This Is What Karma Looks Like

There is a simple proposition at the heart of classical Christianity: if you are a good person and do good works on Earth, when you die you will enter the Kingdom of Heaven and know the full bounty of God’s unending love. But if you are a bad person on Earth, and you sin without repenting, when you die you’ll end up in Hell for all eternity.

In many Eastern religions like Hinduism and Buddhism, that duality is baked into the singular notion of Karma: good intentions and good deeds will be repaid in the next life with great kindness; bad intent and bad deeds (or sin) will be repaid in the next life with great severity.

The Stoics take a different approach. They don’t say that cheating or lying or murdering should be avoided out of fear of future punishments at the hands of God. Instead, they make a much more immediate and self-interested case. Seneca especially, who saw Caligula and Nero and other infamous Roman rulers up close, takes pains to point out these people are not winning. Nor are they getting off scot-free for their crimes. Actually, they’re paying for it every single day.

Seneca would have liked the passage at the conclusion of the novel What Makes Sammy Run? by Budd Schulberg, which renders this verdict on the empty, broken life of an immoral Hollywood studio boss:

I had been waiting for justice suddenly to rise up and smite him in all its vengeance, secretly hoping to be around when Sammy got what was coming to him; only I had expected something conclusive and fatal and now I realized that what was coming to him was not a sudden pay-off but a process, a disease he had caught in the epidemic that swept over his birthplace like a plague; a cancer that was slowly eating him away, the symptoms developing and intensifying: success, loneliness, fear. Fear of all the bright young men, the newer, fresher Sammy Glicks that would spring up to harass him, to threaten him and finally overtake him.

The Stoics would say don’t sin or your life will be hell. Not your next life, not your afterlife, but this life right now. Today.

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