As innumerable works of fiction have pointed out, “perfect” is fragile. So utopias have to be unchanging, which either is an inevitable death sentence or would be a stasis comparable to a fly preserved in amber. And as innumerable works of fiction have also pointed out, the strictures necessary for a utopia are often tyrannical to the point of making it a dystopia. Maybe not openly cruel but mercilessly non-negotiable.
It’s not overly complicated. It’s a philosophy focusing on developing personal virtue, resilience, and tranquility by focusing only on what is within our control. It teaches that, while we cannot control external events, we can control our responses to them, leading to a life of wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance.
It’s deeper than that, but that’s the gist of it.
As Tyler Durden said, “Just. Let. Go.”
Control is an illusion.
The challenge is figuring out what is actually within my control.
Neibuhr’s serenity prayer has three parts:
Accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change those I can,
and wisdom to know the difference.
And yes, the third is usually the toughest.
Everything in your mind - your perception of and reaction to external physical events.
There are some external things you can impose your will upon, but essentially no external circumstance can affect your mind, if you are strong enough.
See Viktor Frankl
That’s not how the human brain works, and it’s a dangerous and often destructive belief that leads to hostility and abuse towards people are “weak” and suffer from trauma like PTSD. It also contributes to homophobia and transphobia, as it is implicitly asserting people could just choose not to be if they wanted.
I’ve got an icepick here that says different.
That’s Stoicism talking - not me.
Of course there are extenuating circumstances. But I assume it means as one encounters the stress of everyday living. If you still want to push back, talk to Marcus Aurelius or Tim Ferriss.
That’s not the way Stoicism works. You’re confusing it with ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps’ people.
Gotta love a guy who references Frankl. I’m a fan.
Zen kinda aims for the same goal, but it’s more by seeing into the impermanent and empty nature of reality through meditation. If you see things as they are, the logic goes, then you won’t suffer. (By suffering I refer to a kind of mental state, not physical pain.)
But based on what you’re saying it sounds like the fundamental idea of not being too attached to things is pretty similar.
I have found Zen useful for noticing the stories I tell myself without getting wrapped up in them. It has helped me with anger, anxiety, and depression. Usually when I sit down to meditate after a a long time I have this moment like, “Oh, right. I forgot all of this stuff I’ve been stressing over is bullshit.”
Agree. I agree with Zen as a discipline. I used to try to practice it in my younger days. My problem was my mind drifts. To be fair, it does with stoicism as well.
But I keep trying to improve myself.
Thanks for your post. Especially this bit:
“ I have found Zen useful for noticing the stories I tell myself without getting wrapped up in them. It has helped me with anger, anxiety, and depression.”
“I have a great idea for a perfect society and I don’t care how many boots I have to stomp onto faces to achieve it!” is a common theme in both fiction and real life.
This is just a matter of definition. My contention is that almost all those fictional portrayals are dystopias, not utopias. The only fictional portrayal which I would classify as even close to a utopia in popular western fiction is that of the Federation from Star Trek. Even WRT Star Trek, I’d limit it to those Star Treks from the 20th century (TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY, and ENT).
I wouldn’t even call the Federation of TOS or TNG-era a utopia; just a damned sight better than 21st century standards, to much the same degree that the 21st century is (mostly) an improvement over the 16th century.
The Culture is the sci-fi setting that I see most often called close to a genuine utopia.
Seriously. What do we actually know about day to day life in the Federation other than it’s much more technologically advanced than ours and is in a perpetual state of interplanetary war?
I have to wonder what that does to the average person’s psyche to be living in this post-scarcity society and turning on the news to learn some colony just got assimilated by the Borg or some starship went down with all hands in a Klingon attack or yet another giant killer space probe is on a direct course for Earth.
“Every time, every time they launch a ship named Enterprise this stuff starts happening. We need to retire the name.”
As a kid, I was watching The Rifleman, my dad reading nearby on the couch. Thinking of how Lucas gets along with his son, I remarked, “Isn’t the Rifleman a great guy?”
My father dryly remarked, “he kills someone every day”.
Dystopia makes for better media than utopia because in dystopia you have protagonists fighting the antagonistic system. A movie where everyone is happy and content would be boring.
The world today is far from perfect, but in the vast majority of ways it is better than it was 300 years ago (except for things like the environment). The world 100 years won’t be perfect but in most ways it will be better.
People always find a reason to be unhappy.
And a common theme in scify is that in attempting to create ideal societies where they eliminate all problems, sometimes even death itself, that society becomes so stagnated, shallow, and soulless that they become intolerable. Or the controls society has to put in place to maintain such “happiness” amount to a Faustian bargain.
IOW, everyone is only happy and content because they’re all on drugs, or the take all the unhappy people and reprogram their brains or disintegrate them.