The Lost Virtue of Thumos (And Why Men Need It)

The Art of Manliness

This episode explores the ancient Greek concept of thumos—a vital inner drive encompassing anger, pride, ambition, honor, and spiritedness—and its relevance for modern men.

Key takeaways

• Thumos is not just anger but a noble, spirited drive toward excellence and honor.
• Modern men often suppress or misinterpret thumos as negative emotion, when it can be a powerful force for self-improvement and action.

Main topics

• The ancient Greek concept of thumos
• Cultivating manly virtue through spiritedness and purpose

Notable quotes

'The real answer, the real cure is put them in nature. Put them in the woods.'

Conclusion

Thumos—the ancient Greek spirit of noble ambition, honor, and drive—is a vital but often overlooked

Transcript preview

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Speaker 1 (2:12) Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the AOM podcast, which since 2008 has featured conversations with the world's best authors, thinkers, and leaders that glean their edifying, life-improving insights without the fluff and filler. The AOM podcast is just one part of the McKay mission to help individuals practice timeless virtues through thought, word, and deed. Also, be sure to explore our articles in artofmanliness.com, read the deeper dives we do in our sub-stack newsletter at dyingbreed.net, and turn our content into real-world action by joining the Strenuous Life program at strenuouslife.com. Now on to the show. Speaker 1 (2:52) The ancient Greeks believed the human soul had three parts, reason, appetite, and something called thumos or thumos. Thumos is difficult to translate into English. It encompasses anger, noble spiritedness, pride, ambition, a sense of honor, and the drive to act. The Greeks thought it was essential to living a life of manly virtue, and my guest thinks we could use a lot more of it. His name is Mike LeBlanc. He's a decorated Marine, a Harvard Business School grad, a tech founder, and the author of What If Anger is the Answer? Today on the show, Mike and I discuss how the angry energy of Thumos can help you close the gap between who you are and who you should be. We discuss why physical training helps cultivate Thumos, how it can be an aid in overcoming appetites, overthinking, passivity, and cynicism, and the role it can play in being an effective leader. After the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash Thumos. Speaker 1 (3:52) All right, Michael LeBlanc, welcome to the show. Speaker 2 (3:55) Thanks so much Speaker 1 (3:55) for having me. So you've got a new book coming out called What If Anger Is The Answer? And it's all about one of my favorite concepts from the ancient Greeks. It's thumos or thumos. Before we get into it, let's talk a bit about your background because one, it's interesting. And two, I think it will provide some context for your interest in thumos. Speaker 2 (4:13) Well, my background, my formative years were really in the Marine Corps. And so that consisted mostly of... 12 months in Afghanistan, and then six months around the Middle East when ISIS had come and taken over Iraq and Syria. And I was a bit of a strange fit for the Marine Corps because I didn't come from a military family. I had never shot a gun before. I didn't know anything about the ranks. I didn't know the difference between officer and enlisted and really had ended up just putting my phone number into marines.com, a kind of scary way to get into the whole thing. But through that process, I think that the reasons that I'd gone into it were for, you know, wanting to put myself up against the hardest things that I could find. It was about becoming a certain worth that I thought that I could deserve. And throughout the course of my time in the Marines, I think I learned a lot about that. And that really, to me, felt like a dissertation in Thumas. Speaker 1 (5:08) You also, your education background's interesting. Didn't you go to St. John's? You did the great books. Speaker 2 (5:13) Yes. So right before that, I mean, that... That was kind of the way I'd grown up in Ohio. And I only applied to one school, St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland. And there you learn to translate ancient Greek. You read all of the great books. And so I was spending my days with Plato and Aristotle and Thucydides. And you really start to take on that world. You know, no one's allowed to have a TV at the school. So you really just start to live in what are ancient Greek principles. And it was through that that I really started to see. you know, young people my age, they went to war. Young men went to war. That was what they did. And I started realizing, well, there was a war going on at the time, the war in Iraq. And I was thinking, why did I think that I was exempt