How Trendy Stoicism Assimilates the Counterculture

And how big business neutralizes philosophy to reassure puzzled consumers

If you walk into the philosophy section of a bookstore, chances are you’ll be struck by the number of books on Stoicism you’ll find on the shelves.

Search the internet for “Stoicism and self-help” and you’re met with four million web pages (some of which are quite critical of the phenomenon).

But why has Stoicism recently become so trendy, at least in North America?

Stoicism and the Brutal Logic of Ancient Greek Philosophy

To answer that question, we need to know what “Stoicism” means. The Stoics were ancient Greek and Roman philosophers and virtue theorists who toned down the more radical philosophy of Cynicism.

The Cynics, in turn, were so repulsed by the decadence of mass society that they became infamous for distrusting the motives and the progressive potential of the unreflective majority. “Cynic” became a pejorative label, which is a mark of how antisocial Cynicism was.

The Cynics were like the Taoists in saying that virtue lies in living a simple, natural life. They would agree with Jean-Jacques Rousseau when he said that society corrupts us with its unnatural expectations and compromises.

Like the Beat Generation and the Hippies, Cynics, therefore, rejected social norms. They “dropped out” of society, gave up their wealth and material possessions, and were content with their freedom from social restrictions.

Early Christianity adopted this outlook, wedding it to the Jewish messianic longing for the material world’s end.

The Stoics, then, agreed with the Cynics in thinking that happiness consists in the practice of virtue, not in a race for wealth, fame, or other external goods. The sage should be content with the quality of his or her thinking and shouldn’t be foolish enough to attempt to control nature.

Instead, the sage tries to understand how nature works and to harmonize his or her behaviour with natural norms.

We’re wrongheaded when we treat civilized society as an excuse to live apart from nature, when we relish our decadent refuges that alienate us from our simpler purpose.

Indeed, we’ve been led to seek all-consuming progress, thanks to modern scientific and technological advances. We apply our knowledge to build an artificial world, sustaining the illusion that we’ve mastered natural processes.

The Stoic sage avoids that illusion but doesn’t shun material possessions or status symbols with the Cynic’s glee. Instead, the Stoic thinks of possessions as having secondary, instrumental value in relation to virtuous purposes. Wealth and possessions can be used badly or well, depending on the user’s character.

Specifically, we should strive to control our emotions and our behaviour by developing inner calm. Only then are we free in being active agents rather than passive robots that merely react to stimuli.

Buddhists went further in thinking that even such self-control is an illusion. But both Buddhists and Stoics thought we should abandon the pretense that we can escape or can control natural interdependencies.

For the Stoic, nature unfolds as a deterministic rational order. We’re part of that order and have relatively little impact on anything. What we control the most is our perspective, which is the source of our expectations, and we’re ethically praiseworthy when we show that we’ve been trained to react honourably to natural eventualities.

One-Sided Manliness

In practice, Stoicism and ancient Greek philosophy generally made for manly, hypermasculine ways of life for the nobility that indulged in them. Those humanistic philosophers praised virtues like wisdom, courage, justice, and self-restraint, and they accepted patriarchy, war, and slavery as natural.

Aristotle codified much of this virtue theory, and he wrote in Politics that, “as regards the sexes, the male is by nature superior and the female inferior, the male ruler and the female subject.”

He said also that “The slave is wholly lacking the deliberative element; the female has it but it lacks authority; the child has it but it is incomplete.”

Plato summarized this conservatism or inchoate social Darwinism when he said in Gorgias that “nature herself intimates that it is just for the better to have more than the worse, the more powerful than the weaker; and in many ways she shows, among men as well as among animals, and indeed among whole cities and races, that justice consists in the superior ruling over and having more than the inferior.”

Of course, patriarchy, militarism, and slavery were normal at the time, as they’ve prevailed for most of the history of civilizations. Above all, then, Cynicism and Stoicism were philosophical degrees of skepticism about our progressive capacity. The Cynics and Stoics said we should strive for the wisdom to understand our limitations and to avoid the unnecessary suffering that results from hubris or from wide-eyed optimism.

Progress and the Subversive Counterculture

What, then, does any of this have to do with the consumer’s self-help mentality that flourishes in the few remaining large bookstores and in online reading platforms? Is there any dignity at all in this trendy, late-modern admiration for Stoicism?

