Apatheia Saves the West - by Dustin Ogle
Preamble
The root problem of most social issues in Western culture is a pervasive addiction to shallow emotional impulses and mass dependency on group emotive states stimulated by constant exposure to crowds online. The primary effects of the abuse of emotional impulses have direct primary adverse outcomes. However, the most destructive effect is a secondary problem of exploitation. This emotional dependency leaves us profoundly susceptible to manipulation. It can even seduce a person into voluntarily seeking out inducement into group identities and ideologies that are motivated to incite conflict. This proposition is neither metaphorical nor sensational; it is an observation grounded in reality. I don’t believe I am overstating or oversimplifying; instead, I am simply observing a deep truth that may be extremely useful.
It is a truth that took much work to uncover, and by chance or providence, I am perfectly positioned to make the observation. I’m not suggesting that this is a complete explanation of the problem, only that it is the most fundamental. It is the deepest problem upon which most other issues rely. This is a truth that I will attempt to articulate here in a way that will be palatable and useful. I must deliver this position as an argument of sorts, but I don’t intend to persuade you of anything. Rather, I would challenge you to attempt the solution offered and evaluate it for yourself.
My aim is to give you a useful intellectual toolset, a perspective based on sober, unbiased wisdom from the ages, for us to conquer this problem together. It must be solved within ourselves first. In this paper, I argue that Stoic practices aimed at apatheia are the transformative practices needed to immediately salvage contemporary Western society by empowering all individuals to hold a personal central ethos that doesn’t cost them anything but delivers to them everything. Stoicism doesn’t ask for blind adherence, nor does it demand sacrifice. Instead, it offers an ethos that delivers clarity, resilience, and freedom from the emotional turbulence we so often mistake for progress. In simpler terms, If our biology is our hardware and our mind is our software, I propose that we run Stoicism as our operating system that governs our participation with ideas.
It is essential that we conquer the chaos and renegotiate our social contracts from our most fundamental agreements that are true and impenetrable. It is imperative to accomplish this immediately to avoid the cataclysmic destruction of Western societies. The goal is to restore social unity. Unity comes from honest negotiations seeking an agreement and all people being compelled to uphold those agreements for their own good, especially in the long term. Negotiations that seek an agreement differ from the conflicts seeking victory by mob vote, submission, or exclusionary tactics, as we too often see now. Looking for an agreement takes mutual respect for people with opposing ideas and the willingness to listen and consider their oppositional argument. When we move our conversations away from surface details and deeper down to our fundamental desires, humans are remarkably similar. Agreement is not only possible, but it’s inevitable.
Also, agreement requires the willingness to protect other people’s right to voice their ideas even when they are in opposition to our own. To do this effectively, a person must be nonreactive to their emotional impulses and open to seeking the truth even if they don’t like it. Without that, the West falls to chaos or control. All societies in chaos are eventually seized by control, especially wealthy ones. The warning to those who may feel that destroying our institutions and causing chaos is a good idea is that it is only a layover on the way to authoritarianism or totalitarianism. Both paths lead to subjugation—the end of freedom in the world.
Part 1
I’ll never forget the time I walked into a room of cocaine addicts around 11:30 pm some years ago. Most of them were new to the addiction and still living relatively normal lives most of the day. Personally, it was an enlightening experience because only a few months earlier, I would have been a part of that group. I was now sober in more than one way, but they were gripped with an addiction that I had myself been previously seduced into. Although brief, my dance with addiction was captivating in a terrifying way. Having recently broken free from that spell, watching them was like watching myself from a recent past that seemed like an impossible bad dream from a lifetime ago. I instantly remembered the moment I began to recognize my own emotional dependencies, which was both terrifying and liberating. Realizing that my personality had been hijacked by these unconscious forces gave me the power to reclaim myself—and that same power lies within each of us.
So, as I watched them, I was empathetic and sympathetic, but most of all, I was extremely curious to observe. I watched each person reveal their personality, identity, and motivations in conversation. It was clear to me that everything that they were doing and saying felt significant and reasonable to them, and they had little reason to suspect that it was all being orchestrated by a deep desire to do cocaine. To them, it seemed like their personality was real and authentic; they felt their presentation of themselves sincere and were convinced of the other reasons causing them to all coincidentally end up in this room at about the same time. In fact, they expressed it all adamantly as if the goal was to remain possessed and affirm each other’s false delusion of reality.
