Stoicism, cyber-bullying, trigger warnings, and hope
By: Matthew Sharpe
Tags: Psychology, Bullying Prevention, Bullying, Stoicism, Philosophy

Stoicism, cyber-bullying, trigger warnings, and hope

Social media can often be less than sociable, we now know.

The following text continues an interview with Donald Robertson, author of How to Think Like a Roman Emperor (2018) and other works, and one of the founders of modern Stoicism. In international anti-bullying week in mid-November, 2020, we talked at length about Stoicism, ancient and modern, and a range of issues surrounding bullying, and how to respond to it.

As the interview continued, the discussion turned towards questions surrounding the social dimensions of bullying, especially in the world of ‘internet 2.0’ —that is, social media. A great deal of evidence suggests that cyberbullying is troublingly common globally, especially amongst adolescents and young adults.

At the same time, including within the modern Stoic community, lively debates rage about whether measures like “trigger warnings” for disturbing content are the best means to protect people from offence and harm, and to promote the virtues.

So, I was especially keen to draw Donald out on these subjects.

What do you say to the view that Stoicism, far from assisting targets of bullying, actually facilitates it? This, in the sense that it tells us that how others take what we say is up to them. Our insults and provocations are only ‘representations’ for them, which they interpret as harmful, when in fact they need not do this. Shouldn’t we be unafraid to speak harshly or even aggressively to others, since how they take things is ‘their problem’, not our responsibility?

The person who takes this position, Donald responded, gets things upside-down, as far as Stoicism is concerned. They are expecting others to in effect be sages. This could be called “premeditating the best”.

Nevertheless, for Stoicism, wisdom involves premeditating the worst, in order to soften any blows fortune or others may have in store for us.

We should recall here Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations II, 1, and his premeditation of the kinds of people he will meet every new day. There is no sage among them. On the contrary:

S ay to yourself in the early morning: I shall meet to-day inquisitive, ungrateful, violent, treacherous, envious, uncharitable men. All these things have come upon them through ignorance of real good and ill. But I, because I have seen that the nature of good is the right, and of ill the wrong, and that the nature of the man himself who does wrong is akin to my own (not of the same blood and seed, but partaking with me in mind, that is in a portion of divinity), I can neither be harmed by any of them, for no man will involve me in wrong, nor can I be angry with my kinsman or hate him … (translated by A. S. L. Farquharson).

Marcus is hardly imagining that he will only meet advanced Stoics. In Meditations XI, 18 — a kind of inventory of ‘gifts from Apollo’ to assist us with not angering at others’ insults and malign conduct — a final, tenth of these gifts reads as follows:

And, if you will, receive a tenth gift from the leader of the nine Muses, to wit that it is madness to require bad men not to do wrong, for it is aiming at the impossible.

However glad a Stoic might be when people act well, this “gift” suggests, they should not be surprised that people act badly. Knowing the fragility of human nature, the folly would be to expect everyone else to bear up to insult and injury as if they were so many Socrates’.

I was reminded as Donald drew my attention to these quotes from Marcus, in this context, of a comment Plato puts in the mouth of the mysterious “stranger” in the dialogue The Sophist. The stranger is talking about the power of philosophical dialogue, and how submitting oneself to refutation (being shown up as wrong or confused) by a teacher can serve to remove our conceit — the sense of ‘knowing it all’ which Plato identifies as the biggest obstacle to a person advancing philosophically. The skilled interlocutor:

cross-examines a person’s words, when he thinks that he is saying something and is really saying nothing, and easily convicts him of inconsistencies in his opinions … The person, seeing this, is angry with himself, and grows gentle towards others, and thus is entirely delivered from great prejudices and harsh notions, in a way which is most amusing to the hearer, and produces the most lasting good effect on the person who is the subject of the operation. (Trans. B. Jowett)

A Stoic should hope and help others to be sage, as we can strive ourselves to become better. But we cannot expect others to be so, any more than we should ever take ourselves to be fully perfect.

