A Stoic Approach to Politics in the US in 2020
Democrats need to relax, and do the best they can
Like all articles on The New Haberdasher, this story is presented to you for free. If you like what I do, consider supporting my work with a small monetary contribution at my Patreon and thank you.
First, a word of preface
I believe this: There are no lifehacks, no shortcuts worth taking; certainly Stoicism is not one. Pithy Stoicism and stoic swag is not actually understanding Stoicism, because as far as I understand it, Stoicism is a discipline which takes your entire life. I might be wrong.
A Stoic approach to the Political Contest in the US
Saying this, tonight I am trying to meditate on the position I could take, as a person desirous of practicing Stoicism in my life, toward the political contest currently occurring in the US.
I have learned thus far a couple things which can apply. The first is the notion of detachment from outcomes. And the second is that Virtue is the only true Good, and all other things we might consider to be “good” are either indifferent or we are mistaken. I can view our political situation in this nation with these two lenses and find what I should do with regard to this situation.
The first, detachment from outcomes, suggests that one should not worry about the outcomes of one’s action: the action itself is the thing a person has control over. If your action is done with a mind toward virtue, you may or may not, nonetheless accomplish your intended goal. There are so many things that can still go wrong between your deciding to do something and the thing that actually happens. But we cannot control the outcome. We therefore should do our best to do our best, and be satisfied with controlling the things we can control.
The story of the archer is useful here. A master archer can do everything he can do to fire a true shot. He can aim as he has been taught. He can realize the memory of his muscles in the drawing of the string back, or the feeling of the tension between his two arms. He can see that the arrow he has is perfectly straight, and if not, he can change it for one that is, and that the feathers are intact and secure on the arrow. He can practice his breathing before his shot, holding it at the perfect moment so it does not affect his shot.
He can do all of this and when he lets go of the arrow, a gust of wind can blow the arrow off, or the target could move unexpectedly, or the gravitational pull of the earth’s core could suddenly and dramatically change momentarily. Any number of events could put even the best aimed arrow off the target. Or, conversely, a person with a blindfold, with no skill or experience with a bow may nonetheless accidentally hit the target, and may indeed kill it, while the skilled archer can do everything possible and still miss.
The goal is to do your best with the things you can control, and be satisfied with having done your best even if you never hit the target.
Being detached from the outcome of your effort forces you to focus on your effort itself: “Are you doing your best in the moment, playing the best plays with the cards you have been dealt?” should be your sole concern. Because what happens will happen. You have control over what you do up until the moment you let that arrow fly. And you have control over nothing that happens as it flies. So concerning yourself with the arrow in flight is a consummate waste of time — it is focus on something other than doing your best, therefore it is a focus on an indifferent thing, which while preferable to some other indifferent thing, is not focus on the ultimate good which is Virtue, or moral excellence.
This naturally also covers the second principle above: It is imperative to remember that the ultimate Good in all things is Virtue, and its components: Wisdom, Morality, Courage and Moderation. This is the only correct end to everything. Anything preferable but not these are called “indifferent” by the Stoics. And I am reminded that if we see a scale with Virtue on one side and all the gold coins in the world on the other, Virtue should never be outweighed, even if you tripled the number of coins. We should never trade Virtue for anything, and we should never prefer anything to Virtue.
Seeking the perfect at the expense of the Good, according to Aristotle, is preferring the immoderate to the Moderate.
If we seek perfection in some folks, we are not focusing on Virtue in our own selves. Instead we are fixated on the splinter in another person’s eye while ignoring the plank in our own. We prefer Vice, as absolute immoderation to the Virtue of Moderation.
I keep these two principles in mind as I examine a very practical question in American politics: Who should I vote for?
Voting the Best you Can
Now. I am of the Left in American politics. I am not a follower of St. Karl, except in so much as he agrees with me. I disagree with his basic us vs them dialectic materialist theory of the world, and I believe that he insists that his theory is based on scientific discovery, when in fact it is a materialist ideology which caused him to cherry pick his data in his “scientific studies”. He admits no evidence which suggests that he might be wrong, and his followers even came up with a term to apply to those who find evidence that contradicts Marx’s theory. We are said to suffer from a “false consciousness”.
So I am not that sort of Leftist. But neither am I what one would call a DLC (neo-) Liberal, who believes that the government should be bent toward the needs of the private sector, that cutting poor people off welfare is ever a good thing, unless there is something as good if not better to replace it, be it a job with dignity or a UBI, and that we need to force, with bombing if need be, liberalism down the throats of the rest of the unwilling world for their own good. I am neither a fan of Lenin nor Clinton(s).
But I am of the sort that watches the Democratic primary contest with a bit of bemusement. More correctly, I watch the reaction to the Democratic Primary Contest with bemusement. I see Democrats refusing to describe the contest in detached terms. This is another Stoic practice: We should describe things plainly, and forego all the hyperbole. Trump’s election in 2016 wasn’t the end of the world that Democrats in the so-called “Resistance” predicted it would be, nor was the “Resistance” really much of one, except on Twitter and online mob call-out sessions, which has been recently expanded into “cancel culture”. They impeached Trump, and yet they knew he would be acquitted by a Senate that seems intent on protecting the President — funny thing is, when Senate Republicans did exactly what they were expected to do, everyone freaked out about how they met expectations set for them.
Democrats, and Leftists in general are rather unprogressive in their apprehension of the contest in front of them. They seem so consumed by fear that they are being driven by it. A recent Time Magazine headline says it well: “In New Hampshire, Democratic Voters Are Paralyzed by Fear of Making the Wrong Choice.” These people are being driven by reaction, and reactionary politics are the exact opposite of those the Democrats claim to practice.
But this does not concern them. Instead, Democrats are less interested in casting the best possible vote, and more interested in the outcome of the election. It is true that the number one issue for Democrats this year is “Beating Trump.” They therefore take their eyes off the Virtue of their action and focus on a thing they have no control over. Democrats do not make the best, most Virtuous choice, because they are figuratively “paralyzed” by fear of making the wrong choice.
Their fear of failure is the one thing which will scare Democrats into actually failing to accomplish their (indifferent, but preferable) goal this fall, because it causes them to focus on something over which they have no actual control.
You see: This is the archer worrying about the target or the flight of the arrow, rather than in firing the arrow with excellence. Nobody can directly affect the outcome of the election themselves. This is a simple fact! There is absolutely nothing I, as an individual, can do to affect the outcome of an aggregate vote in a state, which is added to a different aggregate in the Electoral College. My vote, as such, literally means nothing. So why shouldn’t I focus on the one thing I can do, and that is vote with a mind toward Virtue? Why shouldn’t I seek to vote for the truly best person for the office, or finding none, vote for no one, rather than vote for someone who is indifferent?
The Stoic Calculation of preferences, as I understand it, is Good(Virtue)>Indifferent (preferable)>Indifferent (not preferable)>Evil (Vice). By this calculus I should choose to be wealthy over being poor. I should prefer to eat over starvation. I should prefer health to sickness: All of these are indifferent to Good or Evil. But I should never choose wealth over Virtue, Health over Virtue, and a full stomach over Virtue, and I should always choose honest poverty over dishonestly obtained wealth, being a vice, or sickness over health at the expense of another. So, extending this calculation, if I am a Leftist, and feel that Leftism is preferable to Rightism, both of them being indifferent in relation to actual Virtue, then I should choose ANY Leftist to Trump.
Fine. So knowing this, what difference does it make if I choose Sanders or Buttigeig? Warren or Biden? Or even Tulsi Gabbard, or Kamala Harris or Michael Bloomberg or Hillary Rodham Clinton? All those, in terms of my preference and in terms of their relationship to Virtue, are exactly equal. And even if I prefer Sanders to Buttigeig, and indeed vote for my preference, why should I be troubled if my preference loses? It doesn’t matter. If Virtue is not on the Ticket, which it is not, then I should still vote as best as I can, and not fear the outcome. When the General election comes along and my choices are still only indifferent, where Virtue is not anywhere on the ticket, I should still vote as well as I can, and not be concerned one bit about the outcome. I will have done my job, and done the best with the things I can control, my vote, leaving the outcome, which is entirely outside of my control, to happen as it does.
There is no reason to fear the thing you cannot control, and no reason to be paralyzed by it. The Stoic will say, as I understand it, that fear, while a natural human emotion which seizes us unexpectedly, is outside of our control: What is in our control is what we do with that fear. Do we let it paralyze us, and therefore influence us, causing us to make decisions out of panic, or do we take a breath, do our best, and make our decisions with a calm, reasonable mind? The Stoics will tell us to do the latter:
The fear itself becomes a motivator to do well, an opportunity to be better than the unreasonable person, a chance to aim ourselves deliberately at Virtue and the Good. But ultimately, the choice is ours.
Seeing your vote with this measure of detachment, understanding that you will neither CAUSE a preferable NOR an unpreferable outcome one way or another, will allow you to breathe, relax and go vote for the best option possible. Maybe not the prefect candidate, but really, who is the perfect candidate? At any rate, the question we should concern ourselves with is not how to get the perfect candidate or how to ensure the outcome we prefer, but how do we conduct ourselves. Do we make a vote out of fear and reaction? Most people will. The alternative, which a Stoic would attempt, would be to make a calm reasonable choice aiming to do the best he or she can. This is what we SHOULD do and let the outcome take care of itself.
Don’t Let the Perfect be the Enemy of the Good
We cannot control the outcome of any of the elections we are being asked to vote in. So we should not become obsessed on perfection or ideological purity in our votes. Again: focusing on doing the best we can should be our goal in the election.