The truth was glaringly obvious, however; they were there behaving like lab rats hanging around the lever, which sometimes produced a reward around this time if pressed. The dealer would likely show up soon. One of them would slip out to the parking lot and return with cocaine to share and sell while everyone would pretend to be surprised. I remember it well because I was deeply concerned. I called some of these people friends, and I had a bit of an epiphany-like self-realization, putting me face-to-face with my own ability to rationalize and how quickly it can change. A question appeared to me, “Who is running my show now?”. In other words, what deep motivation may be usurping my personality? At that moment, having gotten rid of substance motivation, I couldn’t be completely sure; I wouldn’t know after all, would I? That realization shook me, and I committed to finding out.
If we consider that emotions are psychic reactions that cause physical reactions, just like taking a hit of a quick-acting drug, and the sensations in our mind and body can be experienced very strongly, then we see that they operate exactly like a ‘drug’. Also, there is almost no limit to the types and intensity of emotions to experience, each with its own endocrine cocktail of chemicals being released into our body. Further, there is no place on earth where we are prevented from having an emotional response anytime we please. There is infinite availability and access. So, I would consider emotional addiction as a class of drugs or a general category to speak about a large group of addictions with the commonality of how and where they are manufactured and administered.
What would happen if a person became addicted to emotion? What would happen if a giant group of people all became addicted to emotions and kept finding themselves ending up in the same spaces, like the cocaine addicts, executing the same type of rationalizations for their self-destructive behavior? And what if it seemed to them perfectly rational and essential because they could find all the affirmations needed from the crowd? It would be the norm. Imagine a person addicted not to a drug, but to the highs and lows of their own emotional reactions—each surge of anger or fear as potent as a chemical hit. Now, scale that to entire societies. What if whole populations were consumed by the endless need for emotional arousal, unable to distinguish between authentic responses and the craving for more stimulation? If a person can consume an external chemical but somehow not believe it’s a problem, how would any of us ever believe we are addicted to internally manufactured feelings and chemicals?
Well, that situation would create an entire culture of people who essentially worship emotion. The god of emotions would demand that they react to everything in the universe with a provocative opinion as an offering and take time to express their feelings as a form of divine prayer. They would build emotive stimuli-rich environments and ways to carry small doses in their pocket, like unlimited apps on a cell phone. They would fully identify with their patterns of thoughts built by a motivation to consume constant cathartic responses and impulsive feelings of all types. They would become fixated on seeking it out, driven by an insatiable craving. In a short time, they would believe that this is the only way to experience life. A life devoid of constant emotional highs would become a lacking that feels hollow and without purpose.
In a short time, feelings would pervade the narrative of life. You would be able to notice expressions of emotion replace declarations of duty. Bias would be confused with evidence. Validation by consensus would come to define correctness. Therapy would corrode into a professional false affirmation that can be bought and paid for. The word reasonable would come to describe something attractive, and logic would be redefined as consistent with whim. It wouldn’t take long to subvert all the tools we have to seek truth despite emotion to be used for the attempted murder of truth itself. And any dissent from this delusion would be perceived as a deep threat that must be attacked. People under the spell would come to despise the very things that would help them, exactly like a person addicted to a drug.
For many, the idea of living without constant emotional stimuli might seem unsettling or even threatening, as it challenges what we've been conditioned to believe is necessary for a fulfilling life. While we may initially prefer the better positive emotive drugs with less destruction and hangover, it wouldn’t take long to need a bigger hit and move to manic elation of some kind. Just like the best, most expensive drugs, those emotions take quite a bit of effort to procure. Unfortunately, there are cheap, easy emotions to get that are even stronger than the good ones. Fear and anger are the crack cocaine of emotional drugs. And they can be elicited with no effort by taking one small cocktail of the cheapest, most available negative emotions. It is called being offended.
