What is stoicism and why is it popular now?

As life becomes more unstable and uncertain, people look to nature as a source of stability and guidance. Nature is increasingly looked to as if it has some profound answers to the most important questions. An eternal source of truth. But it’s all bullshit.

Philosophy has a name for this kind of thing—the “naturalistic fallacy.” This means the mistake of looking to nature as a sort of arbiter of truth or morality. But nature is blind, silent, cold, and meaningless. Using it as a way to find a kind of value or truth-content makes no sense—nothing is less natural than those, so nature should be the last place you look.

Today, I see two specific manifestations of the naturalistic fallacy—the STEM cult, and the interest in stoicism as the leading form of self-help. Both of these are having big social impacts, and both are bad.

STEM cultism was a big 2010s thing, and maybe is dying down a bit now, as education in general is dying (college enrollment is down). Also, there’s something of a backlash against Big Tech, which pushed STEM ideology for years—people increasingly hate the tech overlords, so their ideology is also hated. And the economic promise of STEM—that if you studied science, technology, engineering, and math, you could have a nice high-paying computer job—has been exposed as bullshit. The tech industry has been laying people off like crazy all year, and with the growth of AI, this looks likely to keep going.

STEM is an ideology of neoliberal elites, and it’s useful to promote the illusion that things are getting better, that we’re making progress, as real conditions of life get worse for the mass of people.

But STEM is kind of old hat now. Stoicism seems like it will have more legs in the 2020s at this point. Like STEM, it is also an example of the naturalistic fallacy. Stoics are supposed to model themselves after nature itself—stoics view nature as indifferent and cold, and so they say we should be like that, in order to be as powerful as nature itself. This is stupid for a number of reasons. Nietzsche offers one of the best critiques of this in his book Beyond Good and Evil (this is one of my favorite little paragraphs anywhere in Nietzsche):

“You desire to LIVE ‘according to Nature’? Oh, you noble Stoics, what fraud of words! Imagine to yourselves a being like Nature, boundlessly extravagant, boundlessly indifferent, without purpose or consideration, without pity or justice, at once fruitful and barren and uncertain: imagine to yourselves INDIFFERENCE as a power—how COULD you live in accordance with such indifference?…And granted that your imperative, ‘living according to Nature,’ means actually the same as ‘living according to life’—how could you do DIFFERENTLY? Why should you make a principle out of what you yourselves are, and must be?”

This pretty much says it all. Stoicism says “live according to nature.” But if nature is the same thing as life, then living according to nature means “living according to life,” which is saying precisely nothing at all.

But Stoics act like saying “live according to life” is some profoundly useful thing. It’s a classic bit of sophistry—a fraud philosophy meant to milk people out of their money. It’s no surprise that hucksters like Ryan Holiday, Andrew Tate, and Silicon Valley as a whole are pushing it. (The New York Times calls it “the preferred viral philosophy.”) (Holiday even sells a course called The Wealthy Stoic. Lol).

It makes sense that a philosophy like stoicism—which says nothing at all but seems deep—is popular in the digital age. That’s what social media is—it seems like something but is really nothing. Nothing is real in the digital age, and nothing makes sense. Everything moves fast and nothing is really ever understood. Emptiness and confusion reign. Stoicism is a philosophy for that experience—it seems to offer some kind of perspective on this—but is in fact just part of it. It speaks so well to life in digital space, and in the social media age, not because it is some deep, profound, solid alternative to it—but because it is exactly the same thing as it!

Another reason stoicism is popular now is because it was a philosophy created for Greek slaves thousands of years ago—a way for slaves to cope with their awful existences, by being stoic about it. It should be obvious how this applies to today: 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, record numbers pack homeless shelters, drug overdoses and suicides are at all time highs, and on and on. Stoicism is the perfect philosophy for a new world of hopeless wage slavery and techno-feudalism.

Stoicism today has a double purpose for the ruling class: it helps the masses of neo-feudal subjects cope with their hopeless situation; and it is trotted out as the preferred philosophy of the lucky few rich winners of the game, the code of the new feudal overlords. So there’s the hope that if you too learn this philosophy, you can beat the odds and win the game and not spend your life paycheck to paycheck.

STEM is an ideology of elites, just like stoicism is. Both use the magical power of nature to mystify the masses as they plunge deeper into permanent poverty. Both offer some obscure hope that you can climb out of the abyss of the neo-feudal future, by learning to code, or by having special money mindset powers like Andrew Tate. But both are fundamentally fraud philosophies used by elites to keep the lower classes in control.