It's no accident that a roman emperor (tyrant, mass murderer, and courtier) is the premier famous stoic. Nor is it an accident that the next most famous case is that of British empire public schooling, british "stiff upper lip" stocisim.
(EDIT: Marcus Aurelius) himself was no stoic philosopher, he merely wrote diaries to himself in his late days -- diaries he wanted burned, not published. And these were rehresals of what his stoic teachers had taught him while he was being raised into the roman aristocracy. Without this context, its very easy to misread his diaries in the manner of some religious text, cherry picking "whatever sounds nice".
Its clear, under this view, how bitter and resentful many of these reflections were. He retreated to his diaries to "practice stoical thoughts" on those occasions where he was emotionally distributed. They are, mostly, rants. Rants against the court (eg., ignore the schemes of others, etc.); rants against the public (no matter if one is whipped, beaten, etc.); rants against how his prestige means little as a leader. Stocism here serves as a recipie to smooth one's injuries faced as a member of the elite, surrounded by vipers and with meaningless prestige.
Stoicism, under this light, is training for a ruthless sort of leadership. From the pov of The Leader, all adoration is fake, all prestige, and status. Your job is to pretend it matters because it matters to your followers. It's a deeply hollow, dissociative, nihilistic philosophy which dresses up the status quo as "God's plan" -- a rationalization of interest to the elite above all others.
Your perceptions of stoicism are so detatched from mine, I have to ask, what does stoicism mean to you? The wikipedia entry describes it like this:
"The Stoics believed that the practice of virtue is enough to achieve eudaimonia: a well-lived life. The Stoics identified the path to achieving it with a life spent practicing the four cardinal virtues in everyday life — prudence, fortitude, temperance, and justice — as well as living in accordance with nature"
Which seems pretty close to how I understand it, and it seems a pretty reasonably approach to life.
But this wikipeida version seems very far from your description of "a deeply hollow, dissociative, nihilistic philosophy which dresses up the status quo as 'God's plan' -- a rationalization of interest to the elite above all others."
I adopt rather the opposite virutes. Imprudence, risk, throwing-your-self-at-a-wall-until-you-cant, intemperance (conflict, debate, disagreement, competition) and pragmatism (address what is rather than what should be).
Behind each of the stoic virutues is a psychological position to dettach, dissociate and live in a more abstracted conceptual space. This can be theraputic if you are in grief, etc.
Outside of that, personally I think: attach too much, risk more than you ought, and participate in the world ("dirty your hands") by making the best of it, rather than anything more abstract.
Professors of stocism like to make a virute of dying quiety -- this i think absurd. If the plane is falling from the sky, i envy the people screaming -- they have the right levels of attachemnt to their own lives.
> Behind each of the stoic virutues is a psychological position to dettach, dissociate and live in a more abstracted conceptual space.
Many proponents of Stoicism would disagree with this in rather strong terms, FWIW. If you go back to our earliest sources, Stoicism seems to be very much about living in the present moment and engaging with the world; it's just very careful about avoiding dysfunctional behaviors and the attitudes that would promote them.
The oft-referenced Stoic notion of avoiding the harmful "passions" is not so much about becoming completely detached from the world, and more about not acting outwardly in ways that turn out to be materially bad or dysfunctional. It's just that achieving this is harder than we might expect: the Stoics were well aware that our acting-out is often driven by inner attitudes and stances that can only be controlled effectively after quite a bit of time and inward effort, and complete control is more of an abstract ideal than something readily achievable.
I think your last example demonstrates the value of stoicism. In many cases, our untrained emotional response to life prevents us from achieving more or enjoying life. Instead of screaming, you could spend the time enjoying your loved ones for as long as possible. You could try to find a way to stop the plane from falling or work on bracing yourself to survive the impact.
Stoicism is a realizing that many of our instinctual and emotional and responses and actions do more harm than good. It may feel good to scream at someone we believe has wronged us, but it doesn't help them or us and doesn't correct the perceived wrong.
I suspect that screaming at a person who has done you wrong, in the vast majority of cases, has both the intended effect and a desirable one.
If you are in an elite position of leadership, and otherwise have more Machiavellian options, then you can always try to calculate revenge instead -- or forgive endlessly and be exploited.
I'd say in the majority of cases, for most adult people with some life experience, shouting when you want to shout is probably a healthy thing.
Though there are always cases of those who shout at the wrong people (displaced agression), or have to little life experience or no composure at all -- I dont think these are any where near the majority of cases. It's very rare. Though a perpetually (literally,) adolescent internet might make it seem so.
Almost no one ever shouts at me, though I'm very shoutable-at.
> I'd say in the majority of cases, for most adult people with some life experience, shouting when you want to shout is probably a healthy thing.
Sure, and that is totally fine.
But Stoic philosophy disagrees with that. Just as with many other fundamental questions about how to live life, there are different answers/points of view. You don't agree with the Stoic one, and you even offer some reasons why you think it may be harmful. That's entirely fine. The only problem is in your implicit assumption that Stoicism has failed to consider the perspective you have, and if it did, Stoics would abandon their approach to life. That's not true. While there may be Stoics whose individual lives would be improved by adopting your approach, Stoicism as a philosophy is not blind to the perspective you're offering. It just rejects it.
I agree. But you'll note one of my professed virtues is conflict, so I'm "participating in the world" by expressing a social emotion (contempt) towards a value system I disagree with in order to change the social environment. This makes me a political animal.
This is why I express my view in this way. If I wanted to be a stoic, or nearly equivalently a contemporary academic, I'd present some anemic "balanced view" in which you've no idea what my attitude is.
But as I'm not a stoic, I take it to be important to communicate my attitude as an act of social participation in the creating-maintaining of social values. In other words, I think on HN my contempt towards stocism itself has value here, since it invites the person reflecting on stocism to be less automatically respectful of it.
> I think on HN my contempt towards stocism itself has value here, since it invites the person reflecting on stocism to be less automatically respectful of it.
In case it's helpful to you, I'll point out that your effect on me was entirely the opposite. I'm not too positively inclined to stoicism, and I feel the Epicurean and Nietzschean critiques of it hold a lot of water. However, the tone of your top-level post made me instinctively defensive of the qualities of stoicism! I think that's because I perceived the tone of your top-level post as demonstrating something akin to what Nietzsche called ressentiment.
That's one of the effects of being particular -- being a particular person, with particular feelings -- the effects are particular. That's part of the point, part of the aim.
The received view of the tyrannical mass murderers of rome is hagiography, if a few "on my side in the debate" (or otherwise) think I'm being too harsh and want to undermine that a little: great! I would myself do the same if I heard myself speak, if my feelings on what was being said were that it needed moderating.
This interplay I vastly prefer than trying to "be the universal" myself -- disavow all felling, and suppose i can in a disinterested way be unpartisan to a view. This asks vastly too much of any individual, and is in the larger part, extremely (self-) deceptive.
If I can speculate: your perspective seems to be at least a second, maybe third-order perspective, of someone in an atypical environment surrounded by would-be stoics, who are all participating in order to succeed in e.g. middle management. This corporate stoicism produces suboptimal product results because while stoicism is perhaps necessary and valuable to hold a position, as you noted it is fundamentally detached and dishonest.
But until someone lives in your version of the social environment, they cannot see the relative value of a return to “radical candor” and so you get rejections, both from people behind you in their profession into stoic corporatism and from those who make their living from behaving in accord with it and believe they are superior for it.
How does your opinion matter than the parent’s opinion?
Even in an ideal scenario favorable to you it seems impossible for it to lead anywhere, after mutually negating each other, other than generating more noise on the internet.
It took me a while to to figure out why I find your position so disgusting. I think a lot of people perceive this contempt as intentional distortion, dishonest, socially hostile.
I dont think we need more stoking of conflict and contempt, but need more good faith and balanced information sharing. I don't think your have correctly modeled the effects of your approach.
I think you hit on it, but the total reason why is slightly different, and the key is in its trigger of your disgust mechanism:
Conflict does not need philosophical reinforcement because it is a major biological default. Using our higher abilities to reinforce these prerequisite (but not higher/good) positions triggers disgust because it leads to traumatic outcomes. That is why disgust exists: to cause us to avoid actions that lead to traumatic outcomes. Sometimes the arm of perception of our disgust reaction reaches further than our comprehension.
I think cooperation is, by far, the most ordinary case. Oppressive, normative, cooperation. This may not seems so online, which is a very unusual environment -- but the vast majority of people are conflict-avoidant.
You might say a war is conflict, but not really: the main mechanisms of war are cooperation.
Very rarely are interpersonal situations prone to disagreement.
The disgust here isn't about trauma, it's a healthy narcissm: the guy doesn't want to be deceived and thinks i'm being deceptive.
I don't think I'm being deceptive, because my heart is on my sleeve -- if I were being deceptive, I'd present an apparently objective analysis and give away little of my apparent feelings on the matter (cf. seemingly all mainstream news today).
I have a different ethic of transparency -- I want people to be emotionally and intellectually transparent. Pretending not to feel one way about an issue represses itself in a manupulated intellectual presentation of the matter -- the reader becomes mystified by the apparent disinterest of the speaker.
If there's one thing I hate with a great passion its false dispassion and intellectual manipulation. So I opt for emotional honesty as part of the package.
The contents of people's replies (, votes) is a measure of my effect, so post-facto, no modelling is required.
I'm clearly aware of the existence of people who want an "objective (unemotive) presentation", and clearly aware of what effect emoting has on those people. I haven't failed to model it. On many issues I'm quick to suspend this expression, and engage in a more dispassionate way with a person who wants me to, if I see some value in it. But I'm loathe to give up expressing my feelings, because that is part of the purpose of expression.
I am only doing what you are here in this comment -- you express your contempt in much more extreme terms ("disgust") than I, in order that I may take your feelings into account.
Likewise, when appraising stoicism, I think there's value in others taking my feelings on the matter into account. If only as a means of a kind of reflexive emotional equilibrium modulated by surprise: there's too little contempt towards stocisim in my view, and in its absense, has grown a cult around figures like aurelius.
I've been to the cult meetings in which he is read in a religious manner, cherrypicked and deliberately misunderstood. I'm here out in the world you see, participating -- and I wish to reflect that in my thinking and feelings on the world.
> I suspect that screaming at a person who has done you wrong, in the vast majority of cases, has both the intended effect and a desirable one.
Not usually. Just some examples:
Customer service people tend to be trained to de-escalate and send things up a level. Sometimes they call it "killing with kindness"; basically you repeat your stance with a smile on your face until the person going wild either calms down on their own or leaves. Either way, the person yelling does not get what they want. On the other hand, if you're charming to customer service people, a lot of times they'll bend the rules for you if they can, and if they can't -- well, you don't have to have on your conscience: "ruined the day of someone making minimum wage"
In long term relationships (say, work relationships or family relationships) this sort of excessive emotionality doesn't work either. In a job, you'll probably just get fired, or if you're the boss, people will avoid telling you things. Your family can't fire you, but they can set a boundary and stop dealing with you.
Basically, what I'm trying to get across is that uncorked rage is very rarely effective. It may work once or twice but it's a bad overall strategy.
If you don't want to be exploited, a controlled show of mild anger is a lot more effective. People who are not in control of their emotions can be easily exploited, but those who are in control of their emotions are not. I think you think there's this axis of Rage-a-holic <--------> Door-Mat, but the problem is both ends of those axes have people that aren't in control of their feelings. The door mat lacks control also, but in their case it presents as withdrawing from the world.
> If you are in an elite position of leadership, and otherwise have more Machiavellian options, then you can always try to calculate revenge instead -- or forgive endlessly and be exploited.
You're assuming that in most cases when people shout, they're being excessive.
I don't think that's true, at least "per capita". Maybe most shouting is done by the emotionally unstable, but most people arent emotionally unstable (as adults).
If an adult were shouting at me, I'd be greatful of it. I was slapped once, and I said thank you to the person who slapped me -- it told me I was being careless.
For people who arent evilly trying to manipulate you, like customer service -- expressing how you feel helps others know how you feel. I am, in many cases, grateful to know.
If I saw someone getting angry at a person in the customer-service-way, my instinct as an adult with life experience, is to treat that anger as symptomatic -- not evil. This is the danger in saying you shouldnt get angy: blaming the victim.
> Yikes dude
I wasnt endorsing that, I was saying, that's less healthy than just being angry.
There's definitely a cultural aspect, but at least among the people I tend to interact with, shouting is very much a last resort.
If you're at the point where the only way to make your point is by being louder than the other guy, then you're really just winning on intimidation rather than persuasiveness. If both people, or multiple people, are shouting, is anyone actually listening? And if not, what's the point of being so loud?
I see your example of being slapped and I mean, I guess it's good that you took that act in a positive way, but, to me if I'm being so closed off that I need to be slapped, I really need to evaluate how I'm acting.
> I wasnt endorsing that, I was saying, that's less healthy than just being angry.
Fair enough, I'm mostly saying yikes to the implied spectrum of [ scary powerful sociopath bent on revenge <------> complete doormat ]. I don't think anyone needs to concoct weird revenge fantasies to be taken seriously unless you work for the cartel or something, and in that case I'd recommend a career change.
Well now it sounds like you are disagreeing for it's own sake. There may be a name for what you describe, but it's not what is commonly understood as Stoicism.
And in my many years, I have never found shouting at another person to be a healthy thing.
> Professors of stocism like to make a virute of dying quiety -- this i think absurd. If the plane is falling from the sky, i envy the people screaming -- they have the right levels of attachemnt to their own lives.
Not to sound flippant, but that strikes me as absurd. You don't gain anything by that. You're going to be just as dead, but with a lot of suffering in your final moments that didn't need to happen. It's a pure negative thing, not a virtue.
That's all great and it sounds like stoicism isn't for you. But that doesn't mean that it's "a deeply hollow, dissociative, nihilistic philosophy which dresses up the status quo as 'God's plan' -- a rationalization of interest to the elite above all others."
Virtues like prudence, fortitude, temperance, and justice can improve the lives of people of any part of society, not just the elites.
I was a staunch Stoic, and a hollow disassociative mess is exactly what I became.
Think of the end goal of the Stoic and what it takes to achieve it. At every misfortune, you rationalize and deny your natural emotions. If you do it well, you're an all understanding guru of life, sharing oneness with everything, and becoming nothing in particular.
We have to accept that we too are a part of nature and flawed imperfect beings who can be unreasonable, hate unnecessarily, be selfish without ultimate good reason, etc. It makes us the individuals that we are, and gives us the will to care and have something we intrinsically want to live for.
Perhaps as a peer comment is alluding to, this issue might simply be viewing things through an all-or-nothing lens.
In some ways I think this is similar to Thomas Jefferson and Christianity. He was drawn to the soundness of the values of Christianity as a system of moral and ethical behavior, but found the supernatural aspects of it unbelievable, and words of third parties as less relevant. So he simply cut them out and actually literally cut and pasted his own 'Bible' together, the Jefferson Bible. [1]
For self evident reasons he kept this as a personal project, but that was essentially 'his' Christianity. Beliefs and systems are what we make of them. Stoicism may shape one, but we can also shape it back in return, for otherwise it's certain to never truly fit.
That is totally fair, and I'd say what me and the other commenter here are doing is precisely that, arguing that Stoicism by itself, is not something to live by.
These are genuine questions, but please don't feel obligated to answer if you aren't comfortable. I'm fascinated to hear your story though.
Are you generally a pretty gung-ho person? Do you feel drawn to strive toward perfection?
Were you or are you previously religious with Christianity, Islam, or other world religion?
Do you view stoicism as an all-or-nothing thing? I.e. do you think a person applying stoicism in a light-weight or even casual manner is useful, or would you still recommend avoiding it?
Growing up I was a pretty reserved, depressed kid. Culturally Christian background but I was a pretty staunch agnostic. I am not a perfectionist when it comes to work, but I did always strive to be as rational as I could in how I approached life. It was very much naturally my coping mechanism.
If faced with being wronged, "They're just a biological machine, how could I be mad at a tree that grew the wrong way?", personal failures, "I am just a biological machine, this is just where I am at at the moment", "Whats it matter what I accomplish? Were all dead in the end anyway", faced with some accident, "Well something was bound to happen at some point. Its nothing unexpected that it happened now", a loss of love, "It happens to everybody, things just didn't coincide".
Its all very calming, and can make you resilient to what's going on, but I came to realize that what I am really doing is disassociating from every aspect of my life. Instead of feeling/processing my emotions, I was simply just not caring about any of it. I read Nietzche's Genealogy of Morals, and it was such a derailment from my natural philosophy, and yet it felt he was saying everything that I wanted personally. You're human, be angry if you're angry, be sad if you're sad, do what you want to be doing, have and enforce YOUR will for life.
Yes I agree this line of thinking is definitely needed and can be extremely helpful to someone with the opposite problems, but as with all things in life, its complicated and in truth there is a fine balance that's always difficult to know in advance.
Do you have any idea why stoicism (and rationalism) gets conflated with lack of passion and goals?
In my experience, both are tools to get what one wants, but it seems like a lot of people miss out on the instrumentality. Goal orientation is necessary to determine when emotional repression is appropriate.
That is the opposite of Stoic practice. I have never heard Stoics denying things. What does it mean to deny things that happen? Emotions are not in one's control. Whenever they come up, one would observe and act according to Stoic virtues. If one has failed to observe, then they reflect on the failure and intend to observe in the future.
>Whenever they come up, one would observe and act according to Stoic virtues.
I am talking about precisely this. If something happens that angers you or makes you sad, you can always stop and try to alter your natural reaction/thoughts to be more aligned with a more forgiving/serene/understanding nature.
What I am saying is if you do this really well, everything in life just becomes "it just is", and in turn becomes nothing at all
"If the plane is falling from the sky, i envy the people screaming -- they have the right levels of attachemnt to their own lives."
Instead of screaming, I would rather stoicly prepare and brace myself for the impact of the rough landing. I might die anyway, or I might survive because I managed to put the seat belt on and hard things away from my torso and head. But screaming will not increase my chances, rather the opposite.
> Behind each of the stoic virutues is a psychological position to dettach, dissociate and live in a more abstracted conceptual space. This can be theraputic if you are in grief, etc.
This is also great during the best of times. Happiness is as ephemeral as grief. Accepting that in many ways the vicissitudes of life are beyond your control is a positive thing. Exercising temperance and prudence, among other things, is far from being merely therapeutical.
> Outside of that, personally I think: attach too much, risk more than you ought, and participate in the world ("dirty your hands") by making the best of it, rather than anything more abstract.
You are describing hell. I actively avoid in my life people like that, for good reason.
This is a very interesting comment for me. I really dislike your virtues but agree with everything else and your general dislike of stoicism.
I think there might be a more middle way which doesn’t include impertinence, for example, as a value but still celebrates screaming as your plane is falling from the sky.
The reason I dislike your values is because at face value they imply a disregard for others. I think there is a way to deeply value both yourself and others. It’s possible you don’t imply that disregard for others that I get from the values you listed though.
