Ben Rockwell Stoicism Sucks! (Literary Fight Club) lit

For every high school student and college undergraduate who fell asleep reading Marcus Aurelius. For all the bros who listen to podcasts and think Stoicism is the new thing. This book will set you straight.

Zeno founded the philosophy after losing a shipwreck, and ended his life by stubbing his toe and treating it as a summons from the gods. Cicero read the doctrine aloud to a Roman jury and they laughed the prosecution out of court. Seneca preached the emptiness of wealth from behind five hundred matching ivory-legged tables. Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher king, spent eighteen years educating his son. The son was Commodus, the bloodthirsty villain of Gladiator, and the arena scenes were not invented.

Thirty-nine chapters, and every criticism is nailed to a sentence the Stoics wrote themselves.

WHAT IS INSIDE

- MEDITATIONS, READ ALL THE WAY TO THE END. The famous quotations all come from the first third, because that is where everybody stops. Marcus Aurelius had one really good idea and he wrote it down forty times in case it escaped.

- SENECA'S EXPENSE ACCOUNT. Tacitus, Cassius Dio and a hostile senator on how a philosopher of poverty assembled one of Rome's great fortunes.

- THE NERO PROBLEM. Ten years of tutoring, one treatise on mercy, and the letter that explained a murdered mother to the Senate. If Seneca was so wise, somebody should explain Nero.

- THE COMMODUS PROBLEM. The best education in the empire, administered by its most committed Stoic, to a boy who renamed the calendar after himself. Commodus looked at the Roman Empire and thought, 'You know what this needs? Me in a loincloth.'"

- THE SAGE WHO NEVER SHOWED UP. Five centuries, thousands of practitioners, not one confirmed sighting. "Epictetus, you asked to be shown one Stoic, and two thousand years later the request is still outstanding."

- THE LIBRARY AT THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA. The greatest Stoic philosopher who ever lived wrote seven hundred books, and every single one of them is gone.

- THE CHARGES. Suppression sold as mastery. Two boxes that leave out everything interesting. A doctrine that files injustice under indifferent. Stoicism's greatest trick was convincing people that suppressing a feeling counts as conquering it.

- THE ARGUMENTS FROM THE COMMENT SECTION. The objections people actually make online, taken seriously and answered. Every criticism of Stoicism on the internet gets the same reply, and the reply is that you have criticized the wrong Stoicism.

- AND AN HONEST LAST CHAPTER. After two hundred pages, the annoying part is that some of it works.

Every quotation comes from the defendants: Marcus, Seneca, Epictetus, Zeno and Cato, with Tacitus, Suetonius, Cassius Dio, Cicero, Quintilian, Plutarch, Gibbon and Nietzsche for the prosecution.

This book will set you straight.