The best part of taking this drug is you don’t have to take responsibility for it at all. You get to see yourself as a victim who stands on a higher moral ground, shifting the responsibility to the offender. This rationalization makes the dose last even longer because sober-minded people will argue with you about your reaction until you get a chance to run through many different negative emotions. If you’re lucky, you will get to have the most potent high of all: a complete meltdown or physical violence.
My journey into the depths of truth and personal responsibility required me to avoid the crowd for two years. It turned out to be exactly the right two years. ‘Avoid the Crowd’ is a warning proclaimed by many great thought and spiritual leaders throughout history, but none more accessible to us in the West than the often-forgotten Greek warning. I know we like to believe we are more sophisticated now than a couple thousand years ago and that all our problems are new, but they aren’t. Think of what you see happening in the West at this very moment while reading the following paraphrased warning from over 2,000 years ago.
The Greeks understood that consorting with the crowd could corrupt individuals by leading them away from rationality, virtue, and true happiness. The crowd, driven by irrational passions and external pursuits, threatens one’s moral and intellectual integrity, leading to a life of distraction, instability, and moral compromise. The Stoic, Epicurean, and Socratic traditions all found a profound agreement about this and described exactly how it works. In short, too much consorting with the crowd causes a loss of individual reason and virtue. When one starts to identify with a group, he loses his identification of himself as an individual. This is because crowds apply an inherent pressure to conform. Whether we are aware of it or not, we don’t want to be rejected by a crowd, and it shapes our thoughts to some degree into alignment with the group.
On the other hand, acceptance or admiration in a group can feel dangerously good. That causes the pursuit of fame, which is a false pursuit of happiness. It’s a trick that can have you trading the truth and productive behavior for pandering to the shallow whims of a crowd. We now call that audience capture, mob mentality, or crowd-think. This set of circumstances is like a spell that makes propaganda invisible and as sweet as sugar.
Also, my observation is that the more involved people are with a group, the less open they are to conversation for discovery with opposition found in other people and within oneself. The effect is a decline of the critical thinking process that prevents us from unwittingly signing up to believe in destructive ideas indefinitely. This effect is precisely what makes the worst atrocities imaginable become possible. This is how the regular people became genocidal communists, Nazis, Maoists, etc. Take note, most people who ‘supported’ and cheered on these events were people just like you and me.
A crowd also increases your exposure to vice, which is the pre-Christian word for sin or immorality. The bigger the crowd, the more ‘bad’ stuff you will see; it will become more familiar to you, and you risk changing your mind to think it's also acceptable for you. Further, these, sometimes, subtle crowd pressures distract a person from examining themselves and replace that profoundly beneficial activity with the futile activity of judging others. Lastly, crowds are unreliable, unstable, and offer no certainty. Crowds turn into mobs of contradictions rapidly. The only thing reliable about a mob is that the members will turn on each other eventually. Evaluate for yourself. Think back to who you were a few years ago compared to now. Be honest and remember the truth doesn’t hurt you; it sets you free. Free from what? Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn might say it keeps you free from crossing the line that runs through every man's heart from good into evil.
I found the old Greek warnings and others to be a perfectly accurate description of what happened to our culture after we stuffed the whole thing into a few social media apps and formed history’s largest crowd that fits in one hand. Naturally and as predicted, it split into tribes with exclusionary tendencies. It’s not a new problem, but it’s the biggest, most accessible version of the problem imaginable. So, for two years, I avoided contact with any crowds of strangers, especially social media, while engaged in the hard work of becoming my authentic, unadulterated self that uses mindfulness and Stoicism to seek the truth to describe some of my efforts. I ended up with an adapted universally representative methodology that I wrote into a book called “We Aren’t Who We Are, How to Become.” It is a cohesive guide that takes the reader through their own unique journey by offering practical exercises and the framework of thought to place their experience. Toward the end of the two years, I decided to publish the book and start a podcast of genuine conversation as a positive example of how to hold conversation properly. I then reentered social media and in-person crowds. It was weird, very very weird.
