As the summer of discontent gets under way, most of us will be affected by strikes of one kind or another. We need a fairer distribution of wealth and there will inevitably be many unions balloting members in the coming months. With inflation, escalating food prices and energy bills, this seems inevitable. NHS workers, teachers, baggage handlers, and others are already poised to withhold their labour in the hope of getting a fairer deal. Rightly so in my view. Can philosophy help us cope with the personal impact of all this? Perhaps.
When people say “I’m philosophical” about what’s happening, they usually mean they’re stoical. And being stoical boils down to this: not getting worked up about things that you can’t change. You can try to influence fate, but you need to recognise that you can’t control it. All you can control are your reactions to it. This philosophy is extremely useful when things aren’t going according to plan: when your train or flight is cancelled, your operation postponed, or, as may well happen this autumn, if your child’s teachers decide to go on strike.
The founder of the Stoic school of philosophy was Zeno. His followers would meet at the Stoa, a distinctive painted porch on the edge of the marketplace in Athens – that’s how the group got the name. But it was the former slave, Epictetus, born around 50AD, who crystallised Stoic wisdom.
Like Socrates, Epictetus didn’t write anything down. But his student Arrian recorded his teaching. The essence of it is in the opening lines of the Enchiridion, his school’s handbook for life. There he introduces the so-called dichotomy of control:
“Some things are within our power, while others are not. Within our power are opinion, motivation, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever is of our own doing; not within our power are our body, our property, reputation, office, and in a word, whatever is not of our own doing.”
In other words, we can control what we think and feel about the cards we are dealt, but not what happens to us. We can influence what happens to our body, property, reputation, and office, but that is all. In contrast, we (allegedly) control the internal parts of what we are: what we think and feel. For Epictetus what goes wrong for many people is that they allow themselves to become slaves to what happens, when they should just have focused on what they could control, their own minds. How we think about things is the key factor in whether we can achieve mental peace, what the Stoics called ataraxia.
The most famous Stoic in the modern era, the US fighter pilot James Stockdale, was shot down over North Vietnam in 1965. He ejected from the plane, and as he descended towards what he knew would be a kind of hell, he whispered to himself “I’m leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus”.
Stockdale had learned about the Stoics as a student at Stanford and that helped him survive seven and a half years as a prisoner of war. Beaten, humiliated and tortured, he was kept in solitary confinement, in shackles for some of that time. His legs were broken twice. But he survived without losing his mind, using Stoicism to help him concentrate on his reactions to what his captors did to him.
Stockdale wrote several books about his experiences and seems to suggest that if you apply Epictetus’s philosophy as he did you will be able to endure great suffering, far greater suffering than a justified rail strike is ever likely to cause you. He was an exceptional person facing exceptional cruelty. But the Stoic way of thinking can help many of us get through a difficult patch.
That’s not to say that I’d endorse it wholeheartedly across the board. Present-day Stoics, advocates such as Massimo Pigliucci and Ryan Holiday, write enthusiastically about how and why we should be Stoics. But I’d much rather reserve it as a psychological tool to cope with emergencies and inconveniences, than as a general stance towards the world.
There are events such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine that I can’t directly affect, but I still want to stay emotionally involved with that, anxious about the outcome, fearful of the way things may go. To remain connected with the world we need to risk having our emotions swayed by things we can’t change as well as by the things we can.
