Limitless

Turned 23 the other day and moved out of my house. Drove 5 hours down the eastern seaboard and ended up in some ramshackle locality outside of D.C. It's funny how our nation's lawmakers have allowed the country, even right outside their doorstep, to fall into abject disrepair, but it's not very surprising. I suppose they're mostly commuters anyway. What I did find surprising was how sad I felt when I left. An incomprehensible tightening of the chest and a wavering of the muscles in my face accompanied my flight down the LIE. I always envisioned it as a kind of two-lane runway. The farther east you go, the farther you are spinning out into empty space, taking off over the sparkling blue sea that takes you, if you slog it out long enough, to Portugal (there's a large expatriate community of portugese that reside in my home hamlet and I have often wondered why). Westbound is the frontier, the great American expanse, towards manifest destiny and all that. I get the acute sensation that what I am doing is destined, written in the stars, swept along by causes I can hardly fathom. After all, I left the day after my birthday. Now I'm an adult. The youngest millennial and the oldest of Gen-Z. Gone, cut loose, adrift, all on my own and of my own choosing. This is what I wanted. I get the willies, you know.

Something that's giving me the willies is the continued degradation of the near certainties and convictions I held firm in my mind up until about this moment. In a certain sense this isn't the cataclysm it would appear to be because I have so often espoused the rhetoric of fluidity and adaptability, expressed a casual disdain for fixed beliefs, and praised the virtue, recently, of harnassing the power of mass politics without the ideology. So why the fear? Because I have also spent this past half decade leaning into grievance, solidified a great antipathy for modernity, and pledged fealty, like a bird fluttering between nests, to a variety of exotic and niche ideologies. But this is all part of the game. A small cottage industry is being made out of it on the fringes of social media platforms, where energetic and politically aware young adults gather and hold discourse on hot-button topics and make a show of outdoing each other in posting the most self-gratifying, vacuous and loquacious aphorisms possible. Most of it is laced with profound irony, whatever the seemingly profound disagreements each niche faction has with the other. But that is just the supposed substance. The sentiment behind every such post is very real and masks sincere emotion. Without typing out an essay, the point is (to self-negate once again), there is no real point. It is a game of "clout-chasing", as we've discussed before. It is a transference of real-life interactions, both real and ideal, to the digital sphere. An e-agora. 

So, again, why the trouble? Because I too had latched on to strange and niche ideologies, neoreaction, catholic integralism, national syndicalism, and in doing so have left myself open to the quite fitting charge that I too am nothing more than a living, walking, talking charade. I have compromised myself, because by thinking that what I thought was certain and true, by my inflexibility and dogmatic stance towards the world, I have sunken into ignorance. I did not know what I did not know. 

This is tough to grapple with, but I can see now (just as I can see the future, I can now look back and see the past with open eyes) that it's been a long time coming. The tendency to sympathize with quietest thinking is no coincidence. In the vein of Parmenides, Wittgenstein and Pyrrho, self-negating philosophies are the only ones to truly grapple with epistemological limits, something not even Kant (for all his pretensions about "limits that dictate the possibility of experience") could stake a claim to. So what does that mean? What do I believe? 

I don't know (not entirely anyway). But what I do know is that this blog is part of my failure. Adam Tooze summed up in a sub-250 character tweet what I tried to say in an essay-length blogpost. Tiktok is the opium of the zoomers and this has become a threat to national security. Was that so hard? Apparently for small minds such as mine, it is. So once again I am confronted by epistemological crisis, greater perhaps in magnitude than the one that struck me in 2015 and 2016. But it is a natural evolution, just as it was then. The fact that it has led me here, towards these tendencies, is perhaps surprising. But it is a reconciliation of disparate strands I had tried desperately to string together. What is clarity anyway? It is waking up.

The reality of political power

Sometimes I want to let go of all my hatreds, prejudices and biases and accept (even embrace) things as they are, but that would feel too much like a surrender of all principle. The latter sentiment is far stronger than the former, but I wonder what will happen if I give it another decade. Is that part of the maturation process? If my father were in his grave, he would be rolling in it. But I wonder if it's possible to accept things as they are (is, i.e. being) while also retaining great disdain for what-is. A great negation of the All, that's nihilism, isn't it? I'm not a nihilist, haven't been since I had an intellectual growth spurt that took me right out of the progressive-liberal-humanistic-atheistic mentality of my formative years (of which I am eternally thankful, for many people never progress (haha) beyond this point, indeed feel as if they don't have to), but lately I have grown tired, and I have begun to wonder if perhaps some kind of reconciliation isn't possible, if maybe it is right to think it all a waste while still retaining some notion of positive value, if not in what currently is, then in process, style, for lack of a better term: artistry. 

