As a young boy, the famed basketball coach George Raveling learned an invaluable lesson about the power of both knowledge and ignorance from his grandmother, who raised him.
“Why did the slave masters hide their money in books, George?” she asked the young boy, standing together in her kitchen.
“I don’t know, grandma,” he said.
“Because they knew the slaves wouldn’t open them,” she said.
There’s a reason it was illegal to teach slaves to read. There is a reason that every totalitarian regime has burned and banned books. Knowledge is power. It sounds like a cliche, but cliches only sound that way because of the generally accepted truth at their core. What is less of a cliche but actually more true, is the converse of that idea: A lack of knowledge is weakness, it engenders supplication and makes resistance harder.
From this early lesson, George Raveling came to see reading as a moral duty. To not read, to remain in ignorance, was not only to be weak, it was to ignore the people who had fought so hard, who had struggled at such great cost to read and to provide for future generations the right and the ability to do so. It was to spit in the face of Frederick Douglass, of Booker T. Washington, and, of course, of Martin Luther King, Jr. who Raveling had gotten to know.
It is worth pointing out today that money is still hidden in the pages of books—though not because someone put it there in order to keep it from you. Think about how many people want to get better–at something, anything, everything. Look at how many people are desperate to be successful, or to extricate themselves from this cycle of mediocrity that has trapped so many of our generation. These people look everywhere for the solution to their problems. They seek out secret formulas, shortcuts, gurus. They will turn their entire world upside down before they stop and look at the one place where you can always be sure to find answers—the book shelf.
Marcus Aurelius talks about going “straight to the seat of intelligence.” That’s what books are. Epictetus found freedom from slavery, long before he was legally free. How? In the writings of the Stoics, in the words of Musonius Rufus.
We read because it makes us powerful. When we don’t read, we become weak—easy to manipulate, less than what we are capable of being. It’s in our self-interest to read (there’s money in it), but it’s also our moral duty.
P.S. This was originally sent on June 26, 2020. Sign up today for the Daily Stoic’s email and get our popular free 7-day course on Stoicism.