Happiness is only one meta-value, and at the level of "what the right meta" is, I'm somewhere between a nihilist and an aristotleian-sort-of-biologist:
I only think that the people who are screaming when they are about to die are living like a healthy animal. And in the absence of any objective meta-values, it kinda seems like we might well just be what we are.
Denying's one's instincts is an interesting exercise, and no doubt improves self-control -- but it isnt "above being an animal" -- its, at best, a different way of being an animal. One I think, taken to a stocial extreme, seems an injury.
People who readily accept death (as, no doubt, I do) seem injured, and trying to get to this state seems like a kind of self-injury to me -- a means of poking out the eye because the brain doesnt like what it sees.
People screaming when a plane is crashing seem to have their eyes open.
A crashing plane has roughly two possibilities, screaming wildly seems like the least useful and least pleasant option for either:
- You are going down in a way that might be survivable - If you want to live, you want to shut up and prepare yourself and your peers as best you can. If you're completely prepared and have time to kill, see below as long as it doesn't impair being ready when the time comes.
- You are going down in a way that obviously isn't going to be survivable - Your remaining lifespan has been suddenly reduced to minutes or seconds and there's no solving it. The only choice you have left is how to spend that time. Accepting the hand you've been dealt quickly and doing the best you can with the choices available to you rather than panicking or raging about things out of your control, is....sensible. Taking a last view of the world out the window, listening to a favorite song, a conversation with a loved one or even a stranger, etc, all seem like far more satisfying ways to spend your final moments than screaming like it's going to do anything.
> I only think that the people who are screaming when they are about to die are living like a healthy animal.
I'm not much of a biologist, but there seem to be plenty of animals, especially more intelligent ones, that pretty much calm down and await death when they recognize they are not long for the world for reasons they can't control and have no hope of escaping. (age, illness, etc).
I think what youd ultimately agree with is that it's healthy to be aligned with your emotional, instinctual reactions.
Though I am not totally sure one cannot fully accept snd fully align their being with the absurdity of life - celebrating their life/death rather than wallowing in it.
So you don't like Buddhism either. Question for you though, if the opposite virtues are so much healthier, why did practices like Stoicism and Buddhism develop to help people cope with the difficult realities of life?
Stoicism is a powerful tool to achieving long term objectives that require planning, commitment, and control. Not all objectives fall into this category.
What are your priorities? Would you consider yourself a hedonist?
I think a gap between wikipedia and a polemic by somebody clearly fired up about a topic is not just reasonable, but productive. Wikipedia, by nature, gives the sense that all philosophical viewpoints are equally dispassionate and it minimizes the degree to which reasonable people can substantially disagree about the rightness or wrongness of various worldviews. That usually gets dumped in the Controversy section. This is fine for an encyclopedia, but not for a debate.
Of course, I also think that OP is being polemical and that means they're not interested in being charitable. I think their criticisms are interesting, but the original post linked here does a far better job at balancing a charitable read of stoicism with a critique of why it is appealing to the rich and powerful.
Philosophies are frameworks that help us make sense of the world. We can adopt them in ways that are maladjusted.
People with power often adopt stoic thinking as the nature of power comes with stresses that are difficult to manage. I’ve wielded power at a scale that was nothing like a president or ceo, but way beyond what the typical person experiences. It’s hard, and whatever you do, someone has a bad outcome in many cases.
Most people would characterize Marcus Aurelius or George Washington as wise rulers. They embraced stoicism. Yet Mussolini and Robespierre also identified as stoic-ish as well, and most people would objectively look at them with a harsher light.
The next most famous stoic would then be Epictetus who influenced Marcus Aurelius and is cited in the Meditations.
> Epictetus (/ˌɛpɪkˈtiːtəs/, EH-pick-TEE-təss; Ancient Greek: Ἐπίκτητος, Epíktētos; c. 50 – c. 135 AD) was a Greek Stoic philosopher. He was born into slavery at Hierapolis, Phrygia (present-day Pamukkale, in western Turkey) and lived in Rome until his banishment, when he went to Nicopolis in northwestern Greece, where he spent the rest of his life.
> Epictetus studied Stoic philosophy under Musonius Rufus and after manumission, his formal emancipation from slavery, he began to teach philosophy. Subject to the banishment of all philosophers from Rome by Emperor Domitian toward the end of the first century, Epictetus founded a school of philosophy in Nicopolis. Epictetus taught that philosophy is a way of life and not simply a theoretical discipline. To Epictetus, all external events are beyond our control; he argues that we should accept whatever happens calmly and dispassionately. However, he held that individuals are responsible for their own actions, which they can examine and control through rigorous self-discipline.
Stoicism was a philosophy that spanned slave to emperor in Rome.
I have read Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. Your description of how bitter and resentful they are is utterly bizarre, and bears no relation to the book that I read.
You completely misunderstood everything about Stoicism. It has nothing to do with God his plan or elites.
Stoicism in its essence is about living with accordance with nature by seeking virtue.
It is funny that you call Marcus Aurelius a tyrant while he is considered one of the five great emperors. During the Pax Romana golden age the empire lived in relative peace prosperity and progress. After the death of Aurelius the empire descended into chaos.
His reflections are profound not bitter or resentful. Majority of them are relatable today some 2000 years after...
My guess why Aurelius is considered as the face of stoicism is due to the fact he was an emperor/powerful man. I doubt that the twisted way in which stoicism is viewed today would benefit from selling it as a philosophy of Zeno, who was a foreigner.
What I mean by that is that stoicism in its modern iteration seems a brosphere/manosphere thing that will help you to become rich/powerful/successful/buy a lambo, while in reality, the stoics rejected material possessions and the entire philosophy was created by Zeno who lived an ascetic life, despite being wealthy.
If you read Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy, he takes rather dim view of Marcus Aurelius, and specifically doubts the seriousness of his writings and ideas, considering them somewhat dubious.
Russell himself makes false and dubious claims in that book (for example, claims about Aristotle/Aristotelianism, which he hated). I don't regard him to be an especially reliable or objective expositor of philosophy or philosophical history, generally speaking.
I think it's just one of the few therapeutic skills that are generally offered to men and that genuinely considers the problems that men face.
The problems and issues that men face are largely ignored or downplayed compared with women and there's little offered to men in dealing with it. The traditional outlets like men-only clubs and spaces have been torn down in the name of equality. In that environment, literally anything at all that attempts to address the problems men face will become popular among men.
> one of the few therapeutic skills that are generally offered to men and that genuinely considers the problems that men face.
These things are not OFFERED to men, they are available for the taking if one is so inclined. Your options do not depend on your gender, but many will reject them as if they do. Therapy? It's not just for sissies. If men are so tough, why do they need society to OFFER solutions to their problems?
You're right but the parent poster was responding to the question of why Stoicism is so popular with men in the modern era. He didn't say it was inherent to the philosophy.
Well, for that specific question, I'd skip all the bro-nonsense and just note that Stoicism is at least superficially quite like the implicit life philosophy that many men acquire from their families and the culture, but organizes that into something more coherent and with a fairly long past. It provides a positive explanation of why something vaguely close to what you already do could be a good thing. The appeal of that seems fairly obvious to me.
Note that I don't seek to demean or reduce Stoicism to "what men do anyway". It is a much more carefully thought out philosophy of life than that would imply, and contains far more insight and potential than "keep doing what you already do". But the fact that it is somewhat adjacent to the pop-stoicism associated with masculinity doesn't hurt its accessibility.
Stoicism has nothing to do with men. It's not a male-exclusive philosophy. It's just a way to cope with life and the struggles in life. Stoicism is just being weaponized, often by misinterpretation, by "male-clubs".
It kind of became like a cult. "You need to be a Stoic in order to be successful". It's the same story all over, and a similar thing happens with every -ism, like minimalism where it transformed from being a philosophy of being happy with the things you have, into a philosophy where you need to identify yourself as minimalist by buying a bunch of crap that is labeled as "minimalist [whatever]".
> Marcus Aurelius himself was no stoic philosopher, he merely wrote diaries to himself in his late days - diaries he wanted burned, not published.
This is how I read "Meditations" - not as writings of a sage (as far as I know, he didn't consider himself one), but as "shower thoughts". Ironically, since these were private notes, they were likely more genuine than if they had been intended for publication. And more approachable, precisely because he was not a philosopher.
Roman emperors were, without exception, autocrats. Yet, he is considered one of the better ones.
Even if he didn't always live up to stoic ideals, he strived for them. This doesn't excuse his wrongdoings, but it suggests his writings can have value despite his flawed actions.
One thing that struck me, though, is how a philosophy promoting ideas like "things are good as they are" or "ignore spiteful people" works well when you're at the top. If you're a slave or poor, things might look quite different. Especially when spiteful people cannot be ignored - be it your master, your centurion, or an unfair competitor trying to frame you.
I have no idea how you can read his meditations and come away with this conclusion. Where are you getting that “Your job is to pretend it matters because it matters to your followers”
Your take on this is wild to me, and while TFA as whole is somewhat more balanced, I'm pretty surprised at this whole train of thought. An emperor was a stoic, and so was a slave. Epictetus is only mentioned twice in passing in the article, but it does say that
> Some stoic authors were slaves themselves, like Epictetus author of the beautiful stoic handbook Enchiridion, and many stoic writings focus on providing therapies for armoring one’s inner self against such evils as physical pain, illness, losing friends, disgrace, and exile.
Seems like people from all walks of life thought maybe it was a useful point of view, and that it's universal because people from all walks of life have their own suffering to deal with.
I get that in an inevitably political world that's increasingly polarized, philosophy always becomes a sort of fashion show where it's not about what's being worn but who is wearing it lately. But this is really pretty silly. Stoicism predates silicon valley and will still be around after it's gone, and there is substance that goes far beyond "deeply hollow, dissociative, nihilistic".
If it sounds that way to you, I assume maybe you are just in a situation where you have someone that you kind of hate preaching it at you.. in which case adding some distance makes sense no matter what they are evangelizing. Quoting TFA again
> [stoicism] reminds me of the profession of wealth therapists who help the uber-wealthy stop feeling guilty about spending $2,000 on bed sheets or millions on a megayacht.
So there it is, that's what's really bothering the guy.
I'm glad they wrote several more comments. The first comment was intriguing, but the more the wrote the more wild it got. Especially the part about being connected to life like a person in a fall airplane.
I think they've mixed up Stoicism with some other philosophy entirely. They think Stoicism means feeling nothing, doing nothing. Almost like the Hindu concept of sanyasi.
> a roman emperor (tyrant, mass murderer, and courtier)
It's interesting to read up on the lives of famous ancients like Julius Caesar and Alexander. I know it was a different time, but the regular and casual war crimes and mass murders sticks in one's craw.
> the regular and casual war crimes and mass murders
It's phenomenal to read about these revered historical figures! They turn out be privileged thugs. We should be extremely reluctant to extol their virtues.
The best thing about the arc of history so far is that by and large it decentralized power (with some horrific exceptions)
God-kings / pharaohs / caesars -> a handful of feudalists -> millions of millionaires vs voters vs large governments all competing in a much less violent and more stable balance of power
I don't see how the fact that his most famous work is his diary makes Marcus Aurelius not a philosopher. Is there some magic credential you need to be a philosopher? As far as I can tell, philosophers come from all over the place; slaves, clergy, clerks, etc. Since there wasn't an institution to get his philosophy degree in, I think we can give him a pass?
With regard to the other criticism that there are rough bits in his not-intended-to-be-published diary and not all of it holds up.. so what? You've never said something bitter and resentful in private that you wouldn't want broadcast to the world? If you have a diary, do you think it'd stand intense scrutiny 2000 years later? Being a stoic means embracing your imperfections, so, the fact that Marcus Aurelius was an imperfect man tells us nothing about stoicism.
FWIW Marcus Aurelius is considered one of the greatest (maybe the greatest?) Roman Emperors ever, and he was plucked from relative obscurity, so, while you can certainly criticize the institution you're picking on someone that navigated that level of power better than his peers.
> He was a member of the Nerva–Antonine dynasty, the last of the rulers later known as the Five Good Emperors and the last emperor of the Pax Romana, an age of relative peace, calm, and stability for the Roman Empire lasting from 27 BC to 180 AD. He served as Roman consul in 140, 145, and 161.
> ...
> The historian Herodian wrote:
> Alone of the emperors, he gave proof of his learning not by mere words or knowledge of philosophical doctrines but by his blameless character and temperate way of life.
> ...
> The number and severity of persecutions of Christians in various locations of the empire seemingly increased during the reign of Marcus Aurelius. The extent to which the emperor himself directed, encouraged, or was aware of these persecutions is unclear and much debated by historians. The early Christian apologist Justin Martyr includes within his First Apology (written between 140 and 150) a letter from Marcus Aurelius to the Roman Senate (prior to his reign) describing a battlefield incident in which Marcus believed Christian prayer had saved his army from thirst when "water poured from heaven" after which, "immediately we recognized the presence of God." Marcus goes on to request the Senate desist from earlier courses of Christian persecution by Rome.
Marcus Aurelius was the last of the Five Good Emperors because he did not adopt a competent, non-biological son to take his place like the previous four. Instead, he set up Commodus as Caesar and his heir, despite his mental instability. That decision alone calls into question his Stoic resolve.
True, the other Good Emperors - Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius didn't set up their children as their successors. They each adopted someone who would be good at the job. But there was one difference between them and Marcus Aurelius - none of them had biological sons. Their adopted son would be their only heir.
Marcus Aurelius' decision can be criticised in hindsight because Commodus was terrible at his job. But I'm not sure I could have done differently in Marcus' shoes. Parents find it difficult to view their children objectively and feel the need to protect them. Even if he was aware of Commodus' faults he also knew this - if he adopted someone else and crowned him Emperor, then it would have led to civil war after his own death. Either Commodus and his other sons would kill the adopted son or vice versa. Having all of them alive and at large would be an unstable equilibrium that could only be solved with war.
Come on man, this guy ran an Empire pretty well for a couple of decades despite challenges like war and plague. Maybe he knew what he was doing. Give him the benefit of the doubt.
Pretty much all Roman emperors would be considered tyrants and mass murderers by the standards of modern western liberal democracies. Marcus Aurelius was a product of his time and hardly a hero to emulate. But despite their flaws we can learn some universal lessons from their surviving writings that still apply to modern life — including at least some elements of stoicism.
Modern western liberal democracies aren't without faults either. They've been involved in a few conflicts themselves, like Iraq and Israel/Palestine (whatever your view the situation is an ongoing mess not really helped by foreign influence). Or propping up illiberal rulers. There's the values liberal democracies espouse, and then there are the geopolitical realities of how they act.
But be aware that most writings about him are roman, and hence state propaganda which glorify his actions. In order to see more clearly what his actions were, just imagine being their victim. He perpetrated a genocide against Germanic tribes in retribution.
It's very hard to be a morally good roman emperor -- you can be seen as good by either the plebs or the elite of roman society, but not by nearly anyone else, and almost never by both even in rome.
I don't think its any accident the elite of concequering empires adopted this mentality. Though, no doubt, there were originally honest/moral/good stoic-philosophers they did create a kind of "retreat from the world dissociation" which isn't in my view, itself good. It's therapeutic in some situations, typically in cases of grief/loss/extreme-attachement --- but outside of these cases, you want to associate and attach.
Perhaps there's some case for a little stocisim in the face of social media today, or in the kinds of "adversarial environments" which exploit your attachment -- such as leading an empire (cf. Machiavelli: leaders have to be rutheless). There's possibly an argument that twitter turns everyone into a viperous courterier looking to attack each other's reputation and attachemnt-bait.
On the scale of leaders: not being needlessly cruel, trying to consider the impacts of policies beyond the immediate, and dedicating your days to ruling rather than enjoying whatever pleasure you pick makes him one of the "good" ones. Maybe that's a low bar, but even today not all leaders clear it and certainly we can compare to Commodus who came immediately after and the sources for which are similarly patchy, to compare.
I have read his diaries, though carelessly writing Mark Antony over Marcus Aurelius does undermine the point. -- Thanks, edited. I guess one shouldnt write HN comments while listening to corporate policy announcements.
In my personal life, work and home, I am surrounded by people who are constantly in a state of distress, ranging from frustration to simmering rage, about things which are completely beyond their ability to change. I never see it do them any good, nor cause any constructive change for society. My personal understanding of stoicism is focus on changing the things I can change, and not spend my time being miserable about things I'm powerless to change. This gives me peace. My younger brothers spend all day ranting about the state of society, one from the right and the other from the left, and it has never done either of them any good. They have twice as much gray hair than me despite being years younger.
Then I go on the internet and read commentary like yours, making stoicism out to be some sort of rich conspiracy against the eternal revolution or something. I find this baffling. Of all the things to get yourself worked up about, people choosing a stoic mindset is definitely up there in fruitlessness. Nothing you can tell me would ever convince me to adopt the methods of my brothers, so what is the point of what you're doing?
(I confess I've never read any Marcus Aurelius, it seems like it would be very dry. Maybe I'm wrong, but my reading list is already very long and philosophy all gets bumped far down the list.)
> My personal understanding of stoicism is focus on changing the things I can change, and not spend my time being miserable about things I'm powerless to change.
This is the overriding principle I've come away with as well, and it has felt to me like one of the most simple and wise things I've heard.
I've read the Meditations -- in the Emperor's Handbook translation -- and they're nothing like GP is making them out to be.
In their original, unedited comment, they didn't even get Marcus Aurelius's name right, attributing the Meditations to Mark Antony.
Their take is such a wild and inaccurate mischaracterization of Stoicism that it's frankly not worth engaging with -- written absentmindedly while "listening to corporate policy announcements." Take it with a grain of salt.
Real question, did you have GPT write this for you with some kind of anti-intellectual prompt, or did you actually type this out by hand?
Otherwise, it's a nice fan-fiction about the worst possible interpretation of stoicism, but has really not much to do with what the philosophy is about or what it can be positively applied for.
I'm surprised to see this at the top of the thread, because it's mostly utter nonsense, but it does sound emotionally appealing to a certain social group that believes it's trendy to invent new negative definitions for things they don't like or understand.
Let's just be clear. It's not just that a roman emperor is the premier famous stoic.
It's also that the Romans were instrumental in setting up Christianity and Judaism as exportable religions, after they completely destroyed Jerusalem in the Judaic wars.
Marcus Aurelius was very close with Judah ha Nasi (the Prince) and the Gamaliel family. Subsequent Roman emperors also helped boost the churches and make Christianity a religion that wasn't just for Jews.
Judaism and Christianity were based in Jerusalem. Afterwards, Judaism was based in Babylon (really old schools that had been established during the first exile of Jews, survived and became primary). Meanwhile, Christianity moved to Rome (which became primary over the main church in Jerusalem). It grew there until Constantine made it the official state religion 300 years later.
The Judaic wars is probably the reason why Jesus' own direct students and the Church he set up in Jerusalem (with his brother James and "Peter" as the "Rock on which the Church would be built" and also the "Apostle to the Gentiles") were marginalized (probably regarded as ebionites / judaizers).
