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Stoic advice: what about the toxicity of public discourse?
D. writes: what would be a Stoic response to the divisiveness that just seems to be increasing evermore in our society right now? How to cope with the toxicity of exchanges between people?
This is a darn good and very timely question, and the Stoic answer is at once very straightforward and yet incredibly difficult to implement. First off, let’s review what we are talking about here. The United States, as is very clear for the world to see, has been going for a while now through a phase of increasingly bitter political and social polarization, a phase that has led to a sharp and seemingly irreconcilable divide between “blue” and “red” America. We now have a President who is publicly sexist and racist, and has enabled some who feel the same to say and do things in public that would have been inconceivable until a very short time ago. On the other side (which, full disclosure, I by no means see as “equally” at fault), we have calls to engage in behavior demeaning toward one’s political opponents, such as booting them out of restaurants and other public spaces. Moreover, many on the left do subscribe — openly or not — to the infamous comment made by candidate Hillary Clinton about the “basket of deplorables.” There is anger in abundance, and essentially no dialogue, just shouting past each other.
