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Stoic q&a: But, if people were Stoics, wouldn’t the Nazi win?
B. writes: Just finished Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, and I have been pondering the following: for the Stoics, virtue is the only thing that matters. At the end of the day, even life itself is a preferred indifferent. But when I think about Frankl’s description of life in Auschwitz, it becomes clear that every minute of every day involved a struggle to survive, which inevitably entailed making moral compromises, both large and small. It seems clear that the only people to have survived were those who were both very lucky and made such compromises. I think this is even true of Frankl himself. So, the conclusion would have to be that every single person in the concentration camp who followed the logic of Stoic philosophy, i.e., that virtue trumps even life itself, would be dead. I’m sure that one of the ways people willed themselves to survive was the motivation of living to build a better world after this nightmare was over. To have children and grandchildren, to prove that the Nazi attempt to exterminate a people had failed. But in a way, wouldn’t the Nazis have won if every decent (i.e., virtuous) person walked through the open door?
That is a very interesting and subtle question. The basic answer is: no, the Nazi wouldn’t have won if everyone in the camp had been a Stoic. But this requires unpacking in two different…