Then Paul became the main "Apostle to the Gentiles" instead, even though he himself admits he never learned from Jesus' students, but argued with them instead (including Peter). He has a chip on his shoulder about these "super-apostles". In Acts 15 and 21, Paul is admonished by them and seems to relent, being given an official letter to distribute to gentile churches. But in his Galatians letter he claims that they added nothing to his message, except to remember the poor, something he was going to do anyway. Thomas Jefferson called Paul the "great corruptor of Christianity". Most of the New Testament is based on writings of Paul and his student Luke.
So in fact, Roman emperors picked and chose winners in the global religions that became Orthodox Judaism and Christianity.
According to Paul's letters, the main disagreement Paul had was over whether Gentiles should become Jewish converts, including being circumcised, instead of just being God-fearers, a category already recognized in Judaism as long as they abided the Noahide covenant. Paul didn't think becoming Jewish mattered, because Jesus would return soon and everything would be transformed, including those in Christ.
There isn't any indication as to whether James, Peter, John (the Three Pillars in Jerusalem) disagreed with Paul over his Christology or eschatological expectations (Jesus was probably an apocalyptic prophet like John the Baptist). Paul says Jesus first appeared to them, so they likely began believing God had raised him to heaven before Paul. Paul says he persecuted their movement at first, likely because he found it offensive. A risen crucified messiah would be offensive to a Pharisee.
Paul further says they had their gospel (literally good news) for Jews and he was sent to Gentiles, but again there isn't any indication over whether there were substantive disagreements beyond whether Gentiles needed to become Jewish. That and some people clearly questioned Paul's claim to apostleship, particularly in relationship to other apostles, especially in Jerusalem.
What developed after the destruction of the Temple with the proto-orthodox, Ebionites and Gnostic Christianity is not necessarily a reflection of Paul's conflict. Those were further developments.
Constantine gave Christians reprieve from persecution in 313 with the Edict of Milan.
In 380 it was Theodosius who made Christianity the state religion with the Edict of Thessalonica.
Negative assessment of Paul's influence on the development of Christianity predates Jefferson by many centuries, e.g. in the writings of ߵAbd al-Jabbār and Ibn Ḥazm. Muhammad himself believed that Christians had diverged from the truth about Jesus' identity and teachings, though he didn't criticize Paul specifically as far as I'm aware.
It's something of a theme, really, that shows up, seemingly independently, in the writings of those who "want" the core teachings of Jesus but are determined to identify an irreformable corruption that invalidates orthodox Christianity as such. Some identify that corruption with the influence of Paul, others find their smoking guns within the pre Nicene church, or post Nicene, and so on.
"But on the negative side, stoicism’s Providential claim that everything in the universe is already perfect and that things which seem bad or unjust are secretly good underneath (a claim Christianity borrowed from Stoicism) can be used to justify the idea that the rich and powerful are meant to be rich and powerful, that the poor and downtrodden are meant to be poor and downtrodden, and that even the worst actions are actually good in an ineffable and eternal way"
I didn't understand these repeated digs at Christianity as having been borrowed from the Stoics. For one, that all bad things are actually good is not a tenet of Christianity and is not in the Bible. Perhaps some Christians taught this, but you can find a person claiming Christ who teaches absolutely anything you can think of. Such is the nature of things that are popular.
I can only assume the author is referring to this section from Romans 8:28 (NIV) "And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose."
If you fly through too quickly you could reach the Stoic claim, but there are a few key differences.
1. It says "God works for the good" in all things, but not that all those things are good in essence.
2. This is a promise only to those who love God, not automatically extended to all people or things.
Finally, I'll note that the entire Old Testament predates the Stoics, and is the foundation for Christian thinking about God's will and plan for the universe.
> For one, that all bad things are actually good is not a tenet of Christianity and is not in the Bible.
Surely you in your life you have met many Christians who said "God works in mysterious ways", "there is a purpose for everything", "trust in the Lord", etc.?
In the Christian communities I grew up around, it was a pervasive idea that misfortune was explained away by our limited understanding. These cliches were always trotted out when something horrible had happened which needed to be explained away.
It's arguably a necessary tenet for Christianity to hold together as a coherent belief system. If you believe in an omnipotent, benevolent God, you need some way to explain why bad things still happen[1].
> For one, that all bad things are actually good is not a tenet of Christianity and is not in the Bible
Just for my own learning, if it's not considered a tenet, why do I see this line of thought so often portrayed: "This <bad thing> is not bad. God made is so to test my faith."
This is one of three major answers to the problem of Theodicy (justifying God in the face of evil) in Christian theology. They are:
1. Pedagogical (the one you mentioned) - Evil exists so that we may grow and learn. All evil will be used to create even greater good. Quintessential example would be the story of Job in the Old Testament.
2. Eschatological — Evil is a by-product of having any creation in time whatsoever, and will be fully restored at the end of all things. Another way of thinking of this one is that evil is "non-being", the absence of the good. A lack, a privation. Espoused by Augustine (and before him, Neoplatonism in general), and Aquinas.
3. Freedom-oriented — Evil (even natural evil) is a broken state of affairs caused by the freedom of people, who use that freedom against God. God nonetheless allows this because he allows us the dignity to choose. The official teaching of the Catholic Church. The straightforward reading of Genesis 2.
None of these say that "This <bad thing> is not bad" - Christianity acknowledges the existence of evil "as evil". However, with God's grace, evil may be healed or made to serve higher purposes.
Them be some deep theological waters you're wading into.
It's not a tenet, because it's not presented as a teaching that "bad things are good things".
However, we often label things as "good" and "bad," which are overly simplistic for many things in life. A child dying is unequivocally a bad thing. But if your faith deepens through the course of grieving, then a good thing happens from that bad thing. It doesn't nullify the bad thing. It doesn't magically transform it into a good thing. But your faith being made stronger is a good thing, while your child dying is a bad thing.
My understanding is this is the Biblical principle of redemption. Not to be confused with salvation. It's used to refer to God's ability to make good happen from a bad thing, or to "redeem" a bad thing. In this way, redemption can also refer to salvation because man is inherently bad, but through Jesus's death on the cross, man can be redeemed. Once again, bad things happen, but good things can come from them.
Again, it's important to note that the Bible does not teach BAD == GOOD. It teaches that bad things can be redeemed for good outcomes.
I am not a theologian, but that's my understanding of it.
In the story oh Hiob/Job,he is unaffected in his behavior and the trust instilled in him from others, which clearly discouble his person from his misfortune.
In the original there is no word for faith, believe or trust only for character.
Job is of good character despite his misfortune, that makes him a man of God.
Technically correct, but quite misleading. The idea of "trust in God" or "faithfulness" is completely central to Job. The story doesn't concern itself with "doctrinal faith", but it implicitly discusses "faith" in the general sense of trust in the providence of God in the face of challenges that might make one abandon Him.
Came here to write this. Relieved to see someone already wrote this.
Only someone who has never actually taken the time to study the Bible could possibly claim that it teaches “things are secretly good underneath”
The Bible teaches that things are so broken, so bad, and so irredeemable that God himself had to humble himself into the form of man, dying a physical death, to redeem it.
It’s only pop-Christianity that teaches that people are mostly good and make mistakes. The Bible teaches that man is a wretch, incapable of redemption within his own power, and deserving of damnation.
If people are allowed to make choices, evil is a possibility. You can argue that free will isn't good, but I'm not sure what evidence supports that argument.
So if God allows free will, then evil can happen. Just because he doesn't immediately stop it (read: eliminate free will) doesn't make God not-good.
I think part of this is man's hubris in assuming we can know what is perfectly good. The Epicurean paradox is hinged on the description of "all-good," which is far too simple in most people's minds.
A metaphor:
If I shove my child to the ground to teach them the consequences of falling, I am a bad father. If I warn them to tie their shoes, or they will fall, but do not explicitly force them to, I am a father willing to let my child learn, but I am not a "bad father" because of this.
Another aspect I think the Epicurean paradox misses is the concept of justice and eternity. If this physical life is all there is, then yeah, allowing people to suffer and die is an injustice. But if we are eternal beings in a temporary, physical body, suffering and dying in this world is a small blip on the timeline. What comes after has to be factored into the equation of "What is justice?" But that's where non-theistic reasoning can no longer come with us. The Bible is fairly clear about what comes after, and there is justice when viewed in that light.
If you believe this life is all there is, then yeah it's not hard to argue that God isn't just. But again, the Bible, upon which the Judeo-Christian belief system is built, is very explicit that this life is NOT all there is.
So the Epicurean paradox takes a small slice of the Bible out of context and points at it, without considering all the other context and argues, "Ha! See? Logical inconsistency!" when in reality it's just out of context.
## How do you get over the fact Marcus Aurelius wife cheated on him with a gladiator?
I have been into stoicism for a while and have been using it to cope with life but learning this info has made me second guess the entire philosophy. Now whenever I try to be stoic I think about Marcus sitting in the corner writing meditations while his wife gets brutalized by a gigachad gladiator. Now whenever I think about stoicism it seems like a cuck philosophy. Was Marcus really the adam22 of his time? How can I get over this?
---
Idk why this was the funniest thing to me, and now I just think of Marcus in the other room, hearing his wife getting ploughed, writing about how happiness doesn't depend on external circumstance so it's nbd
I saw a post a while ago from a guy who had read the 48 laws of power and tried to mirror the girl he liked but ended up making her think he was gay instead. Same energy.
I'm certainly not rich or powerful, but I have found Stoicism to be extremely helpful. It is hard to always bear it in mind when in times of stress, but when I can, it really does help to focus on the idea that what matters is not my external circumstances, but my own actions and thoughts. It reframes things and helps me to feel better about unpleasant situations I might find myself in.
I also would say that I disagree with the author in his assessment of Stoic thought. He asserts that with millennia of experience, we have learned that we can effect change on the world. I believe that if anything the exact opposite is true. Some men have more power to change the world than others, but for most of us we can't do a damn thing. For example, if I'm unhappy with the actions of the US government, I can write to my representatives asking them to change things, and I can vote for someone else next election (or possibly participate in a recall effort). But that's all I can do, and (speaking from experience) those don't accomplish anything. I still do those things because they are my duty, but I'm realistic about the fact that they aren't going to change a thing and I don't stress out.
"stoicism’s Providential claim that everything in the universe is already perfect and that things which seem bad or unjust are secretly good underneath (a claim Christianity borrowed from Stoicism) can be used to justify the idea that the rich and powerful are meant to be rich and powerful"
What did I miss? Does Stoicism claim everything in the universe is already perfect? That seems like a bold (counter-intuitive) claim.
"perfect" is a weird word to use in stoicism, but I do think it can be used to justify that things "are the way they are" and shrug it off with some visualization.
both "screwed up" and "perfect" are judgements calls/perspectives, and panicking isn't going to change things (panic doesn't necessarily make something worse either)
you can't think of an example where it doesn't? I can. I'm not saying there is any virtue to it, but panic can subside without having had negative side effects on anything other than your mood
"You want to live 'according to nature'? Oh, you noble Stoics, what deceptive words! Think of a being like nature, prodigal beyond measure, indifferent beyond measure, without purpose or consideration, without pity or justice, at once fruitful and barren and uncertain—do you want to live according to such indifference?" - Nietzsche
If Stoicism appeals to the rich, I wonder if the same can be said about Western Buddhism à la Alan Watts and other "everything is love" spiritual philosophies?
From my anecdotal observations, these philosophies particularly appeal to successful people - especially those recovering from burnout or seeking balance in their careers. Think Burning Man's tech hippies. And let's be honest: not every working-class person can afford to take time off for a spiritual retreat.
This dynamic was brilliantly portrayed in the Black Mirror episode "Smithereens".
Why should one feel guilt about being prosperous in an unequal society? Even if you accept that it's based entirely on luck rather than merits, I don't see why you should feel guilt.
A few examples of things based entirely on luck that no one really argues we should feel guilty about:
All those things are somewhat socially determined. Even height has gone up in the last century. Personally I think I'm tall for somebody my age but I see a lot of young men who are a lot taller than me.
To look at that last one, in the solar economy up until 1920 or so, the peak of beauty socially [1] was the debutante from a rich or noble family. As soon as there were cities there were entertainers and courtesans, but in the mass media age the likes of Marie Antoinette just can't compete with professionals.
Standards of athleticism also involve an element of conformity. "Extreme sports" are frequently pioneered by older athletes who have no chance of making the NFL draft but get taken over by the young once a path is visible. (Early winners of the World Series of Poker were outright old, but it became a young man's game when it became mainstream in the 2000s.)
Some societies have a use for people with high intelligence, others don't.
[1] I'm sure there were beautiful peasants to my eye in Heian Japan but the text that survive from that period describe a very specific ideal including perfectly straight and rather coarse black hair that's about as rigid as the look of the kind of woman who, creepily, Instagram wants me to follow today.
The problem is that the things you identified as being based on luck have cascading second-order effects. For example, people that are perceived as handsome have better chances in wage negotiations, and the same goes for people with a lighter skin tone. The most strongly connected trait to being financially successful: being born in a rich and educated family.
These things are outside your control, but entirely in control of a society.
This is questioning why someone should feel a particular emotion.
> is an invitation to keep everything as-it-is.
I don’t need to feel personal guilt about something outside of my control in order to 1) recognize problems in the world, 2) want the factors causing those problems to change, and 3) actively work to change them.
And for many people, feeling guilt - especially for things outside of their control - is absolutely paralyzing and leads to the opposite of action.
I mean I'm more responding to Marcus Aurellius and other formalisations of historical stoicism, than the pretty widely understood idea that "somethings are important, some arent" and "care most about what you can change, and least about what you cant"
These sort of bits of old wisdom also come in their opposites ("you never know when something is important", "your passions can define your life, and create opportunities") etc.
So I'm taking stoicism as a particular prioritising of those "bits of old wisdom" that combine together in relevant historical texts, and add up, in my view, to being quite radically dissociative.
> These sort of bits of old wisdom also come in their opposites ("you never know when something is important", "your passions can define your life, and create opportunities") etc.
But they don't. They're typically not used in such a way, because they're nonsense.
> you never know when something is important
This is just resigning yourself to ignorance and chance. It's an unfalsifiable truism, because you can point to instances where it was true (survivor bias) and say you applied this bit of wisdom, whereas in reality it was just chance.
> your passions can define your life, and create opportunities
Sure, that's one of the possibilities. But it's not wisdom. It's another random truism out of a horoscope that may or may not end up being true.
> Stoicism doesnt own, "keep calm under fire"
A philosophy doesn't need to own anything for it to be valid. One of its principles can be used by other philosophies. What a weird thing to write.
So if I'm fortunate and blessed with wealth, I should feel guilty and be vocal about my guilt. So I make my life worse off and that of the people around me. People with heavy burden of guilt are often insufferable. And this will somehow make the world better off?
Notice these people making these arguments never argue for voluntary charitable giving which is actually encouraged by stoic philosophy as is promoting justice.
But the most important thing to some people is the signaling and guilt associated with any gift.
> Why should one feel guilt about being prosperous in an unequal society?
I can understand the idea of feeling guilty about wasted potential (wealth, time, strength, beauty, intelligence). That which could be used to help those who need help, not exactly novel: “If you have two coats, give one away”
The guilt isn't due to the simple fact of being prosperous it's more about the prioritization of self-interest over that of a win-win option that helps the broader good.
You shouldn't. First, I reject the framing that one's success today is due to privilege. But even if that were true (and it isn't), so what? What previous generations did has nothing whatsoever to do with me, morally speaking. I'm responsible for my own actions alone; this collective guilt line of thinking some people follow is nonsense.
A lot of people don’t know that guilt is an emotion and like all emotions needs to be managed. They feel it, assume it’s appropriate and then seek a cause that fits.
Sorry if this sounds dismissive, it’s not meant to be. But I think it is the cold hard reason for a lot of feeling/stress among people who have otherwise nice lives with no explicit moral failings…
You should feel guilty because you can do something about other people's suffering, instead of being a greedy hoarder who has far more than he could possibly use in multiple lifetimes while other people starve and live miserable lives due to the system you benefit from.
I think Peter Singer makes the argument very well [1] but many others in the history of philosophy have done just as good a job. Even Rawls is an option.
"Luck" is the wrong word w.r.t. your examples. It could not have been otherwise, as you are those features. You wouldn't be you if you didn't. There's no ghost in the machine that is the "real you" that is haunting a carcass where these features are like possessions that you own. You don't own them. They are (a part) of who and what you are. They are things you can, in the appropriate manner, share with others.
You didn't earn them, but so what? Why is everyone obsessed with everything having to be earned? A gift also belongs to me, even if I didn't do anything to earn it, and no one is entitled to take it from me as such any more than they can take anything I have earned.
Now, w.r.t. material prosperity, of course there is no reason to feel guilt. If you acquired your wealth morally, then all is well. This is distinct from the general obligation of those in our society with means that exceed their own needs to aid those in a state of poverty. Note that I said poverty, not having less. Having less is not an injustice.
The framing of inequality as injustice in recently years is rather a symptom of envy or confusion rather than an impulse coming from an intelligent sensitivity to injustice.
Almost universally prosperity is gained through privilege, compounded over generations. Privilege being rules/customs/systems that favored your group over others.
To be fair, the traits OP mentioned are heritable, and so to a large extent come from the privilege of having [tall | intelligence | athletic | beautiful] parents. So privilege doesn't explain why you'd feel guilty about one and not about the rest.
Inequality is not bad, so we should stop speaking of inequality as if it were. There is nothing to be guilty about for having more that is acquired or received by licit and moral means. Indeed, the obsession with equality is often itself rooted in envy. The envious have an obvious reason to feel guilty, as envy is evil (whether overt, such as when we try to take what others have, or concealed, such as when we deny the good of something or play the game of sour grapes).
However, a society does have an obligation to respond to poverty (poverty in the true sense, not "I can't afford an iPhone"). Those with more than they need (and this is subject to prudential judgement) have more means to contribute toward this end.
If anyone is interested in stoicism then this classic lecture by Dr Sugrue is excellent.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Auuk1y4DRgk
I have watched this lecture multiple times (each time I was going through some bad things in my life) and it helped me tremendously.
Stoicism in general has many excellent philosophical ideas that you can apply to your life. Maybe this lecture and stoic ideals will help you if you are in times of despair and sadness the way this lecture and those ideals helped me.
Cultivating stoicism probably increases one's power and riches on the margin, because it emphasizes emotional stability which is correlated with higher incomes. Hedonism probably works in the opposite direction on net, even though hedonists would probably get more direct pleasure out of the extra cash.
I don't think she is a stoic or particularly bothered by rich people using it. She is a historian and this is a topic that overlaps with her area of study.
She said: "I personally love stoicism. It’s gorgeous. It’s brilliant." Maybe that doesn't make her a stoic, but it still struck me as ironic that she seemed wary of rich people using it, that's all.
