“It is among the most powerful that you find the superlatively wicked,” said Socrates – words which resonate today, writes Tom Hodgkinson 

How do you find happiness and freedom? For a certain class of man, generally the inner weaklings, the answer would seem to be through power and money. Again and again these awful men – who project an image of greatness and loudly advertise their charitable activities – turn out to be immoral, greedy sex addicts who aspire to private jets and private islands and courtesans.

Among the Epstein Files is a transcript of a 2019 conversation between Steve Bannon and the convicted sex offender. Bannon asks if he considers himself a Stoic. “No, I consider myself a hermit,” Epstein replies. “Stoics aren’t very happy.”

This rejection of the philosophical life in favour of one of power and pleasure would have been very familiar to Socrates. In Plato’s dialogue the Gorgias, a young man called Callicles attacks Socrates’ philosophical preachings. That’s for the weak, he says.

Great men, says Callicles, are amoral – they ignore the rules that confine ordinary mortals: “If any man arises endowed with a nature sufficiently strong, he will, I believe, shake off all fetters, and break loose.”

Might is right: “This is natural justice, that the cattle and all other possessions of the weak and inferior belong to the superior and stronger.”

He then talks anti-philosophy. “When I see an older man still studying philosophy and not deserting it, that man is in need of a whipping.” Talk of philosophy is “babblings, follies, trifling matters”.

He says only the weak praise temperance and self-control and justice – virtues that would later become core to the Stoics. Happiness comes from power and the fulfilment of desire.

“Luxury and intemperance and license… are virtue (arete) and happiness. And all the rest is tinsel.”

This, then, is the anti-philosophical life, and it seems to be just as attractive today, to a certain kind of man, as it did two and half thousand years ago. Have we learned nothing?

Socrates sticks to his philosophical guns and tells Callicles: “I urge you to choose in place of an insatiable and uncontrolled life the life of order that is satisfied with what at any time it possesses.” This is the sort of idea that would go on to inspire the Stoics.

We have a choice, Socrates says. “What kind of life should one live, the life to which you invite me, the life of a ‘real man’, speaking in the Assembly and practising rhetoric and playing the politician according to your present fashion, or the life spent in philosophy?”

Socrates’ great friend Alcibiades chose the first path, the way of the tyrant. He ignored Socrates’ advice and indulged in affairs, courtesans and violence and came to a sorry end.

Well readers. Which would you choose?

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A Drink with the Idler

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How to Live Like a Stoic: Book Launch

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