Internet Stoicism and Covid-19


Emil Cioran

Not coping with some of the more outrageous aspects of the lockdown? The internet can help. For example, Epictetus: Fortify yourself with moderation, for this is an impenetrable fortress.

But the Stoics lived in simpler, even if physically more dangerous, times. Dangerous to their personal existence, that is. The modern danger is more subtle and far-reaching: the danger that the living of your life will be sacrificed to someone else’s ludicrously impassioned idea.

Cioran: In itself every idea is neutral, or should be. But man animates ideas, projects his flames and flaws into them; impure, transformed into beliefs, ideas take their place in time, take shape as events. The trajectory is complete, from logic to epilepsy … whence the birth of ideologies, doctrines, deadly games.[1]

Yet every time I read a reasonable-sounding put-down of Cioran, usually by a well-read American, I end up thinking: but why is the world exactly how Cioran says it is if he’s so far up the wrong tree?

Cioran: History is nothing but a procession of false Absolutes . . . Even when he turns from religion, man remains subject to it. Depleting himself to create false gods, he then feverishly adopts them. His need for fiction, for mythology, triumphs over evidence and absurdity alike. A man who loves a god unduly forces other men to love his god, is eager to exterminate them if they refuse.

So is moderation really an impenetrable fortress, or just a superficial placidity that hides a selfish lack of interest? Well, Cioran doesn’t seem to think it matters, although he employs a much less self-flattering term (indifference) to describe the inner state:

There is no form of intolerance, of proselytism or ideological intransigence, which fails to reveal the bestial substratum of enthusiasm. Once man loses his faculty of indifference be becomes a potential murderer; once he transforms his idea into a god the consequences are incalculable.

My conclusion: you can wrap yourself in the fortress of Stoic moderation if it makes you feel good, but it’s probably better if you don’t allow yourself to feel morally superior.

 Charlotte Randall



[1] Quotes are from Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay, Penguin, 1949/2018.

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