My interpretation was always that the Stoics were the more type-A people while the people following Epicureanism were a bit more hippie. Still lots of overlap
Not a bad article, all things considered. Interesting, given the overall message, that the author manages to spin the worldly engagement that is still present in stoicism (as opposed to Epicureanism etc.) as somehow a suspicious thing. In Republican times the dominance of stoicism in Rome wasn't so pronounced, I think, and the elite followed all kinds of philosophies. And soon, under the Empire, the political engagement became more of a theatre anyways. Patrician families declined. So the whole idea of having an excuse to stay in politics is weaker that one might think. There was more of an incentive to shut off in your villa as much as you can, and just try to avoid displeasing the emperor.
Graeco-Roman world also created more patterns of radical political engagement than people tend to give it credit for (regardless of what you think of its legitimacy). Plato with his speculatively constructed vision of ideal republic. Ideologically motivated coups, like one of the Spartan king Cleomenes. Generations of social radicalism had looked at Gracchi. We are just too far removed from classical education to see and appreciate it.
The idea that you somehow have to pursue universal salvation as a part of and precondition of your personal happiness, I think this is extremely wrong-headed. Maybe not OP, but many people think you are morally obliged to be permanently depressed and want to ideologically control your every waking thought. In actuality, I'd say it is better to have internal calm and contentment to be able to achieve whatever you are able to achieve for the world.
As for popularity of ancient philosophy, I think some of this is it having more practical outlook and being less complicated, in a way, than most modern (meaning post-medieval) thought. Note that wide popularity of Enlightenment in 1700s also stemmed from it being more accessible to the masses in many ways. While also ancient stuff has enough of a "base lore" to be somewhat insulated from completely freewheeling "philosophical" crankery. That being said, I would encourage anyone to also look into Epicurean, skeptic etc. thought alongside stoicism. Cicero was somewhat right in trying to peruse and combine all this stuff.
It's unfortunate that the elite's interest in stoicism (along with the sigma male crowd) has tainted its perception. It's essentially the basis of CBT and logotherapy that has changed my life for the better. But we also saw this with Buddhist meditation and other various practices divorced from the worldview that spawned them.
It's been interesting to watch and experience Techbros jump on different philosophical/religious trends over the years. Post 9/11 through the Great Financial Crisis New Atheism was all the rage. Once the tech boom was in full swing Stoicism became the dominant ideology.
Now, post Covid I see a hard pivot towards Christianity, but importantly, "traditional" forms of it. Protestant sects are being ignored and Catholicism, or if you are really intense, Orthodoxy seems to be in vogue.
I was recently listening to a podcast about Silicon Valley thought which theorized that at its root it is a justificatory mechanism and not a coherent worldview. Whatever the current problems facing Silicon Valley, its leadership will find some new theoretical underpinning that happens to justify whatever is in their naked self-interest. It's "move fast break things" but with philosophy. Their example was Marc Andreessen who once had coherent ideas that could be agreed with or disagreed with, but saw the writing on the wall and has aligned his "thinking" with the political movement he thinks will most protect his interests.
> Now, post Covid I see a hard pivot towards Christianity, but importantly, "traditional" forms of it. Protestant sects are being ignored and Catholicism, or if you are really intense, Orthodoxy seems to be in vogue.
I have seen these trends as well, especially Orthodoxy of late. My assumption is this is a response to rampant moral relativism that has become the dominant culture in the west.
I think you're being too kind in assuming there is some sort of real philosophy or faith here. I laid out what I have observed the tech elite doing precisely to show that they are rootless and will join with whatever bandwagon is popular in their techbro circle.
It's the great irony of our tech elite. They all believe they are independent thinkers who are changing the world but like any clique they follow what the group says and found another Sass App or become another VC investor.
Half the comment section seems to be entirely missing the point of Stoicism.
Stoicism is not merely just accepting everything and allowing it to happen, without pushing for advancement. That is absurd.
Under Stoicism, you would still push for that advancement and speak up for it, as doing so is not living according to virtue or nature (which Stoics defined our nature as our ability to reason). It's just that you will focus within that on the things that you can control, such as your own personal activism.
If anything it pushes people to do more in this area, not less. Because often people feel helpless so don't do anything, Stoicism would teach to do it anyway, because that is the part you can control and the only way to live a life of virtue, what the world does in reaction to that, is up to the world.
People that have a problem with this way of thinking/being seem to have taken a reductionist version of the philosophy to argue against it.
On the contrary, it's a philosophy that is perfect for the powerless and destitute. One of the most famous Stoics (Epictetus) was a slave. People have used the philosophy to help get them through stints in POW camps. It is by no means a philosophy that is primarily for those with power or agency.
> Because I think it’s important that we mingle some Voltaire in with our Seneca, and remember that stoicism’s invaluable advice for taking better care of ourselves inside can–if we fail to mix it with other ideas–come with a big blind spot regarding the world outside ourselves, and whether we should change it.
Ideally the answer is no, there’s no need to actively change systems if the system proponents are not interested in that change. In case of majority rules, the minority has to seek compromise. Such rules assume that different systems will create their own conditions for long term stability, and there will not be any interference from outside forces.
Under these ideal conditions, agents have freedom of movement to other places, where they exercise free will and actualize because determinism by random events (like being born into a specific system in which an agent is unfulfilled or unwelcome) does not promote long term stability for any system.
In reality, however, agents compete to dominate, and every system then has to mirror each other in some way, or face destabilization.
There’s no such thing as resource scarcity in an endless universe—the problem of different systems is that the existence of another presents an existential threat. Stoicism helps manage this existential threat while acknowledging the caveat that aggressively defending the existence of a system is justified when faced with a direct threat.
A note on social inequality in a given state: if everyone has the same rights, and those rights are applied equally, then that ensures long term cultural stability. If you create second class citizens, or justly aggrieved minorities, then that’s asking for trouble as any interfering force can use that minority to create destabilization. The only things which makes sense is letting people have their own places, and not be interfered with; practically, for a country like the U.S., it means that all states should be free to determine their own set of rules governing rights outside of the purview of the Constitution. In that case, maybe it’s more humane for blue states to accept refugees from red states, and vice versa. Like people mad about Trans rights in CA should move to TX. Extending this logic dictates that blue cities in red states can have their own rules for governance. I think, then, the smallest unit which can have its own set of governing powers should be any which has the resources to implement them, in a self-sufficient and independent manner. I don’t know practical that might be, but it’s an interesting thought experiment.
We can squabble over definitions, but a primary characteristic of Platonism for many people is the belief in a (separate) domain of ideals/concepts. That e.g. mathematical objects exist outside of our individual cognition. That's more dualistic than monistic.
> But for all Seneca’s powerful advice about the big picture and the meaninglessness of wealth, he was also a slave-owner who, when alerted that his male slaves were sexually abusing his female slaves, set up a brothel in his estate so he could make his male slaves pay him for the privilege of abusing his female slaves–not quite the behavior we imagine when Seneca says money is meaningless and all living beings are sacred.
It could be argued that this policy was simply reasonable: the only alternatives being to either do nothing, or set up a police force to prevent and/or punish abuse.
Also, not sure if Seneca really believed "all living beings [were] sacred"; he despised games of gladiators because he thought the spectacles were vulgar and appealed to lower instincts, but he never expressed any form of compassion for the gladiators themselves.
Anyway, I knew that Seneca was the richest Roman in his time (and perhaps, of all times), but didn't hear that story before. Would like to know more. (Did slaves have money to spend?)
You know, I think people will read the headline and have an eat-the-rich-mindset and lump stoicism in with obnoxious tech bros. However, I would posit that if tech-bro's internalize the teachings of stoicism we'd all be better off. It's worth mentioning that Epictetus was a slave, so just because the rich and powerful are finding stoicism doesn't mean that stoicism is a philosophy for only the rich and powerful. Just as an example, stoicism is also very popular in recovery communities (along with Buddhism). As far as pragmatic philosophies go that you can apply easily and have quick benefits, stoicism is a great one.
"stoicism’s Providential claim that everything in the universe is already perfect and that things which seem bad or unjust are secretly good underneath (a claim Christianity borrowed from Stoicism)"
This is obviously and patently false. Christianity recognizes that God has both an active and permissive will. So, while God actively wills the good, He does not actively will evil. This would make God evil, which is incoherent. Rather, God permits evil, but only to bring about some greater good. So, it isn't that the evil isn't really evil, and it isn't that God wills the evil, but rather that the evil is permitted to occur to allow a good to come out of it. We do not deny the evil or the suffering it causes, but we embrace it and allow it to become an instrument of the good. To refuse to suffer the inevitable and inescapable evil that will be inflicted on us only produces more suffering, but a fruitless kind (though potentially instrumentally fruitful in that it may be instructive on this point). The Crucifixion is the paradigmatic example of fruitful suffering and self-sacrifice. The Crucifixion is tremendously evil, and according to Christian theology, the greatest evil ever committed. But by permitting this greatest of evils, God created the greatest of sacrifices, so cosmically great, in fact, that it could pay the price for all sin ever committed.
So, there's no complacency in Christianity, but it is cool-headed and subjects the emotional to reason and moves by the authentic love reason enables.
"stoicism predates the concept of human-generated progress by more than a millennium. It doesn’t teach us how to change the terrible aspects of the world, it teaches us how to adapt ourselves to them, and to accept them, presuming that they fundamentally cannot be fixed."
Another divergence is that Christianity encourages the humble discernment of what should be changed, what can be changed, and what cannot be changed and what should not be changed. In retrospect, this is common sense, and that is a good sign and to its credit, but ideologically-possessed people can become enraptured by a spirited and blind pursuit of some real or perceived good and cause a good deal of destruction as a result. There is a big difference between authentic zeal, which remains firmly rooted in reason, and becoming blinded by one's passions.
I absolutely hate Stoicism. It's used by people as a way to shut me up when I'm expressing negativity about something "I can't control". Almost everything about our lives, especially as we transition to this rent based economy, is out of our control. Stoicism just creates lonely people who are obsessed with controlling things and others.
This is nonsense though. How are people using stoicism to shut you up? I've never seen anyone do that. If they are, they are misunderstanding the intention.
Doing what you can control and focusing on that, doesn't mean that you also don't speak up for change, because that is entirely something you can still control. In fact it's encouraged, because of stoic 'virtue', "That which you do the right thing, that is all that matters"
If others are using it to shut up up, that is what is outside of your control, you ignore it and do the right thing anyway.
Under stoicism, you would still push and advocate for change as an individual, but you would understand that if the world doesn't change or doesn't respond, that is out of your control, but you can and should still excuse your right to do that, because that is within your control.
The entire argument here seems to be missing the point.
I find that the tools of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is a re-embodiment of many of elements of stoicism. It is interesting to think of the 50 million Americans going to therapy as paying for a personal philosophy mentor. You can use this as a jumping off point for all kinds of societal speculation and armchair observations on culture.
The first, true and only philosophy for the working class, the exploited, the proletarians and the dispossessed is marxism. Teaching "stoicism" to people who barely can afford food, to slaves in the Congo, to overworked uber eats cyclists that work 12 hours a day for pennies, is not only ridiculous, it's criminal.
Standing silent or content in the face of exploitation, injustice and the threat of destruction of humanity is indeed an ethics that benefit the rich and powerful. "Be content, stay quiet, dont make noise, dont revolt, dont organize, accept your place in the universe.".
Marx was the first philosopher that recognized that philosophy is a product of material conditions, and that it servers the interests of the economic system that contains it. That's why marxism would have been impossible in ancient greece and there was never a greek philosopher that advocated revolution or seizing political power.
Stoicism has 2 main advantages over other philosophies:
* it’s practical. It involves doing things that work and will improve you life, make it clearer what you want and make it easier to do things and generally not waste your time or money
* it’s true in a trial and error, scientific sense. Stoicism concentrates on what works and is applicable. Beleifs come from life experience. Most other philosophies START with arbitrary beliefs and then expect you to live according to them whether they work or not.
It's a remarkably good set of strategies and mindset for dealing with conflict, anxiety, and having to make a large number of difficult decisions.
The core of stoicism (stressed more by Epictetus, a former slave, than Marcus Aurelius) is that we should not focus or worry on things we can't control. We can't control other people, or societies, or the unforeseen tragic events we may experience, but we can control our own actions, our own thoughts, and the way we respond to them. We can't dictate our emotions, but we can handle how we express those emotions.
In many ways, it's similar to what you might learn going through therapy. But the mental health and difficulties that men face are somewhat overlooked by society and not taken as seriously as maybe they should be. In that environment, literally any strategies at all for dealing with stress and anxiety that are tailored towards men are going to be popular.
Thats patently false. Some people do control other people, some people do control whole societies. What stoicism does is: for the underclass, it tells them to accept such control. Lying that "you have no control" over working conditions, exploitation, misery, hunger, suffering, etc. Do nothing, because nothing you do will matter.
And for the capitalists upper class what it does is to validate the atroicities they commit: "the universe is an eternal good entity, everything happens for a reason. Sixty thousand children killed in Gaza? Its just the universe changing colors, changing quantity, some people turned from alive to unalive, but in the grand scheme of things it doesnt matter. You are just doing your role".
Could you recommend another philosophy worth exploring? As someone who's relatively new to Stoicism, I've found the four virtues (wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance) to offer valuable guidance for living a balanced life. I'd genuinely appreciate hearing more about your perspective—why do you find Stoicism vacant?
I don't follow Tim Ferriss, but I heard him interviewed on a podcast I sometimes listen to (I forget which) and Ferris said he reads MA's writings at least yearly and has done so for decades, and credited it with helping him with his depression and other issues. I got the impression he mentions it and advocates that everyone should study them as well. The interviewer was equally enthusiastic about MA.
Considering the popularity of Ferriss, he is probably part of the reason. I suspect the type of people who read his books (eg the 4 hour work week) probably are into it too as it is a macho stance to take. Who the hell thinks it is good to sleep on a stone floor in order to toughen your mind so you don't get too attached to comforts? My philosophy is I'll deal with suffering when it comes, and not practice before then to get good at it.
It reminds me of an interview many years ago with Jim Rose, who put on a traveling sideshow circus. There were no tricks -- the performs just did strange, painful things for entertainment. One of his routines was his wife would throw darts, using Rose's back as the dartboard. The interviewer asked, "Do you practice this?" He replied something like, "Hell no! It hurts! I did it once to see if I could do it, but after that I only do it for the show, where I get paid!"
Interest in stoicism seems to be cyclical on HN. I’ve been following HN regularly since 2010, and I noticed that a couple of times per year there were/are spikes in stoicism-related submissions and discussions over a few weekends. My unsubstantiated theory is that someone gives a presentation/s touching on stoicism to new YC batches, or something like that.
It seems to be a philosophy about being a good little productive serf and continuing to be productive while taking your powerlessness on the nose? Why would anybody in a modern free society follow this philosophy?
I found it to be way more empowering. There truly are many things in life that we don’t control, but there are many that we do. Would you agree it’s wise to reduce stress about the stuff we don’t have control over?
That is not remotely what the philosophy is about. It's about not letting your external circumstances trouble your internal emotions, because they aren't what truly matters. It isn't passive acceptance - Stoics can, and should, try to improve the world around them. They just don't attach their happiness to whether those attempts succeed or fail.
As to why someone would follow the philosophy, it's simple: we all face stressful situations in life (some more stressful than others of course). Why should you let those things rule your emotions? It doesn't help anything to get upset. It just makes you feel worse. It is a pure negative thing in your life. So, you work to try to gain mastery over those feelings so that even when life is hard you can face it more effectively and with greater peace of mind.
> Why would anybody in a modern free society follow this philosophy?
If I don't accept the absurd stupidity of others, and exercise temperance and prudence in my dealings with my fellow men, life in modern society would be nearly impossible.
It's no accident that a roman emperor (tyrant, mass murderer, and courtier) is the premier famous stoic. Nor is it an accident that the next most famous case is that of British empire public schooling, british "stiff upper lip" stocisim.
(EDIT: Marcus Aurelius) himself was no stoic philosopher, he merely wrote diaries to himself in his late days -- diaries he wanted burned, not published. And these were rehresals of what his stoic teachers had taught him while he was being raised into the roman aristocracy. Without this context, its very easy to misread his diaries in the manner of some religious text, cherry picking "whatever sounds nice".
Its clear, under this view, how bitter and resentful many of these reflections were. He retreated to his diaries to "practice stoical thoughts" on those occasions where he was emotionally distributed. They are, mostly, rants. Rants against the court (eg., ignore the schemes of others, etc.); rants against the public (no matter if one is whipped, beaten, etc.); rants against how his prestige means little as a leader. Stocism here serves as a recipie to smooth one's injuries faced as a member of the elite, surrounded by vipers and with meaningless prestige.
Stoicism, under this light, is training for a ruthless sort of leadership. From the pov of The Leader, all adoration is fake, all prestige, and status. Your job is to pretend it matters because it matters to your followers. It's a deeply hollow, dissociative, nihilistic philosophy which dresses up the status quo as "God's plan" -- a rationalization of interest to the elite above all others.
Your perceptions of stoicism are so detatched from mine, I have to ask, what does stoicism mean to you? The wikipedia entry describes it like this:
"The Stoics believed that the practice of virtue is enough to achieve eudaimonia: a well-lived life. The Stoics identified the path to achieving it with a life spent practicing the four cardinal virtues in everyday life — prudence, fortitude, temperance, and justice — as well as living in accordance with nature"
Which seems pretty close to how I understand it, and it seems a pretty reasonably approach to life.
But this wikipeida version seems very far from your description of "a deeply hollow, dissociative, nihilistic philosophy which dresses up the status quo as 'God's plan' -- a rationalization of interest to the elite above all others."
> prudence, fortitude, temperance, and justice
I adopt rather the opposite virutes. Imprudence, risk, throwing-your-self-at-a-wall-until-you-cant, intemperance (conflict, debate, disagreement, competition) and pragmatism (address what is rather than what should be).
Behind each of the stoic virutues is a psychological position to dettach, dissociate and live in a more abstracted conceptual space. This can be theraputic if you are in grief, etc.
Outside of that, personally I think: attach too much, risk more than you ought, and participate in the world ("dirty your hands") by making the best of it, rather than anything more abstract.
Professors of stocism like to make a virute of dying quiety -- this i think absurd. If the plane is falling from the sky, i envy the people screaming -- they have the right levels of attachemnt to their own lives.
> Behind each of the stoic virutues is a psychological position to dettach, dissociate and live in a more abstracted conceptual space.
Many proponents of Stoicism would disagree with this in rather strong terms, FWIW. If you go back to our earliest sources, Stoicism seems to be very much about living in the present moment and engaging with the world; it's just very careful about avoiding dysfunctional behaviors and the attitudes that would promote them.
The oft-referenced Stoic notion of avoiding the harmful "passions" is not so much about becoming completely detached from the world, and more about not acting outwardly in ways that turn out to be materially bad or dysfunctional. It's just that achieving this is harder than we might expect: the Stoics were well aware that our acting-out is often driven by inner attitudes and stances that can only be controlled effectively after quite a bit of time and inward effort, and complete control is more of an abstract ideal than something readily achievable.
