What is Stoicism?

The word "philosopher" means the lover of wisdom. Like many of the intellectual fundamentals of the modern world, the concept of philosophy came from ancient Greece, although its meaning changed over time. For the Greeks, the main purpose of philosophy was to help its students to live better. Philosophers were interested in every aspect of the universe - and before the era of modern science, almost every avenue of seeking knowledge fell under the umbrella of philosophy - but more than anything, they were expected to offer wisdom on how to live your life  - something that their modern peers are explicitly advised against.

One of the most popular philosophical schools of the ancient world was the Stoics. Their teachings haven't really been in vogue in the last couple of millennia, but at least they found their way into the common consciousness as an adjective. In popular imagination, a stoic is someone who takes the travails of life in stride, a stone statue of a human who endures pain and suffering with equanimity. Most of us have met stoic characters predominantly on the silver screen. The oriental monk, the native Indian warrior, the lone cowboy (or its more recent manifestation, the hard-boiled private detective) firing bullets and one-liners with equal skill. The picture these characters convey - that of a silent, strong, solitary figure, emotionally reserved to the extreme -  is not entirely misleading, but incomplete.

I got interested in Stoicism a couple of years ago when I stumbled into a book about it. Since then, the number of Stoicism-related podcasts, articles, and book recommendations I've come across seems to be growing slowly but steadily. In the time of custom-tailored newsfeeds and recommendation algorithms, it's hard to see if this really is a general trend in the outside world or simply my information bubble is getting tighter. But I could readily find some reasons why it would be a genuine phenomenon. In a constantly accelerating and ever less religious world many look for some practical guidance in life especially if it has the veneer of ancient wisdom.

And the Stoics are certainly ancient, and as practical as it gets as far as philosophy goes. Its founders had some theories and assumptions of and about the world as a whole, but these came secondary to the central question of their philosophy:

How to live a good life

The Stoic answer was to live a virtuous life. They defined the four cardinal virtues as Wisdom, Courage, Temperance, and Justice. Each of these covers a number of related traits, but they can be summarized as follows. 

Justice is having a moral compass. Temperance is the ability to restrain oneself and avoid excesses. Wisdom is the capacity to find the right way of dealing with life situations. And Courage, encompassing both moral and physical courage, is the strength to stand up for what is right even in the face of personal danger. 

The Stoics maintained that life visits hardships and difficulties on every one of us, and pursuing these virtues is the only thing that can help one overcome the challenges and find real and enduring happiness. Furthermore, being virtuous is both necessary and sufficient for that. Fortune, health, success, or the opposite of all these are not irrelevant but they are of secondary importance.

So far these are not earth-shattering revelations and they are not supported by evidence in a very obvious way. Everyone knows that life can be hard and courage and wisdom and the rest are important after all, and we all know people, personally or from history books, who have these traits to some degree and yet are or were unhappy. 

What made the Stoics tick and what makes them interesting is not so much their concept of virtues, but a handful of practical ideas directly applicable to life.

Recognize what is and is not under your control 

The first and most important insight of Stoic philosophy is that there are only a few things under your control in this world, and you are responsible for those and you have to accept the rest as they come. If your house burnt down, it will do you little good crying over it endlessly. Making it not happen is not in your power. What is in your power is to interpret the situation and choose your reaction to it.

Shrugging off the destruction of one's home is probably a step too far in an elevator pitch, so let's take a more mundane example. Imagine someone treating you impolitely in the supermarket. Such an event can trigger very different reactions in different people. Some would just be annoyed briefly and forget about it in a minute. Some would find it funny. Some would be enraged. Some would feel so disrespected that it would gnaw at their insecurity for the rest of the day. The Stoic insight in this situation is that the incident already happened and there is nothing you can do about that. Nothing. But you can decide how you choose to react to it. If you are working yourself up over it again and again, and ruin your day, that is your own damn fault. Instead of wallowing in self-pity, you could use the opportunity for self-improvement. To practice how to find humor or to understand yourself better in such situations. Or how to prevent them. Or how to handle them better. In short, life constantly throws stuff at you, and it's up to you to make the best of them. This is how it is.

“Man is disturbed not by things, but by the views he takes of them.” — Epictetus

The idea that the events happening to you don't directly influence you, but are filtered through personal interpretation, is a very modern one (it arguably forms the basis of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy). It also has interesting implications.

Dettachment

One of the most fundamental and radical of those implications is the realization that you can at will disengage from your current predicament. You can be happy or find tranquility even if you are poor, sick, or down on your luck. If at this point it's tempting to tell the ancient Stoics that "it's easy to say that", then keep in mind that they lived in an era when the average lifespan didn't extend beyond 30 years, and more people died of plague, war, or famine than of old age. One of the most famous of ancient Stoics, Epictetus, was a cripple and a slave. (Two thousand years ago, either of those would have been enough to ruin your day, and all your days).

The Stoics encouraged detachment not only from your life circumstances but from possessions as well, both personal and material. This point is worth elaborating on because it is easy to interpret the wrong way and therefore it is the source of the most common misunderstanding about being a stoic.

The Stoics didn't say you should not enjoy or value what the world can offer. The emotionally impoverished stoic is a misconception. They were not necessarily ascetics who despised physical pleasures. They acknowledged that being healthy is better than being sick. Beings wealthy is preferable to being poor. Having friends is better than being lonely. As the philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius, arguably the most famous of all ancient Stoics, put it, if you have to live in a palace, you might as well live well in a palace. You should enjoy good food, health, the company of friends. But you also should avoid becoming dependent on them. All your loved ones will die eventually. One day, at the latest on your last, you will lose everything you have. If you base your happiness on your possessions and personal circumstances, they can be taken away at any moment.

When you kiss your children good night, remind yourself that they can be dead tomorrow. Goulish as it sounds, the Stoics didn't advise it to indulge their morbid fascinations but to remind themselves of the importance of counting your blessings. Don't take your loved ones for granted and think you have all the time in the world to enjoy their presence.

Speaking of misconceptions, let's address another one. The Stoics are sometimes thought to be loners (see gunslingers and private dicks). This is not true. The Stoics recognized that man is a social animal and like good Greek citizens, they actually advocated for engagement in public life.  

Treating life as a training ground

Recognizing that your views and reactions are the only things you are really in control of is the main stoic idea. Treating your life as a training practice is the next best one. A real stoic looks at obstacles in life as challenges. Let's see what fate or the gods can throw at us. The increasing difficulties are like leveling up in a computer game. Your boss told you that you have only one day to prepare the presentation instead of a week? Let's see how much you can do in that time span. You are visiting a country and lost your passport on the day you should be flying home? That's level 2. You had eye surgery and have to live as a blind man for two weeks? At least level 3! A challenge worthy of a seasoned player. The reward is always the satisfaction you get from your accomplishment. 

Practice and self-improvement

As the previous section implies, the Stoics were also believers in another very modern notion, continuous self-improvement. They devised a number of daily practices to hone their skills for the game called Life. The fundamental ones are journaling, the end-of-day review, and the so called negative visualization.

The last one is the practice you should start your day with. Imagine the ways things go awry in the day ahead of you and mentally prepare for them. As Navy SEALS have plan A, B, and C for every mission, so should you be prepared for the most likely things to go wrong.

You should keep a journal. It is a true and trusted practice to help consolidate your thoughts and give the opportunity to see the path you've been travelling.

The evening meditation is what you should do the last time before going to bed. This is the time to reflect on the day. What went well, what went badly, what should have been done differently. Once I listened to a podcaster who rated his performance every day: wage negiotiation went reasonably well, 7/10; handling the stress of the traffic not so much, 3/10; explaining the kid why homework is important could have gone better, 4/10. You get the idea. Honestly admitting the mistakes enables you to avoid them next time, and high scores boost your confidence. 

The Appeal

The appeal of Stoicism is multifold. 

Its daily practice of journaling and of mediations to start and end the day with hammer its message home, well, every day. To be a stoic is to live like a stoic, and the presence or absence of discipline to observe the routine tells you undisputably if you are on the right track or not.

Said routine also provides a framework for life engendering a sense of stability that humans appreciate. It also creates constant opportunities for the practitioner to see her progress, which can create a virtuous cycle.

The Stoic approach of explicitly confronting difficulties and treating them as challenges combined with the clear separation between the things in and outside of our control removes a great deal of anxiety from life. Most of our anxieties come from worrying about other people's opinions, the threat of bad things happening to us, and the perceived lack of control over our own life. Stoicism addresses these problems head-on.

For some reason, the example of this I like most is that of Bryan Cranston, the lead actor in Breaking Bad. His advice to fellow actors was that you should not waste your thoughts on whether you get the role or not. Go to the audition, do the best you can, and drive satisfaction from your performance. If you gave your best, then you did all that was in your power. From that point, the decision is taken out of your hands anyway.

Summary

To summarize the most important points, Stoicism is a life philosophy that is light on theory and heavy on practice. Its concept of virtues may sound a bit anachronistic and high-brow for a modern reader, but its practical tools are as fresh as they get. A Stoic accepts whatever is out of his control without complaint, but takes full responsibility for his reactions to them. For him or her, every event in life is a subject for personal interpretation and an opportunity for self-improvement, every obstacle is a challenge to be conquered. The fleeting nature of life and all things material makes the good things even more precious. Therefore, they are to be enjoyed but not to be dependent on.

Is it just Zen for Westerners?

If the description of an ideal Stoic reminds someone of a Zen Buddhist monk, it's not a coincidence. The two philosophies overlap substantially. The hands-on, no-nonsense approach to life, the constant reminders of the impermanence of things, and the aspiration for tranquility and equanimity in a chaotic world characterize both schools to a roughly equal degree. The next post will explore how these two compare to each other in detail.

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Debate circle

 "We couldn't do these meetings in person in the last two years because of the pandemic", explained G. to another newcomer as I entered the room, the last word preceded by a measured pause and accompanied by scare quotes drawn into the air with his fingers. "Well, this is up for a good start", I thought.

I attended this meetup the second time, the first after the second wave of the "so-called" pandemic. That time I was invited by a former colleague and the conversation was about climate change and the role of fossil fuels in it. The speaker then, who customarily gave a presentation that was followed by a free-style debate, was a representative of the coal industry. So I was prepared to hear some controversial opinions about the Ukrainian war as well, which was tonight's topic.

G., who is the chief organizer of these events, is a fellow countryman of mine. He has lived in Switzerland long enough to lose his Australian accent which he had acquired before. Despite the decades of absence, he hasn't lost his touch with our motherland, as I learned five minutes later when the conversation with the nice Canadian lady strayed onto Hungarian politics. "Orban is a center, very center-right guy, who just refuses to go along with this woke craziness" - he explained. "Maybe I should add some nuance to that?", I wondered silently for some seconds, then decided to pass.

Slowly, people started pouring in, and at seven, the official start time, the oblong table was densely surrounded by circa twenty people. The age distribution of the participants ranged from the early twenties to late fifties, the gender ratio was 6-1 for men, and a depressing 80% of us were software developers. And this is a talk about geopolitics. I'm not sure whether there is something wrong with software engineers or maybe with everyone else.

In absence of a designated speaker, G. kicked off the meeting with a quick overview of the situation. This is a terrible tragedy. It's incomprehensible why no one in the world stood up and demanded that the warring parties stop this immediately and sit down to the negotiating table. The Swiss are equally incomprehensible, giving up their hard-earned neutrality? If they freeze the bank accounts left and right, who will keep their money in their banks in the future? The media is biased and unreliable, and this heroic picture they paint of that corrupt Zelensky is just ludicrous. Still, it's a terrible, terrible situation. And so confusing. What does Putin want? What do Ukrainian Nazis want? Just sad. 

I stopped any effort to be subtle about my facial expression halfway through the speech when it dawned on me that I made a terrible mistake. God, there is still two hours left. But luckily, the situation slowly began to improve and a real conversation started with a diversity of opinions. There were a couple of guys who were, not experts by any means, but well-informed. Some were not very well-informed but were arguing in good faith. Then the mandatory useful idiot, chewing on the Monroe-doctrine (what would the US do if Canada wanted to join a Russian military alliance? it wouldn't behave any differently, would it?) and the stealthy, creepy encroachment of NATO upon Russia (that is, the rudeness of the Baltics towards their neighbor for looking for protection). Anyway, what's been wrong with Finlandisation? A like-minded young historian kid chimed in musing on what right the West has to condemn Russia after Iraq? At that point, I was exercised enough to challenge that but someone else raised his hand quicker.

And then there was the highlight of the evening, the guy who bravely made the next step over G.'s hand-wringing lamentations. Ukrainian Nazis are indeed active in the Donbas. How much do they influence the government? Well, who knows, can you prove they don't? Euromaidan protests, orange revolution? The CIA staged them. Russian incompetence? He is not so sure about that, he read some articles. Mariupol? The Ukrainians themselves are shelling it. Bucha? You shouldn't believe the media uncritically. Nothing confrontational, just asking questions. Politely taking notes, nodding. Then the next observation (the Ukrainians were developing nuclear weapons, you know). For a while, I was genuinely puzzled by him. Is he on Russian payroll or simply enjoys being a cretin, just for the thrill of it? In the end, I decided it's the latter (judgment confirmed later in the bar when he said he knows about international banking and finance - that's why he knows it for a fact that the US is about to collapse - because...prepare...he is a software developer in a bank).

But there is was a real and pleasant surprise in the evening. A young Polish guy, A., who, unlike the rest of us, knew the topic in depth. Not my own "30-days podcast crash course on Ukraine" type of education. He was respectful, but argued forcefully, almost passionately. So passionately, that at one point his voice cracked. He had friends in Eastern Ukraine. His dismantling of the nonsense was merciless, and I leaned back and enjoyed the show. 

At 9:30, I almost felt sorry that the conversation ended, but my bladder was on the verge of explosion. I went to shake the hands of A. and joined others in the bar for an after-event beer.

The topic of the next event will be "Books vs Tik-Tok". I'll think about going.

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To lock down or not to lock down?

Since the start of the pandemic, I have been a supporter of lockdowns. It's a certain sign of the intellectual bubble I live in that for long I had thought it's just common wisdom. The bubble consists of mostly liberal news sources, but due to the lockdown itself, not many human contacts. Later when I had real conversations, I realized that whenever the topic came up, almost no one I was talking to shared my view completely. So I decided to sit down and try and articulate why I think lockdowns was a good idea and why the counter-arguments are wrong or unpersuasive.

My stance rests on three legs. Common sense, referring to experts, and caution. 

Let's start with common sense. Viruses spread from person to person. The less people mingle, the slower the spread is. Even if eventually everyone gets infected at some point, by slowing down the spread we can flatten the curve and prevent unbearable pressure on the health-care system. 

Referring to experts is a nice name for appealing to authority. This is admittedly the worst way to support an opinion, but it's also one we have to do every day. No one can be informed about everything, so you have to outsource your belief verifications to experts in almost every field of life. If epidemiologists and economists say lockdowns are a necessary evil, then I, being none of them, accept their word at face value.

Call me naive, but I also believe that politicians listen to experts. Call me cynical, but I also believe that they always keep their own interest in mind. Almost all Western governments have implemented some form of lockdown, and I don't think it can be fully ascribed to groupthink. Lockdowns cause severe economic damage which always hurts political leaders. If they chose to shut down their economies, they did it because they thought the alternative for them would be even worse. Groupthink is not a satisfying explanation for that, especially considering that no country followed the same pattern. Sweden has chosen not to implement lockdowns at all. Russia made a panicky U-turn after the short and typical strong-man stunt of disparaging the Western panic. Israel, whose people are not prone to public anxiety of imaginary dangers, locked down, too.

