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.
Not everybody is as emotional as you based on your description, some of us naturally have more control over our state of mind, emotions generally, and don't live so reactively.
This allows us not only avoid those typical massive mistakes in life (addictions, bad but attractive partners, cheating, being miserable parents, generally bad emotional big-consequence choices and so on) but also steer us to more successful life paths than most of our peers, whatever that may mean in each case.
Your system works for you and makes you happy and content with your life and its direction? Great for you, but that path is yours only, no need to broaden it to all humanity.
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.
I think your statement was compatible-with/implicit-in mine: that conflict, being fundamental in some regimes (as is cooperation) but also high-friction, does not need philosophical reinforcement. If it is philosophical then it is reasoned, and reasoned, whether deceptively so or not, is higher function submitting to reinforcing older, lower.
I don’t disagree it is better to be emotionally transparent in many cases, but there are many cases where it isn’t, and where personal emotional responses can be counterproductive and/or misleading, producing their own sets of suboptimal outcomes.
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.
Im not opposed to expressing ones feelings, or advocating for unemotive speech.
Im opposed intentionally seeking heightened conflict via deceit and misrepresentation. It is the political metagaming for effect and attention, an intentional manipulation of the emotional equilibrium.
If you are a true believer in what you say, that is one thing. If you are intentionally being hyperbolic, overexpressing emotion, or omitting facts you know to be true, then you are engaging in political rhetoric. This is adversarial, not collaborative.
When the well is sufficiently poisoned, there is no point in outside discourse, or even truth-seeking.
Rhetoric is a good way to make short term gains on a topic, if you have an edge. Long term it is negative sum, as your community falls apart.
I see that your sibling comment explains your position, and was insightful. I have no problem with radical self expression, or radical transparency. What I have a problem with is placing conflict and effect above truth and transparency. This is how I interpreted your comments above.
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.
> 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
It does and it did in a world where I can actually be devoid and detatched from everything. But I got bored of being alone and it makes it hard to connect with anyone when youre living in your own world.
But I dunno sometimes I think all this thinking is useless cause you never really know what caused what
"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.
You must be quite young to hold such beliefs. Whether you approve of stoicism or not, we all will die one day. Someone once said that to philosophize is to learn how to die. I hope you don't spend the last moments of your life screaming in anguish and fear.
>> Behind each of the stoic virutues is a psychological position to dettach, dissociate and live in a more abstracted conceptual space.
You and I have a very different understanding of stoicism. Stoicism's concept of attachment is much more closer to a Daoist/Buddhist one. They don't advocate renouncing the world in fact the opposite - how to live fully. Just that don't cling to things - especially the results as a lot of factors that affect it are not under our control and when things don't happen the way we were forcing them to happen, resentment and anger follows. This can be applied to work, relationship, parenting. It is quite practical.
It is fascinating that these two different cultures developed similar philosophies around the same time in history.
One needs to let go of the medieval/modern interpretation of stoicism which creates such resentment and approach it from a more eastern perspective.
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.
There seems to be the notion in a lot of comments that Stoicism is about acting against one's nature or surpressing ones emotions.
For me, on the other hand, it was very freeing to encounter Stoicism, because I felt like it was okay that I didn't feel or react as strongly as people around me expected me to.
>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).
Pragmatism is a form of prudence. A lot of the other stuff you mention could vaguely be called fortitude.
>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.
This is a recipe for unhappiness. By definition, attaching too much will ultimately (and perhaps immediately) cause you grief. Risking more than what is prudent could lead you to disaster. (Quit your job, for example, and you could end up homeless! That might be a good time to start thinking stoically but a better one would be prior to making such a mistake.) Participating in the world and making the best of it is what stoicism calls for, but it questions what is worth your energy and how you should react to failure.
>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.
The classical Stoic discussion of death is more of a rhetorical device than a prescription for how to live. Nobody is out here saying you should treat your life as unimportant. But extreme fear of death is a thing that gives people anxiety, and sometimes interferes with them doing things that they ought to do.
I've read many Stoic quotes about making the most of life and not wasting time. That kind of stuff isn't suggestive of laying down to rot. I've never seen a Stoic praise excessive laziness.
> 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.
Stoicism does not say that you should not have an attachment to your life, i.e. will to live.
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?
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?
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.
Roman Stoicism, of the sort practiced by Marcus Aurelius or Seneca, is vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy and tendentious sanctimony; Seneca’s insistence that virtue is detached from worldly goods is somewhat undermined by his corrupt exploitation of his station, for example. Stoicism qua stoicism was, like all Roman intellectual pursuits, originally Greek, and was based on an entire metaphysics of free-will determinism that the Romans pretty much ignored in favor of being able to pretend that they were upholding the supposed virtues of an imagined past (a favored pastime, see Tacitus and Cicero), even as they let their society slide ever further into corruption and tyranny. To be honest, Stoicism tells us a lot about the psychological and social character of the Romans, but didn’t really come into its own as an influential philosophy until its early modern rediscovery and the development of neo-Stoicist thought.
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.
FWIW: My experience with stoicism has been that it's mostly espoused by conservatives as justification for ignoring social justice or by people who perceive themselves to be "tough love" types as a way to dismiss other's suffering.
For that reason, although in theory I think that stoicism could be a useful philosophy, in practice I see it as a cudgel for those who benefit from the status quo.
This is sad because its thats not what Stoicism is actually about. The most prominent Stoic author today is Ryan Holiday and the guy is a staunch liberal. He's worth checking out if you want to see a sincere modern day interpretation of stoicism.
They despised material wealth and comfort. They also talked alot about Justice and doing what is inside your control to correct injustice was seen as a high virtue.
"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."