Stoicism Has Always Been Hackneyed Centrist Propaganda

From the amoral legalisms of ancient Rome to self-help rationalizations of consumer capitalism

Thanks largely to the marketing acumen of Ryan Holiday, “Stoicism, the 2,300-year-old philosophy based on enduring hardship, is being rebranded for the 21st century and gaining traction as a modern-day life hack,” according to one columnist.

On his “Daily Stoic” podcasts and in his books, Holiday applies Stoicism as a shallow consumerist therapy for those enduring the First World problems of postindustrial society.

Historians and philosophers have been quick to criticize such expropriations for being shallow. For example, a writer for The NY Times says, according to the title, “If You’re Reading Stoicism for Life Hacks, You’re Missing the Point.” And a Medium writer at Forge says, “Modern Self-Help Is Killing Stoicism,” and wonders whether “ancient philosophy” is here being “reduced to hackneyed self-help advice.”

But it turns out there’s some ironic, likely unintended justification in treating Stoicism as fodder for hackneyed life advice. That’s roughly what Stoic ethics has always been.

Between Aristotle’s Elitism and the Cynic’s Renunciation

To see why that’s so, consider what the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s article on Stoicism says about that school’s historical context. Stoicism was a kind of ancient Greco-Roman virtue theory that stood between two more extreme standpoints.

On the one hand, there was Aristotle’s conservative, aristocratic view that while virtue is crucial to being happy, external, material goods such as wealth, pleasure, and fame contribute to happiness too. Thus, poor people couldn’t be ethically praiseworthy or happy.

On the other hand, there were the radical Cynics who said that virtue is sufficient for happiness and that the external “goods” should be shunned as diversions that impede the wisdom and training needed for the fulfillment of our authentic purpose.

‘What the Stoics tried to do, then, was to strike a balance in the middle, by endorsing the twin crucial ideas…that virtue is the only true good, in itself sufficient for eudaimonia [happiness] regardless of one’s circumstances, but also that other things — like health, education, wealth — may be rationally preferred or “dispreferred,” as in the case of sickness, ignorance, and poverty, as long as one did not confuse them for things with inherent value.’

The difference between Stoics and Cynics was that the Stoics said the external factors were morally neutral, so that wise people should be indifferent towards them, whereas Cynics regarded those external factors or circumstances as insidious.

Between Conservative Prejudice and Radical Idealism

Perhaps we should take a further step back, however. After all, the late-modern materialistic consumer might be wondering why anyone would think that virtue is the only true good in life or that an excellent character is all you need to be happy.

Indeed, the predominant rationale for virtue theory in the ancient world was sheer mysticism.

When Plato said that the material world is a rude, illusory copy of ideal reality, he incorporated Orphism and other themes from the Mystery Religions, which in turn were based on Egyptian theurgy and Hindu and Buddhist monistic renunciation and asceticism. All that’s real for Plato is a singular power of timeless Goodness of which our minds and consciousness are mere fragments. We’re fallen beings, imprisoned in matter, but with the potential to free ourselves if we recognize the profound existential truth, avoid being enchanted by the material world as it’s presented by our senses, and purify our inner self.

Aristotle naturalized Plato’s philosophy, thus laying the proto-social Darwinian grounds of conservative elitism to which all politically conservative or aristocratic prejudices reduce. That is, Aristotle eliminated the Platonic and mystical woo and argued that we should seek virtue merely to fulfill our natural function as rational animals.

He thus committed the naturalistic fallacy, betraying the fact that his elitism isn’t philosophical or scientific but prejudicial. Aristotle’s real point was that members of our species strive to excel, and those who succeed are happy in living the good life, while those who “miss the mark” are miserable failures. And that’s roughly the end of his aristocratic ethics.

Ethical behaviour for him is just a matter of variety in how members of our species naturally succeed or fail to flourish in natural and social terms. Virtue and vice are important because they’re the capacities that lead us to fulfill or to fail to achieve our universal, sociobiological purpose. On the same prejudicial, fallacious grounds, Aristotle defended patriarchy, sexism, and slavery. Thus, Aristotle and Nietzsche could have been two peas in a pod.

Ancient Cynicism, however, was closer to Plato’s mystical monism, although like the Taoists, the Cynics are known for likewise naturalizing the antisocial revolt against the profane consensus on how we should live.

Yet this may be because the Cynics’ writings haven’t survived, so all we know about that movement derives from ancient reports of how Cynic philosophers lived. Cynics lived simple lives, eschewing the comforts of civilization, and even pretending to be animals in their interactions with average folks. Urinating in the streets, barking at strangers, and sleeping in a barrel, however, could have amounted to so many Dadaesque performances. The Cynics might have illustrated the absurdity of popular pretensions by satirizing or desecrating them.

