Alex Tarnava on Stoicism, Floyd Mayweather, Jr., warriors vs. soldiers, and how to strengthen yourself in your community.
Vadim Gershteyn, PhD, MPH served as my editor for StressHacked and contributed writing to my upcoming book The Stone Wall. He joins me for this discussion.
VG: We’ve all learned a thing or two from Stoicism, the Ancient school of philosophy that emphasizes restraint and self-control as a path to a successful life. In Newsletter 13, you and I, Alex, discussed the writings of a practicing Stoic, James Stockdale, who recounts his tenure in a torture prison in Vietnam. Stoicism is a school of philosophy that operates as if all of life is a torture prison, and so it is pessimistic by nature, but it is also reactive. You put it to me recently,
Stoicism is only useful if you’re gaining strength and capacity. If you aren’t, what could be achievable can be written off as beyond your control. Stoicism is an internal defense, and this defense can be strengthened considerably. But it is not offensive; it does not lead to growth, or the ability to achieve more. To truly change the world we need offensive capabilities, as well. This is the shortcoming of Stoicism, not much different from the shortcoming of yogic philosophies on self control. We can only rely on the defensive to a point. We will always break, eventually. So, we must build our capacity, our offensive forces, so that our reliance upon the defensive is not absolute.
This critique of Stoicism mirrors the metaphysical problem I have with Buddhism-vis-a-vis Hinduism, and I hope this Eastern parallel can help tease out what you want the reader to understand about Stoicism and its limitations (especially since you mentioned yoga). Picture this: we are ruled by a Pantheon of sadistic gods, and the recognition of this reality is the Vedic religion of Hinduism. With names like ‘Krishna’ and ‘Rama,’ our Lovecraftian overlords bring us total destruction; they remind the Western reader of Zeus, who routinely transformed into a human in order to rape human females. ‘Karma’ is allegedly the law by which reincarnation is maintained in the Hindu system, but even if you act flawlessly during life, Krishna or Rama can simply choose to banish you to being born an insect or a rodent, or worse. The terror of the Hindu Pantheon is total—making George Orwell’s 1984 look aspirational—and the advice of Siddharta Gutama, the Buddha, is to look inward and effectively ignore everything that’s going on around you.
If we take the Buddha’s critique of Hinduism as literal—and many do not take it literally; this is why there are so many “secular” Buddhists—there exist totalitarian beings trying to control us through mind viruses and sadistic games using supernatural powers. We have a choice, however bleak it looks, to fight back. There is a chance we will lose, but there is a chance we can liberate ourselves as well. Buddhism views liberation as the act of achieving ‘non-existence,’ Nirvana: pure defense. Defense such that one no longer exists. This reminds me of the tortured, moody teenager who views dragging their feet through some mandatory exercise in school as effective resistance. It is not; not even when it ‘works.’
Norman Finkelstein, though he is best known for his scholarship on the Israel-Palestine conflict (supporting the Palestinians to a large degree), has offered scholarship on Mahatma Gandhi, with a book called What Gandhi Says. The long and short of his thesis is that Gandhi’s rhetoric of “non-violence” involved an extraordinary amount of physical sacrifice of human lives, with Gandhi goading his followers to die at the hands of the British in the most violent and provocative way possible. In fact, Gandhi’s rhetoric was loaded with violent terms, which Finkelstein documents in this book. Gandhi knew full well the manipulation of the English spirit through pathos would bring liberation to the nation of India and he was right.
To me, epistemologically, what is true is what works. I don’t believe cowering in fear of the ‘archons’ (to use Gnostic language for perennial, cosmic rulers) is effective, and this is what Stoicism and Buddhism encourage us to do. It may look like self-control and self-mastery—it is, to some extent, but life has risk, and we have to take risks if we want to achieve anything. Risks are more or less ‘offensive,’ not defensive. And, as Roger Scruton puts it, “Life is full of active risk.” Gandhi recognized that. Did the Buddha or the Stoics?
AT: I feel compelled to use a hypothetical analogy to explain what I mean by offensive, and defensive, with a philosophy centered solely on “defense” being one that is resigned to eventually failing. Floyd Mayweather Jr. is often argued as the greatest defensive boxer of all time, and few would contend he isn’t deserving of being entertained in this debate, even if they lean to another legend. But what if Floyd never learned how to throw a punch? What if he devoted 100% of his time to training defensive movements? Certainly, his defense would have been near bulletproof, but would he have been more, or less effective? If you are able to visualize the result, a master in defense, confined to a square ring and forced to engage, who has no offensive boxing capabilities—not even the ability to throw a punch—it becomes clear that said hypothetical boxer would never win a fight. Even in the bouts in which the defensive master was unscathed, scoring would default to the aggressor, the one commanding ring control. Just as a boxer, or any martial artist, focused solely on defense, an intellectual philosophy centered completely upon defensive considerations is one that will inevitably crumble, given enough time and opportunity.
Of course, there is no human on the planet that reaches the point in which they begin to study stoicism, buddhism, or hinduism seriously that hasn’t previously learned offensive skills; the power to manipulate their surroundings to their will, no matter the extent. I begin section 5 of my upcoming book, The Stone Wall, with the following paragraph:
Power exists within all of us; we require power to bend the world around us to our needs, so that we may survive, even thrive. Without sufficient power, we cease to be able to survive. Even our ability to redirect water down our throats is a type of power, as is harvesting food, plant-based or living. We exercise our power in order to pursue—or suppress—our own desires, and critically, we utilize our various tools of power: influence, persuasion, capacity for violence, and sexuality in order to enlist others in the pursuit of our own will-to-power to the potential detriment of their own.