There is a debate in the Stoic community, and more widely, concerning ‘trigger warnings’: warnings especially to school and university students that particular contents may ‘trigger’ negative emotions. So, those who feel this threat can choose to leave, or avoid the content altogether. What would you say about this debate, and where do you stand, between more ‘conservative’ positions, which oppose the idea of ‘trigger warnings’, and more ‘liberal’ or ‘new-Left’ positions, which defend their need?

Donald’s position on this divisive issue was nuanced. William Irvine is perhaps the leading modern Stoic author who takes a more ‘conservative’ position on this issue — although this (like most political terms) is potentially misleading today. Like other critics, I mean, Irvine argues that policing speech is counter-productive, albeit well-meaning. The argument here is that, since life and politics inevitably involves conflicts and darker experiences, to try to shield ourselves or others from these parts of life is misguided.

In the short-term, such measures may protect people from materials which can provoke anger, fear, grief, even trauma. But over time, such avoidance means that people don’t build up the psychological and ethical resources to deal with difficult events, news, and conflicting perspectives.

Do trigger warnings help or hinder the vulnerable?

Somehow, we do have to face up even to the most heinous facts about our shared history, like the holocaust or the gulags, for examples. And not least since we want to avoid repeating their like.

The truth does not go away, because we choose not to look at it. Instead, as Francis Bacon said of people who try to repress their own natures, the truth has a habit of returning in due course, as if with a pitchfork — harder to control than ever.

Donald’s position about the idea of ‘trigger warnings’ is somewhat different than Irvine’s, containing both a ‘yes’ and a ‘no’ (or ‘but’) here.

On one hand, imagine a class where a teacher is talking about a divisive subject, like domestic violence. S/he issues a trigger warning at the start of the session, that these things will be discussed. People who wish to may therefore leave.

There is a problem here. If a person has been subject to domestic violence, and so might be ‘triggered’, s/he also will presumably have good reasons to want to conceal this fact from peers. It is very private, and its being widely known about amongst strangers could redouble the harm.

If s/he however gets up and walks out when the trigger warning is given, s/he’s effectively announcing to the class that this is her situation, or that of someone s/he cares about.

This is surely counterproductive, relative to the benevolent intention of trying to shield the vulnerable from psychological or social harm.

On the other hand, the argument that repeated exposure to causes of trauma and powerful negative emotions always works to desensitize and thus strengthen people is psychologically questionable. It does work, for example, with panic disorders. Nevertheless, we need to specify under what conditions such repeated exposure works this effect.

Donald stresses that research suggests that for repeated exposure to a potentially traumatic object, say spiders for an arachnophobe, to work, what is required is controlled, repeated exposure over extended periods of time.

Exposure to troubling images or narratives, on slides, for instance, in a single class, is unlikely to have any such positive curative effect — especially when getting up and leaving will flag one’s discomfort to one’s fellows. Hence, the argument that simply letting students face up to content will desensitize them, and hence make them stronger, is not for Donald as simple as some of the critics suggest.

What about insults and harassment on social media, or online bullying? Can a Stoic ever embrace social media, or is it a kind of purely ‘un-Stoic’ medium, encouraging us to compare and boast about ourselves while envying others, and making us more dependent than ever on the opinions (‘likes’ and ‘shares’) of others?

In response to these questions, Donald took a different direction than I had anticipated. I’d thought we might discuss narcissism, and how Stoicism’s conception of the self pushes against the idea that ‘we are what others think of us’, as against (above all) the bearers of a capacity to rationally think, choose, and act — what Epictetus calls prohairêsis.

Instead, Donald raised a set of intriguing reflections on what the ancients would have called the rhetorical features of these media. The positive potentials of social media are evident — a good deal more evident perhaps than its more troubling potentials. Modern Stoicism itself has been enabled to no small degree by the internet and its affordances for rapid sharing of experiences and interests between friends and strangers anywhere.

