[Portuguese version here].
In Western societies, the stoic philosophical current has resurged strongly in the last decade. Various authors, thinkers, athletes, and entrepreneurs, among other eminent figures, have referred to the positive impact that this philosophy has had on their lives and professional performance. At its core, stoicism conveys an ideal of personal and psychological sovereignty, where the figure of the stoic sage remains unperturbed by external events, whether potentially positive or negative. As Nassim Taleb states in his book “Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder” the Stoic philosophy (particularly the Senecan perspective) proposes an attitude that goes even beyond imperturbability, where a person can enjoy all the benefits of Fortune/Fate/Luck, without suffering any disadvantage. Since for Stoicism, every obstacle is but a test to the virtue of the sage, there is then nothing truly negative except a lack of character fortification, the rejection of virtue, that is, indulgence in vice (any behavior that is not in function of Logos). For the Stoics, the Logos went beyond our current concept of logic, not being something purely mathematical and hyper-rational, but in part was seen as an invisible sense or ethical code inherent to human nature that tended towards the good.
Therefore, human beings need to put this code into practice to, so to speak, humanize themselves. Making an analogy, when we look at a serial killer, we almost automatically question whether such a person still has any shred of humanity within them. The stoic sage would be the diametrically opposite figure. Someone so forged by the constant battle between life and their psychological structure, they have become a figure that – paraphrasing Seneca – would equal the gods. So, if volatility, chaos, unpredictability, and even the storms that life can bring us, constitute a catalyst for our humanity, we become antifragile. Deep down, we grow and develop with each blow that life deals us. On the contrary, in the current Western culture, American psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that there is a preponderance and propagation of an attitude where the person is seen as a victim, a constant hostage of what they feel, predisposing them to see life as a war between good and evil. This is, therefore, a fragilist conceptualization, where the human being would have a sort of amount of blows they could take from life. Cross this threshold, and the subject “blows up.”
Metaphorically, this attitude is the one embodied by the character of the villain Joker from DC Comics, particularly present in Joaquin Phoenix’s interpretation, as in the comic book classic “The Killing Joke.” In both versions, the character “breaks” under the beatings (symbolic and concrete) that he suffers, thus surrendering to madness. It is interesting to also see how in the film the absence of the ability to regulate his emotions (even the pleasant ones) clearly reveals itself as a huge problem. When Arthur Fleck starts to laugh, he becomes completely unable to contain himself, turning the laughter into pain due to such lack of control. We then see not only the agonizing internal suffering mirrored in his desperate face, but also the uncomfortable faces of the people around him, who exhibit great discomfort while witnessing the situation. This emotional dysregulation seems to emerge largely from the helicopter parenting approach addressed by Haidt, where the terror felt by parents that something bad might happen to their child, leads them to live in a constant state of anxiety that makes them “hover” over their “offspring” so they can intervene at the slightest difficulty or adversity, preventing the child from developing their autonomy and ability to deal with adversities. This creates a relationship of dependency also mirrored in the film, in the Oedipal relationship that Fleck establishes with his mother.
Finally, in the film, the aspect of the struggle between “good and evil” becomes explicit through the character of Thomas Wayne (father of Bruce Wayne), an aristocratic figure who is portrayed as an icon of pedantry and arrogance that amalgamate and confuse with the fact of belonging to the elite. In the end, all these relational, social, and intrapsychic dynamics lead to riots and murders, where the supposed victims of society become the aggressors and the supposed oppressors, victims, showing that after all, evil is not in any particular class, but within the heart of each person. However, the genius of the film makes us sympathize and commiserate with the character of Arthur Fleck/Joker, leading us at least to viscerally understand the reasons for his modus operandi, and at most, justifying and validating it. I think the film aims to precisely show us how easily we can fall into this fragilist trap of overly identifying with what we feel and entering a dynamic of projecting evil onto the Other. In this way, stoicism ends up offering us an antidote to such a narrative.