After I reentered social spaces, it seemed like everywhere I looked; there were people behaving precisely like the cocaine addicts I described earlier. Except they were identified with crowds and addicted to emotion. It became clear that many were caught in a cycle of rationalizing irrational behavior driven by unconscious forces that seemed to erode their usual standards. Social media had entirely fallen off the rails at 1000 miles per hour. What once was a reasonably accurate image of social norms, contracts, and institutions had turned into a lucid nightmare with unrecognizable rules that changed with the tide of an invisible mob. The pressure to present the highest level of candor when publishing had been replaced by a seduction to present one’s shadow avatar. Many people who once aspired to greatness had become part of a butt-cheek brigade, fallacy activists, compassionate narcissists, promoters of nihilism, religious extremists, anti-religious extremists etc. It was chaos that, in essence, was much like the unsupervised interaction between toddlers projecting their unsocialized emotions at daycare before nap time.
I wasn’t judgmental, only observant. Also, I evaluated my sanity to be sure it wasn’t me, as it felt like I woke up in a different dimension of reality. I’m not one to wag a moral finger at anyone and think I am some kind of exception, but I missed the train to this party. I was deeply concerned for everyone who had got on this track innocently and unwittingly. People I knew personally to be reasonable and dignified were acting pathologically with abhorrent short-term motivations and dead-end intentions. It took me some time to discover the most fundamental common error.
At first, I was impressed at the perfect manifestation of the Greek warning. Nearly everyone was a member of some team or mob group of their choosing, and they were constantly serving as activists for their group’s particular identity designed to achieve their mutually self-serving results. Most people were constantly repeating obviously fallacious persuasions of a false reality. It was as if they hoped to validate their false identity with a fellow “supporter” or get into a much-desired conflict with the “opposition”.
Everyone seemed offended by everything and was convinced it wasn’t their responsibility to manage the emotions coming from within their own head. What was considered immoral just a couple of years before had spread to high levels of acceptability. So high that it was being displayed in public and celebrated. Now, I’m not one to decide what is moral for other people. I’m only pointing out that the quantifiable rapid change is exactly what the Greeks would have predicted for everyone spending too much time as part of a crowd. And the chase for fame online had replaced the pursuit of true happiness for many people. The experience of profound moments of real life had been usurped by the possibility of getting likes, shares, and comments or going viral and the false reward potential of widespread attention.
The Stoics would have referred to this result of addiction to emotions as ‘succumbing to pathos’, which they called "complaints of the soul," which may be better understood today as the destruction of the psyche. Succumbing to pathos is an internal event that consists of an erroneous response to external stimuli and circumstances. It is how we are seduced to operate from false presuppositions instead of the truth. The assumption is that the error produces negative results for the individual and society. That assumption is correct.
Gorgias, a Sophist who preceded Aristotle, believed an orator could capture and lead an audience in any direction they pleased through emotional appeal. In the Encomium of Helen, Gorgias states that a soul can feel a particular sentiment on account of words like sorrow and pity. Certain words act as "bringers-on of pleasure and takers-off of pain.” Furthermore, Gorgias equates emotional persuasion to the sensation of being overtaken by a drug: "[f]or just as different drugs draw off different humors from the body, and some put an end to disease and other to life, so too of discourses: some give pain, others delight, others terrify, others rouse the hearers to courage, and yet others by a certain vile persuasion drug and trick to soul.” Later, Aristotle perfected the art/science of articulation, which we still study as the standard called Rhetoric.
I could go on with specific examples of the changes I observed that were perfectly in line with the old Greek prediction, but it’s risky to stare into the depths of a problem too long. That is how one begins to make a problem become part of oneself. It’s much more effective for humans to begin an attempt at a solution and observe how the problem responds. That way, we are learning how the problem wants to be solved. What we really need to know about a problem is its relationship to the solution.
Emotional addiction is a problem that wants to be solved, and it is one of the most fundamental issues in modern society; recognizing it as such could help clarify many of the challenges we all face. It seems self-evident because any feature of almost any cultural or interpersonal problem one can point to here would be solved the moment everyone involved became reasonable, logical, and in search of the truth. In fact, when we do that, our own previous thoughts and behavior often become ridiculously humorous and juvenile to us. Exactly like when we are humored and embarrassed by our behavior as a hormonal teenager, we should be seeking to feel that way about ourselves last year or last month. We are all fallible, after all, and it’s our duty to discover our own folly. In fact, we are incentivized to do so because all our lives are improved the most from learning from our mistakes. This is actual forward progress in sophistication. However, there are self-imposed barriers to this kind of progress now. It’s a psyop.