These are hairy questions, not least because there is a long and substantive philosophical debate, stretching back to Plato, over questions concerning the distinction between art and technique, as well as the question of art's utility at all. Plato is hostile to art, sees in it a mere mimicry of true reality. Aristotle concurs, funnily enough, with Oscar Wilde, who says that while art may be useless, it is not its utility that makes it attractive. Fair enough, I err towards Aristotle in his appreciation of art as a vehicle for luxury and intellectual contemplation, but I lean towards Plato when it comes to his more censorious vision. Not all art, as Plato understood well enough, is good for contemplation. Indeed, he should have just taken the extra step and deemed those deity-anthropomorphizing poems he hated so much as non-art. Negate the whole thing. That's courage. That's decision. It's not the knack of the sophists, but it's not art either. It's nothing. 

A lot of things, it seems, have a claim to nothing. I want to share a passage that's stuck with me from Yukio Mishima's greatest book (of the ones I've read anyway) about politics and art. The narrator Mizoguchi and his precocious, deformed friend/mentor Kashiwagi are taking a walk in a nature preserve with two girls and stumble upon the grave of a storied noblewoman. They stop to pray: 'There's something very shabby about a noble grave like this, isn't there?' said Kashiwagi. 'Political power and the power of wealth result in splendid graves. Really impressive graves, you know. Such creatures never had any imagination while they lived, and quite naturally their graves don't leave any room for imagination either. But noble people live only on the imagination of themselves and others, and so they leave graves like this which inevitably stir one's imagination. And this I find even more wretched. Such people, you see, are obliged even after they are dead to continue begging people to use their power of imagination.' 

'You mean that nobility only exists in the power of imagination?'I said, merrily joining in the conversation. 'You often speak of reality. What do you consider to be the reality of nobility?'

'It's this!' said Kashiwagi, slapping the top of the moss-covered pillar. 'It's stone or bone - the inorganic residue that people leave after they are dead.' 

'You're damned Buddhist in your views, aren't you?' I said. 

'What's it got to do with Buddhism or any stuff like that?' said Kashiwagi. 'Nobility, culture, what people consider aesthetic - the reality of all those things is barren and inorganic. It isn't the Ryoan Temple that you see, but simply a pile of stones. Philosophy, art - it's all a lot of stones. The only really organic concern that people have is politics. It's a shame, isn't it? One can almost say that human beings are no more than self-defiling creatures.'

This is what Mishima really acted out when he went and staged an attempted coup at a Tokyo military base in 1970 before committing seppuku, and this is what a lot of people surprisingly fail to get. The term "right-wing nationalist" gets thrown around a lot, and it isn't hard to slap the label on someone like Mishima, who from his writings it is clear opposed westernization, modernization and retained an appreciation for the simplistic, parochial life. But consider the quote above. Have you ever heard a right-winger speak like that? If he really wished to restore imperial authority, why didn't he march into the imperial palace and proclaim the restoration of the empire? How do you reconcile his stated desire to restore power to the emperor with the views on nobility expressed above?

Mishima engaged in something like political action and as a result defiled himself. He knew this well enough, which is why he planned out his suicide in meticulous fashion, complete with the penning of some traditional death poems and apportioning out roles for assistance in his own beheading. He never intended to leave alive. His act was a statement. A play-drama. A statement of what, though? Politics? No. We know that the political, while seemingly the "only organic concern" of human beings, ends, as with everything else, in the shabby moss-covered headstone. Engaging in the political requires a feat of imagination. Aesthetics, then? Maybe. What people consider the aesthetic turns out to be nothing but dust, for if politics is downstream from culture, and culture is faulty aesthetics, then it all ends the same. But he did write books after all. That, manifestly, was useless in the positive sense as opposed to the negative. It allowed the cultivation of a certain vitality, a new aesthetics that can subordinate the political, strip the emperor of his clothes and reveal to us what it all really means: nothing. It is meaningless. The reality is that there is no reality.

Doubtless there are many who would disagree. Can the all-encompassing Political really be subsumed under something else, the (for lack of a better word) Aesthetic? What's so encompassing about it, anyway? The substantive and enduring may not be as such as it claims to be. If that is the case, where does that leave us? It is quite like trying to atemporalize the temporal, to not only throw out the baby with the bathwater but to keep the water from evaporating after it has been tossed, to gather them back up and toss them some more.

Mishima, more than anything else, was just a good Trotskyist, or perhaps an echo of the future Soviet marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, who, while imprisoned in the prison-fortress of Ingolstadt during the Great War, had this to do and say: "After a lengthy discussion on literature, he would declare that all books should be burnt so that the soul of man could be truly liberated. One day a French captain found him building a grotesque cardboard monster holding a bomb, which he explained was the God of War and Destruction, Pierun. 'We will enter into the state of Chaos, and will only emerge from it with the total ruin of civlization,' [Tukhachevsky] solemnly told the astonished Frenchman as he prostrated himself before it. 

