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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31731 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 24, 2023

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I think the stoic framework is the healthy one in most cases. There are things you can control: what you do, how you react, and what you say. The rest is simply outside of your control. You cannot make the DA press charges, so you don’t need to worry about the outcome here. The universe doesn’t owe you anything and what it does give you is best held lightly as it can be just as easily taken. Enjoy it, but don’t get attached to it.

The rest is simply outside of your control. You cannot make the DA press charges, so you don’t need to worry about the outcome here.

That seems like abdicating responsibility. DAs are often elected. A US citizen is capable of doing many things that would damage their re-election chances. You arguably have a duty to draw attention to their transgressions if you're upset.

You still can’t force him to do anything the best you can do is apply pressure or perhaps remove him. Doing something is better than doing nothing, but you still can’t force things to go your way.

True, but the Stoic take is that you engage in these actions as means to an end, which is making the world a better place, and not as an emotional catharsis without which you cannot achieve happiness and life satisfaction. The goal is that even if your efforts are frustrated and ultimately futile, you should be able to judge your own acts to be virtuous.

I mostly disagree. Almost everything in the world can be influenced to some degree or with some probability. If you dedicated the next year to it, you could probably shut down that puppy mill, or somehow make them a little less profitable.

Picking battles is absolutely necessary, and happens whether you choose it or not. I think that's a better approach than trying to divide the world into "under my control" vs "not".

Seconding this, and emphasizing that stoicism doesn't mean passivity; it means really truly internalizing that sometimes "You want it to be one way. But it's the other way".

You can try to change it, but you gotta accept reality first.

Do people who try to change things usually not accept that the things are in a state they don't like?

I've always seen it more as "accept that water runs downhill." Yes, you can pump water uphill, but there is a cost, and it must be done intentionally. Try as you might, you will never be able to get the universe into a state where "water runs uphill or downhill as needed at no cost" is a fundamental law.

People who successfully change things for the better tend to have internalized this. They understand that their actions have tradeoffs, opportunity costs, and that some things, like the past, are unchangeable. Others beat their heads against the brick wall that is reality.

That makes total sense, I agree that framing things in terms of tradeoffs is a huge upgrade from how most people think about what problems to go after. But that doesn't sound much like the stoicism I've heard about.

No, because you're switching connotations of acceptance from 'willing to tolerate' to something more like 'acknowledgement / recognition.' 'I acknowledge that this is bad, but I will not/ do not have to tolerate it' is not acceptance in the form that stoicism advocates.

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