Stoic Kitsch

Stoicism has a problem, and it’s not just AI slop and red pilled influencers

A selection of thumbnails from Stoic videos on YouTube. A lot of Stoic material is illustrated with AI-slop that combine idealised masculine classical statues and modern body-building images. Why the statues always have such morose expressions is beyond me. Most of these headlines make absolutely no sense in Stoicism and were likely created by opportunists hoping to make money from the Stoicism craze.

I was top of the class at university because I was adept at forming word salads with the crunch and freshness of quotations from the latest French or German theorists that anglophone academics fawned over.

I studied in the 1990s when Jean Baudrillard was hot. His publisher had the ingenious idea to make his books big and square (like children’s books) so that they befitted the coffee table rather than the bookshelf. It worked — the ex-Marxist’s books became props to start conversations about how the first Iraq War didn’t happen, or whatever. When I studied for my Masters and PhD in the 00s Baudrillard wasn’t hot anymore, Zizek and Lacan were hot. Everything wasn’t what it really was, or whatever.

Academia is as subservient to trends as the fashion industry, perhaps all the more so. Ideas are cool, or uncool, by the decree of cliques of haute bourgeois trendsetters who’ve probably not done an honest day’s work in their lives. At least in my time, it was essential to ape star thinkers to survive in a world with a twisted incentive structure.

I remember wanting to incorporate the ideas of a once-cool, but now uncool, thinker into my work. When I ran it by my tutor, whose career was largely built on turning verbs into…