With one viral blog post, Susan Fowler began the torrent of revelations that exposed the immature, sexist culture of Silicon Valley, starting the process that led the downfall of her former boss, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick. She was afraid, yet she persisted. When she wondered whether she should keep quiet, she found strength in an ancient Greek and Roman philosophy dedicated to modesty and self-sufficiency.
“The Stoics were really what changed me,” she told The New York Times this week, in her first interview since the incident. “Because their whole thing was about, ‘You don’t have control over a lot of the things that determine your life, so all you can do is focus on becoming the best person that you can be.’”
Fowler is not alone. Over 2,000 years after it rose to prominence, Stoicism is finding unexpected popularity in twenty-first century Silicon Valley. Preacher-in-chief is startup guru Tim Ferriss, who calls it “an ideal operating system for thriving in high-stress environments.” Other fans include Digg co-founder Kevin Rose, who practices the Stoic arts of self-denial (cold showers; going without a coat in winter) and daily surrender: “I try to surrender to the earth as everything unfolds around me, not judging it, but accepting things as they are.”
In the febrile atmosphere of northern California, self help fads flare up with exhausting regularity. One day it’s consciousness hacking; the next microdosing or blood transfusion. But whereas most of these trends serve to sustain technologically-fuelled fantasies of mastery, Stoicism disdains such striving. Its central tenet is simple: learn to be satisfied with what you’ve got. At a time when tech is desperately need of ethical guidance, could this ancient wisdom supply the answer?
Formulated during the outpouring of philosophy that followed the death of Socrates in 399 BCE, ancient Stoicism was “a medical art for the soul” that advocated “living in accordance with nature.” Since human nature was above all rational, according to the early Stoics, the only way to achieve “a good flow of life” was to focus on the things that could be objectively shown to lead to happiness. It was a short list, since it contained nothing that was not directly under our personal control: not money, nor reputation, nor even bodily health. Only our own judgements and actions truly mattered; everything else was ultimately irrelevant. “Choose not to be harmed – and you won’t feel harmed,” wrote Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius in his Stoic Meditations. “Don’t feel harmed – and you haven’t been.”
Stoics ancient and modern have put this principle to the test. Roman sage Epictetus grew up a slave, crippled by a leg injury, possibly sustained at the hands of his abusive master – many centuries later, US fighter pilot James Stockdale used Epictetus’s writings to endure seven years of torture and imprisonment during the Vietnam War.
Fowler, who calls Epictetus “my guide to living a good, intellectually rich life,” found succour in the same teachings when she was considering publishing her memo. She knew what had happened to other whistleblowers, in particular women who’d tried to draw attention to harassment. She dreaded being defined by this one act.
She found the strength to carry on, she says, by “stepping back, just being in my little Stoicism Susan bubble”. Here, she was able to reconcile her sense of integrity with the backlash she feared would follow. As she puts it on her blog: “Epictetus offers freedom to every one of us: determine for yourself, he says, what is yours and what is beyond your control, and then work and care only for the things that are yours, and you will always be free. What is ours? Our minds, our thoughts, our actions, our intellectual pursuits. If we cultivate those things, nobody can ever take away our freedom.”
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Stoicism is an ideal preparation for adversity, because, for Stoics, life as brief, unpredictable and frequently painful. “Begin the morning by saying to yourself, I shall meet with the busy-body, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial,” sighed Marcus Aurelius in his journal. He meant it literally: regular “negative visualisation”, including imagining the death of loved ones, was a key weapon in the Stoic psychological arsenal. (Ferriss recommends it as a business strategy: “before you define your goals, define your fears”.)
As well as envisaging calamities, Stoics also go out of their way to prepare for them, toughening themselves by going without food and warmth – “rehearsing the worst case scenario,” as Ferriss puts it. If something bad wasn’t happening already, then it undoubtedly would be soon. Everything, said the Stoic statesman Seneca, even life itself, was merely “on loan” from fickle Fortune.