What is Stoicism to social media, or social media to Stoicism?

However, when we look at the kinds of messaging which social media allows, principally short ‘tweets’, images or ‘memes’, it is striking how little information they provide us about the message sender.

There is after all only so much any such soundbite-like communications can say (notwithstanding the old adage about pictures and thousands of words). We can’t see the other person, when they type what they have typed, and emoticons are a poor substitute for all the verbal and visual cues that attend in-person communications — let alone the ability to ask and answer questions.

What this means is that we as receivers of social media messages which might be ambiguous are left with a lot of interpretive work to do, to ‘fill in the gaps’. However, one thing we know about anxiety is that it is diminished by our having a clear sense of what is going on, or what is being communicated, and increased by our not having such clarity. Animal phobias, for example, are diminished by having clear, repeated visual exposure to the objects of the phobia.

With potentially ambiguous social media messages or comments ‘below the line’, the conditions for such pacifying habituation, with access to the other person behind the screen, are not present. We’re left with our own ideas about what a person ‘must’ mean, in the scant signifiers (words or images) the medium presents us with.

But we can’t know exactly. And that uncertainty itself can feed angst and rumination: he said this, but what does he mean? Why did he say that? Was that meant ironically? Why did she use that word?

As such, the media sets up a situation wherein people are primed to respond, defensively, on the basis of misleading, partial interpretations of what others intended. (We might add here that when the medium allows others to ‘watch’ such exchanges, that this also can contribute to highly aggressive dynamics, as people defend their reputations).

Such partial responses can then in turn surprise and anger the original sender. And the whole situation can quickly spiral into name-calling, abuse, and other forms of ‘unsocial’ communications very familiar today.

Some sources on responding to bullying underline the importance of getting to grips, cognitively, with why others might want to try to bring the target down. If you can understand why the bully feels that insulting, belittling, entrapping or gaslighting their colleague[s] is a good thing to do, you will be better able to come to grips with their actions. So it won’t be so surprising and damaging— that kind of idea. What would you as a Stoic therapist say about this?

As Donald sees things, from a Stoic perspective, such a recommendation is risky.

On the one hand, to understand is, if not to forgive, to give yourself a distance from a phenomenon. If it becomes clear to us that the other is acting out of fear or a profound sense of inadequacy, as is usually the case with bullies, seeing this can help depersonalize things. It can even replace anger and grief with empathy or sadness, an old ancient remedy in nonStoic schools.

As we’ve said, with Stoicism, such depersonalizing is held to be very powerful in giving people a distance from what is befalling them.

On the other hand, Stoicism underlines that we cannot know why others act as they do. Other’s thoughts, motives, and actions are not eph’hemin, dependent on us, after all.

Bullies will usually deny that they have bullied. The more cunning will even do this by gaslighting — acting behind closed doors or whispering, Iago-like, in others’ ears to get them to do the dirty work, and enable plausible deniability. In what is called ‘cry-bullying’, bullies switch any attempt of the target to defend themselves by making a complaint as itself ‘bullying’.

Whatever the particulars, if a person feels entitled to ‘take somebody else down’, it will usually be for a complex of reasons, some of which they may not admit to themselves. To worry about what we cannot know is from a Stoic perspective hence not a rational way to spend your time and energies.

Indeed, this “why?” question about others’ actions brings particular psychological perils. Agonizing over “why?” is often a key component in forms of rumination (see below). This is the repetitive, nigh-compulsive going-over of scenarios, or of possible responses, in one’s mind which can become crippling for targets who have been traumatized: “it’s like a tape over and over in my head … I keep asking myself … What I just don’t get is …”

Again, the point of Stoicism as a therapeutic philosophy is going to be to get the person to the point where they can begin saying: “whatever their motives, this is what I can do … Whatever they may do, I can do x, y, z … whatever happens, my role is …”

Again, the, we see that the image of Stoicism as a fatalistic philosophy is deeply misleading: it is a philosophy of taking responsibility for what one can do to change things, not of impassively accepting every ill. Justice is a virtue, as is courage.

