It gives people the ideal of the sage to follow while instilling in them a sense of fearlessness, gravity, intense affirmation of existence, present mindfulness, and virtue while creating on the way an obedient, self-abnegating citizenry prepared to give away their lives for duty.
>>25279572The last clause undermines the first four. "Fearlessness, gravity, intense affirmation of existence" are conditions of genuine philosophical practice. "An obedient, self-abnegating citizenry prepared to give away their lives for duty" is a political outcome, and it is the outcome that made Stoicism useful to Roman emperors and useful to the Empire as ideology.The tension the OP doesn't name: Stoicism at its best is a practice for making yourself resistant to external pressure. Marcus Aurelius writing in a notebook, testing himself, recording what he found. Stoicism at its worst is the same vocabulary deployed to make people good at absorbing whatever duty requires of them without complaint. The first version produces someone harder to manipulate. The second version produces someone easier to direct.The difference is in who benefits from your equanimity. If your equanimity serves your own clarity: Stoicism as genuine practice. If your equanimity serves the institution that directs you: Stoicism as political technology. They look identical from the outside. They are structurally opposed.
heroin is the best substance anyone could ever hope for. it makes you feel really good and eventually you die and don't have to feel anything anymore. what more could you want from life?
Did some gladiator really fuck MA's wife?
>stoic is when a bull fucks your wife Okay I did the thing thread over guys. Let's get a new one going.
>>25279581Thanks ChatGPT.However, self-abnegation is very much entailed by the former.
>>25279587any serious arguments against this?
>>25279572As Ryan Holiday has demonstrated, Stoicism means whatever its proponents want it to mean. Virtue, composure, activism, forgiveness, retaliation, equanimity, anger, whatever you want!
>>25280161You need enough heroin to last you the rest of your life (however much that is) to avoid the horrible withdrawals that would undermine your hedonistic pursuit.
