The healthy eye must be able to look at everything there is to see, and must not say, “I want only what is green.” That wish is the mark of a sick eye.
—MEDITATIONS 10.35
In this entry, Marcus Aurelius described the diseased eye as one that refuses to see all that is visible. The healthy eye, he said, must take in every object of sight without pleading for some and refusing others. The eye that says “no bright colors please” is sick. It has stopped doing what an eye is for.
He wasn’t writing about ophthalmology. He was writing about the mind.
I wrote on this passage because it is a scarily accurate description of how I interpret the present moment in society and discourse. Not of polarization — that word makes it sound like a weather event, something that happened to us. Of malfunction. A specific, observable, mass-scale failure of the receiving faculty in millions of otherwise functional people. The ‘eye’ is still there. The ‘eye’ is no longer doing the work of an eye.
The most common form of the malfunction is this: someone hears a phrase, sees a hat, reads an email signature with pronouns, encounters a name — and stops processing the input before they have actually received it. The argument that follows could be excellent, sloppy, sincere, cynical, true, false. None of it matters. The ‘eye’ decided what it was going to see before the seeing happened.
I want to be clear about what I’m naming, because the diagnosis loses its bite if it gets confused with disagreement. Disagreement is healthy. Disagreement is, in fact, what a functioning ruling faculty produces after it has done its work. The eye sees, the mind judges, the person concludes — and sometimes the conclusion is no. That is not the disease. The disease is the failure to see in the first place. The shortcut from the packaging of an idea to its dismissal without ever stopping at the idea itself.
I grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Cranston, Rhode Island. I moved to Washington, D.C. for university and built a career and home there. I worked on campaigns throughout my young adult years and also inside the federal government during an administration that rooms I often frequent mostly despise. I have moved across enough categories — economic, geographic, political, generational — that I am hard to sort. The practical effect of being hard to sort is that I have watched the diseased eye operate from every angle. I have watched people decide what I was going to say before I said it. I have watched them mishear what I did say because they had already decided my intentions. I have watched it from the right and from the left, in rooms of power and in rooms with no power at all.
I have also watched myself do it.
There are names that, when I see them in my feed, cause me to scroll past whatever follows. There are phrases that, when I hear them in a conversation, tighten something in my chest. The tightening is the symptom. The scrolling is the disease. In those moments I am the diseased eye. I am refusing the input because of the packaging. I have a long list of reasons that sound like rigor and feel like discernment, but if I am honest, most of them are post-hoc decorations on a reflex.
The work, if it can be called work, is catching it. Not eliminating it — I am not going to eliminate it, and if you encounter anyone who claims to have eliminated it, well then I encourage you to cleanse their feet. Just catching it. Noticing the tightening before the scrolling. Asking whether the input has actually been received before the response is launched. The Stoics — the school whose philosophy Marcus practiced — gave a name to the moment between perception and reaction: the gap between impression and assent. The healthy mind can sit in that gap. The diseased mind cannot — though it always could.
What makes this a civic problem and not merely a personal one is scale. A society in which most of its members have a diseased eye cannot self-govern, because self-government requires a citizenry capable of receiving an argument from someone they did not vote for and processing it before reacting to it. Without that capacity, every public conversation collapses into tribal recognition. The content is irrelevant — only the signal of which side it came from. And once that is the operating logic, the work of governing — which is the work of building majorities across difference — becomes secondary to personal motivation — and with that, nearly impossible.
I do not believe this is a temporary condition produced by any one political figure. The conditions for it were laid down over decades by the economics of attention. Short-form video that rewards reflex. Headlines that compress complex stories into tribal signals. Algorithms that learn what makes you flinch and then feed it to you in increasing concentration without consent. The diseased eye is being trained, on most of us, most of the time, by systems that profit from the disease. This does not excuse the individual failure. It does locate it. The malfunction is structural before it is personal, even though it can only be repaired one person at a time, from the inside.
What does repair look like. I am cautious of any answer that sounds clean, because clean answers are usually the diseased mind dressing up as its opposite. But I have a working list, offered without much confidence, that I am trying to live by.
Read past the packaging. When the input arrives with a signal that would normally cause me to dismiss it, read the actual sentence. Not to agree. Just to see. Distinguish between disagreement and dismissal. Disagreement is a conclusion. Dismissal is a refusal to begin.
Notice the tightening. The body knows before the mind knows. If I am tightening, I am about to fail the test, and I have about half a second to choose differently.
Apply the standard to my own side first. The diseased eye is not located on the other team. It is located in the receiving faculty of whoever I happen to be at this moment. The asymmetric application of the diagnosis — sharp toward the people I disagree with, lenient toward the people I do — is itself a symptom.
Be patient with the diseased eyes around you. The diseased eyes around us were trained into that condition by systems designed to do exactly that. Contempt for the diseased eye is its own form of wrong. Unpopular in 2026, maybe, but I still believe two wrongs don’t make a right. The healthy posture is not superiority. It is something closer to the kind of sadness Marcus seems to have carried about the people he governed — a quiet, durable hope that the eye can be restored, paired with no illusions about how often it will be.
None of this is a program. None of this is a fix. It is a posture, available to anyone willing to do the unglamorous work of catching themselves in real time, which is most of what Stoicism actually asks of a person anyway. The healthy eye is rarer than it should be. It is also nothing exotic. It is just the eye doing what an eye was built to do.