I think your last example demonstrates the value of stoicism. In many cases, our untrained emotional response to life prevents us from achieving more or enjoying life. Instead of screaming, you could spend the time enjoying your loved ones for as long as possible. You could try to find a way to stop the plane from falling or work on bracing yourself to survive the impact.
Stoicism is a realizing that many of our instinctual and emotional and responses and actions do more harm than good. It may feel good to scream at someone we believe has wronged us, but it doesn't help them or us and doesn't correct the perceived wrong.
I suspect that screaming at a person who has done you wrong, in the vast majority of cases, has both the intended effect and a desirable one.
If you are in an elite position of leadership, and otherwise have more Machiavellian options, then you can always try to calculate revenge instead -- or forgive endlessly and be exploited.
I'd say in the majority of cases, for most adult people with some life experience, shouting when you want to shout is probably a healthy thing.
Though there are always cases of those who shout at the wrong people (displaced agression), or have to little life experience or no composure at all -- I dont think these are any where near the majority of cases. It's very rare. Though a perpetually (literally,) adolescent internet might make it seem so.
Almost no one ever shouts at me, though I'm very shoutable-at.
> I'd say in the majority of cases, for most adult people with some life experience, shouting when you want to shout is probably a healthy thing.
Sure, and that is totally fine.
But Stoic philosophy disagrees with that. Just as with many other fundamental questions about how to live life, there are different answers/points of view. You don't agree with the Stoic one, and you even offer some reasons why you think it may be harmful. That's entirely fine. The only problem is in your implicit assumption that Stoicism has failed to consider the perspective you have, and if it did, Stoics would abandon their approach to life. That's not true. While there may be Stoics whose individual lives would be improved by adopting your approach, Stoicism as a philosophy is not blind to the perspective you're offering. It just rejects it.
I agree. But you'll note one of my professed virtues is conflict, so I'm "participating in the world" by expressing a social emotion (contempt) towards a value system I disagree with in order to change the social environment. This makes me a political animal.
This is why I express my view in this way. If I wanted to be a stoic, or nearly equivalently a contemporary academic, I'd present some anemic "balanced view" in which you've no idea what my attitude is.
But as I'm not a stoic, I take it to be important to communicate my attitude as an act of social participation in the creating-maintaining of social values. In other words, I think on HN my contempt towards stocism itself has value here, since it invites the person reflecting on stocism to be less automatically respectful of it.
> I think on HN my contempt towards stocism itself has value here, since it invites the person reflecting on stocism to be less automatically respectful of it.
In case it's helpful to you, I'll point out that your effect on me was entirely the opposite. I'm not too positively inclined to stoicism, and I feel the Epicurean and Nietzschean critiques of it hold a lot of water. However, the tone of your top-level post made me instinctively defensive of the qualities of stoicism! I think that's because I perceived the tone of your top-level post as demonstrating something akin to what Nietzsche called ressentiment.
That's one of the effects of being particular -- being a particular person, with particular feelings -- the effects are particular. That's part of the point, part of the aim.
The received view of the tyrannical mass murderers of rome is hagiography, if a few "on my side in the debate" (or otherwise) think I'm being too harsh and want to undermine that a little: great! I would myself do the same if I heard myself speak, if my feelings on what was being said were that it needed moderating.
This interplay I vastly prefer than trying to "be the universal" myself -- disavow all felling, and suppose i can in a disinterested way be unpartisan to a view. This asks vastly too much of any individual, and is in the larger part, extremely (self-) deceptive.
If I can speculate: your perspective seems to be at least a second, maybe third-order perspective, of someone in an atypical environment surrounded by would-be stoics, who are all participating in order to succeed in e.g. middle management. This corporate stoicism produces suboptimal product results because while stoicism is perhaps necessary and valuable to hold a position, as you noted it is fundamentally detached and dishonest.
But until someone lives in your version of the social environment, they cannot see the relative value of a return to “radical candor” and so you get rejections, both from people behind you in their profession into stoic corporatism and from those who make their living from behaving in accord with it and believe they are superior for it.
How does your opinion matter than the parent’s opinion?
Even in an ideal scenario favorable to you it seems impossible for it to lead anywhere, after mutually negating each other, other than generating more noise on the internet.
It took me a while to to figure out why I find your position so disgusting. I think a lot of people perceive this contempt as intentional distortion, dishonest, socially hostile.
I dont think we need more stoking of conflict and contempt, but need more good faith and balanced information sharing. I don't think your have correctly modeled the effects of your approach.
I think you hit on it, but the total reason why is slightly different, and the key is in its trigger of your disgust mechanism:
Conflict does not need philosophical reinforcement because it is a major biological default. Using our higher abilities to reinforce these prerequisite (but not higher/good) positions triggers disgust because it leads to traumatic outcomes. That is why disgust exists: to cause us to avoid actions that lead to traumatic outcomes. Sometimes the arm of perception of our disgust reaction reaches further than our comprehension.
I think cooperation is, by far, the most ordinary case. Oppressive, normative, cooperation. This may not seems so online, which is a very unusual environment -- but the vast majority of people are conflict-avoidant.
You might say a war is conflict, but not really: the main mechanisms of war are cooperation.
Very rarely are interpersonal situations prone to disagreement.
The disgust here isn't about trauma, it's a healthy narcissm: the guy doesn't want to be deceived and thinks i'm being deceptive.
I don't think I'm being deceptive, because my heart is on my sleeve -- if I were being deceptive, I'd present an apparently objective analysis and give away little of my apparent feelings on the matter (cf. seemingly all mainstream news today).
I have a different ethic of transparency -- I want people to be emotionally and intellectually transparent. Pretending not to feel one way about an issue represses itself in a manupulated intellectual presentation of the matter -- the reader becomes mystified by the apparent disinterest of the speaker.
If there's one thing I hate with a great passion its false dispassion and intellectual manipulation. So I opt for emotional honesty as part of the package.
The contents of people's replies (, votes) is a measure of my effect, so post-facto, no modelling is required.
I'm clearly aware of the existence of people who want an "objective (unemotive) presentation", and clearly aware of what effect emoting has on those people. I haven't failed to model it. On many issues I'm quick to suspend this expression, and engage in a more dispassionate way with a person who wants me to, if I see some value in it. But I'm loathe to give up expressing my feelings, because that is part of the purpose of expression.
I am only doing what you are here in this comment -- you express your contempt in much more extreme terms ("disgust") than I, in order that I may take your feelings into account.
Likewise, when appraising stoicism, I think there's value in others taking my feelings on the matter into account. If only as a means of a kind of reflexive emotional equilibrium modulated by surprise: there's too little contempt towards stocisim in my view, and in its absense, has grown a cult around figures like aurelius.
I've been to the cult meetings in which he is read in a religious manner, cherrypicked and deliberately misunderstood. I'm here out in the world you see, participating -- and I wish to reflect that in my thinking and feelings on the world.
> I suspect that screaming at a person who has done you wrong, in the vast majority of cases, has both the intended effect and a desirable one.
Not usually. Just some examples:
Customer service people tend to be trained to de-escalate and send things up a level. Sometimes they call it "killing with kindness"; basically you repeat your stance with a smile on your face until the person going wild either calms down on their own or leaves. Either way, the person yelling does not get what they want. On the other hand, if you're charming to customer service people, a lot of times they'll bend the rules for you if they can, and if they can't -- well, you don't have to have on your conscience: "ruined the day of someone making minimum wage"
In long term relationships (say, work relationships or family relationships) this sort of excessive emotionality doesn't work either. In a job, you'll probably just get fired, or if you're the boss, people will avoid telling you things. Your family can't fire you, but they can set a boundary and stop dealing with you.
Basically, what I'm trying to get across is that uncorked rage is very rarely effective. It may work once or twice but it's a bad overall strategy.
If you don't want to be exploited, a controlled show of mild anger is a lot more effective. People who are not in control of their emotions can be easily exploited, but those who are in control of their emotions are not. I think you think there's this axis of Rage-a-holic <--------> Door-Mat, but the problem is both ends of those axes have people that aren't in control of their feelings. The door mat lacks control also, but in their case it presents as withdrawing from the world.
> If you are in an elite position of leadership, and otherwise have more Machiavellian options, then you can always try to calculate revenge instead -- or forgive endlessly and be exploited.
Yikes dude.
You're assuming that in most cases when people shout, they're being excessive.
I don't think that's true, at least "per capita". Maybe most shouting is done by the emotionally unstable, but most people arent emotionally unstable (as adults).
If an adult were shouting at me, I'd be greatful of it. I was slapped once, and I said thank you to the person who slapped me -- it told me I was being careless.
For people who arent evilly trying to manipulate you, like customer service -- expressing how you feel helps others know how you feel. I am, in many cases, grateful to know.
If I saw someone getting angry at a person in the customer-service-way, my instinct as an adult with life experience, is to treat that anger as symptomatic -- not evil. This is the danger in saying you shouldnt get angy: blaming the victim.
> Yikes dude
I wasnt endorsing that, I was saying, that's less healthy than just being angry.
There's definitely a cultural aspect, but at least among the people I tend to interact with, shouting is very much a last resort.
If you're at the point where the only way to make your point is by being louder than the other guy, then you're really just winning on intimidation rather than persuasiveness. If both people, or multiple people, are shouting, is anyone actually listening? And if not, what's the point of being so loud?
I see your example of being slapped and I mean, I guess it's good that you took that act in a positive way, but, to me if I'm being so closed off that I need to be slapped, I really need to evaluate how I'm acting.
> I wasnt endorsing that, I was saying, that's less healthy than just being angry.
Fair enough, I'm mostly saying yikes to the implied spectrum of [ scary powerful sociopath bent on revenge <------> complete doormat ]. I don't think anyone needs to concoct weird revenge fantasies to be taken seriously unless you work for the cartel or something, and in that case I'd recommend a career change.
Well now it sounds like you are disagreeing for it's own sake. There may be a name for what you describe, but it's not what is commonly understood as Stoicism.
And in my many years, I have never found shouting at another person to be a healthy thing.
> Professors of stocism like to make a virute of dying quiety -- this i think absurd. If the plane is falling from the sky, i envy the people screaming -- they have the right levels of attachemnt to their own lives.
Not to sound flippant, but that strikes me as absurd. You don't gain anything by that. You're going to be just as dead, but with a lot of suffering in your final moments that didn't need to happen. It's a pure negative thing, not a virtue.
That's all great and it sounds like stoicism isn't for you. But that doesn't mean that it's "a deeply hollow, dissociative, nihilistic philosophy which dresses up the status quo as 'God's plan' -- a rationalization of interest to the elite above all others."
Virtues like prudence, fortitude, temperance, and justice can improve the lives of people of any part of society, not just the elites.
I was a staunch Stoic, and a hollow disassociative mess is exactly what I became.
Think of the end goal of the Stoic and what it takes to achieve it. At every misfortune, you rationalize and deny your natural emotions. If you do it well, you're an all understanding guru of life, sharing oneness with everything, and becoming nothing in particular.
We have to accept that we too are a part of nature and flawed imperfect beings who can be unreasonable, hate unnecessarily, be selfish without ultimate good reason, etc. It makes us the individuals that we are, and gives us the will to care and have something we intrinsically want to live for.
Perhaps as a peer comment is alluding to, this issue might simply be viewing things through an all-or-nothing lens.
In some ways I think this is similar to Thomas Jefferson and Christianity. He was drawn to the soundness of the values of Christianity as a system of moral and ethical behavior, but found the supernatural aspects of it unbelievable, and words of third parties as less relevant. So he simply cut them out and actually literally cut and pasted his own 'Bible' together, the Jefferson Bible. [1]
For self evident reasons he kept this as a personal project, but that was essentially 'his' Christianity. Beliefs and systems are what we make of them. Stoicism may shape one, but we can also shape it back in return, for otherwise it's certain to never truly fit.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_Bible
That is totally fair, and I'd say what me and the other commenter here are doing is precisely that, arguing that Stoicism by itself, is not something to live by.
These are genuine questions, but please don't feel obligated to answer if you aren't comfortable. I'm fascinated to hear your story though.
Are you generally a pretty gung-ho person? Do you feel drawn to strive toward perfection?
Were you or are you previously religious with Christianity, Islam, or other world religion?
Do you view stoicism as an all-or-nothing thing? I.e. do you think a person applying stoicism in a light-weight or even casual manner is useful, or would you still recommend avoiding it?
Growing up I was a pretty reserved, depressed kid. Culturally Christian background but I was a pretty staunch agnostic. I am not a perfectionist when it comes to work, but I did always strive to be as rational as I could in how I approached life. It was very much naturally my coping mechanism.
If faced with being wronged, "They're just a biological machine, how could I be mad at a tree that grew the wrong way?", personal failures, "I am just a biological machine, this is just where I am at at the moment", "Whats it matter what I accomplish? Were all dead in the end anyway", faced with some accident, "Well something was bound to happen at some point. Its nothing unexpected that it happened now", a loss of love, "It happens to everybody, things just didn't coincide".
Its all very calming, and can make you resilient to what's going on, but I came to realize that what I am really doing is disassociating from every aspect of my life. Instead of feeling/processing my emotions, I was simply just not caring about any of it. I read Nietzche's Genealogy of Morals, and it was such a derailment from my natural philosophy, and yet it felt he was saying everything that I wanted personally. You're human, be angry if you're angry, be sad if you're sad, do what you want to be doing, have and enforce YOUR will for life.
Yes I agree this line of thinking is definitely needed and can be extremely helpful to someone with the opposite problems, but as with all things in life, its complicated and in truth there is a fine balance that's always difficult to know in advance.
Do you have any idea why stoicism (and rationalism) gets conflated with lack of passion and goals?
In my experience, both are tools to get what one wants, but it seems like a lot of people miss out on the instrumentality. Goal orientation is necessary to determine when emotional repression is appropriate.
I suppose because people consider it as all encompassing guiding philosophy for life.
At least to a philosopher, philosophy is the core basis which all your thoughts, and consequently goals originate.
I think it depends if were talking about "how to live" versus "how to be successful and establish your business this year"
> deny your natural emotions.
That is the opposite of Stoic practice. I have never heard Stoics denying things. What does it mean to deny things that happen? Emotions are not in one's control. Whenever they come up, one would observe and act according to Stoic virtues. If one has failed to observe, then they reflect on the failure and intend to observe in the future.
>Whenever they come up, one would observe and act according to Stoic virtues.
I am talking about precisely this. If something happens that angers you or makes you sad, you can always stop and try to alter your natural reaction/thoughts to be more aligned with a more forgiving/serene/understanding nature.
What I am saying is if you do this really well, everything in life just becomes "it just is", and in turn becomes nothing at all
"If the plane is falling from the sky, i envy the people screaming -- they have the right levels of attachemnt to their own lives."
Instead of screaming, I would rather stoicly prepare and brace myself for the impact of the rough landing. I might die anyway, or I might survive because I managed to put the seat belt on and hard things away from my torso and head. But screaming will not increase my chances, rather the opposite.
> Behind each of the stoic virutues is a psychological position to dettach, dissociate and live in a more abstracted conceptual space. This can be theraputic if you are in grief, etc.
This is also great during the best of times. Happiness is as ephemeral as grief. Accepting that in many ways the vicissitudes of life are beyond your control is a positive thing. Exercising temperance and prudence, among other things, is far from being merely therapeutical.
> Outside of that, personally I think: attach too much, risk more than you ought, and participate in the world ("dirty your hands") by making the best of it, rather than anything more abstract.
You are describing hell. I actively avoid in my life people like that, for good reason.
This is a very interesting comment for me. I really dislike your virtues but agree with everything else and your general dislike of stoicism.
I think there might be a more middle way which doesn’t include impertinence, for example, as a value but still celebrates screaming as your plane is falling from the sky.
The reason I dislike your values is because at face value they imply a disregard for others. I think there is a way to deeply value both yourself and others. It’s possible you don’t imply that disregard for others that I get from the values you listed though.
Here’s an interesting write-up on this. Nietzsche said essentially the same as you:
https://theconversation.com/3-reasons-not-to-be-a-stoic-but-...
> If the plane is falling from the sky, i envy the people screaming -- they have the right levels of attachemnt to their own lives.
Are you saying that happier people scream more (shortly before dying)?
Happiness is only one meta-value, and at the level of "what the right meta" is, I'm somewhere between a nihilist and an aristotleian-sort-of-biologist:
I only think that the people who are screaming when they are about to die are living like a healthy animal. And in the absence of any objective meta-values, it kinda seems like we might well just be what we are.
Denying's one's instincts is an interesting exercise, and no doubt improves self-control -- but it isnt "above being an animal" -- its, at best, a different way of being an animal. One I think, taken to a stocial extreme, seems an injury.
People who readily accept death (as, no doubt, I do) seem injured, and trying to get to this state seems like a kind of self-injury to me -- a means of poking out the eye because the brain doesnt like what it sees.
People screaming when a plane is crashing seem to have their eyes open.
A crashing plane has roughly two possibilities, screaming wildly seems like the least useful and least pleasant option for either:
- You are going down in a way that might be survivable - If you want to live, you want to shut up and prepare yourself and your peers as best you can. If you're completely prepared and have time to kill, see below as long as it doesn't impair being ready when the time comes.
- You are going down in a way that obviously isn't going to be survivable - Your remaining lifespan has been suddenly reduced to minutes or seconds and there's no solving it. The only choice you have left is how to spend that time. Accepting the hand you've been dealt quickly and doing the best you can with the choices available to you rather than panicking or raging about things out of your control, is....sensible. Taking a last view of the world out the window, listening to a favorite song, a conversation with a loved one or even a stranger, etc, all seem like far more satisfying ways to spend your final moments than screaming like it's going to do anything.
> I only think that the people who are screaming when they are about to die are living like a healthy animal.
I'm not much of a biologist, but there seem to be plenty of animals, especially more intelligent ones, that pretty much calm down and await death when they recognize they are not long for the world for reasons they can't control and have no hope of escaping. (age, illness, etc).
I think what youd ultimately agree with is that it's healthy to be aligned with your emotional, instinctual reactions.
Though I am not totally sure one cannot fully accept snd fully align their being with the absurdity of life - celebrating their life/death rather than wallowing in it.
What you adopt are not virtues.
It is absurd in the face of death by plane falling from the sky to not smile at it.
I'm guessing you're young. Those are all behaviors you can get away with < 40 that catch up with you in a hurry.
> they have the right levels of attachemnt to their own lives.
they waste their last seconds on something that will not make them feel better.
as a hypochondriac, last time I thought I was dying, I thought about my loved ones and it helped me calm down.
So you don't like Buddhism either. Question for you though, if the opposite virtues are so much healthier, why did practices like Stoicism and Buddhism develop to help people cope with the difficult realities of life?
Stoicism is a powerful tool to achieving long term objectives that require planning, commitment, and control. Not all objectives fall into this category.
What are your priorities? Would you consider yourself a hedonist?