He continues: 'The Jews brought us Christianity, and that is reason enough to loathe them,' he lectured on another occasion. 'And anyway, they belong to a low race. You cannot understand this, you Frenchmen for whom equality is a dogma. The Jew is a dog, son of a bitch, and he spreads his fleas throughout the world. It is he who has done more than any other to inoculate us to the plague of civilization, and who would like to give us his morality, the morality of money, of capital...The great socialists are Jews, and the socialist doctrine is a branch of universal Christianity...I loathe all socialists, Christians and Jews!'

And critically: 'Why should I care whether it is with the Red Banner or the Orthodox Cross that I conquer Constantinople?' he mused. He never tired of reading about or discussing the feats of Caesar and Napoleon, and was determined to be, in his own words, a general or a corpse by the age of thirty.

In the end, he became both a general and a corpse. Another shabby stone. It is just as well that a man who could say and feel these things would become Marshal of the Soviet Union, just as it's little surprise that someone like Mishima, who evidently sympathized with the spirit of the above quotations, would die for the emperor. It is permanent revolution for revolution's sake. It is, at heart, apolitical. Their nihilisms are a way out. It is the demolition of the political, without a care for its theoretical breadth, and its replacement with a quest for narrative and drama. By seeming to fully embrace what-is, they discover the means by which it can finally be negated. What an insight! 

Lebanon: A future-oriented case study in mass anti-politics

An explosion leveled a good chunk of Beirut yesterday. For a country grown accustomed to its place as a regional punching bag in Levantine wars and no stranger to civil conflict itself, this should have been old hat. But this was something different. Thousands of tons of ammonium nitrate, the same substance Timothy McVeigh used to devastate the federal building in Oklahoma City, caught fire and produced an explosion of such power that its seismic impact was registered as the equivalent of a 3.3 magnitude earthquake. As of now over a hundred are confirmed dead, hundreds more are missing, thousands are wounded, and hundreds of thousands are homeless. Couple this with a polarized political system that makes Congress look like a unity government, a rapidly spreading coronavirus outbreak, and an economy already in total free-fall and you've got all the ingredients necessary to spur the overthrow of the ancien regime. 

It's a little early to break out the guillotines. They're still sifting through the rubble. But the past decade of Lebanese politics will be instructive in predicting what comes next. As I've said, Lebanon is no stranger to turmoil and has not been since it was granted independence by the French in 1945. In the 19th century, the colonial authorities, finding that ruling over a hostile foreign population was not particularly easy, chose to empower certain sectarian minorities to promote their interests at the expense of others, tying native fortunes to those of the colonizer and ensuring that they would maintain their rule through proxy and division.

Despite the absence of French authority, this model of politics has continued in Lebanon to the present day. Breakdown in the relations between Maronite Christians and Muslims of all stripes triggered a twenty year sectarian civil war that drew in regional and international powers and became a test-ground for the exportation of Iranian revolutionary politics. Though a tentative power-sharing accord was reached between the warring parties in 1990, domestic stability has remained precarious since then. Hezbollah, the paramilitary brainchild of the late General Soleimani and his Quds Force, managed to force an Israeli retreat from the south in 2000 and held its ground against an IDF offensive in 2006. The success of this predominantly Shiite force in resisting the hated-and-feared Zionist bogeyman increased its fortunes in Lebanese politics dramatically and so it did what any maturing and politically conscious non-state organization will do to enhance its respectability: it entered domestic politics.

This is not the whole story, of course, though Israeli apologists would certainly like to make it all about Israel. Hezbollah is something like a state-within-a-state, providing essential services to the people who dwell within its power-base, particularly in southern Lebanon. Its popularity, military strength and important political and religious connections to the Syrian Baathists (who occupied the country until a 2005 protest movement forced them out - more on that later) and Iran have enabled it to wield veto power over the formation of new governing cabinets and coerce those who oppose it. The current government, while by no means orchestrated by Hezbollah, is certainly oriented towards it. Party politics in Lebanon, funnily enough, has been split along lines of division over relations with the Syrian government. The March-8th Alliance, led by Hezbollah, supports a close relationship with the Assad regime and is comprised of a number of left-nationalist and nominally populist parties. The March-14th Alliance, on the other hand, is anti-Syrian, mostly comprised of liberal parties, and led by Saad Hariri's Future Movement. The Hairis have a colorful history (no pun intended) of shaping the politics of post-war Lebanon. The father, Rafic Hariri, was assassinated by Hezbollah in 2005, which inadvertently precipitated the Cedar Revolution, which led to the withdrawal of Syrian troops from the country. There is a sectarian element to all this, with Saad being a Sunni and aligned with Saudi Arabia, and Hassan Nasrallah's Hezbollah being Shiite and aligned with Iran. A hodgepodge of other religious minorities, Druze and Christians among them, have their own political parties to represent their interests as per the peace agreement. Tellingly, most have chosen to align themselves with Hezbollah and March 8th.

