Confusing Stoicism with stoicism

And a brief discussion on what the Stoics get wrong

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Stoicism isn’t about improving your bench press. Photo by LOGAN WEAVER | @LGNWVR on Unsplash

This week, I published my article In Defense of Stoic Acceptance. Because the article was running long and needed to end somewhere, an important clarification failed to make it in.

I believe that an enormous amount of the general animosity towards the philosophy comes down to confusing Stoicism with stoicism. Lower-case stoicism, the modern colloquialism, is associated with emotional repression, an uncomplaining, unfeeling demeanor, maintaining a stiff upper lip, and toxic masculinity.

Famously, the American Psychological Association suggested that stoicism was a significant contributing factor to the distress men face and the harm men exact upon the world. In this article, the APA acknowledges (correctly) the many challenges men face:

Men commit 90 percent of homicides in the United States and represent 77 percent of homicide victims. They’re the demographic group most at risk of being victimized by violent crime. They are 3.5 times more likely than women to die by suicide, and their life expectancy is 4.9 years shorter than women’s. Boys are far more likely to be diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder than girls, and they face harsher punishments in school—especially boys of color.

In the rest of the article, they argue that stoicism is responsible.

The main thrust of the subsequent research is that traditional masculinity—marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression—is, on the whole, harmful. Men socialized in this way are less likely to engage in healthy behaviors.

I understand how, with the popular pairing of stoicism with male violence and repression, Stoicism as a philosophy is seen as suspect and even dangerous. The problem, though, is that such usage confuses Stoicism (the philosophy) with stoicism (the modern usage.)

Words have a multiplicity of usages, and that is ok. It is indeed true that "stoicism" hurts many people. But this is not the ancient philosophy of Stoicism, which is far more nuanced and has a far more complicated relationship with emotion than one might initially suspect. As Martha Nussbaum quipped, no one in the ancient world talked about their emotions as much as the Stoics did.

I invite you to consider the following: