My journey with stoicism, part 2
In college, you learn that it may be useful to have ideas, but it’s even better to talk about them endlessly until you can make a career out of it. College and careers—they’ve now become inseparable. It seems almost irrational to imagine a time in your life where the only thing that mattered was the pursuit of knowledge. The romantic version of the past can never match reality. When I look back, I find it poetic that I nearly lost my love for philosophy in college.
There is a lot of talk about the way universities are held hostage by a certain kind of politics. Whatever you want to call it, there’s no denying the influence of politics on higher learning. Politics pervades any institution vying for power and influence. What I find more meaningful is the way universities teach young people to worship people and ideas, instead of thinking critically about people and ideas. Whether intentional or not, this insistence on optics and performance pervades our politics as well.
More important than the pursuit of knowledge, it seems, is the recognition of expertise and adapting your views in favor of serving that expertise. Everything has to be filed under schools of thoughts. Everything is a subtle expression of fame, as if the only way to excite young people about ideas is to manufacture intellectual rock stars. See, knowledge isn’t so boring—if you work hard enough, you may also ascend to the status of “public intellectual!” Instinct will tell you that intellectuals touted by mass media perpetuate political propaganda, but college teaches you to be more nuanced. Everything is about nuance! The masses have small talk. Smart people give lectures.
If you’re an up-and-coming leader of tomorrow, you must be a good student. What does it mean to be a good student? It means being subservient to your mentors. It means doing your homework so you get really good at making talking points sound like your own. Judgment is not critical thinking. Judgment makes you a humble servant of power. This applies to the entire spectrum of politics. If you watch some of our young leaders in government, you can see them rehearse authenticity in real time. In front of the public, they seem full of conviction. Behind the scenes, they are meek and eager to learn from their mentors. Once a good student, always a good student.
Now, we’ve come to see that even anti-establishment heroes can work passionately to defend power. The kind of hero worship that attempts to make moral contradictions acceptable stems from a universal desire to be seen and heard. Who doesn’t enjoy attention? Even if fame is unattainable, it feels good to be recognized. Here, you’d think that stoic philosophy can help mediate the influence of your ego. In many ways, I certainly believe it can. However, even stoic philosophy has become another way to rationalize corruption.
By reducing stoicism to a state of “not caring,” our public intellectuals and leaders provide a much-needed diversion from actual accountability. Leave philosophy to naive students hoping to change the world. The adults are in the room. The adults can talk their way out of anything. The adults can cynically talk about stoic philosophy to appease their conscience and justify the harm they have caused. In the end, they have learned not to care about what others think of them. And that, my friends, is the greatest skill one can ever learn.