In any case, a preference for animalistic simplicity would likely be just as fallacious as Aristotle’s elitism. Jains, Hindus, and Buddhists justified the break from society’s vanities and decadence with more radical arguments. Again, if the material world is an illusion that ensnares us in Maya, bliss is found in freeing ourselves from that trap, which requires philosophical insight and spiritual discipline.

Stoic Ethics as Shallow Political Centrism

To map this onto the modern political context with a rough analogy, we can say that Aristotelian virtue theory represented the conservative wing, while Cynicism was closer to a left-wing, socialist revolt. Granted, the Cynics weren’t advocating for material progress or for egalitarian redistributions of wealth, as far as we know. But the Cynics would have agreed with socialists, progressives, anarchists, and other radical critics of the capitalist status quo in one key respect: they would all repudiate the predominant, traditional social systems and civil norms.

So you had elitist defenders of civility (as though social norms were natural and therefore good), and you had radical critics of that consensus on how people ought to be living. You had the realists or fatalists and the idealists or dreamers.

And in between were the Stoics who were like today’s wishy-washy liberals. On the key question of ethics, Stoics split the difference between Aristotle’s aristocratic naturalism and the Cynic’s antisocial renunciation.

Virtue was crucial to happiness, and although we naturally strive for external goods such as wealth, power, pleasure, and prestige, these goods are ethically neutral. We should be indifferent to them because they needn’t impede nor facilitate our ethical pursuits.

As Diogenes Laertius explains Stoic founder Zeno’s distinction,

Goods comprise the virtues of prudence, justice, courage, temperance, and the rest; while the opposites of these are evils, namely, folly, injustice, and the rest. Neutral (neither good nor evil, that is) are all those things which neither benefit nor harm a man: such as life, health, pleasure, beauty, strength, wealth, fair fame and noble birth, and their opposites, death, disease, pain, ugliness, weakness, poverty, ignominy, low birth, and the like…such things (as life, health, and pleasure) are not in themselves goods, but are morally indifferent, though falling under the species or subdivision “things preferred.”

Pleasure, beauty, and wealth, for example, might be preferred for various reasons, but they’re morally neutral and indifferent because they’re not good in themselves. They can be used well or poorly.

Yet the commonsense suspicion that the power obtained by wealth has a habit of corrupting the powerful person’s character indicates that this distinction between instrumental and intrinsic goods is sheer casuistry. A Cynic (or a Christian) would emphasize that wealth is bad because it’s dangerous and it tends to be abused and to distract us from the existential issues that matter. Yet a Stoic would defend wealth on the technicality that wealth can possibly be used well, so it’s not intrinsically bad.

In any case, there are no intrinsic values, given the naturalistic fallacy. Virtue theorists call virtues “good” because those character traits tend to make us happy, which means they tend to achieve that stipulated goal. Virtues, too, then, are only instrumentally or indirectly valuable. For the virtue theorist, moral values are only subjective in that they depend on what we want, so the question here is just about a tendency’s probability of satisfying some desire.

Or take the famous opening principle from the Stoic Epictetus’s Enchiridion: “We are responsible for some things, while there are others for which we cannot be held responsible.” As in Buddhism, the idea is that we shouldn’t obsess over what we can’t change. Yet the Stoics’ naturalistic reductions lead them to a deterministic cosmology or “physics.” So technically, for the Stoics we’re not responsible for anything that happens in either the objective or the subjective realms.

There’s no such thing as moral responsibility without some level of freewill or self-control. A Stoic will say we have more control over whether to raise our arm than over whether the sun will rise tomorrow, but this is once again specious, assuming the Stoic is also a crude determinist.

Regardless, the Stoic insists that we needn’t fear temptations because we can fortify our personal integrity. But while heroic integrity may be possible, we’d have reason to trust in that potential only if we were led to take a stance on the metaphysical questions that inspire the Aristotelians and the Cynics. If we belong to the upper class of society, so that we receive the best training, we might learn how to avoid temptations and to use the external goods well. Or if human consciousness or intelligence is a fragment of a higher power that controls the universe, then perhaps anyone can overcome temptations because that higher power could do anything.

But the Stoic shares the modern political centrist’s penchant for hackneyed, casuistic, uninspired compromises. The Stoic mixes Aristotelian naturalism with Cynic idealism, with a view to reassuring all social classes. The aristocrats have their privileges, but the poor masses can be morally praiseworthy too. We can all be happy in our respective ways. Thus, the Stoic reduces philosophy to social engineering and to spin doctoring.

