A Brief Update and on Suggestion of Discord Gardens

Quote from A_Gardner

Before continuing, is Charles still active? I haven't seen him on Discord in quite some time and last we spoke he had found some work that was keeping him quite busy.

You are right that Charles has been silent lately, but I am betting he will see your reference to him and that he will make an appearance with an update of his own. I know he was going through some job changes at the very least so I am sure he has been busy himself.

Quote from A_Gardner

I mention this because the interesting pattern that seems to be in these servers (as far as Stoicism goes) is that you can only really call these seekers "Neo-Stoics" at best. Most members are not looking for virtue for virtue's sake, but rather just some armor to mitigate the daily stresses of life.

"Most members are not looking for virtue for virtue's sake, but rather just some armor to mitigate the daily stresses of life." My guesstimate is that by far the largest number of people appearing casually on any of the philosophy forums are in the boat you describe. They are looking for mostly for relief from stress, with the goal of happy living, which - if they understood Stoicism - would disqualify them with a strong rebuke from the godfathers of Stoicism!

As such, these people - who are good people, and I don't mean this as a slam - are generally just in sort of an eclectic search for help, and they find Stoicism and Epicurus in that order because of the relative name recognition. For those who are content to stay in that format I wish them well, but I don't think that is really what we should aim to do in the time we spent on Epicurus.

These issues come up over and over and over. What is the "core" of Epicurus? Every day I am more and more convinced that it does a major disservice to Epicurus to consider his core to be "happy living" or even "pleasure." The core of Epicurus in my view is the intense desire to "get it right" in the game of life and make the best use of our time. That means drilling down to the basics of the nature of the universe and building up from there. For those who think they see "God" after the drill down, they need to follow a religious course in life. For those who think they see "meaningfulness" or "virtue" then they need to follow Stoicism or some form of humanism that essentially suits their political perspective. But for those who "get it" as to what Epicurus was trying to do in the ruthless pursuit of honesty in the way the world works, then those people are going to want to separate as far as they can from those other errors, and they are going to want to associate with like-minded people.

For better or worse that is the opposite of a "let's all get along" melting pot approach, and that's going to turn a lot of people off. I think that's one of the key insights we have to get used to -- although the truth of the universe is open to anyone, there are lots of people who can't or won't "handle the truth," and we have to be prepared for the different paths which people are going to take, allowing them respectfully to take theirs, while insisting also on the right that we have to pursue ours.

Quote from A_Gardner

There's an increasing number of online communities flocking there, and yet Stoic philosophy servers seem to be the ones dominating the discourse, but many members of these servers are more eclectic and diverse than just traditional Stoicism.

I guess I just copied that to reinforce the same point. That's what I have observed in over ten years of relatively intense internet absorption into these issues, and I don't expect that observation to change. What needs to change, over time, is that WE have to adopt our methods and procedures to realize the truth of that situation, and modify our expectations. Yes we can reasonably expect to grow significantly in numbers, but are we ever in our lifetimes likely to rival stoicism or abrahamic religion or other world philosophies in numbers ? Probably not, at least for a long while. But we can still be happy in what we have open to us, because winning the numbers game isn't the goal of life.