"Your boos mean nothing"
Rick & Morty's powerful reminder to model true courage
Rick And Morty is one of the best late-night series from Cartoon Network’s golden years. There are many quick and clever lines of dialogue you can sink your teeth into. Here’s a quick one for today that I hope moves you in the week ahead. You never know when you’ll need it.
“Your boos mean nothing, I’ve seen what makes you cheer” - Rick
Rick is confronting Miles Knightly, host of Heist-Con, a convention dedicated to thievery in the most strategic and charismatic ways possible. The context isn’t too important, but Rick publicly challenges the wisdom of Knightly and the crowd is not pleased.
This is really not easy to do
The crowd of Heist-Con….a gathering for liars, cheats, thieves and swindlers. If you’re going to be boo’d at, isn’t this the best possible people to have hate you?
This is easier said than done. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve wanted to say something true in the presence of nasty people and object liars, but I shied away because I didn’t want to bear the cost of public scorn. Have you been in that kind of situation? Work…a conference…Twitter….a gathering of friends whose morals you find questionable based on your upbringing?
It’s hard to do.
In Marcus Aurelius’ classic Stoic text, Meditations, he goes out of his way to reference the emptiness of applause from wicked people. Aurelius is the emperor of Rome and is expected by the people at the Coliseum for the gladiatorial games.
Marcus finds them disdainful. Aurelius was known to read instead of looking down on the carnage. Far from being a man bored with the violence or detached from its ugliness, he would read and conduct government business to signal to his subjects that this tradition was not the best of Rome.
Remember this. Marcus writes in Meditations 6:16:
“An audience clapping? No. No more than the clacking of their tongues. Which is all that public praise amounts to — the clacking of tongues”
One of my favorite things that Marcus Aurelius does in Meditations is call on us to call things what they really are, just to be reminded of how we dress up bullshit as treasure.
Wine? It’s crushed, rotten, and sour grapes. Roast beef? A dead cow. Sex? Grinding of bodies and a bunch of fluids.
It’s all part of the same observation, which is that we tell lies to ourselves about the value of certain things…including the approval of certain people.
Seek the approval of good & beautiful human beings
If you’re getting boo’d, condemned, ratio’d, canceled, or dragged by a bunch of strangers online or jerks from within your workplace….perhaps you’ve done something right.
Perhaps you’ve modeled courage. Bill Maher said as much on the Joe Rogan podcast just yesterday when talking about the speeches actors give at award shows. “Is anything these people say “brave” if the audience is roaring in applause back at them?” Probably not.
You must practice dissent
I’ll leave you with this. Practice. During the final days of democracy in Rome, Senator Cato would travel throughout Rome barefoot and in shoddy clothes. Why? Rehearsal. He was practicing being out of step with cultural expectations, and training for the days when he’d be treated as a fool, a degenerate, and a traitor for not supporting the regime. You practice being an outsider in small ways, and for him, that was the equivalent of doing a few daily pushups to strengthen himself.
If you’re a Believer or person of faith, Tweet or post publically a (Bible) verse.
Share that news story you think is important but would reveal your views to friends and family.
Next time someone says something bizarre or false over dinner, ask them “Why do you say that?” and see what they do.
Truth and goodness won’t defend itself. Accept the boos and rid yourself of the need for applause, after all, it’s just mammals thoughtlessly slapping their hands together because a few other people are doing it….
This is the way.
Let’s hang out this Friday
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Have you tried out the Podcast?
This is the Way now has a companion podcast called Walk The Way, and you can find it on any podcast service. We do original content and also some narrative versions of what you’re reading about on the Substack. Here’s a new episode of
where he talks a bit more about his recent visit to Lucasfilm, and what it taught him about letting go….Here is the article:
