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...