One feature of addiction is a self-imposed psyop. Short for psychological operation, the term was coined to describe military action designed to control people's behavior by controlling their motivations and reasoning. That is precisely why addiction is remarkably difficult to beat because the motivations and reasoning to use drugs become the new personality of the person no matter how they got to that point. And it is covertly built and designed to serve the motivation to obtain the next hit. We often describe it as denial, but just hearing the word ‘denial’ doesn’t convey enough context.
Most of the time, addicts genuinely believe they are not addicted and can rationalize most of their behavior even though it is obviously irrational and untrue to an objective observer. To different degrees, they don’t know their personality has been hijacked because it happens on an unconscious level, and they still feel like themselves in their conscious thoughts. But we don’t assemble most of our thoughts; instead, they arise from our unconscious. So, protecting our unconscious from being hacked and hijacked by destructive motivations is the same expression as ‘being in alignment with one’s true nature’ that we get from the Stoics. High quality modern psychological treatments and therapies are essentially processes of coming to live an examined life.
As Socrates pointed out, “the unexamined life is not worth living”. It is a well-observed truth that each of us has a personal responsibility to examine our own beliefs for truth and accuracy. Otherwise, we will be motivated by lies and inaccurate information coming from the inside. We literally become our own worst enemy and don’t even realize it.
I was positioned to make these observations because I had just survived an epic crisis that came on many fronts. All at once, COVID closed all my businesses, my marriage was in trouble, my brother died, my reputation was harmed, and I became dependent on substance or hedonism for positive feelings. I decided to take complete responsibility for everything and rebuild from inside myself first to get out of that collapse. So, before I walked into that room of cocaine addicts, I had been regularly practicing insight meditation to objectively observe myself and spend time detached from my egoic self, thoughts, and emotions. I was also implementing old Greek Stoicism as my new operating system and as my primary ideology. For those who don’t know, Stoicism was the final prevailing old Greek school of thought that made Western society possible.
I decided to go back to the beginning for myself. The main objective of Stoicism is to learn to operate oneself from a more objective perspective that aims to see things as clearly as possible for what they truly are instead of how we feel about them. This method trains one to be very cognizant of their emotional responses and irrational desires. It looks on them skeptically or suspiciously because they can’t be trusted to guide our life’s orientation. The aim is to disempower emotion to negatively affect thoughts, decisions, and actions. Emotions, or ‘passions’ as they called them, do serve a purpose and are not thought of as an enemy. Emotions are useful ethereal sensations but are not necessarily indicative of the truth or useful for responding to with the best action. Irrational desires and emotional impulses that are acted upon are a manifestation of bias, by definition.
The intention of the Stoic is to experience emotion in moderation to prevent becoming possessed and seduced into error by them. This moderation, which they called Temperance, is one of the four Cardinal Virtues. Stoics suggest deploying reason and logic to guide us instead of our irrational desires or emotional reactions. The principle idea is that better information creates better results whether you like the information or not, which proves accurate. This axiom of our civilization points to the small moment when we choose how to respond to our feelings or circumstances as the only place and time for a human to realize their power, as it is the only thing we have complete control over. In addition, they propose that we give little or no concern to the things we do not control. I’m sure you can imagine how much reprieve from emotional toiling and freedom from the effort of trying to control everything one gains from this practice.
But wouldn’t a person’s life fall to chaos and destruction if they let go of the reins of control?! It depends. The experience differs from what may be expected when practicing these things instead of just thinking about them. It turns out that without the gripping chase of truly futile impulses, the emotions that arise in your space become deeply meaningful but unobtrusive and more lasting. They become more like a sunrise shining within you than a bomb tearing you to pieces. Also, without the noise of the internal feedback loop, our intuition or conscience can be better heard. Deep wisdom from the inside somehow seems to present itself in the open space created. It turns out that the universe is more friendly to a person’s life when they cease their attempt to control it and align with it instead.