Does this mean we should vote for someone we do not want, because good enough is good enough? Absolutely not. Remember: In these contests, we are being asked to choose among a subsection of all possible choices in the General elections. You should vote for the one you prefer most. If you happen to like Buttigeig, and literally think he is the best option of all your choices, then vote for him. Of don’t. It really doesn’t make much difference to the eventual outcome of the contest.
What matters is that you did the best you could. This is the ONLY thing that matters, for a Stoic, as I understand it. Buttigeig, or Sanders or Warren or Bloomberg or whoever will win or lose the nomination with or without your help — ultimately, participation in the government of a democratic society is the virtue, while seeing a preferable outcome in an election is the indifferent thing.
Only being satisfied with one particular outcome is vicious, especially if it leads you to not participate in the government of your society. This is the preference of the perfect (your particular choice) over the Good, which means removing a truly vicious, morally corrupted individual from office. Preferring the immoderate to the moderate is the Vice in this case. You may hear these stories about supporters for one candidate not voting if they don’t get their preference. Other stories suggested that supporters of one candidate voted for the worst choice instead of an alright choice in 2016, out of spite or frustration or whatever, but certainly not out of reason or wisdom. But this says, they would rather have bad than ok. That certainly violates the preference calculus I talked about above which shows that nonpreferable indifferent things are always better than bad things.
We are all pretty sure who the preferable candidates are to the non-preferable ones. But the practitioners of wickedness are worse than the non-preferable candidates, any day of the year. Therefore, the person aiming for the best outcome, while remaining detached from the fact of whether he obtains that particular outcome should never ever vote for Trump. I would extend this to Republicans, who may see Trump as preferable to any Democrat, but could only correctly vote for him if they were willing to ignore his wickedness, or assert that the generic Democrat is even more wicked than their Wicked candidate. That is quite a leap and fits the Aristotelian definition of “Vice” which is to act from a misapprehension of the Good. In other words, anyone who believes that Trump is indifferent but preferable to any indifferent Democrat has a messed up understanding of what Good even is. Those people are not acting from reason therefore, but from avarice, and do not cast their vote in good faith.
Voting is the Ethical Act
Ultimately, as I have long advocated, you should go and vote. Once there, even writing “No One” on your ballot is an ethical act, because it is participation which is the Just act, and therefore is in accord with moral excellence, and a vote for “No One” is still a vote. Abstention when it is your responsibility to participate in the governance of your society is unjust: It places the burden of your share of the responsibility onto the shoulders of another.
But it is wrong to say that in this case, that you bear the responsibility for a bad outcome. In fact, doing what you are ethically required to do, doing what the virtuous person does in the circumstance, that satisfies your responsibility to your fellow man in this society. And doing it as well as you possibly can, that satisfies your duty to yourself: to live as Virtuously as you can, making your choices with reason and moderation.
Stoicism requires action. It is not passive. It cannot be. Nor is it a way to pass blame for your actions off onto someone else. Marcus Aurelius and Seneca and Zeno were all man of action: They lived the Vita Activa or the Active Life, and their philosophy was a practical one of action. Stoicism tells you that you must act in this world, because idea without praxis is a waste of your time, and endless debates about purely academic subjects is sophism. It does no good to believe you are virtuous without constant demonstration and practice of your Virtue in society among your fellows. You can serve as no role model when you dwell in your own head.
Nor, should you let fear of the outcome of your actions guide your actions. As long as you do the best you can, you are controlling all that you have any power over.
What you have control over is your own actions. You cannot control your neighbor’s action unless you have made that person your slave. You cannot control what a person on the other side of the country is going to do in regards to the election. So why try? Do your best and worry about yourself.
Finally, do not prefer something that is impossible. A perfect candidate does not exist. So do not seek one. Whoever the Dems put up will be preferable for a Leftist at least to anyone the GOP nominates. This should be your singular focus, if you are like me, and of the Left.
If you are not sure, perhaps making an uninformed choice might not be better than making an informed choice which is non-preferable to me. In this case, you are not doing the Best you can. You are making an uninformed, therefore non-judicious choice. The best you can do then requires you to first educate yourself about the choice you are about to be asked to make. To do your best, you are required to educate yourself out of ignorance.
But on the same token, do not refuse to participate just because you do not get the candidate you want to. The Virtue is participation, and whether you get what you want is merely the indifferent matter of personal preference. If you vote the Best you can, the result will take care of itself. And then you can remain true to the cause of Virtue, and its components: Wisdom, Justice, Courage and Moderation.
You should have no fear of Virtue, so just relax, do what you have to do with a calm and reasonable mind, as best as you can. And that is all you need to do ethically.
Like all articles on The New Haberdasher, this story is presented to you for free. If you like what I do, consider supporting my work with a small monetary contribution at my Patreon and thank you.
