Take What’s Good, Ignore The Rest

<h1><br/></h1><p><a href='https://dailystoic.com/letters-from-a-stoic?utm_source=convertkit&amp;utm_medium=convertkit&amp;utm_campaign=ignore-the-rest'>One of Seneca’s most powerful strategies</a> comes from his time as a Senator. Speaking again of a thought from Epicurus, with which he only partly agrees, Seneca explains that he is so readily able to draw from the teachings of a rival school for his writing because of a trick he learned in the Roman senate. Whenever a fellow senator introduced a motion with which he was not in full agreement, he would ask the Senator to <a href='https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius/Letter_21'>break the motion up into two parts</a>, thus allowing other Senators to vote for the part they approved of and ignore or vote against the other part. </p><p><a href='https://dailystoic.com/epicureanism-stoicism/?utm_source=convertkit&amp;utm_medium=convertkit&amp;utm_campaign=ignore-the-rest'>It was this strategy that Seneca applied to Epicurus</a> and, indeed, that all good politicians use to do their job—it’s called <em>finding common ground. </em>It’s focusing on where there is agreement rather than on where there is conflict. </p><p>We could all use a little bit more of this in our lives. Philosophically, it’s fascinating how much Christianity and Buddhism and Hinduism and Stoicism all have in common. We could spend a whole lifetime studying and learning from where these schools overlap...but that’s harder to do than holing up inside the school we were raised in and then locking the gates and slapping a label on anyone left on the outside. They are <em>the other.</em> </p><p>We do this instinctively with our politics. Democrat or Republican. Liberal or Conservative. Globalist or Nationalist. We continually define ourselves in opposition to the other. And yet, with the exception of a small minority at the fringes of both ends of the spectrum, pretty much everyone agrees on the very big ideas about what makes a good life or what a good country looks like. Every parent