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My love/hate relationship with stoicism

So I have a complicated relationship to what's commonly called the Modern Stoic movement. Maybe you haven't heard of what I'm talking about, though I think that's getting increasingly unlikely, but the rough tl;dr is in the past couple of decades there's been a rapidly growing re-interest in revisiting the Greek and Roman Stoics for their philosophy and its applicability to daily life.

This doesn't sound bad at all, at least not at first, but it gets complicated quickly. I think there's a lot of good in Stoicism: lessons about dealing with hardship, about loving the people around you and caring for them but not letting love become a need that distorts your sense of duty and justice, about allowing yourself to enjoy pleasure but not become attached to it in a way that makes you afraid of losing it, &c. There's a rich but practical ethics to Stoic philosophy, one that's very focused on living and being in the world in ways that I often found lacking in Buddhism---the religion that saved my life after I left my incredibly abusive family.

So the problem, though, is that a lot of the growing popularity of Stoicism is as a series of lifehacks: here's how to be a chad CEO who doesn't give a fuck about what other people think and can't be stopped! And that's not even an exaggeration. Ryan Holiday is the absolute worst about this. One of his books, The Obstacle Is The Way, not only praises capitalist investors as the heroes of our day who are living out Stoic ideals but even goes on to rather lavishly praise Erwin Rommel of all people.

Clearly he missed the whole bit about being a citizen of the world, a literal cosmopolitan, who sees loyalty to humanity as greater than any other.

There's also just a lot of rather shallow misreading of the Stoics that contributes to this: people take lines like Epictetus saying that an impediment to the leg is not an impediment to the will as saying you should just be able to shrug off pain, be resilient, let nothing get you down. Hell yeah! When it's a bit more like Epictetus, a former slave whose leg never healed from an injury when he was young, is talking about how someone can break your leg but they can't make you do something you know is wrong. You see the Stoics don't actually deny that pain is bad, it's just that they consider there to be no amount of pain that can justify acting immorally. Only immoral action is true irreparable harm, essentially, everything else is transient one way or another: either it ends and you live or it kills you and you don't feel it anymore. I'm not saying it's not a harsh outlook but it's not inhumane! They advocated for embracing pleasure and avoiding pain whenever it didn't compromise your ethics, your pro-social obligations.

So for everything I've said, I guess I believe there's a lot worth holding onto from the Modern Stoic movement even with all the "rawr be a dominating chad bro who doesn't feel pain" crap that you find. I think there's some really good work people are doing to try and adapt these millenia old ideas to modern contexts and I might write more about that on this gemlog.

In any case, are there any fellow Stoics here in the small internet? Or anti-fans who think it's just so much hot garbage? Either way, you can always reach me at left_adjoint@rawtext.club if you'd like or respond in your own post.

Until then!