Stoicism in the Roman Empire

It’s no coincidence that Stoicism took off after Rome conquered Athens in the first century BCE, since the Roman Empire was infamous for its practicality. The Romans excelled not in spirituality or philosophy, but in industry, legal infrastructure, and war. In short, they were experts in managing and in expanding an empire. They adopted the Greek pantheon wholesale, merely changing the names of the gods, because reinventing the wheel would have been a waste of time and resources. And the Romans weren’t threatened by foreign religions because Romans had only a transactional attitude towards piety.

Like postindustrial liberals that tolerate foreign cultures because the liberals’ decadence secretly makes them nihilistic, the Roman Empire was cosmopolitan in so far as its citizens condescended to conquered “barbarians.” Romans were hyperskeptical and cynical, trusting mainly in the material advantages and know-how that sustained the Pax Romana.

True, Romans were technically and even intellectually sophisticated, but they had far too much to lose to immerse themselves in visionary fantasies or idealistic dreams. They preferred ideologies that worked, that kept the peace, and Stoicism appealed on those political grounds. In the fourth century CE, Christianity would appeal in the same way since that religion was likewise a sophistical, malleable combination of Jewish monotheism and Greco-Roman polytheism that reassured everyone, including the Romans that executed Jesus.

The point is that even in its heyday in ancient Rome, Stoicism was more like a political calculation than an inspired philosophy. Even so, the Romans struggled to uphold the compromises that were tailormade to be practicable.

Speaking of himself in the second-person, the Stoic and Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius worried that “you are no longer able to have lived your whole life as a philosopher since youth; and it is clear to many others and to you yourself that you are far from philosophy. So you are confused: the result is that obtaining the reputation of a philosopher is no longer easy for you…For your experience tells you how much you have strayed: nowhere in so-called reasonings, wealth, reputation, enjoyment, nowhere do you find living well.”

What I’m suggesting is that the reason for his struggle was that the Stoic compromise on ethics was always a sham. The initial insight was that we increase our chance at being happy by honing our inner character. But of course, Romans had an empire to run, which means they were preoccupied with external goods. Moreover, running an empire required tremendous amoral ingenuity. Stoicism had to be twisted, then, to suit the needs of empire.

You can almost hear the ancient Roman Stoic: “Let the external world do what it will in all its amoral, natural causality; yet if you maintain your integrity and your composure, the world won’t corrupt you even if you find yourself participating (with requisite indifference) in nature’s amorality, such as by subduing foreign populations in the Roman military, or by crucifying bands of rebels.”

Romans could have their cake and eat it. They could be aristocratic and imperial without unnecessarily insulting the lowly masses they conquered who naturally lacked the material advantages of the Roman elites, but who could be said to have had a modicum of dignity in so far as they could master their emotions.

Banal Stoic Excuses for Status Quo Injustices

Where, then, is the reason for surprise when today Stoicism is twisted to suit the needs, rather, of capitalism and of the empire of American consumerism? Stoic ethical theory is and has always been hollow centrist hackery.

Once again, the Stoic propagandist or “self-help guru” can explain how consumers are virtuous if they meet the lowest possible threshold of not being too greedy, of knowing their place in the governing systems that no one is powerful enough to change. Set aside your wild idealism and your dreams of revolt and learn to revere the status quo. Focus only on the illusion of what’s in your grasp, on your attitudes towards the amoral, predetermined unfolding of nature and of society.

Never mind that the social systems in question are self-destructive, or that Roman imperialism bred resentment among the barbarians and the slave classes that eventually brought down the empire (although the Roman elites managed to tame the Christian revolution, turning it into an anti-Jesus excuse for that other form of totalitarianism which was Christendom).

Never mind also that Stoicism provides cover for the consumer’s egoism that will likely bring down the capitalist status quo in waves of ecological catastrophes. All the Stoic asks is that the consumer recognize that her material possessions may be preferred even if they’re not intrinsically good. The consumer need have no misgivings about pursuing material advantages if she makes some minor concessions towards a Buddhist outlook and not get caught up in unrealistic cravings.

Even when the barbarians were at the gates, we can imagine the Stoic saying to the subversive Cynic, “Now’s not the time to panic! Let’s not lose our heads in despair over whether the Roman Empire was wise in the long run. Even if we’re about to enter a long dark age, that’s just how the world works, as it passes through its cycles, and the true hubris lies with the radical idealist who would aim for speedier progress.”

And when climatologists warn us that consumerism is ringing our death knell, we can count on the hackneyed Stoic entrepreneur to reassure us in similar fashion:

“Let nature run its course! Let your selfishness flow no matter the cost. Only, be sure to spare a passing thought for morality and rationalize your ill-gotten gains by thinking of them as preferred neutralities rather than as essential goods. What’s essential is that you avoid big ideas of progress and defer to the natural dominance hierarchies and cycles that use us all as fodder. If the hapless masses are typically chewed up more than the privileged elites, that’s just Fate.”