The Daily Stoic

“Man’s inhumanity to manMakes countless thousands mourn.”It is a verse from the poet Robert Burns. It was a favorite of Ulysses S. Grant as well as Winston Churchill, two men who witnessed the absolute worst of what people can do to each other. The line itself may have been borrowed from a similar observation by a 17th century German philosopher, who remarked that “more inhumanity has been done by man himself than any other of nature’s causes.” It also echoes some of the darker observations from Marcus Aurelius, who wrote most of his Meditations while at the front with the Roman army, where he regularly saw decapitated and desiccated bodies.Our ability and tendency to forget that we are all brothers and sisters is partly what allows this inhumanity to happen. Marcus said he was a citizen of the world...yet he saw huge swaths of the population of that world as barbarians simply because they were different than him. He saw the Christians, with their very different beliefs, as something dangerous and unnatural.