Live Without Borders: A Stoic Podcast for Traveling Citizens of the World
Education:Self-Improvement
I’m currently reading Ryan Holiday’s Courage is Calling, and he talked about a writer, Varlam Shalamov, who, in the 1930s, was sentenced to hard labor in a Soviet gulag. This passage stood out at me:
“There he was in one of the darkest places a human could be, and what did he find? He found deep insight into the human condition. “I discovered that the world should be divided not into good and bad people but into cowards and non-cowards,” he wrote. “Ninety-five percent of cowards are capable of the vilest things, lethal things, at the mildest threat.”
When we ask about courage, we are thinking about it precisely wrong.
It’s not our question to ask.
For it is we who are being asked the question.”
We live in an age of cowards. Of people going along with the crowd because it’s the easy thing to do. It feels safer to throw stones at the other side than it does to stand for something positive and hopeful. There’s risk in questioning things and seeking other perspectives, whereas joining in the mob costs us nothing (except perhaps our character).
But maybe things have always been this way.
It’s still difficult for most people to wrap their minds around the Holocaust, how so many people just went along with it. The more I learn about psychology, the more I understand how it happened, but it doesn’t make the lack of courage any more appalling.
As a kid learning about WWII, I had no doubt in my mind that I would have done the right thing had I been in Germany at that time. I’m less sure now that I’m older but I hope I would have acted like a man I learned about when visiting Berlin’s Topography of Terror.
In a black and white photo at this museum, I saw a crowd of mostly men raising their arms in the nazi salute but one man did not join them.
Caption to this photo: “Conformity and refusal: Spectators and workers of the Blohm & Voss shipyards during the singing of the national anthem and the Horst Wessel Song following the ‘Fuhrer’s address’ given by Adolf Hitler on the occasion of the launch of the German Navy training ship ‘Horst Wessel’ Hamburg, June 13, 1936. While all those present raise their right arms in the obligatory ‘German salute’ one man refuses and crosses his arms. We have varying, sometimes conflicting, information on the identity of this brave non-conformist. His name was probably August Landmesser.”
Wow. Can you imagine yourself doing the same?
Really think about that now and how courage plays out in your own life. How often do you stay silent or go along with the crowd because it feels better than standing apart?
Courage doesn’t have to be as grand as being part of the nazi resistance.
It can be as small as offering to help a stranger on the sidewalk. In your mind, you might debate, “Well, do they really need my help? Would I offend them if I offered to open the door for them?” And you might really worry about offending them, but you’re likely also worried, maybe more so, that they would make you feel bad if they took offense to your offer.
Courage is about stretching out of your comfort zone and doing the right thing. You won’t always get congratulated for that, but, when it comes to helping people out, they are almost always appreciative of kind gestures.
This episode discusses what courage is an
It’s not super easy for U.S. citizens to get visas to live and work abroad (and the U.S. gov doesn’t make it easy for people to come in either). But millions of Americans have figured out how to create a life overseas, and so can you.
Here’s my cheat sheet of the nine easiest countries to move to from the U.S.
https://www.sarahmikutel.com/countryguide
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