Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Stoicism's appeal to the rich and powerful (2019)

exurbe.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 338 posts

Re: Stoicism's appeal to the rich and powerful (2019)

#261

Post by scandox »

munificent wrote: post #182
samspot wrote: post #81

"But on the negative side, stoicism’s Providential claim that everything in the universe is already perfect and that things which seem bad or unjust are secretly good underneath (a claim Christianity borrowed from Stoicism) can be used to justify the idea that the rich and powerful are meant to be rich and powerful, that the poor and downtrodden are meant to be poor and downtrodden, and that even the worst actions ar…

> For one, that all bad things are actually good is not a tenet of Christianity and is not in the Bible. Surely you in your life you have met many Christians who said "God works in mysterious ways", "there is a purpose for everything", "trust in the Lord", etc.? In the Christian communities I grew up around, it was a pervasive idea that misfortune was explained away by our limited understanding. These cliches were al…

I think the Cromwellian dictum "Trust in God but keep your powder dry" is the intelligent Christian's attitude to this...

Re: Stoicism's appeal to the rich and powerful (2019)

#262

Post by accrual »

rqtwteye wrote: post #230

I feel stoicism works reasonably well when your life goes generally well. If your life is going very badly, I think it ends up like a lot of positive thinking where you have to live in an almost delusional world where you pretend things are good while they really aren't

It's not able pretending things are good when they aren't. It's about exercising your will against your mind and controlling your thoughts and behaviors even when you cannot control your external environment. Rich or poor - stoicism is about self mastery.

If I lost everything and was in some terrible situation, I'd rather be a stoic.

Re: Stoicism's appeal to the rich and powerful (2019)

#263

Post by carlosjobim »

tasuki wrote: post #249
achierius wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Surely you in your life you have met many Christians who said "God works in mysterious ways", "there is a purpose for everything", "trust in the Lord", etc.? Yes, but this is something people say in times of grief, for the comfort of the grieving -- it's not a consistent moral philosophy that they hold to in other parts of their life, nor is it meant to be. There are better answers than this, but they are oftentime…

>> Surely you in your life you have met many Christians who said "God works in mysterious ways", "there is a purpose for everything", "trust in the Lord", etc.? > Yes, but this is something people say in times of grief, for the comfort of the grieving It is the stupidest thing to say to someone who is grieving.

What would you accept to be said? What would be good enough for you? Words are not magical, they are just sounds. In the most important situations in life and in death, words are simply lacking. We as humans haven't been gifted with neither a spoken nor a written language which can encompass all our feelings and meanings. Words cannot even come close. So people have to do with what they have. And you are in no position to judge against somebody who means well.

Re: Stoicism's appeal to the rich and powerful (2019)

#264

Post by alienthrowaway »

timeon wrote: post #229
adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free will. If people are allowed to make choices, evil is a possibility. You can argue that free will isn't good, but I'm not sure what evidence supports that argument. So if God allows free will, then evil can happen. Just because he doesn't immediately stop it (read: eliminate free will) doesn't make God not-good. I think part of this is man's hubris in assuming we can know what is perfectly good. The Epicurean par…

How does free will explains children with cancer or is that good thing?

Free will -> original sin -> all manner of diseases, suffering tyat are part of the human condition.

Even without the theology, a person suffering due to a forebear's poor decision is well-understood: a decent percentage if people think it's the natural order for a child to go hungry if their parents are drug-addicts or imprisoned.

Re: Stoicism's appeal to the rich and powerful (2019)

#265

Post by accrual »

engels_gibs wrote: post #141
codexb wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a remarkably good set of strategies and mindset for dealing with conflict, anxiety, and having to make a large number of difficult decisions. The core of stoicism (stressed more by Epictetus, a former slave, than Marcus Aurelius) is that we should not focus or worry on things we can't control. We can't control other people, or societies, or the unforeseen tragic events we may experience, but we can control our o…

Thats patently false. Some people do control other people, some people do control whole societies. What stoicism does is: for the underclass, it tells them to accept such control. Lying that "you have no control" over working conditions, exploitation, misery, hunger, suffering, etc. Do nothing, because nothing you do will matter. And for the capitalists upper class what it does is to validate the atroicities they com…

If you're underclass and beat up on by society above you, stoicism is a very rational philosophy to adopt.