The Syrian civil war, which has been raging for 9 years, has done much to unravel the Taif Agreement that ended Lebanon's own war. The Future Movement, at least in the early years of the war, was not very quiet about its support, both rhetorical and material, for the Syrian opposition. Hezbollah, after two years of mounting support, went all in and intervened in the war on the side of Assad in 2013. It did much to turn the tide and the next 7 years have been a slow reconquest of the territories that have fallen out of Assad's grip. Tensions in Syria spilled over into Lebanon, clans that supported opposing sides engaged in firefights on the streets, firebrand salafist clerics like Ahmed al-Assir led their followers into armed clashes with Hezbollah, suicide and car bombs detonated with alarming regularity from 2013 to 2015. The Islamic State surged across the Qalamoun mountains and captured the border town of Arsal in 2014. Millions of refugees have flooded into the country and now comprise approximately a quarter of its population. Gridlock between March 8th and 14th led to caretaker governments from 2013 on. All the while the culture of nepotism, patronage and sectarianism continued to corrode state capacity, the government failed to render essential services, the country's currency has dropped precipitously in value, trash has piled up on the streets. In 2017, proposed tax hikes triggered widespread protests that forced the government to backpedal. In 2019, another tax, this time on WhatsApp, exploded into a revolt against politicians in general and forced the resignation of Saad Hariri, who until then had been enjoying the fruits of being prime minister. Before that, he had been kept in limbo by the House of Saud in late 2017, forced to announce his resignation (which was swiftly reversed) from the premiership in what amounted to nothing more than a big tantrum on the part of his patrons, who naturally cannot figure out how to exercise real influence in the country (they are better at chopping up foreign journalists). Now here we are: after seven years of repeated inquiries from customs officials at the port of Beirut seeking guidance on how to safely dispose of the ammonium nitrate piled up in their storage facilities, the problem has taken care of itself quite fittingly.

So why the history lesson? To tell you that none of it really matters of course. Saudi Arabia and Iran, Syria and Lebanon, Hezbollah and the Future Movement, all the days and ides of March cannot measure up to the fact that the central Lebanese problem is stagnation and the only solution is change - whatever the cost and whatever shape such change might take. Notice how the only time the system has really been rocked has been when protest on the part of the capital-p People have broken out over some issue. The assassination of Hariri led to a revolution that ended a foreign occupation. The 2017 and 2019 street protests were ostensibly about taxes; in reality they were successive straws flattening the humps on the camel's back, and the camel is now slouching not towards Bethlehem as its Shiite retainers might wish it to but towards the abyss that its Syrian neighbors have already plunged over. This explosion was the last straw. Something has to give.

I don't think Lebanon is interested in another round of civil war. Each side, quite unlike the informational asymmetry that allows most wars to break out in the first place, has a clear idea of what to expect from the other and collective memory of the devastation wrought by the 25 years of fighting that flattened the country has proved to be a useful check when things have threatened to spiral out of control in the past. However, the situation now is so bad, the degradation of the country's politics and economics so acute, that the social sphere has no recourse but to exercise a commanding demonstration of power. It must, in essence, seize back control of the state from those who have made it a chessboard. A revolt against not any specific politics but against the political writ large is now necessary to reverse the decline. After all, the fault lies with no specific political party, really. March 8th and 14th respond to different sectors of society, but their constituents are now feeling the squeeze all the same. The spoils of a rapacious system that has raped Lebanon and removed from it its riches, stolen from its people and rendered them destitute is built into the structure of the political arrangement agreed upon by the heads of Lebanon's interest groups. It is politics that is the problem.

This line of thinking might be considered dangerous by more thoughtful observers, since a rejection of the political as such leads us down the dangerous road to apolitical technocracy, in which decision making is located in a small group of experts, and "scientific public policy" becomes the means by which social, political and economic questions are adjudicated. This is exactly the kind of state-capture by expertise that produced two decades of blundering errors and ultimately resulted in the populist explosions wracking the west. If the previous two decades have shown us anything, it's that "experts", when allowed to pursue the policies they feel best serve their countries, more often produce ruin and misery for themselves and others than anything else. How, then, to reconcile the necessity of the political with a mass-movement committed to anti-politics?