In order to see things as they were, Stoics maintained a certain detachment from their emotions. “Anger,” wrote Seneca, “is brief insanity”; even grief was considered “an irrational contraction of the soul.” It may seem cold, but this view of emotions as judgements was one of the key influences on modern cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). With events such as Stoic Week, which polls participants’ wellbeing before and after (up 16 per cent on average in 2014) to find evidence of psychological impact, some modern Stoics seek to imitate the success of CBT – but also to restore the wider ethical message discarded in the passage to scientific respectability. Thus, people taking part are taught a form of “Stoic mindfulness,” which involves paying deep attention to the ethical dimension of everything they do. “Stoicism transcends most modern self-help and therapy by offering the view that much of our emotional suffering is caused by false values, such as egotism, materialism or hedonism,” says Donald Robertson, the therapist who developed the technique.
Robertson worked with Ferriss on an audiobook of Seneca’s Letters. Yet when Stoicism is translated into the language of thrusting startups, the ethics appear to go missing. Ferriss, who’s about page on his website lists, in the third person, his many achievements (“Tim’s Twitter account was selected by Mashable as one of ‘5 Must-Follow Twitter Accounts for Entrepreneurs’”), and who claims to have cut his work down to four hours a week by outsourcing his tasks to India, doesn’t exactly seem free of egotism, materialism and hedonism. The companies he advises and invests in – including Facebook, Twitter and Uber – are as ruthless and ambitious as any of their predecessors.
If this disappointing outcome sounds familiar, that's because it is. A few years ago, everyone in the Valley was into mindfulness meditation. Googlers and VCs inhaled the breath of compassion and serenity – before heading straight back to work to carry on crushing it. A thousand-year-old Buddhist tradition was turned into a life hack: a shortcut to fame, fortune and extra followers on Twitter.
The tension between right behaviour and worldly success is as old as philosophy itself. Yet as Emily Wilson, associate professor of Classics at the University of Pennsylvania, observes, Stoicism's insistence on individual powerlessness lends itself to such reinterpretations. Wilson is author of a biography of Seneca, who, infamously, covered up the Emperor Nero’s murder of his mother, Agrippina, by claiming that she’d killed herself after failing to seize power.
“Maybe Stoicism invites such abuses,” Wilson says. “One can see Seneca’s Stoic insistence that the real Empire exists in the mind – the real slavery is slavery to the passions – as tools that enabled him to deny the real corruptions involved in the real Empire, with real slavery.” Some things should just be changed. By cultivating resilience and accepting the situation as it is, we risk complicity in systemic disgrace.
To her endless credit, Fowler resisted the temptation to suppress her outrage at the behaviour she witnessed at Uber. Her Stoicism proved deeper and more moral than conventional self-improvement. Yet this raises a different puzzle. At a time when digital tools make it possible to access the world’s information, send objects across the world and summon a car in minutes, why do their creators prefer to think of themselves as unable to change anything but their own minds?
Sexism, obviously, is one explanation. In her New York Times interview, Fowler offered another: “I think, right now especially, with Trump in the White House, who knows what’s going on with North Korea? Then we have natural disasters happening. It just feels like you’re being tossed around on the ocean and there’s nothing.” The sentence ends there, but the meaning is surely, “Nothing we can do about it”.
It’s easy to see why Fowler might feel that way – in chaotic times, who doesn’t feel like flotsam on the waves? And although she mentions politics and the environment, after the bureaucratic nightmare of Uber, she no doubt understands the way technology plays into that sensation. Her case helped bring to light the way Silicon Valley firms force their employees to sign away their right to access the public court system, requiring instead that they bring complaints to internal arbitration, a process which obliges them to remain completely silent, even about the existence of a tribunal. In the same way, even as digital platforms increase users’ individual capacity, they hide and distance the source of decisions, exchanging autonomy and accountability for phoney transparency. The technique is different, but the chilling effect is the same.
Observing the “parallels between our society and the Roman Empire,” Wilson notes: “Maybe in a society where individuals feel increasingly disempowered in social and political ways, Stoicism becomes increasingly attractive.” Fowler bypassed gatekeepers and took power into her own hands. That she does not stand for the dream of the democratised web tells you everything you need to know about tech and power in 2017.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
