Stoic Week 4/5: Spite

Note: Epictetus and Aurelius examined fictional characters like Medea and Hercules through a Stoic template. Inspired, I apply the Stoic orientation to the messed-up impressions of characters in the TV stories of the original Perry Mason (1957 - 1966) and then had the ghost in the machine recast it in the style of Seneca. In the novel TCOT Shoplifter’s Shoe, Perry Mason says, "People have their strong points and their weak points. The true philosopher sees them as they are, and is never disappointed, because he doesn’t expect too much. The cynic is one who starts out with a false pattern and becomes disappointed because people don’t conform to that pattern. Most of the little chiseling practices come from trying to cope with our economic conventions. When it comes right down to fundamentals, people are fairly dependable. The neighbor who would cheat you out of a pound of sugar would risk her life to save you from drowning."

The Case of the Witless Witness (Season 6, Episode 28, 5/16/63)

It is a curious thing, Lucilius, how men of sound judgment and upright character, once content to dispense justice from the bench, are drawn to the theater of politics, where virtue is often mocked and ambition wears the mask of service. Judge Daniel Redmond, a man of probity, has accepted the nomination to be Lieutenant Governor - a role which, to the Stoic, may seem as superfluous as weighing down the wise with the ceremonial chains of spectacle and trumpery.

Why would a man exchange the solemn majesty of the law for the hollow pomp and jibber-jabber of political office? Perhaps he imagines he can steer the ship of state. But the Stoic knows: the sea is not calmed by the hand on the rudder, but by the soul unshaken by storms. Yet before we can ponder this folly further, the judge is accused - of fraud, no less, and of poisoning a witness.

The irony is not lost on those who remember his long-ago lecture on statutory fraud, delivered with romantic fervor at a party teeming with lobbyists and fixers. Madge Eberly, once the object of his near-proposal, recalls this moment with a venomous smile. “Weren’t you advising them on fraud?” she asks, her tone sweet with malice. Redmond protests - he spoke only of how fraud might be done, not how it should be. But Madge, spurned and bitter, has already passed the tale to those who would see him fall.

Spite, Lucilius, is a passion rarely named in our post-modern age, which prefers to dress its wounds in irony and scrolling. But the Stoic sees it clearly: it is the soul’s abject surrender to perceived injury, the abdication of reason to resentment. To be consumed by spite is to give one's tranquility to another, to become the very thing one despises.

Marcus Aurelius, that emperor of the inner citadel, reminds us: “The best revenge is not to be like your enemy.” Madge, in her bitterness, has become the architect of her own unrest. Redmond, if he is wise, will not answer her poison with more poison, but with steadfastness and the legal hocus-pocus of Perry Mason.