from this? What made me so special is not to have to go to this. That was really what started popping those questions into my head. Speaker 1 (6:04) All right. So the great books led you to join the Marines. Speaker 2 (6:07) Yeah, Speaker 1 (6:08) it Speaker 2 (6:08) doesn't do that for a lot. And it surprised my parents quite a bit. Speaker 1 (6:11) Yeah. And what did you do after the Marines? Speaker 2 (6:14) So after the Marines, that was direct into, well, I had met my wife and I had deployed while we were together, but she was very clear that wanted me to get out if we were going to get married. And so I knew that I was going to get married and start a family. Today, we're 11 years married with three kids, seven, eight, and nine years old. But at that time, getting out of the Marine Corps, I really had trouble finding any kind of job. There was... no one that would really hire me. I was trying to make $60,000 a year. That was my entire goal in life was to get that and just couldn't seem to find it. And so through some lucky interactions, ended up realizing that going back to school was my best bet. And I worked very hard at the GMAT and then went to Harvard Business School. Speaker 1 (7:01) All right. And then now you run a company today. Speaker 2 (7:05) Yes. Yeah. So I've founded two robotics companies since then. And so my current company is called Foundation Future Industries. We make humanoid robots. So like robots in the shapes of humans that we sell into wars. We sell to the Department of Defense. You Speaker 1 (7:20) make Terminators. Speaker 2 (7:21) That's right. Yes, Terminator company. All Speaker 1 (7:24) right. So I can see your interest in Thumos or Thumos because you learned about it reading the great books. And then that inspired you to join the Marine Corps. And like Thumos, as we'll see, is a warrior emotion. a warrior drive for the ancient Greeks. What's interesting about this book, though, you don't go right into talking about Thumos. You start off with a letter to your son, Michael, and it's all about what it means to be a man. First, why start the book off with that? And then what did you tell your son in that letter? Speaker 2 (7:55) You know, it was interesting. For a long time, I had written this book a long time back, and I would wake up in the morning at 5 a.m. And, you know, we had little kids, only my son at the time. And I would wake up at 5am and I had until 8am until I had to get to work. So I had three hours to work on the book. And it became a kind of meditation about what was it that I had learned about Thumos? You know, when I joined the Marine Corps, I think that I had a rudimentary understanding of what I was up to. I knew that everyone at the time had been telling me it was good to be sensitive. It was good for me to be It was nice to the people around me. It was good for me to find middle ground with people and to compromise. I had heard a lot of that. And then I was reading in the great books and thinking, no, that's actually not the path to virtue. That's a path to a slow descent. And so I took this time to really, really try to think through what was it that I did? Was that right? And what did I learn about it along the way? And during that time, I really just would think about having my son, Michael, Mike Jr., just sit across the table from me. And so I wrote the whole book in a way that I thought he would understand it when he was, you know, 20 years old. And I hoped that, you know, I was in the Marine Corps for 13 years. I was hoping to condense that experience in a way that you could read it in about four hours and understand the same deep things that I did, or at least introduce the frameworks for people to start thinking about them. Speaker 1 (9:25) Yeah, that was interesting. Your letter, you talk about how... in the 21st century in the United States and in the West, to be a man means, like you said, be sensitive, be compromising, don't lose your temper. But as you read the ancient Greeks, and we'll talk about this, like that, like they believed in prudence and not going overboard with your anger, but they actually believed anger was an essential part of the soul, particularly a male soul. Like being able to experience anger was important. And you bring in this idea of, the role anger played in the Greek world with one of Socrates' metaphors for the soul. He has two of them. The most popular one, the most well-known one is the one from, I think it's the Republic, the Chariot. Yeah. But you referenced this one that's in the Gorgias. So tell us about this metaphor of the soul and the role anger plays in it. Speaker 2 (10:18) So, you know, it was interesting to me that no matter who you look at that is talking about the soul, they always break it into parts. Like any serious look at the soul breaks it into parts. And a kind of classic