Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

Is it actually stoicism that's (allegedly) become popular? Or is it just something calling it conservative?

I ask because when i see stoics in normal life, you'll often find them startiing with marcus Aurelius and ending up with Julius Evola. Who is Evola, you might ask? He's quite literally Nazi philosopher (graduating from Mussolini's Italy) that is popular on 4chan. There are edit wars on Wikipedia to remove the Nazi associations from his Wikipedia entry.

Evola is popular with various "trads". The central idea being that there is a moral corruption of our society and we need to return to traditional values, including traditional gender roles. In evangelical circles, you'll see terms like "complementarianism" thrown around to disguise the misogyny.

For many, this is the beginning of the alt-right pipeline. Not being happy with the modern world plus there are plenty of people to fan the flames to make you feel persecuted or oppressed. LARPing as being oppressed is an entry point to white supremacy.

Stoicism is fine. Self-improvement is fine. But if you see anyone on this path look for these signs because you'll start seeing them.

I dunno about young people, but me and some acquaintances discovered and got into stoicism and we just mixed it up with whatever we enjoyed before and that was anarchism, leftism, critical reasoning, philosophy, science, history, etc. It was just something else that was orthogonal..

Bigots get way too much credit?

When the organized populist socialist left is defeated and cannot effectively organize on behalf of working class people, and give secular and democratic answers to why the world often sucks and why crisis are happening...

Into the void steps far right anti-democratic authoritarian conservatism (of which one variant is fascism but also authoritarian conservative religious fundamentalism, etc). All the the conspiracy theories about the WEF and COVID vaccines and whatnot have this tiny yarn of truth attached to real injustices and inequalities, but once you start tugging them, they pull up a whole scary ball of yarn.

Obama promised "Change we can believe in" and ... they couldn't. Demoralization and right wing radicalization is a direct result.

But yes, I think you're right about various flavours of Stoicism making the rounds. They have the aura of "trad" and a kind of rational masculinity, seemingly grounded in some old pre-democratic, pre-enlightenment thought.

Myself... I prefer Spinoza's Ethics to Stoicism.

I'm getting major "working out will make you right wing" vibes from this comment.

The fundamental idea of stoicism is that I will focus on what I can control and accept what I cannot.

It only seems to ruffle the jimmies of people who want to force everyone to care about the things they care about.

At the end of the day there is very little I can do about Gaza or Ukraine or Taiwan or Inflation or a million other things that people all over the world are trying to shove down my throat. What I can do things about is being a good husband and father, serving in my local community, and striving each day to be a better person and help those around me.

Did you skip past "Self-improvement is fine" at the end of my comment?

I wonder if you're "getting those vibes" because you're somewhere on this pipeline? Gym rats don't normally get defensive about working out IME.

Working out is fine. Other forms of self-improvement are fine. Even living what you view as, for example, a "traditional" (as you interpret it) heternormative existence is also fine. It's also compatible with feminism, which is really about giving people freedom rather than assigning them gender roles.

IME this only becomes a problem when you start theory-crafting, rationalizing and imposing that viewpoint on others. It's the difference between:

> "I want to provide for my family with a stay-at-home wife."

and

> "The breakdown in society and increase in crime is due to the attack on and erosion of the traditional family. We need to enact policy to encourage ("force" in some cases) people to get and stay married, for the sake of the children."

The first is making a choice for your life, which literally nobody has an issue with. If two consenting adults decide that's how they want to organize their lives, go nuts. The second is enacting policy to impose your worldview on everyone else. You see the difference?

This has real-world implications like pushing legislation to withholding welfare from unmarried people (eg that may have been an abusive relationship).

I'd argue studying any philosophy correlates with people looking to study traditional thought. Traditional thought correlates with conservatism, not Nazism, maybe Nietzsche does though.

Depends on the strain and what you mean by "traditional thought."

Nazi party was in fact a coalition like any other successful political party. After they purged their left ("socialist") wing, it became a big tent of militaristic anti-enlightenment thinking. It was broad enough that otherwise intelligent people like Martin Heidegger could feel comfortable under the umbrella.

Likewise for Mussolini's actual fascist party. Appeal to a pre-enlightenment quasi-Roman Italy, and the symbolism around that. Fusing hierarchical / anti-democratic with traditional and romanticist aesthetics. They weren't as caught up with the racial superiority stuff either.

The word fascist or Nazi gets thrown around a lot for things that are ... unfortunately... new variants of an old strain to which the word won't precisely apply. E.g. Trump, Proud Boys etc. It is unfortunately important to engage with the content in these movements and offer a democratic alternative rather than just slap the pejorative on it and hope people are shocked out of finding it appealing.

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