What is Stoicism?
Open scene"If you keep twisting, the leg will break"
The master continued twisting {cue broken leg}
"See? I told you it would break"
End scene
No, Brad Pitt didn’t recite the lines above in Fight Club, because the lines aren’t from a scene. It’s the reported encounter between the Stoic slave, Epictetus and his abusive master.
Founded by Zeno of Citium in 300 B.C., the philosophy of Stoicism is a philosophy that above all else, values the capacity for man to use his reason in order to navigate the universe he inhabits and to do so without complaint.
You need it now..
Stoicism is the bullshit detector you need in the modern world. The Stoics reveal the true nature of a thing so that you can see the world for what it is and remove any misconceptions that are clouding your judgement. What remains are a set of unadulterated facts letting you accept or decline what the world has put in front of you.
Modernity, has created the unique assault of propaganda, excess and hierarchy at a scale that history hasn’t experienced before. We’ve traded starvation for obesity, gone from Nation States to globalization and evolved from the fear of exile to the fear of cancel culture.
To the Stoics…
To live well is to live in harmony with nature and nothing on this earth that is the result of nature is outside of your ability to endure and overcome with reason. If it’s a physically painful experience, a stoic wouldn’t see any reason to complain, or give it an anymore thought than the matter required. If it pains you emotionally, because of how much you desired or wished for things to be different, then you’re a child, a ridiculous one at that and you should learn that when something that is possible takes place you should take it with equanimity or risk living life under delusion.
As a philosophy, Stoic don’t waste time thinking about the tree we all learned about in middle school (for me, during an episode of Boy Meets World) and whether it makes a sound. To the stoics…who gives a fuck? If it does it does and if it doesn’t its just as well.
Stoicism is field guide on how to live, contemplation only takes place to spark appropriate action. It’s not Aristotles rhetoric, it doesn’t depend on a cleverly crafted argument, it’s practice instead of theory.
Back to Pitt
“The things you own end up owning you” - Tyler Burden, Fight Club
Tyler Durden, the badass from fight club that men gushed over is essentailly a Nihilist in the movie. What could be attractive about a guy that likes blowing things up in a world where it’s things that we are all trying to accumulate? Freedom. Freedom from the chase, freedom from caring about what others think, freedom to live as you wish with no concern of societies golden stickers.
If you move past Durden’s destructive tendencies you get an ideology that could be mistaken for Stoicism. He’s Thomas Shelby without the desire for power or Ayn Rand’s Ragnar Danneskjold without a vision of a better world. He may even be Epictetus without the broken leg, but with the same acceptance that all men are slaves until they decide they aren’t.