Something curious is happening in other countries bordering the Mediterranean sea whose political economies are facing equally dire circumstances. A new party family, dubbed techno-populist by observers, is emerging in those nations of southern Europe which continue to face stagnating economic conditions, high unemployment, painful austerity, and where debt service as a proportion of GDP continues to rise dramatically. These debtor nations, having failed to recover from the systemic crisis of the Eurozone triggered by the Great Recession, have watched as what had once been solid party systems crumble under the strains of the slow-moving crisis. In some countries, the result has been a turn towards left-populism. In others, right-wing populism. But in some states, particularly Italy, something new has been born. The people have taken their anti-system and anti-establishment sentiments and channeled them into the creation of new, explicitly non-ideological parties that nevertheless retain the discourse of populism.

This is curious, because populism, despite its occasional designation as a "thin ideology", is associated not merely with mass movements but with ideological mass politics. Indeed, someone who considers the history of populist movements, particularly the agrarian radicals of the 1890s, might be inclined to interpret their later embrace of targeted interest group tactics and incorporation into the federal bureaucracy as the resignation of politics in the face of the unconquerable logic of the administrative state. If you can't beat them, join them. But the collision between ideological mass movements and what has been dubbed by some as the "technostructure" need not, as a rule, result in the dissipation of mass politics into the machinery of the state. Indeed, the new challenge for populists seems not to be the question of how to win power (the people seem quite satisfied to elevate them there) but how to master the problem of hostile administration after their ascent.

One solution seems to be to abandon ideology without abandoning mass politics. In essence, we are separating politics from ideology. On the face of it, this is absurd. What is politics without ideology? Simple. It's mass anti-politics. To prevent co-optation, the movement must, after it wins power, continue to govern as if it is not in power. Given a minute's consideration, this appears to be a feature and not a bug. The entire point of an anti-system, anti-establishment movement is to destroy the system and the establishment it supports. In order to prevent capture by the system, it must level everything even after it wins power, including itself. Short of civil war, the only way for anti-politics to defeat politics is to wash it all away from the inside. To halt the game, you must flip the board.

This is why "post-ideological" parties like Italy's Five Star Movement are so puzzling to observers. Its schizophrenic governing style and continued hostile rhetoric against the "system" appear to be undercutting its ability to deliver on its promises. But this was its promise. It demanded an end to elite-driven politics, it promised the introduction of technology as a direct mediator between the people and its representatives, its plebiscitarian character and fondness for referendums, its mishmash of positions taken from both left and right, its focus on "apolitical" problems as represented by the five stars - water, development, transportation, environment and digital access - are all indicative of its desire to transcend polarization and politics. It does not refer to itself as a political party. It's a broad-based cross-party post-ideological anti-political movement and its inability to govern is of no moment. They are there, first and foremost, to destroy.

One must admit a certain amount of flexibility in our use of terminology here. This is not merely a semantic issue. Five Star is certainly non-ideological and hostile to politics as such, even as it has embraced the power of the masses and has committed itself to direct democracy. The party is certainly riven with dispute and its ability to adequately destroy the liberal institutions that seek to undermine it has been hampered by political expediencies and conflict with other parties and supranational entities. The vestiges of political DNA remain within it, that is the danger of such a movement. When the conditions are right, the only power on Earth that can defeat it is itself. By attaching itself to Italy's Democratic Party in a new coalition, it has surrendered ever more of itself to a political configuration that separates it from the masses, hence its dramatic drop in the polls. Its "government of change" with Lega Nord ended not because it was unworkable, but because Lega's leading personality is an egotist. They entered government with the right impulses.

What does this mean for Lebanon? For a mass anti-politics to succeed, they must replicate the successes of past protest by adopting the Five Star model as a guide. In 2005, the People secured the withdrawal of the Syrian army. In 2017, they forced the state to roll back its taxation scheme. In 2019, they forced the resignation of Saad Hariri as prime minister. Now, in the wake of Beirut's disaster, they have an opportunity to put an end to the whole thing. The history, the politics, none of it is relevant any longer. All that matters is the all-consuming tide of rage that can sweep away Lebanon's decrepit institutions. Everything must go. The system must be demolished, smashed, obliterated, incinerated, annihilated, inundated by the ravenous desire for change-at-all-costs.

Will they? Won't they? Anger is simmering in the streets as we speak. There will surely be a reckoning. But what form it takes is up to them. Surely the Lebanese will decide to replicate their previous experiences in mass protest. Past experience tells us that the state, brittle and enervated as it is, will capitulate fairly quickly to demands. The question is whether the demands will be specific, substantive and politically motivated, or broad, non-ideological, and anti-political. An inability to pinpoint specific actions it can stake to quell discontent may lead the state to violent action in order to defend itself. But the army is widely praised as an apolitical institution and with the salary of the individual soldier in steep decline it seems unlikely that they will come to its defense.

Say the protests adapt the Five Star model as a principle of organization. Let's say it even succeeds. The inevitable question among horrified commentators and observers will be: What comes next? To that I have to say: Who cares?

