I dont feel like what you are describing is stoicism though.

> Or if you were wronged, youd try to understand that the person who wronged you is a human being whose acting out of their biological impulses, and instead of being angry youd try to be understanding and and subdue your natural distateful resctions.

As we covered, "Anger" isnt a primary emotion, its a phsyiological response. You process the underlying emotion you feel (like Anxiety, Fear, Shame, Guilt, Envy, Jealousy, Sadness, and Contentment), which then informs you of the action to take.

That doesnt mean you need to neccesarily forgive them or pretend everything is fine and provide them no consequences for their action. If your mother constantly makes racist remarks towards your partner, a stoic wouldnt say to just "let it slide because its not a big deal". Someone you care about is being hurt, and while its a complex situation, the right answer isnt not address it. But at the same time, are you going to accomplish anything by shouting over your mother? Would it bot be better to address WHY you are angry (Guilt for subjecting your partner to the experience, Shame that your mother is so hateful, Fear because you need to stand up to an authority figure, etc.) and then respond to those emotions, like "Mother, I won't be spending the holidays with you until you can accept Jill and apologize to her. I am ashamed that someone I care so much about is being so hateful to someone else I care for deeply, and I will not subject her to this treatment. Jill, I apologize, I did not realize that my mother could be so hateful. I will not ask this of you again until she has been able to examine her feelings."

Nothing in that is not stoicism. You are establishing a boundry and you are communicating how you feel. All without resorting to fight or flight reactions. Thats not harmful at all, and is healthier than just not trying to understand why you are angry at all. In that case its pretty obvious, but what about when someone bumps i to you and you lash out at them. Was that simply "not suppressing your emotions", or was that taking them out on someone who didnt deserve that response?

I would say the article reads more like a celebrity interview on a wide range of topics than a philosophical exploration of the topic of sex.

>> Feminism isn’t an idea or a theory or a belief

Feminism is certainly a noun. A noun is a person, place, thing, or idea. So by process of elimination, she must be asserting that feminism is a person, place, or thing. I can't talk to feminism, I can't get directions to feminism, and I can't reach out and touch feminism. So her fundamental assertion requires circumventing logic to understand.

And I personally cannot take seriously a well-to-do Bahrainian Hindu born in 1984 who attempts to use the American Civil Rights Movement as support for any philosophical claim.

Has anyone noticed she sidesteps or reframes most of the questions? It feels very lawyer like as they basically make up their own question and answer that instead of what the other person was actually asking.

I also don't agree with her notion of sexual selectiveness and that we are forced to put a value to people because society bullies us into wanting certain traits. Basically no matter the stigma I don't think that obese men or women or asymmetry will be a desirable body type no matter how much we try to condition that out of people because those are evolutionary markers of health and fitness.

I also would like to see what her definition of hierarchy is and what part she wants to get rid of. Hierarchy gets a bad rap but it's also essential(as far as we know) to organize people to be a productive work force, how can anything get done if everyone's say is equal? Decisions would take far longer and people without the relevant experience could lead to a tragedy of the commons as they aren't aware of the consequences of their actions.

yes, and the stoics would say that you are morally required to take political action (if your intention is rational and pro-social), this is a core component of stoicism and what differentiates it from epicurianism (which is not the pure hedonism that many people think).

The stoics would say that you simply shouldn't have desire or attachment to the external result of your actions, rather than your intentions and actions themselves. They simply are not disturbed if their actions do not work out, instead they take fulfillment in being a person who pursues justice.

The layman often equates the meme comic with the dog in the room on fire saying "this is fine" with stoicism. If the dog were actually a stoic, he would be calmly but efficiently doing everything within his control to put out the fire.

wrt slavery specifically. In the Greco-Roman times slavery was thought of much differently than we do now. Many have wrote about this topic (mostly a lot of theologians and apologists) rationalizing slavery in the ancient times, but the truth is I just don't think we can simply relate to it. Obviously we've moved on and any rational person considers slavery horrible. But thinking about history begs us to question what do we think is OK nowadays, that future generations will think is horrible. I'm certain there is something.

