Oh, where to start with this intellectual bilge?
Donna Zuckerberg didn’t expect to spend two years trawling through the corner of the internet defined as “the manosphere”, unpicking the grim alliance between pick-up artists, men’s rights activists, incels (involuntarily celibate men), the far right and the most ardent Make America Great Again advocates.
“It started as a curiosity,” she says, as we video call from her home in Silicon Valley, which she shares with her husband and two children. “But it took on a life of its own.” A classicist with a PhD from Princeton, Zuckerberg edits the online journal Eidolon, publishing scholarly essays on the Greco-Roman world from academics and students.
In the summer of 2015, she noticed an unprecedented level of traffic towards a piece entitled “Why is stoicism having a cultural moment?” and went down a rabbit hole to determine why. The results stunned her: men — or rather, misogynists — were using an armchair enthusiasm for the classics to justify manifestos of hate against women. The results were spreading online under a pseudo-intellectual guise, twisting ancient world philosophy to buttress a contemporary hatred of feminism. And it wasn’t a one-off.
“So, there are online communities that exist under the umbrella of what we know as the Red Pill, which are men connected by common resentments against women, immigrants, people of colour,” she explains. “What I was surprised to find was the extent to which they are using ancient Greek and Roman figures and texts to prop up an ideal of white masculinity.”
Red Pillers name themselves after a scene in The Matrix, in which Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) offers Neo (Keanu Reeves) the option of taking the red or blue pill and arriving at either gritty, painful truth (red) or blissful ignorance (blue). Jordan Peterson, the Canadian professor and YouTube sermoniser who rails against identity politics and feminism, is revered as one of the high priests of the movement, while incels have gathered much attention this year.
But in the case of stoicism’s sudden revival, Zuckerberg found that an active corner of Reddit was applying Hellenistic philosophy to explain the pain and hardship white western men were suffering in the 21st century. Except these men didn’t consider themselves angry – they considered themselves oppressed.
“The ancient world was deeply misogynistic — it was a time when there was no word for rape, feminism did not exist and women’s actions were determined by male relatives,” says Zuckerberg. But now the classical texts are being “distorted and stripped of context” online to lend gravitas to campaigns of misogyny and white supremacy. Not only is it toxic but, as Zuckerberg calmly outlines in her new book, Not All Dead White Men, it is deeply dangerous.
First of all, what does it mean to be Stoic? Among other things, the Stoic admires a certain temperament, not being prone to panic or rage, not endlessly complaining about one’s misfortunes. Given the fact that white males are currently the targets of a left-wing propaganda campaign that demonizes them as “privileged” scapegoats for every problem in the world, one could see why a study of Stoic philosophy — as part of an effort to remain calm and reasonable in the face of this relentless drumbeat of anti-white, anti-male rhetoric — might be helpful. Personally, I would recommend that they read Ecclesiastes or Proverbs, but if they find the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius more helpful, OK.
Ms. Zuckerberg evidently does not wish to acknowledge that (a) feminism is an anti-male hate movement and therefore (b) every man intelligent enough to understand feminism is against feminism. There is no need for an Ivy League intellectual to offer us an elaborate explanation of why men hate feminism; all that is necessary is to know what feminism actually is, a truth that Ms. Zuckerberg wishes to obscure. This is how it always is with left-wing ideologues; they never question their own destructive agenda. Anti-male policies that deprive young men of opportunities for education and employment are advocated by feminists as “social justice.” To be male is to be wrong, according to feminists like Donna Zuckerberg, and what needs to be explained, in her mind, is why some men refuse to accept the inferior status assigned to them.
A point that I have repeatedly made:
Rule One: Never argue with a feminist.
This is the only rule you need. There is no point trying to persuade a feminist that she’s wrong. If she were intellectually honest (and thus capable of admitting error) she would not be a feminist.
Because feminists never argue in good faith, nothing is to be gained by engaging in a back-and-forth discussion with them.
Avoid feminists as far as possible, and never speak to a feminist at all. If men were to follow my advice — to shun feminists with aloof silence — there would never be any complaint about “harassment.”
How can a man harass feminists if he never speaks to feminists, if he makes it his habit to walk out of the room as soon as a feminist walks in? This would be the genuinely Stoic response to feminism. What is happening — idiots making obscene comments to women on the Internet, or “incels” going on murder rampages — is definitely not Stoic.
(Hat-tip: Donald Douglas on Twitter.)
