Stoicism and The Internet

Recently on the podcast we covered some of the works attributed to Epictetus. We had some laughs, but we also touched on some deeper topics. Nate raised some interesting questions that left me pondering the practical application of some of the stoic principles I was reading about. I’d like to explore those questions a bit further.

A Brief Tangent from a Douche Philosopher – Why Philosophy?

Before we get started, I want to take a moment to honestly discuss what the field of philosophy means to me. On the podcast and in my writing, I refer to myself as a “douche philosopher” despite having a genuine interest in and respect for the discipline. I grew up in a family of electrical and mechanical engineers. My family placed an extremely high value on education and grades, but only certain kinds of education. Soft sciences like psychology and (heaven forbid) sociology were not to be taken seriously because there was no money in them. The humanities were nice-to-haves but they were firmly relegated to the realm of hobbies. STEM is where the jobs were and STEM is what we would study. My grandfather referred to everything else as “basket weaving.”

For a long time, this kind of thinking made sense to me. To be quite honest, even with my current interest in literature, philosophy, and languages, I still think it was pretty good advice to focus on a career with money-making potential first. I’m sad that we live in a society that places very little value on the human experience relative to the creation of material wealth, but my regret does not change the reality that not all educational paths have an equal (or even positive) monetary return on investment. I can count on one hand the number of people I’ve encountered in my life who were truly happy to live in poverty while chasing their passions. So while I do not consider these “softer” pursuits to be as unimportant as previous generations of my family did, I would probably wind up offering the same advice to anyone interested in studying them. The university system is financially broken, and disciplines like philosophy…though incredibly important…will probably remain the privilege of the wealthy who can afford to study recreationally.

I could never call what I do “proper philosophy” because my formal training consists only of a handful of undergraduate courses. The bulk of what I know comes from my own independent reading and the gaps in my knowledge are chasmic. I’m really no better than the average pseudo-intellectual who winds up featured in r/im14andthisisdeep. Obviously, I try to hold myself to a higher standard and I like to think that I’ve learned a few things, but let’s be honest, you’ve probably heard an episode of Words About Books if you’re reading this. You know I’m an idiot. I’ve also never been able to shake my family’s judgmental perception of philosophy as a discipline of study. So I call myself a “douche philosopher” to shield myself from academic criticism and to signal to people like my family (and myself) that I’m aware of “how this sounds.”

If I had known more about the discipline and its history when I was in college, I may have considered dedicating a little more time and money to formal study. Philosophy, Theology, and even Occult Studies are intimately related. These are disciplines that wrestle with questions that tend towards the untestable and are therefore of little use to the material sciences. Despite this, human beings are often more deeply moved by these questions than more scientifically testable questions. For example, we don’t vote for representatives to represent us in debates about the most efficient propulsion systems for next generation rockets. Instead, we put people in power to debate philosophical issues like freedom, morality, and justice. These are issues that are so important to the people that some are willing to risk anything to win the argument.

The discipline of philosophy has had to make sacrifices in order to survive. To be taken seriously in an academic world that is increasingly hostile to the untestable and the unscientific, philosophy has had to distance itself from anything that smacks of the supernatural or the “spiritual.” Despite this, the goal of much ancient and current philosophy has much in common with theology: the definition of moral good and moral evil and the method by which one may live a “good” life. The separation of secular elements into philosophy and spiritual elements into theology hasn’t been a clean one. What satisfies the academics may alienate the laypeople. That is a shame, because these are topics that every human being has some degree of interest in no matter what their educational level. This is why the words of ancient philosophers still have the power to capture imaginations. It would be in the interests of academics not to cede this power to entirely to idiot podcasters and influencers. I hope that we find a way to ensure that this study isn’t relegated to a quirky hobby for the wealthy. We need to ensure that academic philosophy is available to all. Philosophy should be encouraging people to think deeply rather than manipulating them into a variety of grifts.

Now on to the actual blog post.

The Stoic Idea of Freedom

Epictetus defines “freedom” clearly and often as: never failing to get what one desires and never falling into that which one wishes to avoid. This kind of freedom is achieved not as simple as working to make maximize pleasure and avoid pain. Nor is it quite as simple as suppressing all desires and aversions. Epictetus believed in an ordered universe. He believed that man was not created to be tortured or rewarded randomly according to circumstance. He believed that of all animals, human beings were blessed with reason and that it is our reason that frees us from enslavement to our impressions.