Now, letting go of the reigns of control requires aligning with the truth, and things will go exceedingly well with order and a sense of optimism. When we align with the truth, more things seem to work out in our favor than any other method ever tested. This is especially true in the long term. You can’t know all things true and may never know a single absolute truth. And, thinking you do is a dangerous ego trap. So, the best way to be aligned with the truth is to avoid thinking and speaking anything you know to be untrue, act only in a way that honors the truth you do know, and be aware of your ignorance.
Our great civilization arose from seeking truth despite emotion, but it has fallen to seeking emotion as a respite from truth. How is this possible?
Part 2 - Conversation of my Observation.
When I reentered the crowd space, I was firmly planted in a state of ‘Apatheia ἀπάθεια’.
The word apatheia comes from the Greek words a- meaning "without" and pathos meaning "suffering passion." A state without suffering the perils of one’s own emotions essentially. Apatheia may be better translated as "equanimity" rather than "indifference,” as it is often misrepresented.
In Stoicism, apatheia is a state of mind where one is free from negative emotions and passions and is often translated as "imperturbability" or "tranquility." Stoics believed that apatheia was essential to living a good life and could be achieved through training and practice. They did not believe in suppressing or denying their emotions but instead sought to develop a rational perspective that would allow them to avoid being controlled by their emotions. A state of mind free from negative emotions sure couldn’t hurt our culture, given our current state of mental health crisis.
So, while in this state, I walked into the brewery across the street from my condo on a Friday at 7:30 pm. I was still feeling like a Greek Sage completely out of touch with the collective, which had moved in the other direction into a shallow reactive frenzy. A small eclectic group of us hold plans to meet up there at that time for conversation. It’s a longstanding open invitation. In this particular instance, I was the only one who showed up. I sat there in perfectly comfortable stillness, enjoying my own company without concern. This small group assembles as individuals organically. We don’t text, pine, worry, or wait in the parking lot until someone else arrives. Some of us can miss for consecutive months before anyone brings it up in the group. We prefer each other’s company but are perfectly fine without it.
Sitting there alone, I noticed something about my presence was disturbing or intriguing to many. I was still, present, and content. I was looking out a window as the clouds floated by and carried away any arising thoughts out of my view. If I noticed someone in my periphery attempting to make eye contact, I would give it to them with a gentle smile. Most of them seemed to collapse under the weight of my eyes. I couldn’t imagine how to be less imposing. I noticed that when other people ended up alone, they were beset by a kind of terror or a sense of loss without some stimulation or arousal. It looked a lot like substance withdrawal. Most of them quickly smashed their face into a phone and started scrolling, experiencing some relief.
I had one gentle but vast emotion arise within me. It was a beautifully sad empathy. I know what a terrible fate it is to be in one’s own company and feel it’s an inadequate experience. True to my Stoic practice, I didn’t react to that emotion. Instead, I decided to discover as much truth as possible and respond with the good of all people in mind, and this conversation is part of that response.
It was observing people in person in many places that led to my suspicion that the fundamental problem and solution lies in our relationship with emotion. It became especially evident while observing when they were alone. I saw very little stillness in people, as if they were on the chase for something. But they scrambled for anything to pay attention to, not something in particular. And they often didn’t give a thing their attention consistently, just long enough to get what they were after, whether they realized it or not. I knew I had seen this behavior before. I’ve seen it in others and myself. This is an addiction. To be clear, I don’t think emotions are bad. I think they are good, and I’m grateful to have them. However, they work better under superintendence, in moderation, and at appropriate times, just like Morphine. It’s the abuse of them that is problematic. It is the reaction to them that is destructive.
The misstep of consorting with the crowd over time strips us of our cognizance of individuality, arouses our reactivity, and dupes us into chasing false happiness. If you want it to be more scientific, you can point to all the psychological research and cognitive biases we have discovered and described so far. Still, they all fit into this descriptive category I'm referring to. Being possessed by emotion and caught up in crowd-think makes us wildly vulnerable to identify with and depend on the constant arousal of emotional impulses.