one is you see it in all of the old cartoons. It's an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other. And I think we all know this experience of having an angel on one shoulder and devil on the other. It's, you know, when you're in Vegas and your friends are like, let's go out to the next club. And you have the angel that goes, I think it's probably time to turn in. Nothing is going to happen. It's midnight, right? And then you have this devilish part of you that goes like. Let's just throw all of our money on black and let's see where the night takes us. You know, everybody knows that kind of back and forth, whether it's about eating a piece of candy or, you know, taking revenge on somebody that they know. You know, everybody kind of knows those two. And so Socrates had some version of those. He had the little man of the mind. So he said that your mind is like a little man and it is rational and it thinks about what it should do and what it shouldn't do. you know, generally good decisions. And then you have your desires, which are like a hydra. So he considered this a many, many headed beast. And that beast could just completely take us over. So just completely give us into desires. And so as he's first talking about it, those are just the two parts. And he says, maybe that makes up the whole of the soul. But there enters this third part. And it was a part that I didn't really understand until I had left the infantry officer course in the Marine Corps. So the infantry officer course is a place where you don't sleep, you don't eat, right? It's just, it's very hard for 10 weeks. And so when I got done with that 10 weeks, I got my first night in a hotel room right after that. I was beginning a new course in intelligence. And this was going to be a gentleman's course. So I thought, all right, I earned it. You know, you're always giving yourself excuses for these things. And so I went and I bought every food you could imagine. I bought Wendy's, I got... you know, the Philly cheesesteak at Subway. I got Cheetos. I got ice cream. I got all of this junk food and my favorite of all junk foods, which is peanut butter. And I sat in the hotel room and at first I'm eating and my desires, you know, have been locked up for 10 weeks. And now I'm eating Subway, eating Wendy's and I'm going, you know, I deserve this. The Hydra has been locked up in a cage. I'm going to let it out. And the, you know, rational part of me, the little man of the mind is just like, this is great. Have at. And then I start digging into the Cheetos and things. And a little man of mine goes, you know what? Go crazy. What's it going to do? It's a cheat day. It's one day. No big deal. We'll get right over this. But I just kept eating and kept binging. And so by the time I got to the peanut butter, I started with just a spoon and eating peanut butter directly out and thinking, oh, this is great. But pretty soon, I'm in one of those big jiff jars. And I'm halfway through. And now the little man of the mind is getting concerned and going, oh man, I can't be sitting here eating this huge tub of peanut butter. You know, you're like, how many calories is this? And the Hydra is just screaming back, screw you. You've locked me up for 10 weeks. I don't care. And I'm just digging through this thing. And the little man of the mind is thinking, can you even eat a full tub of peanut butter? Like, am I going to have to go to the hospital? What happens if you eat this much? This seems like some kind of weird YouTube challenge. And the Hydra just keeps... blowing on through. And so that battle keeps going back and forth kind of between the angel and the devil, or as Socrates would have it, the little man of the mind and the hydra. And finally, I get so angry with myself. I'd finished all the peanut butter and I was about to turn toward more junk food. And I was so angry at what I was doing and this whole argument that I made myself put on my running shoes. I had some ice cream left. I had a gallon of ice cream. I just unloaded the whole gallon of ice cream into the toilet, flushed it down, right? Because I couldn't trust myself near it. And this is at midnight before this course. And I went out running and I ran 10 miles and I just forced myself. I mean, I felt so sick, so exhausted, so tired. And so I ran 10 miles, got back at somewhere around 2 a.m. And by 6 a.m., I was at my course. And now everybody at the course thought, oh man. LeBlanc had some fun last night. You know, they pictured me like out with spring break or, you know, who knows what they pictured, but they were like, this guy really came in and had a good time. And no, it was actually, I was shame eating peanut butter in my hotel room alone. And that to me was where I really saw what Socrates was talking about with this third part. The third part was the part that