Notes from Cicero

This blog post is based on a couple of passages that I have copied and pasted from the book “The Cicero Trilogy” by Robert Harris.

2 weeks ago I found myself watching the Impeachment trial of US President Donald Trump from my hotel room in California, while reading about an Impeachment trial over 2,000 years ago in Rome. It was fascinating to see the parallels and feel that the US impeachment process was not a signal of a broken, polarised political system… but part of the system of democracy that we have inherited from the Greeks and then the Roman Republic.

6 Quotes from The Cicero Trilogy

‘It is perseverance,’ he used to say, ‘and not genius that takes a man to the top. Rome is full of unrecognised geniuses. Only perseverance enables you to move forward in the world.’

I learnt this the hard way as an entrepreneur. In my first business, we sold insurance. I had 4 partners. We agreed that we would each aim to sell 4 policies per week to keep ourselves involved in the business. The first week is not too hard. The second week I could still do it selling to friends… but the fourth, fifth… and consecutive weeks… only systematic persistence in making the phone calls day after day allowed me to sustain the sales over the long term. My business today is about meaningful conversations… If I have meaningful conversations with inspiring leaders day after day… our business grows. If I stop having conversations…. sooner or later, the business wilts and starts to die.

‘To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?’

Those who are unaware of history are doomed to repeat it. We are not the first humans to have faced the challenges in front of us. There is a wealth of past experience. I need to let go of my ego and open myself up to this wealth of human experience. It is not the answer for me, but it will give me the perspectives I need to take a better decision. I cannot just copy the past, or other people’s answers… but I am much better placed for life if I have these perspectives.

it was his belief that a great performer, however experienced, must always be frightened before going on stage – ‘the nerves should be as taut as bowstrings if the arrows are to fly’

I say to myself, the day I am not nervous before class or a speech is the day I have stopped caring… and I should stop. I so often wish the nerves would go away. I suffer worries and anxiety before every class and every speech… As much as I would like to not feel these emotions, they are demonstration that I care about the audience and the material and it is important to me to do the work well.

‘The art of life is to deal with problems as they arise, rather than destroy one’s spirit by worrying about them too far in advance.

Easier said than done… I have a vivid imagination and it is very good at creating multimedia future visions of failure and disaster and betrayal and deception… I work to channel my imagination towards productive questions: “How can I…?” is a better form of question to my mind than “Why?” – it pushes my imagination to be resourceful and responsible.

Cicero’s first law of rhetoric, that a speech must always contain at least one surprise.

If you just share generic obvious statements… it is a waste of your and your audience’s time. If we all know something, and we are not yet taking action… then sharing this thing we all know again will not lead to action. There must be a surprise. There are many forms of surprise… but a great speech should lead to the audience seeing something with new eyes, taking new meaning from an old experience, or changing their perception of an aspect of life.

‘We have so much – our arts and learning, laws, treasure, slaves, the beauty of Italy, dominion over the entire earth – and yet why is it that some ineradicable impulse of the human mind always impels us to foul our own nest?’

The german language has the word “schadenfreude“. The experience of joy or pleasure in witnessing another person’s misfortune. It is often harder for us to enjoy another’s successes than it is for us to experience a small inner joy at the setbacks another must face. I wish I could switch it off… in me and in all around me… in humanity as a whole. The ego, or sense of independent self, in each of us needs so much “to be right”, to win, to be “better” and we are willing often to cause pain to ourselves to cause pain to another.

If we are to achieve peace outside ourselves, we must achieve peace within. This is to know myself. To laugh at and accept my flaws, to be grateful for my strengths and to take life as an infinite rather than a finite game.

My thoughts so far from Cicero’s life.

PS I’m only half way through the story.

The World as 100 People, over 200 years

Life is much better today than ever before.  I guess the challenge is that we have improved all of the lower parts of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, but lost a lot of the institutions and connections that helped people explore the higher elements of meaning, connection, significance and self-transcendence.

Check out the improved quality of life over the last 200 years…

  • Extreme Poverty: from 94% to 10%
  • Basic Education: from 17% to 86%
  • Literacy: from 12% to 85%
  • Vaccination: from 0% to 86%
  • Child Mortality: from 43% to 4%

Thanks to my brother for sharing the infographic 😉

The Causes of The Great War

The First World War began in 1914. Today marks the day that Britain and Northern Ireland entered the war.