If I’m right, it’s great news because the solution is swift and within our reach. Just as two dogs can be locked in a vicious struggle one moment, only to be peacefully lying side by side moments later, we can do the same. You may think that example doesn’t work for us because we are more intelligent and complicated than dogs. However, they are smart enough to know they don’t want to keep fighting forever because they rely on each other. We aren’t as complicated as we imagine, and our ability to be sophisticated relies on our ability to cooperate with each other. Without functioning societies and institutions, we regress to an irreconcilable situation. If we lose our sophistication, we will be subjugated by the powerful. Actually, we will beg for it. For this reason, it is imperative that we combat widespread emotional addiction in ourselves. We must first distance ourselves from the crowd and then refocus on personal responsibility and community.
Each person must voluntarily reduce their participation in and observation of crowds and teams and operate from an ideology that seeks the truth.
I would suggest basic Stoicism as a fundamental operating system for Westerners. I believe it has always been our operating system, but we built so many systems on top of it that we forgot it was there. It is commonly accepted that Christianity has been our operating system, but it runs on top of the Stoic protocol. Protocol from Greek potos and kolla meaning first glue. Stoicism is a methodology of living aligned with the truth wherever it can be found and operates below the surface of more shallow ideologies and seductive persuasion. It is the primary personal operating system that made all Western ideas and institutions possible. So, it’s compatible with any truth wherever it is found.
Early basic Stoicism has no strict dogmas and isn’t a religion. Although it includes some metaphysical ideas in its deep philosophy, they aren’t required for the validity of the practice. This feature of Stoicism makes it the best choice for the West because it’s not an excluding or limiting ideology. One can be a Stoic first and a Christian, Muslim, Feminist, Republican, Democrat, Amish, Jewish, etc. However, one cannot become a Stoic and a radical fundamentalist or extremist in another group because those groups don’t allow inquisition. I would consider that a wonderful feature, not a problem of being a Stoic first. It is a sobering and calming practice that pours cool water on everything provocative. It’s also important to note that anyone can practice Stoicism without telling anyone about it. It happens on the inside and manifests on the outside. There is no uniform vanity about it to display and no team allegiance to present with symbology.
The difference is that a person trained in Stoic art will rely on themselves instead of consensus to decide what is true through reason, logic, evidence, etc., and will be critical and selective of what is right for all people, especially within their own community and influence. One then would think, speak, and act in accordance with what he or she believes to be true despite what judgments may befall them. A stoic person would consider those as judgments against the truth and simply incorrect. There is no reason to be upset about something incorrect or an expression of ignorance.
But the Stoic holds an egoic check to balance himself by also remaining cognizant of his ignorance. So, he listens for useful information and welcomes constructive criticism. If everyone were doing that, most of our problems would vaporize. Also, the efforts of propagandist enemies rely on our emotional reactions to subvert our behavior toward destruction, and those efforts would cease to be effective immediately.
The cure comes from the inside, the only place it ever really could. A Stoic Christian would never be convinced to blow up a building or molest a child. A Stoic Muslim wouldn’t choose Jihadism or terror, especially for children. The reality is the opposite. Stoic people are free to arrange their own hierarchy of values, but they must abide by the boundaries of the Cardinal Virtues. These Virtues aren’t the same as more shallow dogmatic instructions but are more like the minimal guiding boundaries to point oneself toward success and integration instead of exclusion and destruction. Stoics are not only allowed to question things but are required to challenge everything, especially starting with themselves.
Also, the West desperately lacks the strength and resilience of the greatest good we were founded upon: resilient individuals. Weak, overly compassionate, and often narcissistic activism is no replacement for Courage to enact Justice. Slanted facts and self-aggrandizing persuasive posturing is no replacement for Wisdom. Satiating irrational desires is no substitute for aligning with the truth. Victim narratives are a poison to the psyche, completely antithetical to the heroic narrative that made our culture the envy of the world. Every person chooses their own story, whether they ever have the courage to admit that responsibility or not.