I think a gap between wikipedia and a polemic by somebody clearly fired up about a topic is not just reasonable, but productive. Wikipedia, by nature, gives the sense that all philosophical viewpoints are equally dispassionate and it minimizes the degree to which reasonable people can substantially disagree about the rightness or wrongness of various worldviews. That usually gets dumped in the Controversy section. This is fine for an encyclopedia, but not for a debate.
Of course, I also think that OP is being polemical and that means they're not interested in being charitable. I think their criticisms are interesting, but the original post linked here does a far better job at balancing a charitable read of stoicism with a critique of why it is appealing to the rich and powerful.
Philosophies are frameworks that help us make sense of the world. We can adopt them in ways that are maladjusted.
People with power often adopt stoic thinking as the nature of power comes with stresses that are difficult to manage. I’ve wielded power at a scale that was nothing like a president or ceo, but way beyond what the typical person experiences. It’s hard, and whatever you do, someone has a bad outcome in many cases.
Most people would characterize Marcus Aurelius or George Washington as wise rulers. They embraced stoicism. Yet Mussolini and Robespierre also identified as stoic-ish as well, and most people would objectively look at them with a harsher light.
> prudence, fortitude, temperance, and justice
So Aristotle then:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinal_virtues
The next most famous stoic would then be Epictetus who influenced Marcus Aurelius and is cited in the Meditations.
> Epictetus (/ˌɛpɪkˈtiːtəs/, EH-pick-TEE-təss; Ancient Greek: Ἐπίκτητος, Epíktētos; c. 50 – c. 135 AD) was a Greek Stoic philosopher. He was born into slavery at Hierapolis, Phrygia (present-day Pamukkale, in western Turkey) and lived in Rome until his banishment, when he went to Nicopolis in northwestern Greece, where he spent the rest of his life.
> Epictetus studied Stoic philosophy under Musonius Rufus and after manumission, his formal emancipation from slavery, he began to teach philosophy. Subject to the banishment of all philosophers from Rome by Emperor Domitian toward the end of the first century, Epictetus founded a school of philosophy in Nicopolis. Epictetus taught that philosophy is a way of life and not simply a theoretical discipline. To Epictetus, all external events are beyond our control; he argues that we should accept whatever happens calmly and dispassionately. However, he held that individuals are responsible for their own actions, which they can examine and control through rigorous self-discipline.
Stoicism was a philosophy that spanned slave to emperor in Rome.
> Stoicism was a philosophy that spanned slave to emperor in Rome.
As is addressed in the article.
I have read Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. Your description of how bitter and resentful they are is utterly bizarre, and bears no relation to the book that I read.
You completely misunderstood everything about Stoicism. It has nothing to do with God his plan or elites.
Stoicism in its essence is about living with accordance with nature by seeking virtue.
It is funny that you call Marcus Aurelius a tyrant while he is considered one of the five great emperors. During the Pax Romana golden age the empire lived in relative peace prosperity and progress. After the death of Aurelius the empire descended into chaos.
His reflections are profound not bitter or resentful. Majority of them are relatable today some 2000 years after...
My guess why Aurelius is considered as the face of stoicism is due to the fact he was an emperor/powerful man. I doubt that the twisted way in which stoicism is viewed today would benefit from selling it as a philosophy of Zeno, who was a foreigner.
What I mean by that is that stoicism in its modern iteration seems a brosphere/manosphere thing that will help you to become rich/powerful/successful/buy a lambo, while in reality, the stoics rejected material possessions and the entire philosophy was created by Zeno who lived an ascetic life, despite being wealthy.
If you read Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy, he takes rather dim view of Marcus Aurelius, and specifically doubts the seriousness of his writings and ideas, considering them somewhat dubious.
Russell himself makes false and dubious claims in that book (for example, claims about Aristotle/Aristotelianism, which he hated). I don't regard him to be an especially reliable or objective expositor of philosophy or philosophical history, generally speaking.
I think it's just one of the few therapeutic skills that are generally offered to men and that genuinely considers the problems that men face.
The problems and issues that men face are largely ignored or downplayed compared with women and there's little offered to men in dealing with it. The traditional outlets like men-only clubs and spaces have been torn down in the name of equality. In that environment, literally anything at all that attempts to address the problems men face will become popular among men.
> one of the few therapeutic skills that are generally offered to men and that genuinely considers the problems that men face.
These things are not OFFERED to men, they are available for the taking if one is so inclined. Your options do not depend on your gender, but many will reject them as if they do. Therapy? It's not just for sissies. If men are so tough, why do they need society to OFFER solutions to their problems?
I see nothing in Stoicism that has anything to do with gender (or sex) whatsoever.
The fact that a particular demographic in the 21st century has declared some affinity for it doesn't change that in any way.
You're right but the parent poster was responding to the question of why Stoicism is so popular with men in the modern era. He didn't say it was inherent to the philosophy.
Well, for that specific question, I'd skip all the bro-nonsense and just note that Stoicism is at least superficially quite like the implicit life philosophy that many men acquire from their families and the culture, but organizes that into something more coherent and with a fairly long past. It provides a positive explanation of why something vaguely close to what you already do could be a good thing. The appeal of that seems fairly obvious to me.
Note that I don't seek to demean or reduce Stoicism to "what men do anyway". It is a much more carefully thought out philosophy of life than that would imply, and contains far more insight and potential than "keep doing what you already do". But the fact that it is somewhat adjacent to the pop-stoicism associated with masculinity doesn't hurt its accessibility.
Stoicism has nothing to do with men. It's not a male-exclusive philosophy. It's just a way to cope with life and the struggles in life. Stoicism is just being weaponized, often by misinterpretation, by "male-clubs".
It kind of became like a cult. "You need to be a Stoic in order to be successful". It's the same story all over, and a similar thing happens with every -ism, like minimalism where it transformed from being a philosophy of being happy with the things you have, into a philosophy where you need to identify yourself as minimalist by buying a bunch of crap that is labeled as "minimalist [whatever]".
> Marcus Aurelius himself was no stoic philosopher, he merely wrote diaries to himself in his late days - diaries he wanted burned, not published.
This is how I read "Meditations" - not as writings of a sage (as far as I know, he didn't consider himself one), but as "shower thoughts". Ironically, since these were private notes, they were likely more genuine than if they had been intended for publication. And more approachable, precisely because he was not a philosopher.
Roman emperors were, without exception, autocrats. Yet, he is considered one of the better ones. Even if he didn't always live up to stoic ideals, he strived for them. This doesn't excuse his wrongdoings, but it suggests his writings can have value despite his flawed actions.
One thing that struck me, though, is how a philosophy promoting ideas like "things are good as they are" or "ignore spiteful people" works well when you're at the top. If you're a slave or poor, things might look quite different. Especially when spiteful people cannot be ignored - be it your master, your centurion, or an unfair competitor trying to frame you.
I have no idea how you can read his meditations and come away with this conclusion. Where are you getting that “Your job is to pretend it matters because it matters to your followers”
After it is written out it appears to be an inherent truth.
Seems to be a practitioner of stoism, to shift ones inner outlook, non obvious takes are strong.
Your take on this is wild to me, and while TFA as whole is somewhat more balanced, I'm pretty surprised at this whole train of thought. An emperor was a stoic, and so was a slave. Epictetus is only mentioned twice in passing in the article, but it does say that
> Some stoic authors were slaves themselves, like Epictetus author of the beautiful stoic handbook Enchiridion, and many stoic writings focus on providing therapies for armoring one’s inner self against such evils as physical pain, illness, losing friends, disgrace, and exile.
Seems like people from all walks of life thought maybe it was a useful point of view, and that it's universal because people from all walks of life have their own suffering to deal with.
I get that in an inevitably political world that's increasingly polarized, philosophy always becomes a sort of fashion show where it's not about what's being worn but who is wearing it lately. But this is really pretty silly. Stoicism predates silicon valley and will still be around after it's gone, and there is substance that goes far beyond "deeply hollow, dissociative, nihilistic".
If it sounds that way to you, I assume maybe you are just in a situation where you have someone that you kind of hate preaching it at you.. in which case adding some distance makes sense no matter what they are evangelizing. Quoting TFA again
> [stoicism] reminds me of the profession of wealth therapists who help the uber-wealthy stop feeling guilty about spending $2,000 on bed sheets or millions on a megayacht.
So there it is, that's what's really bothering the guy.
I'm glad they wrote several more comments. The first comment was intriguing, but the more the wrote the more wild it got. Especially the part about being connected to life like a person in a fall airplane.
I think they've mixed up Stoicism with some other philosophy entirely. They think Stoicism means feeling nothing, doing nothing. Almost like the Hindu concept of sanyasi.
> a roman emperor (tyrant, mass murderer, and courtier)
It's interesting to read up on the lives of famous ancients like Julius Caesar and Alexander. I know it was a different time, but the regular and casual war crimes and mass murders sticks in one's craw.
Say what you will about Julius Caesar, at least he fought in the trenches. Many times were the battle was the toughest.
My reptile brain can appreciate that, at least!
> the regular and casual war crimes and mass murders
It's phenomenal to read about these revered historical figures! They turn out be privileged thugs. We should be extremely reluctant to extol their virtues.
The best thing about the arc of history so far is that by and large it decentralized power (with some horrific exceptions)
God-kings / pharaohs / caesars -> a handful of feudalists -> millions of millionaires vs voters vs large governments all competing in a much less violent and more stable balance of power
This is a fair take at all. Have you actually read about stoicism from the true philosophers?
Epictetus, Zeno of Citium, and Seneca? Not to mention the many modern philosophers.
I don't see how the fact that his most famous work is his diary makes Marcus Aurelius not a philosopher. Is there some magic credential you need to be a philosopher? As far as I can tell, philosophers come from all over the place; slaves, clergy, clerks, etc. Since there wasn't an institution to get his philosophy degree in, I think we can give him a pass?
With regard to the other criticism that there are rough bits in his not-intended-to-be-published diary and not all of it holds up.. so what? You've never said something bitter and resentful in private that you wouldn't want broadcast to the world? If you have a diary, do you think it'd stand intense scrutiny 2000 years later? Being a stoic means embracing your imperfections, so, the fact that Marcus Aurelius was an imperfect man tells us nothing about stoicism.
FWIW Marcus Aurelius is considered one of the greatest (maybe the greatest?) Roman Emperors ever, and he was plucked from relative obscurity, so, while you can certainly criticize the institution you're picking on someone that navigated that level of power better than his peers.
Interesting, can you provide more sources, about the dictators and stoicism, also Marcus Aurelius was he a tyrant, mass murderer, and courtier?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Aurelius
> He was a member of the Nerva–Antonine dynasty, the last of the rulers later known as the Five Good Emperors and the last emperor of the Pax Romana, an age of relative peace, calm, and stability for the Roman Empire lasting from 27 BC to 180 AD. He served as Roman consul in 140, 145, and 161.
> ...
> The historian Herodian wrote:
> Alone of the emperors, he gave proof of his learning not by mere words or knowledge of philosophical doctrines but by his blameless character and temperate way of life.
> ...
> The number and severity of persecutions of Christians in various locations of the empire seemingly increased during the reign of Marcus Aurelius. The extent to which the emperor himself directed, encouraged, or was aware of these persecutions is unclear and much debated by historians. The early Christian apologist Justin Martyr includes within his First Apology (written between 140 and 150) a letter from Marcus Aurelius to the Roman Senate (prior to his reign) describing a battlefield incident in which Marcus believed Christian prayer had saved his army from thirst when "water poured from heaven" after which, "immediately we recognized the presence of God." Marcus goes on to request the Senate desist from earlier courses of Christian persecution by Rome.
----
He was considered to be a good emperor.
Marcus Aurelius was the last of the Five Good Emperors because he did not adopt a competent, non-biological son to take his place like the previous four. Instead, he set up Commodus as Caesar and his heir, despite his mental instability. That decision alone calls into question his Stoic resolve.
True, the other Good Emperors - Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius didn't set up their children as their successors. They each adopted someone who would be good at the job. But there was one difference between them and Marcus Aurelius - none of them had biological sons. Their adopted son would be their only heir.
Marcus Aurelius' decision can be criticised in hindsight because Commodus was terrible at his job. But I'm not sure I could have done differently in Marcus' shoes. Parents find it difficult to view their children objectively and feel the need to protect them. Even if he was aware of Commodus' faults he also knew this - if he adopted someone else and crowned him Emperor, then it would have led to civil war after his own death. Either Commodus and his other sons would kill the adopted son or vice versa. Having all of them alive and at large would be an unstable equilibrium that could only be solved with war.
Come on man, this guy ran an Empire pretty well for a couple of decades despite challenges like war and plague. Maybe he knew what he was doing. Give him the benefit of the doubt.
Pretty much all Roman emperors would be considered tyrants and mass murderers by the standards of modern western liberal democracies. Marcus Aurelius was a product of his time and hardly a hero to emulate. But despite their flaws we can learn some universal lessons from their surviving writings that still apply to modern life — including at least some elements of stoicism.
Modern western liberal democracies aren't without faults either. They've been involved in a few conflicts themselves, like Iraq and Israel/Palestine (whatever your view the situation is an ongoing mess not really helped by foreign influence). Or propping up illiberal rulers. There's the values liberal democracies espouse, and then there are the geopolitical realities of how they act.
There's a lot in just the wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Aurelius
But be aware that most writings about him are roman, and hence state propaganda which glorify his actions. In order to see more clearly what his actions were, just imagine being their victim. He perpetrated a genocide against Germanic tribes in retribution.
It's very hard to be a morally good roman emperor -- you can be seen as good by either the plebs or the elite of roman society, but not by nearly anyone else, and almost never by both even in rome.
I don't think its any accident the elite of concequering empires adopted this mentality. Though, no doubt, there were originally honest/moral/good stoic-philosophers they did create a kind of "retreat from the world dissociation" which isn't in my view, itself good. It's therapeutic in some situations, typically in cases of grief/loss/extreme-attachement --- but outside of these cases, you want to associate and attach.
Perhaps there's some case for a little stocisim in the face of social media today, or in the kinds of "adversarial environments" which exploit your attachment -- such as leading an empire (cf. Machiavelli: leaders have to be rutheless). There's possibly an argument that twitter turns everyone into a viperous courterier looking to attack each other's reputation and attachemnt-bait.
On the scale of leaders: not being needlessly cruel, trying to consider the impacts of policies beyond the immediate, and dedicating your days to ruling rather than enjoying whatever pleasure you pick makes him one of the "good" ones. Maybe that's a low bar, but even today not all leaders clear it and certainly we can compare to Commodus who came immediately after and the sources for which are similarly patchy, to compare.
> not being needlessly cruel
To whom?
I believe you mean Marcus Aurelius
I have read his diaries, though carelessly writing Mark Antony over Marcus Aurelius does undermine the point. -- Thanks, edited. I guess one shouldnt write HN comments while listening to corporate policy announcements.
We all do what must to keep sane.
In my personal life, work and home, I am surrounded by people who are constantly in a state of distress, ranging from frustration to simmering rage, about things which are completely beyond their ability to change. I never see it do them any good, nor cause any constructive change for society. My personal understanding of stoicism is focus on changing the things I can change, and not spend my time being miserable about things I'm powerless to change. This gives me peace. My younger brothers spend all day ranting about the state of society, one from the right and the other from the left, and it has never done either of them any good. They have twice as much gray hair than me despite being years younger.
Then I go on the internet and read commentary like yours, making stoicism out to be some sort of rich conspiracy against the eternal revolution or something. I find this baffling. Of all the things to get yourself worked up about, people choosing a stoic mindset is definitely up there in fruitlessness. Nothing you can tell me would ever convince me to adopt the methods of my brothers, so what is the point of what you're doing?
(I confess I've never read any Marcus Aurelius, it seems like it would be very dry. Maybe I'm wrong, but my reading list is already very long and philosophy all gets bumped far down the list.)
> My personal understanding of stoicism is focus on changing the things I can change, and not spend my time being miserable about things I'm powerless to change.
This is the overriding principle I've come away with as well, and it has felt to me like one of the most simple and wise things I've heard.
I've read the Meditations -- in the Emperor's Handbook translation -- and they're nothing like GP is making them out to be.
In their original, unedited comment, they didn't even get Marcus Aurelius's name right, attributing the Meditations to Mark Antony.
Their take is such a wild and inaccurate mischaracterization of Stoicism that it's frankly not worth engaging with -- written absentmindedly while "listening to corporate policy announcements." Take it with a grain of salt.
it's like you can see the shadows, but you can't see the solids. nothing you have said is wrong, it's just so.... misguided.
Real question, did you have GPT write this for you with some kind of anti-intellectual prompt, or did you actually type this out by hand?
Otherwise, it's a nice fan-fiction about the worst possible interpretation of stoicism, but has really not much to do with what the philosophy is about or what it can be positively applied for.
I'm surprised to see this at the top of the thread, because it's mostly utter nonsense, but it does sound emotionally appealing to a certain social group that believes it's trendy to invent new negative definitions for things they don't like or understand.
Let's just be clear. It's not just that a roman emperor is the premier famous stoic.
It's also that the Romans were instrumental in setting up Christianity and Judaism as exportable religions, after they completely destroyed Jerusalem in the Judaic wars.
https://www.mayimachronim.com/the-caesar-who-saved-judaism/
Marcus Aurelius was very close with Judah ha Nasi (the Prince) and the Gamaliel family. Subsequent Roman emperors also helped boost the churches and make Christianity a religion that wasn't just for Jews.
Judaism and Christianity were based in Jerusalem. Afterwards, Judaism was based in Babylon (really old schools that had been established during the first exile of Jews, survived and became primary). Meanwhile, Christianity moved to Rome (which became primary over the main church in Jerusalem). It grew there until Constantine made it the official state religion 300 years later.
The Judaic wars is probably the reason why Jesus' own direct students and the Church he set up in Jerusalem (with his brother James and "Peter" as the "Rock on which the Church would be built" and also the "Apostle to the Gentiles") were marginalized (probably regarded as ebionites / judaizers).
Then Paul became the main "Apostle to the Gentiles" instead, even though he himself admits he never learned from Jesus' students, but argued with them instead (including Peter). He has a chip on his shoulder about these "super-apostles". In Acts 15 and 21, Paul is admonished by them and seems to relent, being given an official letter to distribute to gentile churches. But in his Galatians letter he claims that they added nothing to his message, except to remember the poor, something he was going to do anyway. Thomas Jefferson called Paul the "great corruptor of Christianity". Most of the New Testament is based on writings of Paul and his student Luke.
So in fact, Roman emperors picked and chose winners in the global religions that became Orthodox Judaism and Christianity.
According to Paul's letters, the main disagreement Paul had was over whether Gentiles should become Jewish converts, including being circumcised, instead of just being God-fearers, a category already recognized in Judaism as long as they abided the Noahide covenant. Paul didn't think becoming Jewish mattered, because Jesus would return soon and everything would be transformed, including those in Christ.