To address the caution part, every public measure either under- or overaddresses the problem it aims to solve. Shutting down the economy might be an overreaction, but with an unknown and deadly virus, that's exactly what I'd want the government to choose over the opposite. I prefer unnecessary economic damage to an unnecessary death toll. When the world-wide lockdowns were introduced, the mortality rate was estimated in the range of 0.5 and 6%. Italy had around 10%. It wasn't known which age groups are in danger, whether kids can contract the virus or spread it, what's the reproduction number, and many other factors. Today, as far as I know, the mortality rate is generally thought to be around 0.6% - which is still 6 times deadlier than the common flu -, and kids are not really at risk. These are good news, but they could have turned out very differently. If the mortality rate were around 10% among children and not among octogenarians, every family would live in their basement behind boarded-up windows. I would certainly do.

These are my arguments. Let's see the opposite side.

"This is an unacceptable invasion into our personal liberty"

Let's start with the libertarian argument which is the easiest to brush aside. Some oppose lockdowns on the ground of the perceived violation of personal liberty. This is nonsense. No one has the freedom to harm others, and that is exactly what a person infecting others does - even if unwittingly. If you subscribe to this reasoning, how would you make the case against anti-vaxxers?

The most common argument is that "the whole thing is blown waaay over, maaan". There are many sub-strains of this.

"This is just like a severe version of the flu"

Tens of thousands a year die in flu in America and no one thinks we should kill the economy because of it. That argument might have been worth considering months ago, but not anymore. The average yearly death toll of the seasonal flu is 10-60,000. COVID-19 has killed 180,000 so far and still counting. All of this while mandatory social distancing was put in place. The number would be much higher without it. The second wave has just started, and no one knows how long it will last or will there be another one.

"The numbers are unreliable, they count everything as COVID-death"

To invalidate the previous point, one has to put the numbers in question. So the next most popular argument is that the data are not reliable. Deaths are habitually ascribed to COVID even when the person would have died anyway from other causes (probably to serve the nefarious plans of...who actually?). That is surely true in many cases, but we have other statistics to look at that neatly eliminate the problem above. This is the number of excess deaths, that is, the increase in the number of deaths compared with the statistical average of the previous years. In America, it is over 200,000, which is even higher than the official number of COVID-related deaths. In the UK it's 65,000 against the official COVID fatalities of 40,000.

"The cure is worse than the disease"

Maybe the deaths are real. But I've heard from multiple sources that the self-inflicted economic damage leads to more misery in the long term than the virus would have done. This is something that's hard to argue both for or against. In ten years, when all the consequences have played out, we can have a pro- and con list, and even then we will need to resort to counterfactuals as the bases of comparison. As for now, many critics commit the mistake of comparing the grim reality to the normal state of affairs. The damage the shutdowns cause should be measured not against last year's GDP data, but against the alternative reality of COVID without mandatory social distancing. Sweden has shown what could happen without a lockdown. Its quarterly GDP fell by 8%. The EU average is 12%, Germany 10%, and Switzerland also 8%. They haven't avoided much of economic damage but lost 5-10 times as many lives per capita than Finland, Norway, or Denmark. Every country is unique in many relevant ways (population density, age distribution, cultural norms, international connectedness, the time and severity of the first outbreak, etc), but Sweden can't be that different from the average of its direct neighbors.

That was it. As a parting message, I offer my favorite line of reasoning, which is a kind of reversed argumentum ad verecundiam fallacy. Listening to people with a history of good judgment is a good strategy, but there is another useful one. It is listening to idiots and tyrants, and firmly taking the opposite view. Who were the loudest opponents of the mainstream reaction? First the Russians who never cared about their citizens' well-being. Then the Belarus dictator, Lukashenko, who claimed that the best cure for COVID is drinking vodka and driving tractor. The president of Turkmenistan who in his country simply banned even the discussion of the topic. The Brazil right-wing president, Bolsonaro, who said if he got infected, he would just shrug it off due to his athletic youth. Donald Trump - no explanation required. Right-wing media almost everywhere. Fox News treated it for weeks as a Democrat-hoax, then even now as the normal flu - so what's the fuss about? The UK government, which is neither malign nor completely moronic, but has shown that they prioritize their personal interests over their citizens'. 