Beneath the 'wheeling stars'

It is often stated that the less people know, the more they opine on the matters of which they know little. Consider that the Socratic thesis we have spoken so much about: that people are generally ignorant when they make assertions concerning matters of which they believe they are intellectually equipped to speak when in fact they are not. We all know people like this as surely as we know ourselves. Because whether you know it or not, you are likely guilty of this very offense.

To my everlasting shame, I am also guilty of indulging in the act. It is almost irresistible and to this I wonder why. What compels us to speak so freely about matters of which we know little? On the one hand, I believe it to be a matter of showmanship. Despite a century of degradation, intellectualism still instills envy and enmity in the hearts of those who lack it. On the other hand however, I find that we are most often compelled to argue against matters which threaten to encroach on cherished beliefs and values. When we find ourselves in the realm of belligerent ideologies and rival philosophies, we are entering the twilight zone, a free-for-all where anything and everything goes, where popular canards and simplified recapitulations of complex arguments become the means by which partisans wage war. Hence the state of political discourse at the present moment, where oftentimes incoherent screaming seems to serve its interlocutors just as well as reasoned discourse. Who wants to read a book in the age of digitized revolution?

Once again, I am guilty of just this very offense. Though I will stake out my nonexistent credibility to reassure the enterprising reader that I will, for the most part, concede my deficiency in matters of which I know little. My ire usually arises as a result of an acutely felt intuition that the characteristics of a particular philosophy's supporters reflect the substantive content (and therefore value) of that philosophy. This is somewhat off the mark, but I believe it approaches something closer to truth when we consider one particularly popular philosophy: stoicism.

If any philosophy has ever suffered immense bastardization, popularization, and intellectual pauperization, it is stoicism. Willingly or not, the content of stoicism has served, consciously and unconsciously, as the basis from which a whole new therapeutic vernacular has been cultivated by a cottage-industry of inward-directed self-help bestsellers. Most of them skyrocket to the top of the New York Times' bestseller list and stay there for weeks or months. What do all these buzzwords mean? It's not terribly difficult. I've said it before. We live in a strange time, where multiplying identities are fueling the balkanization of society into disparate groups, where everything from depression to autism to self-harm are held up like merit badges. It is a brand new culture of individuality. Or to echo the late Christopher Lasch: an ethos of narcissism. The pharmaceutical industry, ever ready to make profit, has few qualms in aiding children and adult-children (it is sometimes hard to tell the difference) alike in their quest to portray themselves as the world's greatest victim by pumping them full of Zoloft. An army of degree-wielding "professionals" on the other hand are plenty pleased to play at perennial extortion by treating symptoms and not causes by pushing treatments like cognitive-behavioral therapy. Instead of concerning themselves with nosology and ultimate causation, they are content to sit behind the desk and provide the validation their victims crave.

A new language has inevitably arisen to cope with the new demands of the day. "Wellness", "self-care", "mindfulness", "personal growth", "self-improvement", "self- actualization". The new mindset preaches (funnily enough) a disinterested attitude towards aspects of the world that seem to infringe of the wellness of the individual. It suggests that withdrawal, nonchalance, and imperturbability are the goals to strive for. People on both sides of the political aisle use this language to describe their real or ideal responses to everyday inconveniences. "I cut off toxic people". "I needed a mental health day". Some of these are old words in new guises. Some of these phrases clash with the demands of permanent victimhood. All use it to describe their ideal state of neo-apatheia, the stoic equivalent to the epicurean ataraxia (of which more is to follow).

The ideal of stoicism is attractive to psychological man because it seems to offer a vindication of everything they desire, perhaps summed up best by the enduring popularity of the crassly titled "book" The Subtle Art of Not Giving A Fuck. The dilemma that arises from self-help of this kind isn't hard to see: never mind the fact that those who write these things disguise pandering trite and pithy statements as profound and life-altering ethical guidance, what people want is to simply not give a fuck about the things that harangue them on a daily basis, but they never seem to succeed in reaching that euphoric state of apathy. They want to craft an image of themselves as disinterested, unbothered and eminently rational. There is an obvious affinity here to a philosophy that preaches a certain kind of ethical and ontological individualism, where the only thing within our control is rational judgment, and everything outside of this judgment is relegated to matters outside of our control. It is quite like that other imported fashion: Buddhism.

Therein lies the issue. Stoicism is not dangerous because its followers are confused and uncouth philistines merely grafting onto its philosophy like a fad. It is dangerous because there is a genuine affinity between the individualism of the stoa and the individualism of therapeutic society. Furthermore, stoicism at its heart is not merely a peculiar application of virtue ethics whose primary difference from other ethical systems stems from mere matters of emphases, but because stoicism at heart is actually self-mastery supplemented by virtue ethics. Self-mastery is morally neutral and not of necessity virtuous. Consider this quote from Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, in which the eponymous protagonist considers his relentless pursuit of sensual experience:

"What has the actual passage of time got to do with it? It is only shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion. A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them."

