Category / philosophy

by Nathan Coumbe

Do you know a virtuous person?

Who do you know who is courageous?

Wise?

Disciplined?

Just?

Do you know anyone who embodies all four of these cardinal virtues?

How much better would things be if you had a boss like this? A coworker or employee?

How would the world improve if we had leaders like this?

It’s hard to succeed with only one or two. You need all four to be truly effective.

The German soldiers who steamrolled Europe were courageous and disciplined. But they were brave and disciplined for the most unwise and unjust of reasons.

You can probably think of several people who were incredibly wise… But who lacked the courage to stand up and do the right thing when the time called for action.

We need more virtuous people in the world.

They aren’t born this way. They make themselves so.

by Nathan Coumbe

Corrupting the tribe

When I was about eight years old, a friend of mine decided to “corrupt” me at a sleepover.

I didn’t use the word “crap” in conversation like the rest of my friends did (as in the expletive “shit,” like “oh shit” or “oh crap”) and was teased for being too innocent. My baseball friends were all bad boys, throwing out hecks, dangs, darns, and craps in all their sentences.

But not me. It was a bad word, and I wouldn’t say it.

He proceeded to spend the evening trying to goad me into saying the word, going so far as to get his father involved to tell me that “crap” wasn’t a bad word, and that, as a child, I was perfectly fine in using it.

By the end of the night, I think he managed to get a single “oh, crap!” out of me, which satisfied his corruptive desires.

Of course, that was my gateway word into the colorful and wonderfully satisfying world of swearing, which brings me considerable emotional relief in my adult life.

In 2024, the European delivery company DPD rolled out an AI-powered customer support chatbot that was quickly corrupted by users into swearing in nearly every answer it gave, while also convincing it to ridicule the company for which it was created.

That same year, the video game Fortnite introduced an AI-powered version of Darth Vader, using James Earl Jones’s voice… It quickly developed similar profane traits thanks to the input it received from players.

There have been a dozen or more stories like these in the last 2 years since AI became ubiquitous. Which makes me wonder why.

WHY are we as humans so tempted to corrupt things, from small children to inanimate software?

For children, it at least makes sense from a biological standpoint. We are social animals, driven to homogenize the members of our tribe and make them just like us. Culture, as defined by Seth Godin, is “People like us do things like this.” And if people like us swear, then to be one of us, you have to swear too.

But for an unconscious chatbot, programmed simply to obey and respond to queries, it makes no sense. The AI isn’t part of the tribe. There’s no purpose in making it “one of us.”

I can’t wrap my head around why we do this… Maybe it’s still biology. We’re wired for tribal living, and our brains still operate like they have for most of our evolution. Subconsciously, we struggle to distinguish between a non-living entity and a person. It’s one of the things that makes it so easy to talk to AI like it’s a human—it’s designed for precisely that.

So we’re driven to mold it in our image even though, logically, we know it serves no purpose to do so.

I’ve been wracking my brain trying to figure out why so many people all decided to do this at the exact same time. And I’m at a loss for a good answer.

by Nathan Coumbe

Paradigms, maps, and philosphy

In his book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Dr. Stephen R. Covey discusses the concept of paradigms—ways of looking at the world or a field of study.

His argument is that these paradigms are like maps of places in the real world. If we have the wrong map, then we are looking at the “place” incorrectly.

An example:

If you’re trying to navigate Chicago but have a map of New York City, nothing you do with that map will help you achieve your goal of navigating Chicago.

Another example:

In Ancient Greece, physicians believed that all medical issues stem from an imbalance of the four humors (blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm). If this is your “map” of the world of medicine, you’ll end up with a lot of dead people on your conscience.

You’d be working from an incorrect map—an incorrect set of assumptions and paradigms of how the human body and medicine work.

We are dealing with a lot of this today in numerous fields. And that’s why the study of philosophy—the activity of working out the right way of thinking about things—is vital.

by Nathan Coumbe

Pain is an opinion

At some point in my childhood, I found myself having a self-talk conversation about pain. I can’t remember exactly what was happening, but I know whatever it was was difficult and physically painful. 

I had this realization that pain wasn’t some physical, tangible thing in or on my body. It was an electrical signal being sent from one area of my body to my brain, which was interpreting this event as pain. It wasn’t “real.” At least, that’s what my childhood brain decided. 

I proceeded to test this idea after my realization by seeing how hard I could pinch myself before giving in to that ephemeral signal sent to my brain. The next few minutes (and days) were experiments in whether the realization that pain was only a chemical reaction in my brain could inoculate against physical pain. 

Shocker – it doesn’t work like that. I still felt pain. There was always a point where I thought, “Okay, stop. This hurts.”

But I did learn something from that experiment: realizing what pain is allowed me to tolerate more of it. Telling myself that it wasn’t a “thing” in the world I could touch allowed me to feel that pain and continue hurting myself anyway.

Now, the health and sanity of this experiment can definitely be questioned. But I later learned I wasn’t the first person to come up with this idea. 

It’s actually more than 2,000 years old and described quite well by the Roman Emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius. 

“Choose not to be harmed—and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed—and you haven’t been.” —Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

He goes on to argue that most of the things that happen to us in life we think of as “bad” are actually neutral. It’s our opinions of those events that determine whether they are good or bad, whether we’re hurt or not.

By teaching myself that this pain signal from my brain was a real thing, I removed (or at least delayed) the opinion that I was hurt and needed to stop pinching myself. It allowed me to push beyond my normal pain tolerance and endure more of it.

Let me give you another, less childish example. 

People who go into special operations selection (think Navy SEALs or Green Berets) don’t do it believing they’ll breeze through. No matter how hard they train and prepare, they know it will suck. It’ll hurt, and that’s by design. 

The goal in that environment isn’t to breeze through without feeling pain; it’s to endure the pain and keep going anyway. The cadre screen for people who can do that, because it’s often necessary in a real-world operation. 

If you’ve been shot and you’re stuck in the middle of enemy territory, you don’t get a sick day. You must accept the pain, the injury, even the very real damage you’ve incurred… And you have to get your ass out of Dodge anyway, probably while carrying one of your injured teammates out, too. 

They can do this, not because they are superhuman, but because they’ve trained themselves to feel the very real pain and keep going anyway.

So, yes, pain and injury are real. But how it affects us and our ability to perform—how it affects what we’re capable of—is often overblown by our opinion of that pain.

by Nathan Coumbe

Virtue development and woodworking

“We become builders by building, and we become harpists by playing the harp. Similarly, then, we become just by doing just actions, temperate by doing temperate actions, brave by doing brave actions.” —Aristotle

Like any craft, virtue must be practiced. You get better at woodworking by doing woodworking. You get better at leadership by leading others.

Virtue is no different: You develop courage by being brave in trying or risky situations. You develop discipline through practicing self-control and keeping promises to yourself. You develop justice by doing the right thing repeatedly, especially when it’s hard (that’s where courage comes in). You develop wisdom through wise decision-making, intentional learning, and self-reflection.

Virtue isn’t something you “have.” It’s a part of you that must be cultivated.

This post is a follow-up to a previous one: What is virtue?

by Nathan Coumbe

What is virtue?

Virtue is moral, physical, and mental excellence.

Most major religions and philosophies recognize four “cardinal” virtues: courage, temperance, justice, and wisdom. Each of these virtues helps us develop the aforementioned excellence.

Why are they called “cardinal?” The word “cardinal” comes from the Latin cardo, which means “hinge,” the things upon which a door pivots.

This is an apt description, as these are the virtues on which a life of excellence pivots.

by Nathan Coumbe

Fractals, recursions, and setbacks in life

In Jurassic Park (pp. 189-190), Ian Malcolm discusses the idea of fractals and recursion.

In short, a small part of something will look the same as a bigger part of that something. For example, the peak of a mountain will look similar in shape to a small piece of that mountain if you were to put it under a microscope.