Presumably, we consumers are just fudging Stoicism so we can flatter ourselves that we’re not addicted to seeking pleasures, social status, or material possessions. We can pretend we’re wise, happy, and in control as long as we keep up a “daily Stoic journal.”

Or we can take cheap pride in reading self-help books even when we consume them like fast food. We don’t take these books to heart or recognize them as works of propaganda that often assimilate countercultural insights from the likes of Stoicism, Buddhism, or ancient Christianity.

The problem is that if we have the time or the inclination to ponder the philosophical question of whether we ought to repudiate social norms and live like hobos, we’ve already made up our minds.

Either we’re rich or privileged like most elite philosophers or we’re poor, introverted, artistically sensitive, or possibly mentally ill or predisposed towards antisociality.

And in the latter cases, we have nothing left to lose so we might as well attempt to understand our predicament at a philosophical level.

Either way, those who most need to reflect on the merits of social vanities are the least likely to do so. The blissfully ignorant masses are too busy being the reactionary, self-destructive drones that disgust philosophers and religious ascetics or fundamentalists.

Meanwhile, the marginalized idealists are beneath the contempt of happy families, businesses, and empires. To the latter, a philosopher is an irrelevant academic or perhaps a resentful incel, someone who rationalizes his or her privileges or failures.

A philosophical demeanor is a kind of masturbatory detachment that busy, successful people can’t afford. To be so objective as to attempt to mentally encompass the cosmic function of life, the “existential” predicament, or how all civilization fits into the natural scheme is like shooting yourself in the foot.

Why bother torturing yourself with subversive, philosophical musings? What’s to be gained apart from debilitating self-doubt, anxiety, or depression?

Cultural Assimilation and the Last Laugh

Yet the antisocial sage insists that there would be wisdom in restraining our beastly impulses even if philosophy were debilitating.

Suppose, for example, the vaunted progress that the unreflective masses are busy achieving will end up bringing about the ecological apocalypse that’s featured so prominently in entertainments like “The Stand,” “The Walking Dead,” and “The Road.” Suppose, that, is, that what lies at the end of our hedonistic liberties and the licenses to sin we cherish, of our capitalist free-for-alls, plutocracies, and monopolies, and of all the runaway technological advances is irreversible civilizational collapse.

Out of hubris, we seek to master the planet, and the planet might shrug off our advances and replace us with more pliable animals.

Wouldn’t the philosophers, the bohemian visionaries, and the antisocial mystics have the last laugh in that case, especially if this looming catastrophe were predictable from those alienating perspectives?

Evidently, we don’t take that scenario seriously, not even after we’ve been stuck indoors for a year or so to fight off a viral pandemic, as in 2020. We trust that our progressive, globally integrated societies are sustainable, even as climatologists warn us about the unintended consequences of our “sophisticated,” “progressive” activities.

Popular books on Stoicism seem to offer us half-measures. We suspect something’s amiss, but we fear that the medicine may be worse than the disease. So we only dabble in Stoicism, Buddhism, and Americanized Christianity, just as we consume mass entertainment and corporate propaganda rather than confronting real, visionary art.

We co-opt the countercultural message, neutralizing and taming it in the process because we’re preoccupied with our social games. The notion that philosophical or religious speculations could be onto something is laughable, given the reality of our families, jobs, hobbies, vacations, class struggles, and national ambitions.

What’s real, we presume, is the artificial world we’ve built that blinks its million lights at us, blotting out the stars at night.

What command our attention are the cyberspaces and social media that addict us, the political tribes that degrade us, the info silos and self-congratulatory worldviews we inhabit, and the pleasures and responsibilities of being upstanding, gainfully employed, sexually active, financially independent men and women.

Ironically, this amounts to a perversion of Stoicism. Like the Stoic sage, we retreat to our inner world, but whereas the Stoic mind is supposed to grimly reflect nature’s inhuman regularities, the narcissistic consumer is preoccupied with fantasies and noble lies.

Captured by a horrific vision of godless nature, the philosopher is alienated from vulgar society, while that society is appalled by the prospect of submitting to nature or of crediting the philosopher’s wisdom or vision.

The more honourable consumer would acknowledge that by merely dabbling in philosophy or religion, he or she would be living in bad faith. The self-help merchandise should be recognized as an array of oversimplifications and cultural assimilations.

And the humanistic consumer ought to celebrate that party for as long as it lasts, rather than pretending she has one foot out the door.