“True education consists precisely in this, in learning to wish that everything should come about just as it does. And how do things come about? As the one who ordains them has ordained.”
–Epictetus, Discourses 1.12

By training our reason, we can realize that our impressions are only data. They should aid us in making informed decisions that are in alignment with our ethics. No impression should be allowed to unconsciously influence our behavior. We should examine them and then choose how to react. In time, we won’t need to suppress our desires or aversions, as we study and practice we will naturally come to see the truth; it is not outside forces that torture us, but rather our insistence that things should be other than they are that tortures us. It is our attempt to control things beyond the realm of our choice that leads to our suffering and enslavement.

‘But what if someone threatens me with death,’ someone says, ‘for he is constraining me then.’

No, it isn’t what you’re threatened with that compels you, but your own judgement that it is better to do this or that than to die.
-Epictetus, Discourses 1.18

Critical to our freedom is understanding which things are exclusively within the sphere of our control and which things are not. Our wealth and status are not exclusively within our control. Forces beyond us can enable us or hinder us in matters of wealth and status. Our family is not within our control, they may become estranged from us or they may take ill and die. Even our bodies are not exclusively within our control, we cannot choose not to age or become ill or injured. Epictetus argues that only our ability to make decisions is truly ours. Outside forces can attempt to influence your decision, but ultimately, you decide. If someone threatens you with death to make you change your mind, you may change your mind, but not as a direct result of their threat. It is instead a result of your judgement compliance is better than death. It’s an important distinction.

Why don’t you reflect, then, that for man the source of all evils, and of his meanness of spirit and cowardice, is not death itself, but rather the fear of death? It is to confront this that you must train yourself, and it is towards that end that all your reasonings, all your studies, and all your readings should be directed, and then you’ll recognize that it is in this way alone that human beings can attain freedom.
-Epictetus, Discourses 3.26

Nate’s Allegory of the Data Center

In the episode Nate asked an excellent question. “What would a stoic do if a data center was coming into his neighborhood? Should he simply accept that this was the natural course of things, or should he take action to try to prevent this thing he wishes to avoid?”

Epictetus’s work does not focus much on what sort of actions people should take, as that is for them to decide, but he certainly doesn’t expect people to sit idle and to accept injustice. Quite the opposite, Epictetus believes that a person should be willing to die in the pursuit of what they believe to be right.

What would Heracles have been if he had said, ‘How can I prevent a huge lion from coming my way, or a huge boar, or a savage man?’ If a huge boar comes along, the contest that you engage in will be all the greater; if wicked men come along, you’ll rid the world of wicked men.

‘But what if I should die in doing so?’

You’ll die as a good person, accomplishing a noble deed.
-Epictetus, Discourses 4.10

Admittedly, Epictetus is a bit sparse with regards to ethics beyond assigning good and evil to those things which lie within the realm of choice and indifference to those things which lie outside of it. Ultimately your decisions are your own to make, but you must recognize in this situation, what is for you to decide and what lies outside the realm of choice. To speak out against a data center may lie within the realm of choice. To prevent its construction almost certainly lies outside the realm of choice. In that case, it may be right to speak out, but if the center is built despite your protests, then it was built. To deny or lament its having been built would change nothing and would only inflict further misery upon yourself.

In the case of this data center, it will likely take the community’s land, water, electricity, and money. It will leave them with a lower quality of life than they had before. Is that bad? Does it lie within the realm of choice to have land, water, electricity, and money? All of these are things do not belong to you. It was nice to have them while you did, but if the one who ordained that you should have them now ordains that they are to be taken away, it’s no using lamenting the force he sent to collect them. This is not to say that one should never speak out or defend one’s self, it’s more to say that one can choose to fight, but one cannot choose to win. If one desires always to win, then one is setting one’s self up for disappointment. Do not desire to win. Merely desire to fight for what you believe in, and then win or lose, you will have achieved your aim.

Social Media – The Modern Day Agora

The insights of Epictetus were not new to me for the most part. I have either received similar advice from other sources or from those who were inspired by Epictetus and his predecessors. A particular passage in Discourses caught me a bit off guard, though.