If you're upper crust and controlling everyone beneath you, I think it's still worthwhile to consider stoicism. Or is there some kind of divide - if one is poor you should enact one set of philosophies, if you're rich and powerful one should enact different philosophies?

Re: Stoicism's appeal to the rich and powerful (2019)

#266

Post by accrual »

larrykubin wrote: post #27
adamnemecek wrote: post #2

I wonder what caused the current obsession with stoicism. It seems vacant.

I always traced this to Ryan Holiday marketing the philosophy and selling books on the topic and starting a YouTube channel "The Daily Stoic"

Ryan Holiday is a good guy. I've followed his content for a while. Yes, he is marketing essentially "free" philosophy, but he does a good job adapting it to modern life.

Re: Stoicism's appeal to the rich and powerful (2019)

#267

Post by sifar »

mjburgess wrote: post #38
andrewmutz wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your perceptions of stoicism are so detatched from mine, I have to ask, what does stoicism mean to you? The wikipedia entry describes it like this: "The Stoics believed that the practice of virtue is enough to achieve eudaimonia: a well-lived life. The Stoics identified the path to achieving it with a life spent practicing the four cardinal virtues in everyday life — prudence, fortitude, temperance, and justice — as…

> prudence, fortitude, temperance, and justice I adopt rather the opposite virutes. Imprudence, risk, throwing-your-self-at-a-wall-until-you-cant, intemperance (conflict, debate, disagreement, competition) and pragmatism (address what is rather than what should be). Behind each of the stoic virutues is a psychological position to dettach, dissociate and live in a more abstracted conceptual space. This can be theraput…

>> Behind each of the stoic virutues is a psychological position to dettach, dissociate and live in a more abstracted conceptual space.

You and I have a very different understanding of stoicism. Stoicism's concept of attachment is much more closer to a Daoist/Buddhist one. They don't advocate renouncing the world in fact the opposite - how to live fully. Just that don't cling to things - especially the results as a lot of factors that affect it are not under our control and when things don't happen the way we were forcing them to happen, resentment and anger follows. This can be applied to work, relationship, parenting. It is quite practical.

It is fascinating that these two different cultures developed similar philosophies around the same time in history.

One needs to let go of the medieval/modern interpretation of stoicism which creates such resentment and approach it from a more eastern perspective.

Re: Stoicism's appeal to the rich and powerful (2019)

#268

Post by goosedragons »

samspot wrote: post #81

"But on the negative side, stoicism’s Providential claim that everything in the universe is already perfect and that things which seem bad or unjust are secretly good underneath (a claim Christianity borrowed from Stoicism) can be used to justify the idea that the rich and powerful are meant to be rich and powerful, that the poor and downtrodden are meant to be poor and downtrodden, and that even the worst actions ar…

It's the idea of predestination.

Re: Stoicism's appeal to the rich and powerful (2019)

#269

Post by FredPret »

lupusreal wrote: post #237
FredPret wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He also ordered a decimation on his own troops. Utterly barbaric.

Not saying you're wrong, Julius Caesar committed more than his fair share of atrocities, but do you have a source? Wikipedia says that Julius Caesar threatened his troops with decimation but didn't carry it out. I asked chatgpt about it and it said that Julius Caesar did order one, but then said no contemporary sources for this exist. It then claimed that Plutarch wrote that Julius Caesar made his troops draw lots, w…

You've done much more research into this than I have. I read about it in a biography of him (Caesar: life of a colossus by Goldsworthy), but you're probably right.

Re: Stoicism's appeal to the rich and powerful (2019)

#270

Post by heyjamesknight »

Cantinflas wrote: post #246
taylorlapeyre wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of three major answers to the problem of Theodicy (justifying God in the face of evil) in Christian theology. They are: 1. Pedagogical (the one you mentioned) - Evil exists so that we may grow and learn. All evil will be used to create even greater good. Quintessential example would be the story of Job in the Old Testament. 2. Eschatological — Evil is a by-product of having any creation in time whatsoever…

Imo 1) and 3) make little sense, e.g. no one learns anything from a toddler dying from cancer, and no "freedom" caused it. 2) looks more interesting, although I'm not sure I understand it

A toddler dying from cancer is horrible. It's not evil.
Post reply on HN