alt Hacker NewsWas in one of those chain book stores recently and decided to stop by the philosophy section. It was tiny, only taking up part of a single shelf in a huge store. I was surprised to find about half of the titles were on Stoicism and closely-related topics. There were many pop-psych texts about applying Stoicism to modern life. I guess it's been having a moment? Interestingly, it was right next to the massive self-help section.
I have a notion that both the ancient West and East experienced a chance to align with systems of thought that reject desire, either in part or whole. In the East, that was more successful and stuck around longer. Unfortunately for us, it remained a fringe notion (think how we would react to a modern Diogenes). However, we never completely forgot, flirting with similar ideas from the direction of Christian piety, the synthesis of Eastern thought that occurred in the counter-culture era, and the psychoanalytic frameworks of Lacan, Deleuze+Guattari, and others. Now that our desires are being exploited against us by the tech that mediates our very existence, it makes sense we would seek defense mechanisms. There's trillions of dollars of economic force out there creating, curating, and capturing desire. It's probably worth stepping back and asking how being embedded in that structure is actually affecting us and the degree it's aligned with our innate interests.
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Stoicism has had a bit of a revival since the early 2010s: https://www.google.com/search?udm=14&q=stoicism+before:2015
Christian thought remains diametrically opposed to Eastern philosophies, at least when it comes to religion. Rejecting desire in an attempt at eternal life is quite different from wanting to escape existence as a whole and return to non-existence.
Ryan Holiday has really popularized Stoicism in the last decade.
Wonderfully put.
Strictures which successfully regulated desire crystallized over the ages into particular forms of tradition and morality. Hence early conservatives like Carlyle and Chesterton were anti-capitalist: they saw the economics of desire as a corrosive force that would break down and nullify the experience of centuries as encoded in customs, tradition and other social bonds.
In the west, we've had a long, deep split between what ordinary people rely on (religion and self-help) and respectable academic philosophy. Philosophy rooted in religion has a strict requirement to scale down to serve masses of people. Philosophy rooted in academia has a strict requirement to scale up to allow practitioners to flex their elite skills and show that they are worthy of scarce academic positions. Academic philosophers pay lip service to the idea that philosophy can and should be for everyone, but in practice, they shy away from anything that could compromise their primary pursuit of a career and academic prestige.
As a result, they mostly respond to efforts to reach a lay audience by distancing and criticizing. They are really harsh on the compromises inherent in meeting lay audiences where they are.