Quite apart from the stoic conception of self-mastery + virtue ethics, what we have here is self-mastery put in service of libertinism. It is the conquest of the self for its own gratification, through indulgence in externalities. So quite apart from the "moral freedom" preached by the likes of Epictetus, we find that self-mastery, the "rational check" on our impulses, can actually be used to cultivate and indulge said impulses. Stoicism contains the seeds of its own destruction.

All well and good, psychological man might say, but there is clearly a choice to be had here. The rational man who exercises mastery of his judgment can still choose virtue over vice. Just because there is no inseparable linkage between control and virtue does not mean that the two cannot be cobbled together into a useful fusion. That may be so, but with the umbilical cord between the two severed, the tensions that had been papered over burst out into full view, for the Stoics themselves conceived of the relationship between the two as inextricable and equivalent. Consider Epictetus's assertion: "Freedom is not obtained through the satisfaction of desires, but through the suppression of desires". Unfortunately for him, the only way forward appears to be through the conquest of the self. But the suppression by itself is not virtuous, as we have seen. Virtue must be tacked on after the fact. It is a junior partner in this relationship, for the suppression of desire, the moral purity of the stoic, can come only after we have purged ourselves of positive interest in things outside our control (judgment). But virtue demands positive interest in the world outside of ourselves, in our community, in our friends and neighbors and relatives. And to the credit of the stoics, they acknowledged these things and sincerely believed the two were compatible. Unfortunately, their mistake reveals discord at best and incompatibility at worst. For a separation of self from world, a retreat into the "inner citadel", cannot possibly accord with the demands and obligations that come from our virtuous investments in the world outside of ourselves. Seneca says we ought to kill ourselves in the face of unbearable indignity and shame. He similarly advises that one ought not to grieve the sudden death of loved ones, for we should have already reconciled ourselves to the expectation of death. One can only wonder what becomes of customs that dictated social relations in every society from Rome to the present day. One wonders what becomes of justice, injustice, honor, dishonor, love, grief, happiness, sadness and the physical expressions and ritual manifestations of them all. I loathe to find myself in concord with anything Nietzsche said, for I find his fanatical fanbase very similar to those of the stoics, but I can only concede the aptness of his statement that such a life is not very much in accord with the diktat of Nature. It is rather hostile to an aesthetics of living.

And so my taste for Hellenic ethics soured somewhat upon encountering this strange alliance between therapeutic man and ancient stoicism. Being the generalist that I am, this naturally made me skeptical of most post-peripatetic ethical systems. But my recent encounter with Lucretius has forced me to rethink what I impulsively assumed. What I found in his famous poem de rerum natura was an altogether more subtle appreciation for the art of living. It was, in fact, a definitive statement of the life that I believe most people would like to lead, if only they would mount an intifada against the shackles they have unthinkingly placed upon themselves.

Epicureanism is curious in that is one of the few philosophies whose entire rationale for existence is the fixation on and widespread fear of death. Epicurus inaugurated a line of thinking that still resonates today when he argued against the fear of death via this rather simple syllogism:

P1: When I am, death is not

P2: When I am not, death is

C: Fear of death is unwarranted

This is compelling enough by itself. I have encountered a surprising number of people who don't fear death and, when pressed to explain their views, echo some variation of this argument. I believe the opposite conclusion to be warranted by the premises, but that's neither here nor there. Wittgenstein would later pick up on this, but rather than use it in service of ethics, he was focused instead on making a transcendental argument concerning the nature of death. Fascinating stuff, but somewhat beyond the scope of this post. For our present purposes, what matters is that epicureanism is so concerned with death to the point where I do not think it hyperbole to assert that its life-ethos revolves around it. For Epicurus and Lucretius were primarily concerned with the abundance of religiosity in their day. They found organized belief ridiculous, they were atomists, materialists (in a rather loose sense), maybe not atheists but at the very least unconvinced that the Gods would concern themselves with human affairs. They saw the fear of death as the primary motivating factor in bringing people around to the idea that Zeus would smite you with a lightning bolt if he was displeased with your votive offerings.

Perhaps they were right about this. They were on the right track in their positing of atoms as ultimate causes, after all. Their refusal to embrace theology sent them towards natural philosophy and metaphysics instead, and opened the door to (as far as I can tell) the first formulation of underdetermination as a principle of physical theorizing, as Lucretius recounts:

To settle upon what's certain in this world,

That's hard. But what might possibly apply

In various worlds arranged in various ways,

That I can show, and set forth many causes

Of stellar motion through the universe.