[7]Why is it, then, that these people are stronger than you? Because all the rotten things that they say are drawn from their own judgements, while your smart talk comes only from your lips. As a consequence, it has no vigor, no vitality, and anyone would feel sick to hear your exhortations and miserable prattle about virtue, which you keep going on about. [8] And so laymen get the better of you; since judgement is all-powerful, judgement is invincible. [9] Until these fine thoughts, then, are firmly established in you, and you’ve acquired the power that is needed to guarantee your safety, I would advise you to be cautious about getting involved with laymen. Otherwise, everything that you write down in the schoolroom will melt away day by day like wax in the sun. [10] You should retire, then, to some place far away from the sun, as long as your opinions are like wax.
-Epictetus, Discourses 3.17

In this passage, Epictetus is encouraging his students not to become involved in debates or social intercourse with laymen, that is, non-philosophers. He compares these discussions to two coals being placed next to one another. If a hot coal is placed next to a cold coal, either the cold coal will extinguish the hot or the hot will set the cold alight. Epictetus warns his students that they are more likely to be set alight by laymen than laymen are to be extinguished by them. He explains in the passage above that this is because one’s own judgement is the all-powerful force in one’s own life. A philosophy student with no real-world experience is unlikely to sway a lay person despite having a superior education. Even when armed with superior facts and rhetorical skill, the philosophy student will lose the argument if they are only parroting the thoughts of wiser men. Knowing the answer and understanding the answer are two different things.

Most ancient philosophers that I’ve read are pretty unimpressed with the lay person. Socrates famously said that the unexamined life is not worth living. So it struck me that Epictetus would tell these young men, taking their first steps toward the examined life, that they were “weaker” than laymen because the laymen spoke from a place of confidence in their own judgement, flawed though those judgements may be. Epictetus was acknowledging something that I’ve seldom heard in a philosophical context: Truth, alone, is not enough.

Most Stoic advice is directed inward. It attempts to train the individual to understand the power of their own choice in shaping their experience, but in this case Epictetus has pointed out two further implications of the power of choice. The first implication was, at least for me, was shockingly easy to ignore; other people have this power too. No matter how convinced I am that the way I see the world is objectively, provably correct, I can never force another person to see it my way if they do not choose to do so. The second implication is that I am equally guilty of knowing things to be true intellectually, but not really agreeing with them on a deeper spiritual level.

I can read all this philosophy, and I can understand it, and I can spit it back out in my own words in a manner that sounds intelligent, but is it all just wax in the sun? How often have I fallen into the digital equivalent of screaming matches with strangers over topics that none of the people involved have any meaningful power to influence? Epictetus uses the analogy of hot and cold coals. Well, how much more likely is a cold coal to ignite when surrounded by tens of thousands of hot coals on a social media platform with an algorithm acting as a bellows to fan the flame?

Epictetus emphasized practice over study. Study is good, but without practice it can’t affect anything. At the end of the day, we are our actions and our actions are the result of our choices. I consistently choose to get involved in meaningless debates on social media that distracts from practice and practical action. I always feel worse for having done so. I become more like the people that I’m arguing with than like the wise old sages I’m reading.

Conclusion

‘Is it possible, then, to derive advantage from these things?’

Yes, from all of them.

‘Even from someone who insults you?’

And what advantage does a wrestler gain from his training partner? The greatest. And that man, too, who insults me becomes my training partner; he trains me in patience, in abstaining from anger, in remaining gentle.
-Epictetus, Discourses 3.20

As much as we may have joked about Stoicism, and broicism, and some of Epictetus’s less insightful rants, I do think I gained some insight from these texts. A lot of my own anger and anxiety come from desiring the world to be different than it is. It hasn’t been enough for me to simply desire to make choices that are in accordance with my own ideals and values. I have told myself that if I do more, if I want it more, if I get angrier and more motivated then I can force change on the world. More than that, I’ve told myself that it is my responsibility to change the world. But obviously, it isn’t. I think there is wisdom in discerning what lies within the sphere of choice and what lies without. I shall endeavor not to be one of those waxy philosophers that melts in the heat. Rather I will strive to become a bold and self-actualized douche philosopher.