The Enchiridion by Epictetus
gutenberg.org
gutenberg.org
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.
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.
Consider the difference between. "Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not commit adultry" and "you shouldn't kill or sleep with your neighbor's wife because both actions cause more harm than they provide benefit, which ought be our goal because the conclusions of such a cost/benefit analysis closely align to most people's natural sense of right and wrong". The former is a statement of morals. If you include the "...because God said so, and God is always right", then it becomes an ethical argument, like the second. The key is arguing the why down to axioms, and defending those axioms as superior to other axioms.
A self-help book like "How to win friends and influence people" provides rules to follow, to achieve a desired outcome, and attempts to explain why the rules work. It doesn't spend much, if any (it's been a while) energy arguing why you should want the desired outcome, or if the desired outcome is actually a good thing.
I think that's exactly the problem: the assumption that philosophers should assume, by default, that self-help is unworthy of their time, and only pay attention to the rare cases that happen to have philosophical merit.
They could take a more active interest to questions such as, how can philosophy improve self-help literature? What kinds of ideas should ordinary people with low to average education consume? The wide array of values, goals, and philosophical approaches would make it a contentious and lively conversation.
But philosophers tend to vacate the field and leave it to mercenaries, culture warriors, and amateurs. When they do speak about it, it tends to be in symposiums or on podcasts aimed at college-educated people with a special interest in philosophy. That's as far down as they're willing to dumb it.
They do tend to enjoy less market success than the less rigorous slop, but that's a symptom of a much broader problem in the world: Someone dedicated to doing something well is at a disadvantage versus someone dedicated to winning. It's the whole "anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job" Douglas Adams quote, it's why it's still not the year of Linux desktop despite having offered the superior OS for years, it's why IKEA has practically killed the market for quality furniture, and it's why damn near every corporation you can name is lead by some ghoulish psychopath. In most competitions, you can simply get a lot more mileage out of optimizing for the competition than you can squeeze out of the underlying skill. So the dude optimizing for selling books is going to knock the socks off the one trying to rigorously convey a robust ethical framework.
If you can fix that basic flaw in society, I think we should probably start with the more pressing matters than who's selling more self-help books.
There are plenty of professionals who don't let arbitrary standards of rigor get in the way of communicating with people. For medicine, there's an entire subspecialty of public health professionals who specialize in crafting communication for broad audiences. They don't target only the people who are capable of processing communications of a certain rigor, and they don't retire their specialty because advertisers will always have the upper hand.
Not to mention that many fields are taught as school subjects, so they have to be presented to literal children. Of course the school curricula of history, literature, and science are taught with naivete and lacunae that would be travesties if judged by professional standards, but historians aren't calling for teachers to stop teaching a dumbed down version history to children. They accept the necessity of it and debate how best to do it.
Not all that relevant to Epictetus, just wanted to add a little linguistic note.
It's wild how the human psyche barely changed since the time of Epictetus.
P.S. If you're a follower of Stoicism, I've been working on a community platform/forum: https://stoacentral.com (there's still a lot of work to be done, but I've been pushing along).
If you wanted to, perhaps at the top of the page, you can add <select> tags for the translations.
But after figuring out what everything is doing, it's a super nice project; I like it, no need to change anything (above are just suggestions). Thank you for putting it together!
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/epictetus/short-works/geor...
Every student of Stoic Philosophy should read this - https://www.routledge.com/Epictetus-Handbook--and-the-Tablet...
Meditations is also a decent read.
The core idea is simple. You separate what you can control from what you can't. Then you stop burning energy on the second category. Easier said than done, but the framework helps.
I keep coming back to "How to Think Like a Roman Emperor" as a practical companion to the original texts. It's Marcus Aurelius filtered through modern psychology, with concrete exercises instead of just principles.
The danger is treating Stoicism as emotional suppression. It's not. It's about choosing where to direct your attention and energy. That's genuinely useful when you're surrounded by systems designed to capture both.