Or, how to be a little less unhappy under present circumstances
“People invested in a given perspective shall—when confronted with contrary evidence—expend great effort to justify retaining the challenged perspective” (Cognitive Dissonance)
One of the most ancient questions of philosophy (after of course the fundamental whodunnit, whydunnit, and what-in-fact-is-it-that-was-dun which arise from the encounter with perceptual reality) is how to be happy. Plato, an aristocrat, could indulge in utopianism when he answered that people would never be happy until kings became philosophers or philosophers kings. Aristotle disagreed, arguing that happiness lay with the individual and was a matter of practising virtue (a commonsense answer yet empirically no less utopian, perhaps). Eventually Epictetus came along and quoted Shakespeare about 1500 years ahead of his time, saying that there was neither good nor ill but thinking makes it so. Plato and Aristotle came to their conclusions among banquets, orchards and kings' palaces. Epictetus, on the other hand, was born a slave, and as such his thoughts on the matter of happiness may be considered as somewhat more noteworthy, stemming as they do from a greater experience of adversity.
Today Epictetus is remembered as a Stoic, a hard caste of ancient philosophers who strove for impassivity in the face of fortune, good or ill. Superficially interpreted today as celebrants of a cult of emotionless, and coupled with their gigachad beards, it is not surprising that the Stoics and their writings - such as Epictetus’s Enchiridion (Handbook), or Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations - have lately enjoyed a resurgence in the form of pop surveys and anthologies among literate-passing members of the manosphere.
But Epictetus is a very curious hero of the alpha crowd: born a slave, lame in one leg, and though he was freed around the age of 20 and lived to be almost 90, by all accounts a lifelong pauper. He was also by all accounts a kind and caring man, who dedicated himself to teaching philosophy and who adopted an abandoned baby in his old age. Though he would rub shoulders with the most powerful people of his time (the Emperor Hadrian reportedly sought his counsel), Epictetus never forgot his early experience as a slave, and extrapolated from it a philosophy applicable to all humans in all times and places, namely that we are all slaves. Rich or poor, happy or sad, according to Epictetus our being is forever in thrall to a terrible master named Fate who brooks no argument. Epictetus himself saw no philosophical difference between his own formal, explicit enslavement and his life after being freed - the only difference was a change in master. Indeed, Epictetus may even have considered himself luckier than most, in that his early experience alerted him to that which others ignored about themselves, namely the universal status of being a slave. Awareness of this status was the necessary first step to alleviating the suffering it was so often thought to cause. For if slavery were a universal feature of the human condition, unhappiness could not be a function of unfreedom, for this would mean we would all be doomed to unhappiness all the time. Rather, according to Epictetus, the path to happiness lies in distinguishing between what is in our power from what is not, and in taking responsibility for the handful of things which are:
There are things which are within our power, and there are things which are beyond our power. Within our power are opinion, aim, desire, aversion, and, in one word, whatever affairs are our own. Beyond our power are body, property, reputation, office, and, in one word, whatever are not properly our own affairs. (Enchiridion, I).
Now, in a typically earthy metaphor, Epictetus writes further on: “Everything has two handles: one by which it may be borne, another by which it cannot.” (Enchiridion, XLIII). Epictetus here suggests that suffering comes from trying to lift a burden from the wrong handle, that by which it cannot be borne. This, I submit, is an excellent image of cognitive dissonance: the great expenditure of psychic, emotional and physical energy necessary to bear a reality in contradiction to belief or expectation.
Cognitive dissonance is a lamentable but inevitable waste product of a consumer society oriented towards the pursuit of individual happiness through the acquisition of things and experiences. When we are sold a thing, we are not really being sold the thing itself, but the promise that the thing will make us happy. When we are left with thing in hand, out of pocket, but none the happier, cognitive dissonance gets to work to repair the sudden chasm between expectation and reality.
The terrible genius of consumerism, and the reason for its powerful grip wherever it takes hold, lies in the personal pact it makes with each one of us, something which the traditional political/economic -isms do not. Even capitalism is an impersonal ideology, allowing one at least a modicum of freedom to feel that even if one is born a worker, one could become the capitalist if one tried hard enough. Consumerism allows no such freedom, but traps us in the abusive spiral of promise after promise after promise made and broken with no other witness than our own innermost selves. The accumulation of cognitive dissonance as the waste product of the consumerist spiral leads quite simply to stress: the accumulation of weight and the application of pressure disproportionate to the load-bearing capacity of a given structure - in this case, the human psyche. We are all stressed all the time because none of our consumerist investments are paying off. The only difference between the experience of the Boomers and those of Millennials or Gen whoever is that the shelf-life of the promises made to them was different, but all had a sell-buy date which is coming up just about now.
Rather than write to you, however, that we should all grow our beards and bear this great deception with Stoic calm, I’d like to suggest instead, as an alternative to cognitive dissonance, cognitive dissidence.
Dissidence is a marvelous word, too little heard today. It literally means “sitting apart”, but far from connoting apathy it harbours the broody, restless, and ultimately intractable energy born of the perception of an unjustifiable wrong. Displeasure mixes with disquiet in the experience of disjointedness, and expresses itself in distaste, disdain, and disgust. And it is by taking a dissident stance that we offer the accumulated stress of cognitive dissonance a route to disperse. For indeed dissidence is I think the other handle of Epictetus’s burden: that “by which it may be borne.” By rejecting the ideology of consumerism and refusing to yoke our sense of happiness to any purchase, from clothing to education, from street address to professional title, our varied needs becomes easier to lift, as they have been emptied of their impossible demands. Let’s not be afraid to sit apart. But unlike the old days of East and West where one could at least in theory express dissent from the hegemonic ideology of ones culture by physically moving from one regime to another, today there is nowhere to go - short of going off-grid. The only space we still have (the only place we ever had, according to Epictetus) which is inalienably ours is our mind, and it is in here I think that we should for now work to cultivate a confident and defiant dissidence. Building this will build our resilience to stress and “burnout”, to the shrill demands of adverts, salesmen, bosses, and politicians. When we can see them first for the liars and dupes they all are, then we can judge dispassionately how much further attention to give their bawling for more power over us.
“If a person had delivered up your body to some passer-by, you would certainly be angry. And do you feel no shame in delivering up your own mind to any reviler, to be disconcerted and confounded?" Enchiridion, XXVIII.