It wouldn't survive strict scientific scrutiny, but as a rule of thumb, it is pretty reliable. When murderous dictators, crackpots, conspiracy theorists, plain morons, and well-known opportunists all tell you the same thing, it's a good sign to place your bets elsewhere.

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Buddhist(?) advices for times of pandemic

A little bit of background first. We own a weekend house in Nagymaros, Hungary, where we are sparsely surrounded by cantankerous old neighbours. The only exception is J., a cheerful middle-aged psychologist, parapsychologist, holistic healer, and Buddhist teacher - as her business card neatly summarizes. She has a funny and, despite her profession, down-to-earth personality which probably would have made her our favorite neighbour even if the bar had been higher.

We exchanged some emails in the last couple of days regarding some beside-the-point matter, and in her last one, she took the time to send me the thoughts of the leader of the Buddhist Church of Hungary, László Mireisz. Plus, a youtube video of breathing exercises for children. I've been interested in Buddhism for some time, but have my reservations about official churches of any kind. Nevertheless, I opened the doc with a curious mind,  and I was in for a treat.

"..the new moon reaching Aries brings the spring, but due to the mass epidemic exacerbated by the new moon, the next 2 weeks will be difficult. April 8 at 4:34 pm: Full moon, the disease is beginning to recede. In 4 weeks or so, the task will probably only be to clean up the ruins."

If only epidemiologists consulted the stars. This opening set the expectations quite high. The next thought didn't disappoint either.

"Outbreaks were always there, every 10-20-30 years, people were always touched, decimated, it is with the man, but it always wants to communicate something."

The highlight is from the author, and so is the grammar - the Google Translate engine respected the spirit of the original text.

Unfortunately, the rest of the 3-page memo is a bit of a letdown. If Mireisz is privy to what the virus wants to communicate, he doesn't tell us. Which is even grosser irresponsibility than telling people that in 4 weeks the danger is over. This obvious lack of profound insight is followed by the usual recommendations: fasting, burning incense oils, loving the loved ones, breathing exercises. Drinking a lot of water stands out as a surprisingly sound one, I will keep that in mind. The other, and last, reasonable suggestion is to follow the instructions of the authorities. Even considering that the authorities in question happen to be the Hungarian government, I concede the point.

Those who are concerned with Buddhist purity probably have been put slightly off by the very first sentence, but the ecumenical spirit shines through in its fullness only later in the middle.

"This December the constellation of the planets will be the same as it was at Jesus' birth."

Maybe there is something to the observation attributed to that pompous liar Chesterton: "When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing, they believe in everything."

To the author's credit, he advises, among others, not to indulge in conspiracy theories. This, I think, goes against the wider context, but a wise suggestion considering the target audience. Speaking of the wider context, maybe there is none. Astrology, Ayurveda, the aforementioned quick nod to Christianity, some yoga nuggets of wisdom, sprinkled with the usual earth-water-fire-air symbolism, the Hungarian Buddhists are open to everything. The only thing that is conspicuously missing is Buddhism.

And I almost forget to mention one of the real pearls.

The word "corona" for the virus is unlucky because it is the aura, the perfection, the sacred symbol. The "barret" would be better.

All in all, László Mireisz made me appreciate the Catholic Church. Those moments are very rare, as my wife could attest. She, who has treasured childhood memories related to the Church and Christianity, often has to listen to my insensitive harangues on the topic.

But the guilty pleasure of making cheap jokes at the expense of gullible people eventually wears off and I still haven't figured out how I should respond to J. I appreciate her kindness and the thought she spared for us in times like this. What's the appropriate answer? Polite honesty? Or just saying thank you without commenting on the subject? Do I dare to wake the sleeping lion by asking questions?

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