We are all on the human team first, and the furthest allegiance that we must have beyond that is our country team, and that’s only true for us because our country is not our government. Rather, our government is an employee of our country, which is its people. A Stoic Nationalist here is called a Statesman. Any other group trying to recruit us can only offer us ideas to consider, but they are likely laced with the anesthesia of persuasion and choice-supportive bias or ridged pledges of allegiance. We must wade in those waters with care and healthy skepticism. We mustn’t pledge allegiance to shallow group identities.
Spending time in the crowd influences us in this direction, so I found it best never to scroll a social media feed randomly or at least set a timer for 10 minutes once a day, maximum. You can still make posts, search for things of practical interest, etc. Be cognizant not to allow yourself to be seduced to peer into the hypnotizing feed that activates emotions and bias. Free up your attention for yourself and those around you. Try it for 30 days, and then evaluate the results for yourself. We must give our precious attention to our individual self-responsibility and service to family, friends, and close community.
If that doesn’t sound exciting enough, then that should be a sign that you may be on the chase for effortless arousal and/or are hypnotized by the crowd. If you find yourself strongly supporting a particular candidate or cause, it’s worth taking a moment to reflect: Are my reasons driven by careful thought or perhaps by emotional reactions? This self-examination can often reveal more about our motivations than we initially realize. Facing yourself and the truth is an adventure that requires tremendous courage. It takes courage to be genuinely optimistic and hopeful. There is a thrill in the uncertainty of listening, giving the benefit of the doubt, and looking for the best in all people while holding them and yourself accountable to a high level of candor. Communicating the truth you discover requires the justice of a fair mind. Limiting your access to very seductive arousal of emotional impulses requires unwavering and ever-tested temperance. It can be like fighting a dragon that lives within you. Acting in alignment with truth requires acute wisdom. There is no greater experience than being honored to be with yourself. Ultimately, we can only achieve that by responding with honor instead of reacting with dishonor. That is the central Stoic ethos and proposition. And now, I fully understand how the Stoics arrived at the four Cardinal Virtues to guide us there. Courage, Wisdom, Temperance, and Justice.
If we simply pass our behavior through those four ideas as a filter, everything improves for everyone. I look up to my steel crimson poster of these virtues often and ask: ‘Am I doing this out of courage or fear, wisdom or ignorance, temperance or indulgence, justice or selfishness, revenge, and malevolence?’ Then I tell myself the truth. If it doesn’t pass through this filter, I change what I’m doing or abandon the initiative. The results are reliable and unmatched in their positive outcome. This is true for everyone. However, I concede that I am widely ignorant about how Stoicism interacts with the feminine. It’s possible that this structure could need some adjusting for feminine women. I can confidently say women would undoubtedly benefit from encouraging men to practice basic Stoicism, especially within a family. Everyone deserves the communal life of profound experience found in the quiet of a tamed mind.
It turns out that the deepest meaning is found close to home, and meaning is the most fulfilling thing. If my solution sounds like it wouldn’t solve the global-national problems, which include the ever-lurking tyranny of invasion, authoritarianism, or totalitarianism. I would suggest the opposite. Imagine trying to conquer a nation of free, strong individuals who support resilient families assembled in immovable communities who solve things for themselves. Imagine trying to fool people with lies and propaganda who spend their time practicing seeking the truth and who rely on reason instead of reacting emotionally and giving in to their biases. It can’t be done. In fact, I just described how our freedom was born in the first place. If you can’t move a man’s mind, you can’t monkey his hands.
By overcoming emotional addiction and disidentifying with the mob, we can reclaim our true selves and secure the future of our society. Adopting Stoic practices aimed at apatheia is not about disengagement from life but about mastering emotional responses that beset one in the adventure of real life and the deepest meaning. Luckily, we are positioned to ascend to the next great achievement of mankind in short order; we simply must remember who we are and who we aren’t. It’s time to wake up. There is no reason to be dismayed or upset by our current failure to operate with honor and dignity in the light of the truth. We progress through failing and redemption to a greater height than before. The greater the fall, the greater the redemption. We are the heroes of this human story. Redemption for all of us will be found in each of us individually first.
Dustin Ogle