Can You Be a Stoic and a Political Activist?
With another election season coming to a close, I keep coming back to a question that seems simple at first: Can you be a Stoic and a political activist?
At first, the two can seem uncomfortable together. Stoicism teaches acceptance, emotional restraint, and careful attention to what we control. Political activism asks us to enter a world full of conflict, disappointment, strong feelings, and outcomes we cannot control. Anyone who has spent fifteen minutes around politics knows that tranquility is seldom included in the welcome packet.
I think some of the confusion comes from how we define acceptance.
Christopher Gill addresses that directly in an essay that prompted this reflection. The Stoics urged us to accept what is genuinely inevitable, including mortality and the limits of human control. Injustice created by human choices belongs in a different category. Gill points out that Roman Stoics repeatedly challenged political injustice and sometimes suffered exile or death for doing so.
Epictetus starts with the idea that some things are up to us and some are not. Our judgments, choices, and actions are ours. The results are not. I’ve written about this before because it’s one of the most helpful parts of Stoicism for me. It helps me focus on what I can still do, even when so much is out of my hands.
We can choose to vote. We can choose to speak up. We can write, organize, volunteer, call our representatives, go to meetings, help a neighbor understand an issue, or stand with someone facing injustice. All of these are within our control.
The result belongs to a much larger world.
This lesson is especially tough during elections. You might work hard and still lose. You can make your case and not convince anyone. You might spend hours knocking on doors and discover that democracy sometimes responds by turning off the porch light.
Stoicism asks us to look at the character of our participation. Does it express wisdom, courage, justice, and self-control?
Justice makes political disengagement especially difficult to defend as a Stoic ideal. The Stoics believed human beings naturally develop concern beyond themselves, first toward family and community and eventually toward humanity as a whole. Gill describes this as recognizing other people as fellow members of a larger human community. Political involvement becomes one possible expression of our obligations to one another.
That seems especially important right now.
Right now, political distrust is widespread. Recent Pew research shows that most Republicans and Democrats have negative views of the other party. More than a quarter of Americans now dislike both major parties.1 In this climate, division can become a political tool. Anger grabs attention. Fear makes complex problems seem simple. Culture wars can take up a huge amount of public energy.
At the same time, people still need affordable places to live. Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies says housing costs are at record highs for renters and getting worse for homeowners.2 People also need affordable health care. KFF reports that almost two-thirds of adults worry about health care costs, and nearly half say it’s hard to pay for.3 Wars continue to destroy lives abroad. Here at home, we see political violence and threats in public life. These are tough problems that need patience, careful thought, compromise, and steady effort.
Culture war politics offers something easier. Give people someone to fear. Turn a neighbor into a symbol. Make identity itself the argument. Then everyone can spend the evening furious while the rent is still due in the morning.
This may be where Stoicism has something particularly useful to offer political life. A Stoic should be suspicious of anyone who needs us constantly angry, because anger can narrow judgment. We should be equally suspicious of our own appetite for that feeling. Epictetus kept returning his students to their judgments because those judgments eventually shape their actions. Political life gives us plenty of opportunities to practice that lesson.
Marcus Aurelius wrote that as a Roman, Rome was his city, but as a human being, the universe was his community. What helps those communities, he said, is what truly matters.
This reminds me of something I’ve mentioned before. Barney Frank once said that government is just the name for the things we choose to do together. I’ve always liked that idea. The more I learn about Stoicism, the more it sounds like a Stoic thought.
Politics, at its best, concerns the life we share. Roads and schools. Housing and health care. Safety and opportunity. How we treat the poor, the stranger, the worker, the child, and the person whose life looks very different from ours. We will disagree about what government should do and how much it should do. Those disagreements belong in a democracy. The deeper question is whether we still understand ourselves as people who share a community.
Marcus ruled an empire. Seneca advised Nero. Cato stood up to Caesar. Helvidius Priscus and Thrasea Paetus challenged the emperor’s power. Gill points out that Roman Stoics sometimes skipped meetings, stayed silent, or walked out of the Senate as moral protests, even though it could mean exile or death.
These were imperfect people working in imperfect political systems. That may make them more useful to us.
A similar moral thread runs through people we remember from our own era. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote from a Birmingham jail that “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” His point rested on the same recognition of human interdependence that appears in Stoic thought. What happens to another person cannot always be dismissed as someone else’s problem.
John Lewis carried that obligation into a lifetime of political action. Near the end of his life, he urged people facing despair to
“Organize. Demonstrate. Sit-in. Stand-up. Vote.”
William Wilberforce expressed the moral burden in words I have kept in my notes for some time. “You may choose to look the other way, but you can never say again that you did not know.” Knowledge creates responsibility.
For me, that is where Stoicism and political activism meet. Temperance can restrain anger before it takes over our judgment. Wisdom can make us examine evidence and our own certainty. Courage can keep us present when speaking carries a cost. Justice reminds us why we showed up.
And the Dichotomy of Control helps us accept whatever comes next.
We do what is ours to do. We vote, speak, listen, organize, question those in power, protect others’ dignity, and keep working for the common good.
That’s what Stoic political activism looks like. We show up because justice calls us, and we hold onto our character as we do the work.