Once aware, the best you can do is manage it.

Sorry, I didn't make my point clear. I don't like the idea of not being disturbed by Fortuna. I think one should actively fight and work against bad societal situations such as slavery, rather than learning how to live with it. I think thoughts like that lead to people not unionizing or not fighting for their rights. I didn't mean slaves could not be virtuous.

It seems that would turn the argument into merely a moral condemnation.

Differentiating a bad happiness as being a "happiness at the expense of others" seems to just put forth another tired scape goat on which some can happily rest their laurels.

My takeaway is that the issue is cultural right relation to happiness, which doesn't have such simple answers.

Yes, a slave with a crippled leg, who's lessons were compiled into one of the most influential texts on ethics of all time, and who's legacy underpins the bulk of modern psychotherapy 2000 years later.

He lived a life in pursuit of virtue, with reason and pro-social action at its core. Does being enslaved or crippled have anything to do with cultivating either?

While that's a nice ideal, I think in reality wealth has more to do with how wealthy your parents were than it does with personal competence. The best way to make money is to have money, and being gifted a down payment on a house and a debt-free college education sets you on a radically different trajectory in terms of earning prospects.

Most likely the stoics (the classical stoics) had a plurality of beliefs related to mind/body dualism -- some believed in a pneuma or soul, some did not. All believed that we -- whether mind or body, were part of an ordered universe, one giant machine of matter and logic, so even if body and mind were believed to be separate, they are still both part of logos.

Whether the mind exists out of the body's matter notwithstanding, Epictetus considers the body as external and not under our control, he says it right on page one of The Enchiridion actually. Despite your best intentions and efforts, you could be effected by cancer or be in an accident, for example. Neither situation is in your control, or prevents you from cultivating virtue, so to be emotionally disturbed by such events is irrational.

I think what the modern stoic must acknowledge, moreso than neurobiology, is that we now know that in some cases it may not be possible to control our own mind and we may lose our faculties of reason. Dementia being the most clear example but someone may fall victim to psychological disorders as well. This is tough to come to terms with and I personally am not sure I have a solution.

Please can someone do a TLDR in plain english. It's like I become dyslexic when I try and read these kinds of articles.

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you did not actually ever begin to argue with me to be fair

if you were given the choice of receiving ten million dollars or becoming a paraphalegic, I think it is obvious that you would prefer the ten million dollars, and rationally would do what is in your control to receive it. However, you must recognize that in the real sense, both outcomes are indifferent to your ability to cultivate virtue, and thus should not be approached with desire or aversion, because they are neither good nor bad.

It is only rational to desire true goods, and the only true good is virtue.

Happiness became my goal after I experienced crippling suicidal depression.

Happiness is not something you can achieve, the pursuit of happiness is a lie. Happiness is an emotion and emotions are like the ocean’s waves, they come and go. Nobody in the world can be permanently happy. Its not something you can achieve. We can do things that bring in those waves. But those Waves can vanish as quicky as they come.

Others have said it really well, but what it boils down to, in every day parlance, is "hope for the best, prepare for the worst".

So certainly work towards your goals, but be prepared to find you don't reach them (incidentally, being resilient like this makes it more likely to reach your goals).

>So is the principle to put "reason over emotion" or to follow the original stoics?

Why in this case would there be tension between the two? The original stoic philosophers came to the conclusion about humans being social animals through a rational argument.

>Regardless, substitute lonlineness for another situation outside of humans being social animals and we arrive at the same thing

You are missing what I stated about emotion being a valid impetus for rational analysis. So the eventual questioning and self-examination should happen for any such hypothetical, regardless of the specific situation one has to repeatedly experience. In stoicism acceptance and reason over emotion are just tools; means to an end, not the end itself. The end is "living the good life".

Conversations surrounding topics of beauty and desire are always circular. It is easy to accuse the other party of having their standards of beauty be the result of social engineering, but the accusation can always go both ways (no matter if it is true or not).