There isn't any indication as to whether James, Peter, John (the Three Pillars in Jerusalem) disagreed with Paul over his Christology or eschatological expectations (Jesus was probably an apocalyptic prophet like John the Baptist). Paul says Jesus first appeared to them, so they likely began believing God had raised him to heaven before Paul. Paul says he persecuted their movement at first, likely because he found it offensive. A risen crucified messiah would be offensive to a Pharisee.
Paul further says they had their gospel (literally good news) for Jews and he was sent to Gentiles, but again there isn't any indication over whether there were substantive disagreements beyond whether Gentiles needed to become Jewish. That and some people clearly questioned Paul's claim to apostleship, particularly in relationship to other apostles, especially in Jerusalem.
What developed after the destruction of the Temple with the proto-orthodox, Ebionites and Gnostic Christianity is not necessarily a reflection of Paul's conflict. Those were further developments.
Constantine gave Christians reprieve from persecution in 313 with the Edict of Milan.
In 380 it was Theodosius who made Christianity the state religion with the Edict of Thessalonica.
Negative assessment of Paul's influence on the development of Christianity predates Jefferson by many centuries, e.g. in the writings of ߵAbd al-Jabbār and Ibn Ḥazm. Muhammad himself believed that Christians had diverged from the truth about Jesus' identity and teachings, though he didn't criticize Paul specifically as far as I'm aware.
It's something of a theme, really, that shows up, seemingly independently, in the writings of those who "want" the core teachings of Jesus but are determined to identify an irreformable corruption that invalidates orthodox Christianity as such. Some identify that corruption with the influence of Paul, others find their smoking guns within the pre Nicene church, or post Nicene, and so on.
"But on the negative side, stoicism’s Providential claim that everything in the universe is already perfect and that things which seem bad or unjust are secretly good underneath (a claim Christianity borrowed from Stoicism) can be used to justify the idea that the rich and powerful are meant to be rich and powerful, that the poor and downtrodden are meant to be poor and downtrodden, and that even the worst actions are actually good in an ineffable and eternal way"
I didn't understand these repeated digs at Christianity as having been borrowed from the Stoics. For one, that all bad things are actually good is not a tenet of Christianity and is not in the Bible. Perhaps some Christians taught this, but you can find a person claiming Christ who teaches absolutely anything you can think of. Such is the nature of things that are popular.
I can only assume the author is referring to this section from Romans 8:28 (NIV) "And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose."
If you fly through too quickly you could reach the Stoic claim, but there are a few key differences.
1. It says "God works for the good" in all things, but not that all those things are good in essence.
2. This is a promise only to those who love God, not automatically extended to all people or things.
Finally, I'll note that the entire Old Testament predates the Stoics, and is the foundation for Christian thinking about God's will and plan for the universe.
> For one, that all bad things are actually good is not a tenet of Christianity and is not in the Bible.
Surely you in your life you have met many Christians who said "God works in mysterious ways", "there is a purpose for everything", "trust in the Lord", etc.?
In the Christian communities I grew up around, it was a pervasive idea that misfortune was explained away by our limited understanding. These cliches were always trotted out when something horrible had happened which needed to be explained away.
It's arguably a necessary tenet for Christianity to hold together as a coherent belief system. If you believe in an omnipotent, benevolent God, you need some way to explain why bad things still happen[1].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_evil
> For one, that all bad things are actually good is not a tenet of Christianity and is not in the Bible
Just for my own learning, if it's not considered a tenet, why do I see this line of thought so often portrayed: "This <bad thing> is not bad. God made is so to test my faith."
This is one of three major answers to the problem of Theodicy (justifying God in the face of evil) in Christian theology. They are:
1. Pedagogical (the one you mentioned) - Evil exists so that we may grow and learn. All evil will be used to create even greater good. Quintessential example would be the story of Job in the Old Testament.
2. Eschatological — Evil is a by-product of having any creation in time whatsoever, and will be fully restored at the end of all things. Another way of thinking of this one is that evil is "non-being", the absence of the good. A lack, a privation. Espoused by Augustine (and before him, Neoplatonism in general), and Aquinas.
3. Freedom-oriented — Evil (even natural evil) is a broken state of affairs caused by the freedom of people, who use that freedom against God. God nonetheless allows this because he allows us the dignity to choose. The official teaching of the Catholic Church. The straightforward reading of Genesis 2.
None of these say that "This <bad thing> is not bad" - Christianity acknowledges the existence of evil "as evil". However, with God's grace, evil may be healed or made to serve higher purposes.
Them be some deep theological waters you're wading into.
It's not a tenet, because it's not presented as a teaching that "bad things are good things".
However, we often label things as "good" and "bad," which are overly simplistic for many things in life. A child dying is unequivocally a bad thing. But if your faith deepens through the course of grieving, then a good thing happens from that bad thing. It doesn't nullify the bad thing. It doesn't magically transform it into a good thing. But your faith being made stronger is a good thing, while your child dying is a bad thing.
My understanding is this is the Biblical principle of redemption. Not to be confused with salvation. It's used to refer to God's ability to make good happen from a bad thing, or to "redeem" a bad thing. In this way, redemption can also refer to salvation because man is inherently bad, but through Jesus's death on the cross, man can be redeemed. Once again, bad things happen, but good things can come from them.
Again, it's important to note that the Bible does not teach BAD == GOOD. It teaches that bad things can be redeemed for good outcomes.
I am not a theologian, but that's my understanding of it.
In the story oh Hiob/Job,he is unaffected in his behavior and the trust instilled in him from others, which clearly discouble his person from his misfortune.
In the original there is no word for faith, believe or trust only for character. Job is of good character despite his misfortune, that makes him a man of God.
Technically correct, but quite misleading. The idea of "trust in God" or "faithfulness" is completely central to Job. The story doesn't concern itself with "doctrinal faith", but it implicitly discusses "faith" in the general sense of trust in the providence of God in the face of challenges that might make one abandon Him.
Yeah, it's an especially odd claim because early Christianity was apocalyptic. The Second Coming was imminent. The world would be radically remade.
I think the author is confusing early Christianity with Calvinism.
The author's claims are not generally true of Calvinism, either.
Came here to write this. Relieved to see someone already wrote this.
Only someone who has never actually taken the time to study the Bible could possibly claim that it teaches “things are secretly good underneath”
The Bible teaches that things are so broken, so bad, and so irredeemable that God himself had to humble himself into the form of man, dying a physical death, to redeem it.
It’s only pop-Christianity that teaches that people are mostly good and make mistakes. The Bible teaches that man is a wretch, incapable of redemption within his own power, and deserving of damnation.
So what is your answer for Epicurean paradox?
Free will.
If people are allowed to make choices, evil is a possibility. You can argue that free will isn't good, but I'm not sure what evidence supports that argument.
So if God allows free will, then evil can happen. Just because he doesn't immediately stop it (read: eliminate free will) doesn't make God not-good.
I think part of this is man's hubris in assuming we can know what is perfectly good. The Epicurean paradox is hinged on the description of "all-good," which is far too simple in most people's minds.
A metaphor:
If I shove my child to the ground to teach them the consequences of falling, I am a bad father. If I warn them to tie their shoes, or they will fall, but do not explicitly force them to, I am a father willing to let my child learn, but I am not a "bad father" because of this.
Another aspect I think the Epicurean paradox misses is the concept of justice and eternity. If this physical life is all there is, then yeah, allowing people to suffer and die is an injustice. But if we are eternal beings in a temporary, physical body, suffering and dying in this world is a small blip on the timeline. What comes after has to be factored into the equation of "What is justice?" But that's where non-theistic reasoning can no longer come with us. The Bible is fairly clear about what comes after, and there is justice when viewed in that light.
If you believe this life is all there is, then yeah it's not hard to argue that God isn't just. But again, the Bible, upon which the Judeo-Christian belief system is built, is very explicit that this life is NOT all there is.
So the Epicurean paradox takes a small slice of the Bible out of context and points at it, without considering all the other context and argues, "Ha! See? Logical inconsistency!" when in reality it's just out of context.
I can’t speak for the rich and powerful (as I’m neither), nor do I subscribe to stoicism necessarily.
But I do work in tech and enjoyed (and periodically re-read) Marcus Aurelius’ “Meditations”
I originally read it out of curiosity, not often you get to see a leader’s supposedly unedited, personal diary.
But I keep coming back because of the calming prose and (imo) useful lessons about dealing with a stressful world.
Eg Epictetus’ quote “don’t hand your mind over to every passerby”
and “don’t be upset by disrespect from people you don’t respect”
were good reminders on not getting mentally derailed from rudeness or slights by the minority of interactions throughout a day.
“we all come from nature” is a nice reminder on forgiveness
Perhaps the first two could be seen as elitist, but it was helpful to me in a customer-facing role in dealing with the 10% of rude clients.
Overall it reads like a secular proverbs, with that much more weight due to the size and non-publishing intent of the author.
I love Meditations but everytime I think about Aurelius I laugh so hard thinking about this random Reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/Stoic/comments/1823mip/how_do_you_g...
Here's the text:
## How do you get over the fact Marcus Aurelius wife cheated on him with a gladiator?
I have been into stoicism for a while and have been using it to cope with life but learning this info has made me second guess the entire philosophy. Now whenever I try to be stoic I think about Marcus sitting in the corner writing meditations while his wife gets brutalized by a gigachad gladiator. Now whenever I think about stoicism it seems like a cuck philosophy. Was Marcus really the adam22 of his time? How can I get over this?
---
Idk why this was the funniest thing to me, and now I just think of Marcus in the other room, hearing his wife getting ploughed, writing about how happiness doesn't depend on external circumstance so it's nbd
I saw a post a while ago from a guy who had read the 48 laws of power and tried to mirror the girl he liked but ended up making her think he was gay instead. Same energy.
lmao — reddit is undefeated
for opponents of stoicism “cuck philosophy” might be the goat of slogans
or an insane testament to the monk-like philosophy
I'm certainly not rich or powerful, but I have found Stoicism to be extremely helpful. It is hard to always bear it in mind when in times of stress, but when I can, it really does help to focus on the idea that what matters is not my external circumstances, but my own actions and thoughts. It reframes things and helps me to feel better about unpleasant situations I might find myself in.
I also would say that I disagree with the author in his assessment of Stoic thought. He asserts that with millennia of experience, we have learned that we can effect change on the world. I believe that if anything the exact opposite is true. Some men have more power to change the world than others, but for most of us we can't do a damn thing. For example, if I'm unhappy with the actions of the US government, I can write to my representatives asking them to change things, and I can vote for someone else next election (or possibly participate in a recall effort). But that's all I can do, and (speaking from experience) those don't accomplish anything. I still do those things because they are my duty, but I'm realistic about the fact that they aren't going to change a thing and I don't stress out.
"stoicism’s Providential claim that everything in the universe is already perfect and that things which seem bad or unjust are secretly good underneath (a claim Christianity borrowed from Stoicism) can be used to justify the idea that the rich and powerful are meant to be rich and powerful"
What did I miss? Does Stoicism claim everything in the universe is already perfect? That seems like a bold (counter-intuitive) claim.
The serenity Prayer always have a stoic quality to me.
"God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference."
It’s wrong on the same level of “The central message of Buddhism is not ‘every man for himself’, Otto!”
"perfect" is a weird word to use in stoicism, but I do think it can be used to justify that things "are the way they are" and shrug it off with some visualization.
I always saw Stoicism as “things around you are going to be really screwed up and panicking about it will make it worse”
The first part of that sentence is opposite to what the author here suggests.
both "screwed up" and "perfect" are judgements calls/perspectives, and panicking isn't going to change things (panic doesn't necessarily make something worse either)
I think panic almost always makes things worse. There's a reason that in an emergency, the first piece of advice to people is "don't panic".
almost is the key term here, yes, it depends on the situation causing the panic.
Panic always makes things worse
you can't think of an example where it doesn't? I can. I'm not saying there is any virtue to it, but panic can subside without having had negative side effects on anything other than your mood
Stoicism does not claim that at all. Not sure what the author means…
"You want to live 'according to nature'? Oh, you noble Stoics, what deceptive words! Think of a being like nature, prodigal beyond measure, indifferent beyond measure, without purpose or consideration, without pity or justice, at once fruitful and barren and uncertain—do you want to live according to such indifference?" - Nietzsche
If Stoicism appeals to the rich, I wonder if the same can be said about Western Buddhism à la Alan Watts and other "everything is love" spiritual philosophies?
From my anecdotal observations, these philosophies particularly appeal to successful people - especially those recovering from burnout or seeking balance in their careers. Think Burning Man's tech hippies. And let's be honest: not every working-class person can afford to take time off for a spiritual retreat. This dynamic was brilliantly portrayed in the Black Mirror episode "Smithereens".
To be clear - I am just as guilty as charged.
One perspective is that meditation and stoicism helps silence guilt about being so properous in an unequal society.
Why should one feel guilt about being prosperous in an unequal society? Even if you accept that it's based entirely on luck rather than merits, I don't see why you should feel guilt.
A few examples of things based entirely on luck that no one really argues we should feel guilty about:
Being tall
Having high innate level of intelligence
Athletic
Physical beauty
All those things are somewhat socially determined. Even height has gone up in the last century. Personally I think I'm tall for somebody my age but I see a lot of young men who are a lot taller than me.
To look at that last one, in the solar economy up until 1920 or so, the peak of beauty socially [1] was the debutante from a rich or noble family. As soon as there were cities there were entertainers and courtesans, but in the mass media age the likes of Marie Antoinette just can't compete with professionals.
Standards of athleticism also involve an element of conformity. "Extreme sports" are frequently pioneered by older athletes who have no chance of making the NFL draft but get taken over by the young once a path is visible. (Early winners of the World Series of Poker were outright old, but it became a young man's game when it became mainstream in the 2000s.)
Some societies have a use for people with high intelligence, others don't.
[1] I'm sure there were beautiful peasants to my eye in Heian Japan but the text that survive from that period describe a very specific ideal including perfectly straight and rather coarse black hair that's about as rigid as the look of the kind of woman who, creepily, Instagram wants me to follow today.
The problem is that the things you identified as being based on luck have cascading second-order effects. For example, people that are perceived as handsome have better chances in wage negotiations, and the same goes for people with a lighter skin tone. The most strongly connected trait to being financially successful: being born in a rich and educated family.
These things are outside your control, but entirely in control of a society.
Because you're a social animal in a social world, whose social action creates and modifies that world.
Since you are a body, in an environment, with a psychology -- your actions have an effect upon the world.
The invitation to dissociate and mute your social emotions is an invitation to keep everything as-it-is.
This is not an invitation to mute your emotions.
This is questioning why someone should feel a particular emotion.
> is an invitation to keep everything as-it-is.
I don’t need to feel personal guilt about something outside of my control in order to 1) recognize problems in the world, 2) want the factors causing those problems to change, and 3) actively work to change them.
And for many people, feeling guilt - especially for things outside of their control - is absolutely paralyzing and leads to the opposite of action.
I mean I'm more responding to Marcus Aurellius and other formalisations of historical stoicism, than the pretty widely understood idea that "somethings are important, some arent" and "care most about what you can change, and least about what you cant"
These sort of bits of old wisdom also come in their opposites ("you never know when something is important", "your passions can define your life, and create opportunities") etc.
So I'm taking stoicism as a particular prioritising of those "bits of old wisdom" that combine together in relevant historical texts, and add up, in my view, to being quite radically dissociative.
Stoicism doesnt own, "keep calm under fire"
> These sort of bits of old wisdom also come in their opposites ("you never know when something is important", "your passions can define your life, and create opportunities") etc.
But they don't. They're typically not used in such a way, because they're nonsense.
> you never know when something is important
This is just resigning yourself to ignorance and chance. It's an unfalsifiable truism, because you can point to instances where it was true (survivor bias) and say you applied this bit of wisdom, whereas in reality it was just chance.
> your passions can define your life, and create opportunities
Sure, that's one of the possibilities. But it's not wisdom. It's another random truism out of a horoscope that may or may not end up being true.
> Stoicism doesnt own, "keep calm under fire"
A philosophy doesn't need to own anything for it to be valid. One of its principles can be used by other philosophies. What a weird thing to write.
So if I'm fortunate and blessed with wealth, I should feel guilty and be vocal about my guilt. So I make my life worse off and that of the people around me. People with heavy burden of guilt are often insufferable. And this will somehow make the world better off?
Notice these people making these arguments never argue for voluntary charitable giving which is actually encouraged by stoic philosophy as is promoting justice.
But the most important thing to some people is the signaling and guilt associated with any gift.
height isn't fungible
even if acquiring wealth is random, retaining wealth means choosing not to see and positively act on the state of the world
> retaining wealth means choosing not to see and positively act on the state of the world
This is just silly. Just because you retain wealth doesn't mean you aren't positively acting to improve the current state of the world.
every dollar kept is a choice not to effect one dollar of change
> Why should one feel guilt about being prosperous in an unequal society?
I can understand the idea of feeling guilty about wasted potential (wealth, time, strength, beauty, intelligence). That which could be used to help those who need help, not exactly novel: “If you have two coats, give one away”
The guilt isn't due to the simple fact of being prosperous it's more about the prioritization of self-interest over that of a win-win option that helps the broader good.
I don't follow. If you're prosperous due to no reason of your own (eg rich parents, lottery, etc), you didn't prioritize self interest
If it is self made you presumably made it by creating value for others, otherwise why would anyone pay you?
You shouldn't. First, I reject the framing that one's success today is due to privilege. But even if that were true (and it isn't), so what? What previous generations did has nothing whatsoever to do with me, morally speaking. I'm responsible for my own actions alone; this collective guilt line of thinking some people follow is nonsense.
A lot of people don’t know that guilt is an emotion and like all emotions needs to be managed. They feel it, assume it’s appropriate and then seek a cause that fits.
Sorry if this sounds dismissive, it’s not meant to be. But I think it is the cold hard reason for a lot of feeling/stress among people who have otherwise nice lives with no explicit moral failings…
I'm guilty of all your examples. It pains me so.
> I don't see why you should feel guilt.
You should feel guilty because you can do something about other people's suffering, instead of being a greedy hoarder who has far more than he could possibly use in multiple lifetimes while other people starve and live miserable lives due to the system you benefit from.
I think Peter Singer makes the argument very well [1] but many others in the history of philosophy have done just as good a job. Even Rawls is an option.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVl5kMXz1vA&pp=ygUMcGV0ZXIgc...
"Luck" is the wrong word w.r.t. your examples. It could not have been otherwise, as you are those features. You wouldn't be you if you didn't. There's no ghost in the machine that is the "real you" that is haunting a carcass where these features are like possessions that you own. You don't own them. They are (a part) of who and what you are. They are things you can, in the appropriate manner, share with others.
You didn't earn them, but so what? Why is everyone obsessed with everything having to be earned? A gift also belongs to me, even if I didn't do anything to earn it, and no one is entitled to take it from me as such any more than they can take anything I have earned.
