Stoicism Dampens An Adversarial Nature

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One of the great joys of becoming a more-in-earnest practitioner of Stoicism, has been what it has done to my politics.

Hold on there, Prokoptôn! Don’t assent unjustly! 

I’m not going to espouse any personal political views.

This is going to be a nice, calm, relatively brief reflection on the impact adopting a lifestyle in-alignment with the philosophy of Stoicism has had on me.

Adopting Stoicism as a life philosophy has resulted in both more political frustration and compassion across the entirety of the political spectrum. I suspect many of you will find resonance with the thoughts that follow. Or, at least, I hope you do.

Let’s start with frustration

I find myself regularly frustrated with the ideas of political parties which are not my own.

I find myself equally frustrated with the ideas of the political party which is my own.

It is the word “equally” that I want to draw your attention to, because it didn’t used to be the case.

It used to be the case that I was jubilantly giddy over every idea and position represented by my party, and abrasively chidding toward every idea and position represented by those parties that were not my own.

Now, a few years into having fully adopted the philosophy of Stoicism as something that borders on a spiritual practice (which, while absolutely not a religion, Stoicism can come very near to when internalised as a blueprint for living), I find myself recoiling from most every idea and position represented or put forth by any political party including my own. And, it would seem, I experience this feeling in equal measure toward the general goings on of each and every party.

And the compassion?

My frustration manifests differently, now, than it did before.

Before Stoicism, my frustration felt very much like anger, rage, or self-righteous indignation.

Now, though, it feels something more like sympathy and confusion.

It used to be the case that when political candidate X, from party Y, said Z (where Z represents an ignorant, cruel, or incompetent thing), I would take to the streets (figuratively) to rant and rave about it.

Or maybe I’d put hours of week into writing some scathing, entirely un-asked-for opinion piece for my own blog or some small political publication that needed more content of a certain kind in order to improve their domain authority or Google rankings.

But now, I take such things in stride. Turning them over in my head and thinking, “I suppose I could see why they think that.” or “Maybe if my experiences were different, I would think the same thing” or “That’s objectively incorrect, and is clearly being used to manipulate people… but is the problem really the idea, or is it that no one is offering a compassionate counter argument that that addresses the concerns that enable such lies to be adopted with no resistance?

What do I think is behind these shifts in regard?

Once I accepted that a person only chooses what they’ve reasoned to be right (even when/if their reasoning was poor), it became difficult to regard those individuals as being guilty of anything uniquely heinous.

If it is true, as Socrates and, of course, the Stoics believed, that human beings only choose to do what they believe to be right, then all that every crooked politician, vexing fellow citizen, abrasive celebrity or online personality, or drama-inducing family member is actually guilty of is… ignorance of moral wisdom.

To put it Stoic terms, the absence of Virtue.

But, none of us are sages. So, doesn’t this apply to everyone?

This is a powerful retardant to our moral grandstanding that Stoicism promises to provide every practitioner of Stoicism with eventually — a perspective-shifting epiphany, really.

We’re all suffering from the same ailment, (even if to varying degrees of severity in terms of dispreferred impact): ignorance of how to be morally just in all our choices.

When the politician we love to hate (whoever that is for each of us) says the thing we love to hate most (whatever that is for each of us), what they are expressing is the result of what they’ve come to believe is the right thing for them to choose to say. And, this is the important part: it exposes what end results they have reasoned to be right to endeavour towards.

If a politician has chosen to lie, they fully understand that lying is “wrong”, in the sense that people aren’t supposed to lie, but they’ve also fully concluded that to lie in this particular instance is the “right” thing to do because it will lead to the outcome that they have further reasoned to be “right” to pursue.

Perhaps that outcome is something we might, privately, feel is an honorable one to pursue (like a peace treaty for some long-drawn-out conflict somewhere in the world or at home), but it could just as easily be something we’d feel less warm and fuzzy about — like personal enrichment (such as bribery money or other stereotypical forms of corruption). No matter the outcome, the choice is always driven by what the individual has come to understand to be “right”, contextually, for them.

In the case of political leaders and individuals in power, this is difficult to make peace with (mostly because their choices have such broad and far-reaching impact), but for individuals (like our neighbors, family members, and would-be friends), this train of thought ought to find us asking, “why am I treating a person as prone to moral error as I am, as if they were this intentionally cruel entity that knew exactly that they were being evil and cruel?”

And once I found myself asking that question, I started to wonder what the way forward really was (from a political and social perspective).

The answer wasn’t anger. Instead, it was something more like… compassion — and a feeling of responsibility to work with others to get to the bottom of what was closer to “right” than either of us had been able to get to on our own.

Thanks for reading.