Hierarchies always form, and especially so around sex, because sex and procreation are some of the few topics in which it is increasingly difficult to obfuscate the difference between one's stated and revealed preference due to the skin-in-the-game that is required for both of these topics. There are such high opportunity costs associated with these decisions, and your pick of mate speak louder than the words you say regarding what you look for in a mate.

An emergent order is always created in these fields. Look at tinder data, okcupid data. It maps on to the Pareto principle almost seamlessly: the top 20% of men are having 80% of the sexual encounters that are attributable to all men. Just look at the whole West Elm Caleb thing. The majority of women are sharing a minority of men, the top selection. Or you can see it as these men having their pick of the litter and these women are willing to wait. This is an emergent order. No one is telling these men and women that they have to do act in this way.

I’m with you. It should be noted that tribalism may precede hierarchies, especially narratives claiming divinity being at the top. However, I get your point. In addition to tribalism, specialization and individualism are also corroding human well-being.

Specialization has uprooted human autonomy, which means people become completely reliant on this toxic socio-economic system for their basic necessities. You start to contribute and perpetuate, with taxes, to cultural hegemony as you are shackled to a system that ignores biological tendencies and evolutionary psychology, which is dressed up as “progress”, forever ambiguous and vague.

Individualism is a metaphysical truth that emerged through desperation not progress. With 8 billion humans saturating every waking moment, an ideology had to manifest that allows such a horrendous population to persist. The sanctity of human life had to be a first principle shared by everyone, yet in reality, individualism makes little sense for any mammalian creature, as primary groups are how identities are naturally built, whereas algorithms and advertisements bolster manufactured identities in a system that isolates and alienates humans for profit.

There is a difference between "how you feel" and "how you act". A stoic wouldn't argue to not feel, or force themselves to feel everything as okay. Rather, they would investigate why they feel this way and try to find the root cause and think of the most fitting action. Therefore, they make their emotions constructive rather than destructive.

Stoicism is self-tyranny - Nietzsche

“You desire to LIVE ‘according to Nature’? Oh, you noble Stoics, what fraud of words! Imagine to yourselves a being like Nature, boundlessly extravagant, boundlessly indifferent, without purpose or consideration, without pity or justice, at once fruitful and barren and uncertain: imagine to yourselves INDIFFERENCE as a power—how COULD you live in accordance with such indifference? To live—is not that just endeavouring to be otherwise than this Nature? Is not living valuing, preferring, being unjust, being limited, endeavouring to be different? And granted that your imperative, ‘living according to Nature,’ means actually the same as ‘living according to life’—how could you do DIFFERENTLY? Why should you make a principle out of what you yourselves are, and must be? In reality, however, it is quite otherwise with you: while you pretend to read with rapture the canon of your law in Nature, you want something quite the contrary, you extraordinary stage-players and self-deluders! In your pride you wish to dictate your morals and ideals to Nature, to Nature herself, and to incorporate them therein; you insist that it shall be Nature ‘according to the Stoa,’ and would like everything to be made after your own image, as a vast, eternal glorification and generalism of Stoicism! With all your love for truth, you have forced yourselves so long, so persistently, and with such hypnotic rigidity to see Nature FALSELY, that is to say, Stoically, that you are no longer able to see it otherwise—and to crown all, some unfathomable superciliousness gives you the Bedlamite hope that BECAUSE you are able to tyrannize over yourselves—Stoicism is self-tyranny.”

• Friedrich Nietzsche, “Beyond Good & Evil”

>I already explained why this conclusion doesn't really fit well with the foundations of stoicism, to them humans are social animals.

So is the principle to put "reason over emotion" or to follow the original stoics?

Regardless, substitute lonlineness for another situation outside of humans being social animals and we arrive at the same thing

That's a complete misinterpretation of what he actually says in the book (or the interview). I'll stop arguing with you, it will not lead anywhere.

We need to be childlike because then we’re open to learn, we need to find better company and unlearn, and relearn, ask questions.