On Anger and Activism

And avoiding flatterers

The other day, I was reading an excerpt from Seneca’s On Anger (De Ira), and there was one section that caught my eye:

Do you not observe that with each advancing grade of fortune there goes the greater tendency to anger? It is especially apparent in the rich, in nobles, and in officials when all that was light and trivial in their mind soars aloft upon the breeze of good fortune. Prosperity fosters wrath when the crowd of flatterers, gathered around, whispers to the proud ear: “What, should that man answer you back? Your estimate of yourself does not correspond with your importance; you demean yourself”—these and other adulations, which even the sensible and orginally well-poised mind resists with difficulty.