The Importance of Doing the Right Thing

How does someone

stand up and do the right thing when they know that they're

gonna face great opposition?

You have to have some kind of, of spiritual commitment because,

uh, the, the punishment and the disincentives for telling the

truth are

often overwhelming if you are just living in the, in the

material world. You know, my father believed

that we should be indifferent

to what people thought about us, that we should do the next right thing,

and that we had to be indifferent ultimately to the world and to, you know,

what the Stoics believed. And my father was a Stoic,

i- is that we should be indifferent to our

own desires, our own pain, all

of the things that drive us in the material world, and that

our duty was to figure out what our

function was and then to, to perform it no, no matter

what the cost. So I grew up kind of in that milieu,

and to

me,

every person that I've admired throughout my life have been

people, you know, who I read about, historical figures.

They're all people who went through a-- They went through a

valley of the shadow of death. They went through periods when the

world turned against them, when they were abandoned by their friends, when they

were, um, they became pariahs in their community,

a- and they persevered. So for me, as long as I

feel like I'm doing the right thing, the public rebukes are a kind of

gift because they're confirmatory

that, um, you know, I'm doing something difficult and that I

should be, uh, you know, I need to be grateful for that

and not feel...

never feel like a victim and never feel self-pity and never, you

know, lapse into those, uh, into those mires.

So, you know, for me, I'm doing what I, I'm supposed to be doing.

I'm very confident of that. And, you know, my, my only other

job is to be grateful and to be peaceful.