PhilosophyTube is usually pretty cool but I think this is kind of an L? She gets into some pretty heavy criticisms of the traditional Stoic philosophy and seem to just dismiss them all at the end. I don't know how someone can say that "You can be in literal chains and be the freest person in the world if you are a sage" with a straight face. I know it's technically true from some perspectives but it just seems so hollow compared to everything else in the video. Mental freedom doesn't help someone when they're doing a daily 12 hour shift that drives them to the edge of exhaustion and takes away everything they enjoy in life.
None of this is me criticizing Stoicism, btw, I don't think I'm smart enough to, just felt like a weird end to the discussion part of the video
Maybe, I'm just not familiar enough with PhilosophyTube's format?
Yeah that's why I said it was technically true
I agree that it can help people cope, but IMO it's never going to be as good as actually being free physically. And, freedom is different from happiness. You can feel plenty free in prison but your conditions can still make you miserable in other ways.
Yeah, I try to lean towards good faith interpretations when people are pretty much on our side like she is.
I'm not trying to argue they're doing or saying anything wrong, at worst I just disagree with them on an abstract moral plane. Because of the context I got the impression that "freedom" was being used as a stand-in for "happiness", implying that happiness can only be obtained "within", which is something I don't really agree with. People need to do work on themselves, yes, and individual coping mechanisms can help, yes, but you need both that and a change of environment for a fundamental change in attitude.
I think that someone who is liberated but misunderstands what that liberation is in reality is going to feel a lot freer than someone who is not liberated, even if they think they don't. Someone could be a conservative who despises living in a socialist country but their subconscious attitudes caused by having free healthcare are going to affect them positively nonetheless.
In stoicism, freedom has a specific meaning of not being controlled by your initial emotional impulses. It's the Greek thing of emphasizing freedom-from instead of freedom-to. It's a provocative phrase that rests on a specific definition, and is only literally true in the context of stoicism, but is a powerful metaphore outside of that context and is true (in the poetic sense)
The tricky part is when you start equivocating stoic freedom and socialist freedom. Or truth in the poetic sense with truth in the literal sense.
Also inb4 "tell me Socrates, what is truth?"
So, then, the Stoic "No" in response to the passivity problem just doesn't work? Or it does work, but relegates Stoicism to a kind of vibe rather than a lifestyle?