One of those anyway must be what stirs

The stars to move; but to find which it is

Is not for our slow, step-by-step advance.

There is some humility in there. But the humility sometimes curdles into revelry:

One thing restores another; it must be.

And no one's flung to the pit or the pains of Hell.

We need those atoms for our progeny.

Who, though they live life full, shall follow us.

Before you came, men died - and they will die.

One thing gives rise to another, incessantly;

Life's given to no one outright; all must borrow.

Reflect how the span of the endless past

Before our births mean nothing at all to us.

Here Nature has provided us a mirror

Of the time to come when we at last have died.

Is there horror in the prospect? Any sorrow?

Isn't it freer from care than the sweetest sleep?

We frighten ourselves with stories of heaven and hell. What really ails us are our anxieties and fears about what-is-not, we cling (cravenly) to life when we should instead accept it as a natural progression in the endless All, the void in which atoms clash and clang and weave together to form the universe. Despite his hostility to Heraclitean ontology, the epicurean world is a world of ceaseless change, of reformation and destruction, life and death, it is a unity of opposites. Epicureanism tells us that we are born to die. We must embrace death to truly live.

Not content with his exhortations, Lucretius describes the fear of death as a consequence of man's ascent from a state of savagery to civilization, for death was of no moment to man before he discovered community:

Nor did those mortals much more often then

Lament their leaving the sweet light of life.

More often it happened then that someone snatched

By the fangs of a beast gave him living feed to gobble,

Filled hills and forests with his cry, alive

But watching his vitals interred in a living tomb.

And those who could flee to safety with half-gnawed bodies

Later would press their festering sores, their palms

In a palsy, and call for Death with dreadful cries,

Til the grip of lockjaw took their lives away,

Helpless, not knowing how to treat a wound.

From this it is not a long pathway to inventing the Gods, and from there we are not very far from ascribing to them vindictiveness and a willingness to "aim at us" the "limitless power" that "wheels the planets and stars".

And what does it mean to truly live? We find a description of tranquility in the latter half of the poem:

And echoing the liquid warble of birds

Came long before men gathered together to sing

Fine polished carols to delight the ear.

And the winds whistling in the hollow of reeds

Taught them to play the rustic hemlock pipe.

Then little by little they learned the sweet complaints

That the pipe pours forth at the fingering-pulse of the players,

Heard in the trackless forests, the shepherds' dells,

Places of sunlit solitude and peace.

After a hearty meal these songs caressed

And pleased them all - for then things touch the heart.

Often they lay at ease in the soft grass,

In the shade of a tall tree by the riverside,

Their bodies refreshed and gladdened, at no great cost,

Especially when the weather smiled, and the season

Stippled the meadow with fresh and lusty flowers.

Then they had games, and talking, and sweet laughter,

For then the rustic Muse was in her prime;

Then prompted by merry foolery they would garland

Their heads and shoulders with a crown of flowers,

And move their limbs in a rough rhythm and dance,

Pounding their mother Earth with their rough feet.

Then they would smile at themselves and merrily laugh -

It was all new to them then, and wonderful!

Whatever my deep disagreements with him about what our proper response to death ought to be, it is hard not to see in this the kind of peace and tranquility that we all aspire to achieve. Resting in the shade by the riverside, free of worry and care, playing music and dancing in languorous delight with friends. The question of how to get there aside, this is what it ought to be like, this is the end to strive for. That all being said, it seems clear to me that the epicurean has far less to concern himself with when it comes to reconciling community and the individual than the stoic does. The epicurean admits a certain amount of indulgence, a certain appreciation for both pleasures and pains. Keeping limits in mind (and even here we find a curious resemblance to the notion that death is a transcendental limit), the self is allowed to pursue the maximization of pleasant sensation however he may see fit, so long as he keeps the ends of ataraxia as described above in clear sight.

Later commentators have taken this to constitute a ringing endorsement of unrestrained hedonism, without taking care to consider that Epicurus and Lucretius both find a lack of equilibrium in the pursuit of sensation to be the primary cause of man's downfall, for the ever-increasing desire for more, the relentless drive for pleasure, profit and power, often leads men towards that same end from which they were striving to protect themselves against in the first place: death. As Epicurus intones: "When it comes to death, we are like a city without walls". But I would be remiss not to acknowledge that the epicurean leaves himself open to such charges so long as he stresses the primacy of pleasant sensation.

So we see in epicureanism what both the stoic and the libertine lack: an appreciation for limits, an acknowledgement that self-mastery might just require a leveling of all that really matters, both within and without, for it to truly succeed. And if it does leave open a crack in the door for a bit of excess, well, sometimes a little radicalism is needed in order to secure tranquility. The ends are quite alright. It is the means for which we still have occasion to debate.