Harvesting food, redirecting water down our throats, and everything beyond are offensive strategies. They are displays of our power, our ability to shape the world around us. The Stoics, of course, acknowledge this in teaching to only focus on the offensive powers within one’s control; but without guidance on how to expand one’s power, to gain greater capacity, this relegates their followers to a journey in which they do not grow offensively, and in all likelihood regress, focused solely on master of the self, defensive strategy. The truth is, there is no great defense without a powerful offense. We have all heard the sports saying, “the best defense is a good offense,” and this is true for every area of life. However, just like in sports, we require exceptional defensive skills. We rely on our defense when our offense fails us, either through being outmaneuvered by an opponent, or in life when random chance, some tragic event we did not expect, befalls us.
This is why I study Stoicism, yet do not call myself a Stoic. Stoicism is a part of my life strategy, but does not define me, and should not be the backbone of any individual seeking greatness to any extent, whether that is in the pursuit of serving one’s family or greater humanity. We need to stop talking about the various schools of philosophy in a manner which pits them against each other, as if any are worthwhile of singular devotion. Just as the traditional martial arts have long lost any claim of producing the greatest and most effective fighters, with the athletes who cross-train numerous disciplines proving time and time again that, in fighting, a jack of many trades beats a master of one almost every time, our intellectual fighting style must also evolve. This is why my works transcend definition, borrowing (sometimes barely changed) others’ wholly manipulated or inverted thoughts and concepts across countless philosophies. The effective mental warrior of today must craft a new age system, learning all in the quest to be vulnerable to none, or rather those looking to weaponize ideologies against us.
If you define yourself by one art, one school of thought, ask yourself what your strategy will be when your adversary, living or inanimate, decides not to play by the rules in which you’ve confined yourself?
VG: I like this idea that to be an effective mental warrior we must become “jacks of all trades,” without the negative connotation that phrase sometimes holds. While this may be an aside, I think to the differences between a warrior mentality and a soldier’s mentality. Warriors fight alone, while soldiers group together. Warring has the tenor of the Indo-European belief system—something you wrote about extensively in The Stone Wall—whereas soldiering reflects the mentality of the non-Indo-European people of the world. How do you see our quest for intellectual sovereignty feed into this distinction between people acting alone and with others?
AT: Just as “it’s better to be a warrior in a garden, than a gardener in a war,” it’s better to be a warrior united with the group as a soldier, than a soldier isolated and alone, attempting to become a warrior. We live in a paradox; we are completely dependent on each other, but we can rely on no one. So, we must radically take charge of our lives through personal responsibility, seeking to lift others along with us, but simultaneously allowing them to lift us. We must presume no one will help us, then gratefully accept when they do.
This philosophical ratcheting allows us to ascend, allows us to be individuals while simultaneously existing for the group. We focus on ourselves in the pursuit of serving others, and then graciously accept when they do likewise. That is how we thrive, that is how we grow, that is how we unite. An army of individual warriors, seeking to protect each other, each accountable to each other through obsessive fixation on the self.
VG: This reminds me of a storied discussion you and I had in The Stone Wall, namely the interlude, “Simone Weil and the Limits of Liberalism.” In particular, I quoted Weil as stating that obligations precede rights; that is, we have responsibility to each other before we become individuals (we are soldiers first and warriors second). Becoming an individual is called individuation. ‘Individuation’ is, for Gilbert Simondon (who I also referenced in that interlude), a process of differentiation. We are individuals insofar as we stand out from the group, and we only stand out relative to our position in the group. Simondon argues that such a process of individuation among humans is ontological, relating to other elements of life, not just humans, including crystals:
The crystal possesses two types of completely different anisotropy. The first is continuous anisotropy: certain vectoral properties of crystals vary continuously with direction; this is the case of electrical, magnetic, and elastic properties and properties related to thermal dilation, caloric conductibility, and the speed of the propagation of light. But alongside these properties, we note other properties that vary discontinuously with direction: they are expressed by the existence of linear directions or planar directions with particular properties, whereas the neighboring directions do not possess them to any degree.…A bundle of X-rays that strikes a crystal is reflected in a limited number of planes with well-determined orientations. However, these properties of discontinuous anisotropy arise from the genesis of the crystal as an individual and not as exemplary of a type; each individual is structured in this way….In an aggregate of crystals assembled without any order, each crystal has defined its facets, its dihedral angles, and its corners according to a direction of the ensemble that is explained by external circumstances, whether mechanical or chemical, and yet according to rigorously determined internal rapports starting from the singular genesis….For the crystal, the fact of being an individual consists in the fact that it has developed in this way relative to itself….There is ultimately at the end of the genesis a crystal individual, because an organized ensemble has developed around a crystalline germ that incorporates an initially amorphous matter that is rich in potentials by structuring it according to a proper arrangement of all the parts with respect to one another….The phenomenon of growth is consequently automatic and indefinite, since all the successive layers of the crystal have the capacity to structure the amorphous milieu that surrounds them while this milieu remains metastable; in this sense, a crystal is endowed with an indefinite power of growth; a crystal can have its growth stopped, but it can never be considered complete, and it can always continue to grow if it is put back into a metastable milieu that it can structure.
AT: I would say I disagree with the ordering, and strongly; our relation to the group may help mold us as individuals, but we can be an individual without the group. A group without individuals is akin to nothingness, a hive of unthinking programs lacking the qualities we associate with sentience.
To be a soldier and serve the group, we must first learn to become warriors and master the self. An army of soldiers without warriors lacks direction, leadership, morality, and thought itself. It becomes an unthinking horde of destruction. Since our purpose is to each other, it requires us to be warriors, individuals, a united collective of sentience aligned for a shared purpose.