 What I learned in my studies this morning

Today's Tao:

In caring for others and serving heaven, 

There is nothing like using restraint.

From The Daily Stoic: 

“Don’t be bounced around, but submit every impulse to the claims of justice, and protect your clear conviction in every appearance.”—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 4.22

Am I controlling my thoughts and actions, my focus? Or am I pinballing around, merely reacting to every wisp of influence that comes my way? 

Don’t you wish they just had a filter through which they could test the good impulses versus the bad ones? 

There is such a filter. Justice. Reason. Philosophy. If there’s a central message of Stoic thought, it’s this: impulses of all kinds are going to come, and your work is to control them, like bringing a dog to heel. Put more simply: think before you act. Ask: Who is in control here? What principles are guiding me? - Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic 

Again, today I see a connection between today's Tao and this morning's Stoic lesson. 

From Eric Hoffer, Part III, Unifying Agents:

Leadership 

The frustrated, who, lacking self-confidence prefer order to freedom, follow easily. For them, freedom is a burden, not a blessing. Forgoing the ability to decide because they willingly give up that risk to the Movement and the Leader, they are happy and equal. No one may claim to be their superior who does not follow the orders of the Leader. 

This offers them a faux confidence because they are helping, they are good. Those who have the inner drive to go their own way are now renegades who are fighting against the Movement, the new order, the Utopia to Come. (Or are, at the very least, not helping to bring it about.) 

People whose lives are barren and insecure seem to show a greater willingness to obey than people who are self-sufficient and self-confident. To the frustrated, freedom from responsibility is more attractive than freedom from restraint. They are eager to barter their independence for relief from the burdens of willing, deciding and being responsible for inevitable failure. They willingly abdicate the directing of their lives to those who want to plan, command and shoulder all responsibility. Moreover, submission by all to a supreme leader is an approach to their ideal of equality. 

In time of crisis, during floods, earthquakes, epidemics, depressions and wars, separate individual effort is of no avail, and people of every condition are ready to obey and follow a leader. To obey is then the only firm point in a chaotic day-by-day existence.

(The True Believer, XIV-93)