Royal Irish Rifles in a communications trench, first day on the Somme, 1916.

Over 9 million soldiers died in the 4 years until 11 November 1918.  Total direct casualties were over 37 million (source).

My great grandfather Sidney was in the trenches in the Great War.  He never spoke of his experiences.

The causes of the war are complex. The trigger for the war was the assassination of the Crown Prince of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo by a Serbian nationalist.

The true causes of the war?

  1. The rise of Nationalism.  “My country is better than any other” was a popular belief in Britain, France, Germany.  This storyline blinded the population and the leadership to the real facts of the situation.
  2. The rise of Imperialism in Germany threatening Great Britain’s sense of world superiority.  Germany were rapidly building a powerful navy and Great Britain were concerned about Germany overtaking their control of the seas.  Germany wished to build an international empire “worthy” of their status as a leading power.  Britain felt this ambition threatened their own empire.  Both Britain and Germany had interest in a valid reason to “adjust” the balance of power.
  3. Delusional Arrogance of the aristocratic leaders of Germany, France, Russia and Britain. They were surrounded by “yes-men”.  Roles were filled by family connection not by merit.  Each leader was led to believe by their advisors that they had massively superior military capabilities. Each country believed that the conflict would be over in a matter of weeks.  “It will be over by Christmas” was the general view of the British soldiers as they headed off to war.  Germany’s first 3 days of war was so incredibly successful (Belgium and northern France collapsed entirely) that the country got very excited by the war.
  4. Political Power more important than Human Rights.  Military and Political leaders who saw soldiers like pawns on a chess board – expendable units for a few yards of advance.  Military technology had moved ahead in giant leaps, but military tactics remained locked in the distant past.
  5. Internal weaknesses in Russia and Germany – the senior leaders needed an external enemy to avoid revolutions and major changes in their own regimes.  Russia had lost a recent war with Japan and needed a victory to boost moral.  Germany was a weak confederation and Kaiser Wilhelm needed a common dangerous enemy to unite factions.
  6. “Sleepwalking” diplomats that watched the events unfold without having a sense that the continued build up would reach all-out war.  Europe had not had a major war in almost 100 years and senior diplomats were often chosen for their family ties, not for their experience or wisdom as spokespeople for their nations.

 

The song “The Green Fields of France” is often sung in pubs in Ireland to remember the fallen of the war.  It is an intensely sad song that always makes me feel an intense gratitude to be alive today and to live in a time when myself or my friends and children are not under the threat of spending 4 years in trenches.  The song asks whether we have ever learnt the lessons of the war.  I hope we do.  My own personal ambition is to teach the world to use words so powerfully that guns are not needed.  This is a big challenge.

The Green Fields of France

by Eric Bogle

Well how do you do, young Willie McBride,
Do you mind if I sit here down by your graveside
And rest for a while ‘neath the warm summer sun
I’ve been working all day and I’m nearly done.
I see by your gravestone you were only nineteen
When you joined the dead heroes of nineteen-sixteen.
I hope you died well and I hope you died clean
Or Willie McBride, was it slow and obscene.

Chorus :
Did they beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly,
Did they sound the dead-march as they lowered you down.
Did the bugles play the Last Post and chorus,
Did the pipes play the ‘Flooers o’ the Forest’.

And did you leave a wife or a sweetheart behind
In some faithful heart is your memory enshrined
Although you died back there in nineteen-sixteen
In that faithful heart are you ever nineteen
Or are you a stranger without even a name
Enclosed and forgotten behind the glass frame
In a old photograph, torn and battered and stained
And faded to yellow in a brown leather frame.

The sun now it shines on the green fields of France
The warm summer breeze makes the red poppies dance
And look how the sun shines from under the clouds
There’s no gas, no barbed wire, there’s no guns firing now
But here in this graveyard it’s still no-man’s-land
The countless white crosses stand mute in the sand
To man’s blind indifference to his fellow man
To a whole generaation that were butchered and damned.

Now young Willie McBride I can’t help but wonder why
Do all those who lie here know why they died
And did they believe when they answered the cause
Did they really believe that this war would end wars
Well the sorrow, the suffering, the glory, the pain
The killing and dying was all done in vain
For young Willie McBride it all happened again
And again, and again, and again, and again.

 

Further Resources

 

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