If the Joker is the character who represents a fragilist perspective of the human being, who could then make its opposite parallel? Naturally the character of Bruce Wayne/Batman. Deep down he represents the stoic antifragile counterpoint. In a sentence: “Kill my parents, and I become a hero!” In this sense, Stoicism has the potential to heal a person from the prevailing fragilist tyranny.
I myself devoured books of the Stoics and felt on my skin a tremendous personal growth through the principles they proposed. For quite some time, my closest friends must have been fed up with me quoting the Stoics, so passionate was I about books such as “Letters to Lucilius.” However, over the years I also realized that what can determine the difference between a medicine and a poison is the dosage. By this, I mean that the human being (particularly the contemporary version) has a tendency to absolutize or deify something that they perceive as beneficial, and to see stoicism as food instead of medicine can bring, in my opinion, serious problems.
Stoicism is a philosophy, not an ideology, that can be so captivating, it might blind us with infatuation, rendering us incapable of seeing its potential biases. I give the example where Seneca (my favorite Stoic philosopher) states that anger should be completely repudiated, stating that it can’t help in any way. I mentioned earlier that giving ourselves over to emotions and letting them reign and direct our lives is not a good strategy. However, I disagree with Seneca in assuming that an intense emotion like anger has a negative meaning a priori and that it is entirely disposable. I agree that it is a potentially destructive emotion, but so is the loving affection of a mother when it translates into a hyperprotective excess that destroys a child’s abilities to grow and develop, even though these two examples operate with distinct mechanisms. As the saying goes, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”. I underline the term a priori, in attributing an inherently negative (or positive) connotation to an emotion, in this specific example, like anger. Human emotions are extremely complex phenomena and the context in which they arise and express makes all the difference in their meaning and even moral valence. For example, the ethologist Konrad Lorenz observed that an animal’s aggression towards an enemy/predator is proportional to the former’s proximity to its family members. The closer to them, the greater the animal’s aggression against the “intruder”.
This National Geographic-esque example could be complemented with another much more intrapsychically subjective one: imagine a young person who is walking down the street and sees a very expensive, stunning car passing by. Feeling that there is an insurmountable gap between his current state (teenager, without money, living at his parents’ home) and what he would need to own a car like that and everything that object might represent to him (from social status to financial freedom), the aesthetic feeling of beauty transforms into resentment, anger. Meanwhile, he even forgets about it, but a few months later he fervently (if not religiously) adopts a Marxist ideology and begins to argue that the “bourgeoisie” must be dethroned, being the oppressive class and he an oppressed one. In an alternative multiverse, this young person connected with the feeling inherent to his frustration, felt it without collapsing or rejecting it from his consciousness (without moralizing the emotion at birth), analyzed it, reflected on it, understood what it meant, and integrated/metabolized that moment. He then channels his efforts to overcome the initial gap and, years later, becomes a philanthropic multimillionaire.
In summary, if the fragile perspective makes us slaves to emotions, Stoicism can inadvertently make us slaves to a rationality disconnected from our internal affective and symbolic apparatus. I alternatively propose that, like Carl Jung, we should seek a process of religio, i.e., a true and deep connection (reconnection) with our internal world, while we connect to the external world. Essentially, Jung proposes that we integrate even the darkest aspects of our psyche, rather than surrendering to them or trying to eliminate them. I conclude with a beautiful image present in the Iliad which, to me, represents exactly this: Upon Hector’s return home after a battle, his son begins to cry in the nurse’s arms seeing that intimidating figure of an armored warrior, whom he did not recognize as his father. Hector and his wife laugh (something helicopter parents would never do), understanding what was happening. He removes his helmet and picks up his son, calming him down. While on one hand we must develop the ability to fight in the harsh arena of life, developing the ability to act determinedly in a productive manner, on the other hand it is essential that we know how to welcome the cries and tears of our unconscious, which also translate into the ability to form bonds with other people and, in this way, humanize ourselves in a more complete manner.