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Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

>like bodybuilding, nootropics, hackathons and life-hacks, it presents rigid, rationalized mastery of the self as both desirable and achievable.

This is a good observation. It reminds me of some kind of digital protestantism on steroids. The same kind of displayed humility, work obsession and so forth.

I think it's very self-aggrandising in a way.

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So you want to live “according to nature?” Oh, you noble Stoics, what a fraud is in this phrase! Imagine something like nature, profligate without measure, indifferent without measure, without purpose and regard, without mercy and justice, fertile and barren and uncertain at the same time, think of indifference itself as power – how could you live according to this indifference? Living – isn’t that wanting specifically to be something other than this nature? Isn’t living assessing, preferring, being unfair, being limited, wanting to be different? And assuming your imperative to “live according to nature” basically amounts to “living according to life” – well how could you not? Why make a principle out of what you yourselves are and must be? – But in fact, something quite different is going on: while pretending with delight to read the canon of your law in nature, you want the opposite, you strange actors and self-deceivers! Your pride wants to dictate and annex your morals and ideals onto nature – yes, nature itself –, you demand that it be nature “according to Stoa” and you want to make all existence exist in your own image alone – as a huge eternal glorification and universalization of Stoicism! For all your love of truth, you have forced yourselves so long, so persistently, and with such hypnotic rigidity to have a false, namely Stoic, view of nature, that you can no longer see it any other way, – and some abysmal piece of arrogance finally gives you the madhouse hope that because you know how to tyrannize yourselves – Stoicism is self-tyranny –, nature lets itself be tyrannized as well: because isn’t the Stoic a piece of nature? . . . But this is an old, eternal story: what happened back then with the Stoics still happens today, just as soon as a philosophy begins believing in itself. It always creates the world in its own image, it cannot do otherwise; philosophy is this tyrannical drive itself, the most spiritual will to power, to the “creation of the world,” to the causa prima.

Ok, who wrote that?

Me.

It's actually Nietzsche -- "Beyond Good and Evil," Part 1, §9. I have very serious reservations about Nietzsche, but he doesn't pull his punches.

Nietzsche

>Imagine something like nature, profligate without measure

If by "profligate" he means "wasteful in the use of resources" then this whole thesis falls apart immediately.

This seems like a critique of what I would regard as Stoicism "taken too far."

The most helpful parts of Stoicism for me are understanding and accepting that awful things might happen I can't do anything about, the hedonic treadmill exists and a little more money, a car, a speedboat, or whatever I currently desire probably won't make me happy in the long term.

If I spend a week or a month in tatters over something minor, I can learn to adjust myself rather than trying to change the world to fix my own head. Long-term happiness is a mixture of changing the world to fit my goals and changing my goals and what I demand from it to fit the world - to learn that I cannot get everything I want.

Where I disagree with Stoicism is the ideas that my goal should be to optimize myself to some sort of perfection, and that I can ever have perfect control over myself mentally. My thoughts themselves live inside a biological brain which is affected by its construction, genetics, hormones, and many other physical influences. Beyond this, the idea that any specific thing must be the moral goal of all persons seems, as it is put here, like a gross presumption. But I never went in that far to the philosophy.

What does strike me, though, is your identification of various "self-improvement" techniques together under the Stoic banner - I've recently been confronting aspects of my personality in that sense and it made me jump a bit to read your description - it makes me think there is a bit of "There" there I should reconsider.

> protestantism on steroids

"Protestantism on steroids" (Puritanism / Calvinism) did conquer the world, so maybe there's something to it.

Weber made the early connection between protestantism and capitalism so it is surely no surprise that it would manifest again in modern tech hubs.

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