Minding The Stoa
Hey beautiful people,
I hope you had a great father’s day.
No events tomorrow but here are some upcoming events you’d might like:
Stoic Blues w/ Greg Thomas. June 29th @ 7:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Dialogos w/ John Vervaeke, Guy Sengstock, and Christopher Mastropietro. Every Other Tuesday @ 6:00 PM ET. Starts on June 30th. RSVP here.
Vajrayana Now: Sutra to Tantra w/ Charlie Awbery & Jared Janes. July 5th @ 12:00PM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
Steal the Culture w/ John Vervaeke and Akira the Don. July 6th @ 7:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
What is Emerging? w/ Maria Clara Parente. July 7th @ 4:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
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June 21, 2020
I am reading The Practicing Stoic: A Philosophical User’s Manual by Ward Farnsworth. It is good, and I will probably invite Ward to The Stoa. Something on the back of the dust jacket really caught my eye: a reference to what was possibly written on the tomb of Seneca …
Who’s Minding the Stoa?
Don't worry bro, I got this. I confess I was resistant in minding The Stoa—or “stewarding” to use proper Limbergian vernacular—but I am ready now. Maybe I am not ready, but I desire to pretend to be ready. Sometimes pretending you are ready makes you ready.
The Modern Stoics are not even in the stewarding game. They are too busy not listening to Epictetus, who famously wrote: "Don't explain your philosophy. Embody it."I quoted this before and I will quote it many times again because it is so central. Marcus wrote something similar: "Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one."
It is so fucking boring talking and writing about Stoicism, just read the OGs and shut the fuck up. But here I am being irritable again, and not appearing like a Stoic again, but that is the whole point: I am not here to appear to be Stoic, I am here to be one, and right now I should be one. I am well-connected with a Modern Stoicism movement, and I probably should chill with being annoyed at them, and maintain friendly relationships with them.
The point stands though. This is not about ideas for fuck's sake, this is about holding space, one where ideas can seriously play. The Stoa is a space for unknowingness to be fully alive, and it needs to be fully alive so we can earnestly explore a topic without being pressured by political memes. The politically minded get annoyed at this performative agnosticism, and will accuse this stance as being gateway drugs or dogwhistlers or useful idiots or cucks or whatever. No, you ideological idiots: unknowingness is not a panacea, nor should it be.
I agree with Eliezer Yudkowsky when he wrote that politics is the mind-killer. I do think we need to get political, but we do not have to get political at all times and in all spaces. Some spaces need to be stewarded differently and The Stoa is one such place. It is time for us to have a place for us to risk thinking differently, without knowing in advance what that difference might be.
David Fuller wants me to return to my correspondent role at Rebel Wisdom to do a piece on memetic mediation, and talk about what The Stoa is. The idea here is to raise The Stoa’s profile to encourage people to see it as the "Switzerland of the Culture War," which is a place we can talk about what matters most without fear of getting our asses cancelled.
I have felt resistance towards this, because I want this to grow organically. I have no desire to court Blue Church investments, nor culture war noise. It might be strategic to do that at some point, but right now this is about the space. The thing that some people do not get is that The Stoa is not a YouTube channel, or a podcast, or a membership subscription. Where I see people messing up in the sensemaking web is that they instrumentalize their “community building” initiatives on Game A models.
We do everything over Zoom for now, but The Stoa is not a Zoom room either. The Stoa is a space where a seed is planted, and we shall see if communitas will emerge from this seed. It might not though, and there is fear that this project will fail.
If I am going to go all in with stewarding The Stoa, and allow Seneca’s tombstone to tag me in, I will have to be a good Stoic and do my negative visualizations. This is The Stoic practice of visualizing the worst-case so you are not hindered by fearing the worst-case.
I am concerned that I might disappoint you and your expectations. Many people already have an emotional connection to The Stoa, and to its potential, and they are already projecting their hopes onto it. It is possible I am not worthy enough to steward this space well enough to not let your hopes down, but I have to risk letting them down, because somebody has to risk that.
Cancel culture could also come for this space. In a world where everything is problematic, it is not that hard to cancel someone or something. Our handsome mascot, the face of Marcus Aurelius, might be too white for example, hence too exclusive or something. We also had “problematic” guests visit The Stoa that were not Blue Church kosher, hence the old guilt by association attack is available.
I will be mindful of playing chess with cancel culture. I think my sensitivities to culture war dynamics allow me to do this as well as anyone can. The trick is not to capitulate to memetic gaslighting, nor become inauthentic with perspectival code-switching.
I do have some advanced preemptive metagaming moves up my sleeves, and I have a few contingency plans if cancel culture comes our way, but the idea is not to react with the fight or flight response. There is a more loving response, one that does not explain Stoic virtue, but embodies it.
Good. Do more of this, and become psychologically failure-proof, and fucking get at it. Now it is time to go beast mode, and hype this joint up. This is going to be a lot of work, but this is not about me. This is about the gift and The Stoa is a gift. Stoics are philosophers of the world and being a philosopher of the world means you are response-able to give your gift to the world.
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