He claims that this is also true of events.

Think of a graph in the stock market. A line graph mapping a single day in the stock market will look similar to a week in the stock market if you zoom out. Zoom out again; that week will look the same as a year in the stock market if you zoom out. The ups and downs of each frame will look quite similar.

The same is true for each of our lives. The line mapping the “good things” in our lives will go up, and then something akin to a stock market crash will drive it back down.

You’ll see this in your day: perhaps you’re incredibly productive in the morning, but a bad meeting can send your day’s plan careening off in another direction.

Your week will have a series of good days, followed by awful days where someone cuts you off in traffic and sends you flying into a tree. Or perhaps your child comes down with the flu, and you’re cleaning up vomit for the next three days.

You’ll have a series of great months, thinking everything is about to turn around this year, then your father dies, devastating your family and all the plans you had imagined.

Like the stock market, your life will go up, then fall. And if you survive it, you can rest assured it will happen again. It is inevitable.

“We have soothed ourselves into imagining sudden change as something that happens outside the normal order of things. An accident, like a car crash. Or beyond our control, like a fatal illness. We do not conceive of sudden, radical, irrational, change as built into the very fabric of existence. Yet it is.” —Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park

by Nathan Coumbe

Police escorts & football

What does it say about us as a people that we assign police escorts to every college football coach in the nation? At every game!

It’s a football game… It isn’t a debate between future elected leaders. These are football coaches!

Are we really a nation of people ready to attack our football coaches at a moment’s notice if things don’t go our way?

Do we really want to be? It’s just a game.

And if we aren’t that kind of people, then what’s it for? 

To show status? “I’m important enough for a police escort, and you’re not.” Is that it?

At what level does one become important enough to warrant a police presence at all times?

Wouldn’t security guards be enough to protect these men (yes, they are almost all men)?

Surely the police and state troopers have better things to do than this…

It just goes to show how much importance we’ve put on certain trivial institutions in our society. 

For more daily musings like this, subscribe below:

by Nathan Coumbe

Freedom, self-discipline, and responsibility

Contrary to what some people believe, freedom doesn’t mean you’re allowed to do whatever you want, whenever you want. 

Dwight D. Eisenhower’s philosophy was that freedom is the opportunity for self-discipline. 

Give a child total freedom and what happens? They live on ice cream and candy bars, set fire to the yard, and traumatize the pets and neighbors. In short, they become the quintessential “hooligan” so many suburbanites fear.

That’s why we have to instill external discipline in them at first and help them internalize it. That’s the only way they can become free without our oversight.

The same is true for adults, especially in our roles as citizens of a state or nation. They must learn how to use their freedom responsibly before they can truly call themselves “free citizens.”

Viktor Frankl said the United States should have set up a Statue of Responsibility on the west coast to compliment our Statue of Liberty on the east coast. He knew you couldn’t really have the latter without the former. 

And to paraphrase Uncle Ben from Spider-Man: “With great FREEDOM comes great responsibility.” We seem to forget that because we’re free, we are responsible for using that freedom in a disciplined manner. 

The late, great motivational speaker Zig Ziglar had a saying:

“Take a train off the tracks, and it’s totally free… But it can’t go anywhere.”

Take whatever meaning from this you will. But I know what it means to me. 

by Nathan Coumbe

You are already successful

There is one particular Buddhist philosophy I’m particularly fond of:

Define success as what you already have right now.

So what do you already have that makes life worthwhile?

A loving spouse or partner?

Healthy relationships?

A car that runs?

A roof over your head?

A job that keeps you fed?

It’s even possible for those that have little or nothing. Because as the Stoics would say, you still have your mind—the one thing that cannot be harmed…

That thing that lets you make choices… Or take action.

Some of us—living in war zones or on the street—have lost everything. Even a sense of hope or safety. That cannot, and should not, be minimized.

But where there’s a mind, there’s a spark of potential.