Only the good are strong
Cicero's advice to young men in troubled times
The Book:
On Obligations (De officiis)
By Marcus Tullius Cicero
Translated by P.G. Walsh
Oxford World Classics
2000
The Talk:
If you have been an American male for the past decade or so, you’ve been exposed to the following online advice:
Women find bad guys attractive.
Women secretly wish to be patronized and even assaulted by men.
Obnoxious billionaires are billionaires because they are obnoxious.
If you want to be rich, you have to cultivate an “obnoxious billionaire” mindset first.
The natural and proper structure of society is a dominance hierarchy.
Every social interaction is a competition over who controls “frame.”
The ideal man “holds frame” by not letting others control the conversation.
To feel happy and whole, every man needs an enemy to fight, metaphorical or real.
The more brazen the lies, the more savvy the politician.
Power and status accrue to those who violate social norms.
The source of your personal problems is being too nice.
Nice guys are weak—cucks, betas, soy boys, and simps.
Your conscience is feminist propaganda designed to keep you down.
To understand this is to be red-pilled and thus freed to become a true alpha male.
It didn’t used to be this way. Twenty years ago an ambitious man would likely have on his bookshelf the works of Peter Drucker, Stephen Covey, John C. Maxwell, and Dale Carnegie. All these figures argued that character was foundational to attaining, sustaining, and wielding power.
Young men today know nothing of this. It seems obvious now that any man who wants to be successful in life must eventually hand it to terrible men: Being good holds you back. Being nice is a limiting belief, keeping you from your dream life. If you really want something, you have to be willing to do things a “nice guy” would never do.
But the debate isn’t over.
Enter Cicero.
Does it pay to be good?
In 44 BC the Roman statesman Cicero wrote to his son, advising him on how to live a good life. The work, De officiis, translated by P.G. Walsh as On Obligations, became a foundational text of Western moral thought into the 18th Century. In late antiquity, it influenced Ambrose. In the Middle Ages, it influenced Abelard, Aquinas, and Dante. When the German printing press was invented, Cicero’s De officiis was the second work printed after the Bible. In the early modern era, it influenced Milton, Locke, and Hume.
The central question of On Obligations (often titled On Duties) is this: Does it pay for a man to be good? If a man wants to be successful in life, should he do what’s moral or what’s in his best interest? Cicero argues that the honorable is always in a man’s best interest, and that the dishonorable is never in a man’s best interest. The most rational path to material success in life (i.e. power, wealth, prosperity, influence, reputation, and glory) is to pursue a life of honor—of honesty, integrity, justice, fairness, mercy, benevolence, and generosity.
In this (political) economy?
Before examining his argument, it must be kept in mind that Cicero wrote his book in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Roman republic. In the spring of that year, Julius Caesar had been assassinated on the floor of the Senate. In less than a year’s time, Cicero himself would be assassinated by Mark Antony’s soldiers for his philippics. Cicero did not write in a world where there were no risks.
There is no doubt that On Obligations is a sad book. Throughout the text Cicero grieves the loss of the rule of law and the rise of dictatorship.
My opinion, for what it is worth, is that we should always aim at a peace which does not contain the seeds of future treachery. If this policy of mine had been followed, we should still have some sort of republic, even if one far from ideal, whereas now we have none.
But the book is by no means an elegy for old values. Walsh calls it a “political manifesto” for societal and political renewal in a time of social unrest. Walsh writes in the introduction:
But Cicero visualized [his son] Marcus as representative of the young men of senatorial families in whose hands lay the political future of Rome. In this sense the guidelines for political advancement and for appropriate behaviour in office are addressed to a whole generation which would outlive the political corruption of Mark Antony, and might bend to the task of restoring the republic.
In sum, Cicero gives his son advice for a future in which the bad guys have already won and the old institutions were imploding, if not already gone.
In such a world, how should a young man live?
The rational case for being honorable
Cicero begins with the premise that other humans are the greatest source of good in our lives and the greatest source of danger. All our wellbeing and material prosperity depends on the effort of others, and much of the risk to our material prosperity comes from others.
Two ideas follow from this:
First, our individual prosperity and the prosperity of those around us are connected. If I harm the people around me, I’m ultimately undercutting myself—the source, strength, and future of my own wellbeing. If I want to do well, not in this moment but for a lifetime, I need the people around me to do well, too. That includes my family and friends, but also my community, and humanity at large, as much as possible.
Second, if we want to be successful in life, we ought to focus on persuading others to do us good and dissuading them from doing us harm. Being honest, trustworthy, and fair makes people more likely to help us and work with us in the future. Being dishonorable makes people avoid us or despise us, and being unjust and cruel fires them up to seek vengeance against us at a later date.
One of the best ways to be beloved by others is to be generous to them. Cicero thinks that this could include money but that doing generous acts is better. Generosity for Cicero is strategic without being overly calculating. For example, many people are generous to those above them who could do them favors in the future. However, Cicero argues that you get more “bang for your buck” by being generous to the lower classes, who often sing your praises louder and spread word of your character farther.
Cicero thinks that, rather than doling out favors based on status, a man should be generous to those who are closest to him, have the most affection for him, and who are of good character. All this is meant to be strategic without being stingy—win over the people next to you, strengthen your closest allies, and don’t feed your threats. At the same time, don’t pass up a chance to do a good turn for a stranger or a foreigner1.
