It’s a tempting cognitive bias but ultimately a paralyzing one. Worse, it is often complicit in very preventable evil.
We have talked before about “whataboutism” but lately we’ve seen a new strain of this moral false equivalency, dubbed “preemptive whataboutism” by pundits. Except actually it’s not new: We can imagine Seneca doing it. Yeah, sure, Nero is really bad, he told himself. Yes, it’s bad that he’s killed his brother and his mother and utterly neglects the business of state. But if I leave, what about the evils of the next emperor? So Seneca stayed, rationalizing his service to a deranged tyrant with the uncertain, unprovable assertion that the alternative might be worse.
We can see how tempting this logic is but how cowardly it turned out to be. Seneca was declining to face the problem that was actually in front of him by focusing on a potential problem that may or may not have occurred in the future. He was also missing the point: It was true that Nero’s successor theoretically could have been worse… but that didn’t change the fact that Nero was really, really bad right then! And can we really accept Seneca’s feigned care about this future problem when he was neglecting the present one?
We are seeing this play out right now. There are radical extremists on both sides of the political spectrum in the United States. There are dishonest politicians on both sides. People who have fallen down on the job. And yet whenever leaders are given a chance to do things about this, they talk themselves out of this by focusing on imaginary boogeymen of what the other side might do in response. Voters have been guilty of this too. Yeah, sure, I don’t like the craziness on my side, they said, but what about my exaggerated fears of what will happen down the road if we express even the slightest weakness in purging these bad actors?
No! You gotta do the right thing, Marcus Aurelius said. The rest doesn’t matter. You gotta focus on the ethical concern in front of you right now. Not the next one or the one after that or the one totally in your head. You gotta deal with this. You gotta deal with it right.
In case you missed it, Ryan Holiday’s new book, The Boy Who Would Be King, is available for preorder now! It’s the story of a young Marcus Aurelius and how he became one of the wisest and most virtuous leaders in history. Comes with a free audiobook if you preorder now. Learn more here.
P.S. This was originally sent on February 19, 2021. Sign up today for the Daily Stoic’s email and get our popular free 7-day course on Stoicism.
