“That which isn’t good for the hive, isn’t good for the bee.”
MARCUS AURELIUS, MEDITATIONS, 6.54
In keeping with the idea that we’re all connected, today’s quote from the Daily Stoic is a metaphor about a bee in their hive — or more literally, about individuals and their community.
Now, it’s not often that author Ryan Holiday completely misses the mark, but I feel like today is one of those days. Here’s a direct quote from him: “Just because something is bad for you doesn’t mean it’s bad for everyone. Just because something is good for you definitely doesn’t mean it’s good for everyone.”
The problem with Holiday trying to explain Marcus Aurelius’ sentiment this way is that logic can’t be inverted and reversed like that, and still be true. That’s playing games with logic, and any debater will explain that you can’t do that. The statement doesn’t hold true when you twist things in that way.
So I’m going to attempt to go back to the original quote and try to suss out its true meaning. When I see the word “good”, my first thought was that Aurelius meant “excellent” or “great”, i.e. “That which isn’t great for the hive, isn’t great for the bee.”
But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that he probably meant “good” as in the right thing to do, the ethical thing to do. So in that sense, the quote is better understood as “Anything that isn’t the right course of action for the community, isn’t the right course of action for the individual either.”
In essence, just because you’re an individual and some of the common truths about what’s the good and right course of action in your community seem to be rather dated and too broad, it doesn’t mean that they don’t apply to you. They do. Whatever is determined to be right for the community, is right for you as an individual.
In the end, Holiday did seem to latch onto an accurate statement at the end, when he said “good and wise actions by the whole are what’s good for the individual.”
And what’s wrong for the whole is wrong for the individual, too.