In addition, Cicero believes that generosity should extend to being “fair and affable, conceding to many people much that is rightfully yours.” He writes:
On occasion it is not only generous to forfeit a modicum of one’s rights, but there are times when it is even profitable.
In other words, being nice—addressing common folk gracefully, eschewing anger, acting with forbearance when it comes to collecting debts and holding people to oaths, allowing a confession of guilt to be sufficient for forgiveness—is strategically potent2.
Security is a requirement for success
There’s a key factor in Cicero’s thinking that is not entirely explicit but I think is critical to understanding his argument: It’s not just about success, it’s about how secure your success is.
In On Friendship, Cicero says:
Unless a good thing is durable and stable and lasting it is quite impossible for its possessor to be happy.
Imagine three foundations for a successful life. The first foundation is to be beloved for being a good person and actually being a good person. That’s the most fortified position with the widest pool of allies and resources.
The second foundation is to have a reputation for being a good person but not actually being one. That one still has many benefits of the first foundation, but a lack of integrity puts you at risk over the long term.
The third foundation is to have a bad reputation and to maintain one’s success through fear. This may provide some apparent benefits in life, but it’s the most risky and most fragile. On the eternal question of “Is it better to be feared or loved?” Cicero comes down firmly on love as the more strategic and rational choice. Cicero, quoting Ennius, writes:
Him whom they fear, they hate; and him whom all men hate
They would see dead.
In other words, being beloved by being a good person surrounds you with social capital, with ever-stronger bonds of trusting relationships. In contrast, being a bad person is a fragile and impoverished state and plants the seeds of its own destruction. Case in point, the assassination of Julius Caesar.
But Cicero lost!
Cicero’s logic may make sense, but Cicero lost, right? He may have eloquence, but the path of history proves his argument is wrong. The republic crumbled. Bad guys win.
Moreover, what do we do then with the many cases today in which bad men seem to thrive? If bad men are supposedly weak, why are they so strong?
Cicero might reply, “But are they though?”
I think Cicero would point once again to Caesar, that in his ambition for power, he ruined the thing he was attempting to control.
I present to you the man who lusted to become king of the Roman people and lord of all the world—and who achieved his aim! Anyone who says that this ambition is honourable is a lunatic; it justifies the extinction of laws and liberty, and regards the squalid and accursed subjugation of them as magnificent.
Dishonorable men don’t end up possessing the thing they wanted but rather something much less valuable. They desiccate the source of their own power and find themselves ever more isolated, without resources or allies. Caesar was murdered by his friends. Is that winning?
When we look to past and present examples of “successful” bad men, it is easy to spot their trail of bankruptcies, lawsuits, and ruined partnerships. No matter how much they possess, they still scrounge desperately for more. Their enemies are many; their friends few. They attract people they cannot trust, who give them bad information—liars, fraudsters, and sycophants. They exude bitterness and contempt, with rarely a moment of peace or restful sleep. Their hidden crimes of the past follow behind them wherever they go, ready to lunge out at any moment and wreck their plans. The fear they instill in others eventually haunts them themselves. Whatever achievements they gain are fragile; they are always on the edge of ruin.
Such men with erroneous judgement have their eyes fixed on rewards which attend on their actions, but not on the penalty which they pay. I refer not to punishment under the laws, which they repeatedly violate, but to that imposed by their own base conduct, punishment which is the bitterest possible.
Only the good are strong
Napoleon once wrote, “Only the strong are good.” This can be interpreted two ways. First, that might makes right. What is strong is good. Second, that to do good one must have the capacity. To give money, one must have money. To save a life, one must have the ability to do it. By that logic, you cannot be weak and also accomplish great deeds. Strength is requisite for moral action.
I think that Cicero would flip Napoleon’s adage around: Only the good are strong. Bad men may seize material in the short term, but in their greed they undercut themselves, spoil their gains, generate new enemies, and increase their future risks3.
Whereas good men are like a great tree, drawing resources from every quarter, constantly shoring up and reinforcing their influence, strengthening the people around them like a thick wall, buttressed by those who admire and love them.
If people imagine that they can obtain enduring glory by deceit and empty exhibitionism and hypocrisy in word and look, they are wildly off the mark. True glory drops roots and also spreads its branches wide, whereas all false claims swiftly wither like frail blossoms, for no pretence can be long-lasting.
The point is not that good men will succeed, for nothing in life is guaranteed, but rather that only good men can succeed, in any sense worthy of the term. Thus, according to Cicero, the honorable way is not only the most rational and strategically sound path to success in life, it is the only path to success there is.
Related:
Is stoicism bad for democracy?
Hypatia of Alexandria: A philosopher for polarized times
“As for those who argue that we must take sympathetic account of fellow-citizens but not of outsiders, they are destroying the fellowship common to the human race, and once this is removed, kindness, generosity, goodness and justice are wholly excluded.”
An example of mercy being an effective policy is when modern militaries avoid “no quarter” in battle. If enemy combatants are confident they will be treated humanely when they surrender on the battlefield, they are more likely to give up than those who know torture or death is certain. This leads to quicker victories with fewer resources expended and fewer soldiers lost on the winning side.
By the same token, institutions led by cheats, liars, and criminals are by nature weak. A corrupt army is a less effective army. This doesn’t mean their failure is assured, but corruption is fundamentally bad strategy.