Now, w.r.t. material prosperity, of course there is no reason to feel guilt. If you acquired your wealth morally, then all is well. This is distinct from the general obligation of those in our society with means that exceed their own needs to aid those in a state of poverty. Note that I said poverty, not having less. Having less is not an injustice.
The framing of inequality as injustice in recently years is rather a symptom of envy or confusion rather than an impulse coming from an intelligent sensitivity to injustice.
Almost universally prosperity is gained through privilege, compounded over generations. Privilege being rules/customs/systems that favored your group over others.
To be fair, the traits OP mentioned are heritable, and so to a large extent come from the privilege of having [tall | intelligence | athletic | beautiful] parents. So privilege doesn't explain why you'd feel guilty about one and not about the rest.
Inequality is not bad, so we should stop speaking of inequality as if it were. There is nothing to be guilty about for having more that is acquired or received by licit and moral means. Indeed, the obsession with equality is often itself rooted in envy. The envious have an obvious reason to feel guilty, as envy is evil (whether overt, such as when we try to take what others have, or concealed, such as when we deny the good of something or play the game of sour grapes).
However, a society does have an obligation to respond to poverty (poverty in the true sense, not "I can't afford an iPhone"). Those with more than they need (and this is subject to prudential judgement) have more means to contribute toward this end.
If anyone is interested in stoicism then this classic lecture by Dr Sugrue is excellent.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Auuk1y4DRgk
I have watched this lecture multiple times (each time I was going through some bad things in my life) and it helped me tremendously.
Stoicism in general has many excellent philosophical ideas that you can apply to your life. Maybe this lecture and stoic ideals will help you if you are in times of despair and sadness the way this lecture and those ideals helped me.
Cultivating stoicism probably increases one's power and riches on the margin, because it emphasizes emotional stability which is correlated with higher incomes. Hedonism probably works in the opposite direction on net, even though hedonists would probably get more direct pleasure out of the extra cash.
Is it a bit ironic that the author, a stoic herself, seems bothered by rich people using stoicism to advance themselves?
edit: corrected pronoun
I don't think she is a stoic or particularly bothered by rich people using it. She is a historian and this is a topic that overlaps with her area of study.
Apologies for the assumption. (Edited).
She said: "I personally love stoicism. It’s gorgeous. It’s brilliant." Maybe that doesn't make her a stoic, but it still struck me as ironic that she seemed wary of rich people using it, that's all.
My interpretation was always that the Stoics were the more type-A people while the people following Epicureanism were a bit more hippie. Still lots of overlap
Not a bad article, all things considered. Interesting, given the overall message, that the author manages to spin the worldly engagement that is still present in stoicism (as opposed to Epicureanism etc.) as somehow a suspicious thing. In Republican times the dominance of stoicism in Rome wasn't so pronounced, I think, and the elite followed all kinds of philosophies. And soon, under the Empire, the political engagement became more of a theatre anyways. Patrician families declined. So the whole idea of having an excuse to stay in politics is weaker that one might think. There was more of an incentive to shut off in your villa as much as you can, and just try to avoid displeasing the emperor.
Graeco-Roman world also created more patterns of radical political engagement than people tend to give it credit for (regardless of what you think of its legitimacy). Plato with his speculatively constructed vision of ideal republic. Ideologically motivated coups, like one of the Spartan king Cleomenes. Generations of social radicalism had looked at Gracchi. We are just too far removed from classical education to see and appreciate it.
The idea that you somehow have to pursue universal salvation as a part of and precondition of your personal happiness, I think this is extremely wrong-headed. Maybe not OP, but many people think you are morally obliged to be permanently depressed and want to ideologically control your every waking thought. In actuality, I'd say it is better to have internal calm and contentment to be able to achieve whatever you are able to achieve for the world.
As for popularity of ancient philosophy, I think some of this is it having more practical outlook and being less complicated, in a way, than most modern (meaning post-medieval) thought. Note that wide popularity of Enlightenment in 1700s also stemmed from it being more accessible to the masses in many ways. While also ancient stuff has enough of a "base lore" to be somewhat insulated from completely freewheeling "philosophical" crankery. That being said, I would encourage anyone to also look into Epicurean, skeptic etc. thought alongside stoicism. Cicero was somewhat right in trying to peruse and combine all this stuff.
It's unfortunate that the elite's interest in stoicism (along with the sigma male crowd) has tainted its perception. It's essentially the basis of CBT and logotherapy that has changed my life for the better. But we also saw this with Buddhist meditation and other various practices divorced from the worldview that spawned them.
Life isn't fair but you also have agency. That's my favourite take.
It's been interesting to watch and experience Techbros jump on different philosophical/religious trends over the years. Post 9/11 through the Great Financial Crisis New Atheism was all the rage. Once the tech boom was in full swing Stoicism became the dominant ideology.
Now, post Covid I see a hard pivot towards Christianity, but importantly, "traditional" forms of it. Protestant sects are being ignored and Catholicism, or if you are really intense, Orthodoxy seems to be in vogue.
I was recently listening to a podcast about Silicon Valley thought which theorized that at its root it is a justificatory mechanism and not a coherent worldview. Whatever the current problems facing Silicon Valley, its leadership will find some new theoretical underpinning that happens to justify whatever is in their naked self-interest. It's "move fast break things" but with philosophy. Their example was Marc Andreessen who once had coherent ideas that could be agreed with or disagreed with, but saw the writing on the wall and has aligned his "thinking" with the political movement he thinks will most protect his interests.
> Now, post Covid I see a hard pivot towards Christianity, but importantly, "traditional" forms of it. Protestant sects are being ignored and Catholicism, or if you are really intense, Orthodoxy seems to be in vogue.
I have seen these trends as well, especially Orthodoxy of late. My assumption is this is a response to rampant moral relativism that has become the dominant culture in the west.
I think you're being too kind in assuming there is some sort of real philosophy or faith here. I laid out what I have observed the tech elite doing precisely to show that they are rootless and will join with whatever bandwagon is popular in their techbro circle.
It's the great irony of our tech elite. They all believe they are independent thinkers who are changing the world but like any clique they follow what the group says and found another Sass App or become another VC investor.
Half the comment section seems to be entirely missing the point of Stoicism.
Stoicism is not merely just accepting everything and allowing it to happen, without pushing for advancement. That is absurd.
Under Stoicism, you would still push for that advancement and speak up for it, as doing so is not living according to virtue or nature (which Stoics defined our nature as our ability to reason). It's just that you will focus within that on the things that you can control, such as your own personal activism.
If anything it pushes people to do more in this area, not less. Because often people feel helpless so don't do anything, Stoicism would teach to do it anyway, because that is the part you can control and the only way to live a life of virtue, what the world does in reaction to that, is up to the world.
People that have a problem with this way of thinking/being seem to have taken a reductionist version of the philosophy to argue against it.
It's a philosophy that is a lot easier to adhere to when you have some amount of power or agency and your basic needs are met.
On the contrary, it's a philosophy that is perfect for the powerless and destitute. One of the most famous Stoics (Epictetus) was a slave. People have used the philosophy to help get them through stints in POW camps. It is by no means a philosophy that is primarily for those with power or agency.
> Because I think it’s important that we mingle some Voltaire in with our Seneca, and remember that stoicism’s invaluable advice for taking better care of ourselves inside can–if we fail to mix it with other ideas–come with a big blind spot regarding the world outside ourselves, and whether we should change it.
Ideally the answer is no, there’s no need to actively change systems if the system proponents are not interested in that change. In case of majority rules, the minority has to seek compromise. Such rules assume that different systems will create their own conditions for long term stability, and there will not be any interference from outside forces.
Under these ideal conditions, agents have freedom of movement to other places, where they exercise free will and actualize because determinism by random events (like being born into a specific system in which an agent is unfulfilled or unwelcome) does not promote long term stability for any system.
In reality, however, agents compete to dominate, and every system then has to mirror each other in some way, or face destabilization.
There’s no such thing as resource scarcity in an endless universe—the problem of different systems is that the existence of another presents an existential threat. Stoicism helps manage this existential threat while acknowledging the caveat that aggressively defending the existence of a system is justified when faced with a direct threat.
A note on social inequality in a given state: if everyone has the same rights, and those rights are applied equally, then that ensures long term cultural stability. If you create second class citizens, or justly aggrieved minorities, then that’s asking for trouble as any interfering force can use that minority to create destabilization. The only things which makes sense is letting people have their own places, and not be interfered with; practically, for a country like the U.S., it means that all states should be free to determine their own set of rules governing rights outside of the purview of the Constitution. In that case, maybe it’s more humane for blue states to accept refugees from red states, and vice versa. Like people mad about Trans rights in CA should move to TX. Extending this logic dictates that blue cities in red states can have their own rules for governance. I think, then, the smallest unit which can have its own set of governing powers should be any which has the resources to implement them, in a self-sufficient and independent manner. I don’t know practical that might be, but it’s an interesting thought experiment.
Calling Plato a dualist seriously calls into question the author's philosophical credentials.
We can squabble over definitions, but a primary characteristic of Platonism for many people is the belief in a (separate) domain of ideals/concepts. That e.g. mathematical objects exist outside of our individual cognition. That's more dualistic than monistic.
Plato is generally considered to be the archetype of early dualism. What are your credentials?
> Please don't post shallow dismissals
> Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> But for all Seneca’s powerful advice about the big picture and the meaninglessness of wealth, he was also a slave-owner who, when alerted that his male slaves were sexually abusing his female slaves, set up a brothel in his estate so he could make his male slaves pay him for the privilege of abusing his female slaves–not quite the behavior we imagine when Seneca says money is meaningless and all living beings are sacred.
It could be argued that this policy was simply reasonable: the only alternatives being to either do nothing, or set up a police force to prevent and/or punish abuse.
Also, not sure if Seneca really believed "all living beings [were] sacred"; he despised games of gladiators because he thought the spectacles were vulgar and appealed to lower instincts, but he never expressed any form of compassion for the gladiators themselves.
Anyway, I knew that Seneca was the richest Roman in his time (and perhaps, of all times), but didn't hear that story before. Would like to know more. (Did slaves have money to spend?)
how quickly things change. the aspirational tech ethos today is one of a will to dominion, of incessant action over introspection, of gut over mind.
You know, I think people will read the headline and have an eat-the-rich-mindset and lump stoicism in with obnoxious tech bros. However, I would posit that if tech-bro's internalize the teachings of stoicism we'd all be better off. It's worth mentioning that Epictetus was a slave, so just because the rich and powerful are finding stoicism doesn't mean that stoicism is a philosophy for only the rich and powerful. Just as an example, stoicism is also very popular in recovery communities (along with Buddhism). As far as pragmatic philosophies go that you can apply easily and have quick benefits, stoicism is a great one.
Epictetus, anyone?
"stoicism’s Providential claim that everything in the universe is already perfect and that things which seem bad or unjust are secretly good underneath (a claim Christianity borrowed from Stoicism)"
This is obviously and patently false. Christianity recognizes that God has both an active and permissive will. So, while God actively wills the good, He does not actively will evil. This would make God evil, which is incoherent. Rather, God permits evil, but only to bring about some greater good. So, it isn't that the evil isn't really evil, and it isn't that God wills the evil, but rather that the evil is permitted to occur to allow a good to come out of it. We do not deny the evil or the suffering it causes, but we embrace it and allow it to become an instrument of the good. To refuse to suffer the inevitable and inescapable evil that will be inflicted on us only produces more suffering, but a fruitless kind (though potentially instrumentally fruitful in that it may be instructive on this point). The Crucifixion is the paradigmatic example of fruitful suffering and self-sacrifice. The Crucifixion is tremendously evil, and according to Christian theology, the greatest evil ever committed. But by permitting this greatest of evils, God created the greatest of sacrifices, so cosmically great, in fact, that it could pay the price for all sin ever committed.
So, there's no complacency in Christianity, but it is cool-headed and subjects the emotional to reason and moves by the authentic love reason enables.
"stoicism predates the concept of human-generated progress by more than a millennium. It doesn’t teach us how to change the terrible aspects of the world, it teaches us how to adapt ourselves to them, and to accept them, presuming that they fundamentally cannot be fixed."
Another divergence is that Christianity encourages the humble discernment of what should be changed, what can be changed, and what cannot be changed and what should not be changed. In retrospect, this is common sense, and that is a good sign and to its credit, but ideologically-possessed people can become enraptured by a spirited and blind pursuit of some real or perceived good and cause a good deal of destruction as a result. There is a big difference between authentic zeal, which remains firmly rooted in reason, and becoming blinded by one's passions.
I absolutely hate Stoicism. It's used by people as a way to shut me up when I'm expressing negativity about something "I can't control". Almost everything about our lives, especially as we transition to this rent based economy, is out of our control. Stoicism just creates lonely people who are obsessed with controlling things and others.
This is nonsense though. How are people using stoicism to shut you up? I've never seen anyone do that. If they are, they are misunderstanding the intention.
Doing what you can control and focusing on that, doesn't mean that you also don't speak up for change, because that is entirely something you can still control. In fact it's encouraged, because of stoic 'virtue', "That which you do the right thing, that is all that matters"
If others are using it to shut up up, that is what is outside of your control, you ignore it and do the right thing anyway.
Under stoicism, you would still push and advocate for change as an individual, but you would understand that if the world doesn't change or doesn't respond, that is out of your control, but you can and should still excuse your right to do that, because that is within your control.
The entire argument here seems to be missing the point.
I find that the tools of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is a re-embodiment of many of elements of stoicism. It is interesting to think of the 50 million Americans going to therapy as paying for a personal philosophy mentor. You can use this as a jumping off point for all kinds of societal speculation and armchair observations on culture.
The first, true and only philosophy for the working class, the exploited, the proletarians and the dispossessed is marxism. Teaching "stoicism" to people who barely can afford food, to slaves in the Congo, to overworked uber eats cyclists that work 12 hours a day for pennies, is not only ridiculous, it's criminal.
Standing silent or content in the face of exploitation, injustice and the threat of destruction of humanity is indeed an ethics that benefit the rich and powerful. "Be content, stay quiet, dont make noise, dont revolt, dont organize, accept your place in the universe.".
Marx was the first philosopher that recognized that philosophy is a product of material conditions, and that it servers the interests of the economic system that contains it. That's why marxism would have been impossible in ancient greece and there was never a greek philosopher that advocated revolution or seizing political power.
Stoicism has 2 main advantages over other philosophies:
* it’s practical. It involves doing things that work and will improve you life, make it clearer what you want and make it easier to do things and generally not waste your time or money
* it’s true in a trial and error, scientific sense. Stoicism concentrates on what works and is applicable. Beleifs come from life experience. Most other philosophies START with arbitrary beliefs and then expect you to live according to them whether they work or not.
It appeals to them because it's everything they aren't. Temperance and virtue? Please.
I wonder what caused the current obsession with stoicism. It seems vacant.
It's a remarkably good set of strategies and mindset for dealing with conflict, anxiety, and having to make a large number of difficult decisions.
The core of stoicism (stressed more by Epictetus, a former slave, than Marcus Aurelius) is that we should not focus or worry on things we can't control. We can't control other people, or societies, or the unforeseen tragic events we may experience, but we can control our own actions, our own thoughts, and the way we respond to them. We can't dictate our emotions, but we can handle how we express those emotions.
In many ways, it's similar to what you might learn going through therapy. But the mental health and difficulties that men face are somewhat overlooked by society and not taken as seriously as maybe they should be. In that environment, literally any strategies at all for dealing with stress and anxiety that are tailored towards men are going to be popular.
Thats patently false. Some people do control other people, some people do control whole societies. What stoicism does is: for the underclass, it tells them to accept such control. Lying that "you have no control" over working conditions, exploitation, misery, hunger, suffering, etc. Do nothing, because nothing you do will matter.
And for the capitalists upper class what it does is to validate the atroicities they commit: "the universe is an eternal good entity, everything happens for a reason. Sixty thousand children killed in Gaza? Its just the universe changing colors, changing quantity, some people turned from alive to unalive, but in the grand scheme of things it doesnt matter. You are just doing your role".
Could you recommend another philosophy worth exploring? As someone who's relatively new to Stoicism, I've found the four virtues (wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance) to offer valuable guidance for living a balanced life. I'd genuinely appreciate hearing more about your perspective—why do you find Stoicism vacant?
I don't follow Tim Ferriss, but I heard him interviewed on a podcast I sometimes listen to (I forget which) and Ferris said he reads MA's writings at least yearly and has done so for decades, and credited it with helping him with his depression and other issues. I got the impression he mentions it and advocates that everyone should study them as well. The interviewer was equally enthusiastic about MA.
Considering the popularity of Ferriss, he is probably part of the reason. I suspect the type of people who read his books (eg the 4 hour work week) probably are into it too as it is a macho stance to take. Who the hell thinks it is good to sleep on a stone floor in order to toughen your mind so you don't get too attached to comforts? My philosophy is I'll deal with suffering when it comes, and not practice before then to get good at it.
It reminds me of an interview many years ago with Jim Rose, who put on a traveling sideshow circus. There were no tricks -- the performs just did strange, painful things for entertainment. One of his routines was his wife would throw darts, using Rose's back as the dartboard. The interviewer asked, "Do you practice this?" He replied something like, "Hell no! It hurts! I did it once to see if I could do it, but after that I only do it for the show, where I get paid!"
I always traced this to Ryan Holiday marketing the philosophy and selling books on the topic and starting a YouTube channel "The Daily Stoic"
Interest in stoicism seems to be cyclical on HN. I’ve been following HN regularly since 2010, and I noticed that a couple of times per year there were/are spikes in stoicism-related submissions and discussions over a few weekends. My unsubstantiated theory is that someone gives a presentation/s touching on stoicism to new YC batches, or something like that.
Vanity.
It seems to be a philosophy about being a good little productive serf and continuing to be productive while taking your powerlessness on the nose? Why would anybody in a modern free society follow this philosophy?
I found it to be way more empowering. There truly are many things in life that we don’t control, but there are many that we do. Would you agree it’s wise to reduce stress about the stuff we don’t have control over?
That is not remotely what the philosophy is about. It's about not letting your external circumstances trouble your internal emotions, because they aren't what truly matters. It isn't passive acceptance - Stoics can, and should, try to improve the world around them. They just don't attach their happiness to whether those attempts succeed or fail.
As to why someone would follow the philosophy, it's simple: we all face stressful situations in life (some more stressful than others of course). Why should you let those things rule your emotions? It doesn't help anything to get upset. It just makes you feel worse. It is a pure negative thing in your life. So, you work to try to gain mastery over those feelings so that even when life is hard you can face it more effectively and with greater peace of mind.
> They just don't attach their happiness to whether those attempts succeed or fail.
Doesn't that seems bit pointless?
> Why would anybody in a modern free society follow this philosophy?
If I don't accept the absurd stupidity of others, and exercise temperance and prudence in my dealings with my fellow men, life in modern society would be nearly impossible.
As an example, this very post.
> As an example, this very post.
Ah, don’t be too hard on yourself.
No matter of era, age or social status, people do seek ways to cope. That is why stoicism seems to be so popular.