What can Stoicism say to people who are perhaps suffering from insomnia, or related conditions, having faced difficult experiences? There is a compulsion to repeat set in chain by traumatic experiences, for example, and sufferers often wrestle with ruminating again and again on the causes of their condition, as well as with sleeplessness.

There are different kinds of insomnia. Post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, often associated with targets of bullying, involves what is called “intermittent insomnia”. Individuals can get to sleep at the end of the day. But they cannot stay asleep. They wake up in the middle of the night, and often find it extremely difficult to return to sleep. Instead, they ruminate over the anxiety-provoking events, possible responses, courses of action, meanings, etc.

There is the idea that Stoicism is about repressing negative or difficult thoughts (which we discussed in the first part of the interview), as if we could wholly control every part of our own mental life. This isn’t Donald’s understanding of the Stoic position.

There are automatic thoughts that can be involved in post-traumatic conditions. Their appearance in individuals’ minds, perhaps in the early hours of the morning, will not be something they can control just by gritting their teeth.

Rumination, one of the typical symptoms of post-traumatic responses

However, this doesn’t mean that the conscious mind is powerless, either. What we do, once the thought has appeared, remains up to us. This, at least to the extent that the individual is able to catch themselves having the thought, and not let it carry them away.

Such self-awareness is not always easy, and is arguably one of the things Stoic practice aims to increase our capacity for. We practice having a thought but ‘letting it go’. (This is also one skill that different Eastern traditions of meditation teach practitioners).

Another thing we can do, which Donald also talks about in How to Think Like a Roman Emperor, is scheduling times to consider difficult issues. There is certainly no point in thinking over the same issue many dozens of times. There is probably nothing new or constructive that will come from thinking about this issue once more at 2 am in the morning.

One can however practice thought-scheduling. Once you become aware of a troubling thought, you can schedule facing up to it at a particular, discrete time.

This will also have the effect of containing the anxiety or negative affects that might surround thinking about this issue. It is a matter again of suspending the voluntary response to the automatic thought.

We return here also to the Stoic insight that affects, like anger and anxiety, bring with them certain modes of thinking which are often suboptimal for thinking through difficult issues and important decisions. Anger, Donald repeated, involves if not a temporary madness, as the ancient Stoics claimed, then a temporary stupidity: catastrophizing, over-simplifying, and focussing only on the short-term.

There is wisdom (and inner strength) in being able to say to oneself: “I’m not in the right frame of mind right now.” Anger subsides, and often decisions don’t need to be made right now, especially in the early hours of the morning.

Epictetus, Donald commented, already took all this in. He recommended that when you get upset you should take a time out until you calm down.

So, summarizing, a Stoic response to automatic ruminative thinking can involve three stages: (i) recognizing the thoughts; (ii) suspending one’s immediate impulses in response to them (letting go); and (iii) scheduling in advance a better time to think about it, outside of the ‘heat of the moment’.

Bullying in schools or the workplace does not only involve the perpetrator and the target. There are teachers, Principals, managers, who ideally should be looking to understand and minimize this kind of behavior in their institutions. Yet, these figures often become part of the problem, and in some definitions, bullying requires an asymmetry of power, operating from someone with authority to someone less empowered. What can Stoicism as a therapeutic philosophy say to teachers, Principals, managers, as against targets?

In response to this question, Donald was keen to underline again the limits or parameters of Stoicism as a therapeutic and ethical philosophy. Certainly, Stoicism also has an understanding of justice, and of the duties that come with having taken on different roles (as Brian Johnson’s The Role Ethics of Epictetus: Stoicism in Ordinary Life has valuably examined).

Both bullying targets, and managers, will have institutional, industrial and wider law available to them to govern dispute resolution, discipline wrongdoers, protect targets from unreasonable ‘managerial actions’, etc.

With that said, Stoic philosophy is not inarticulate here. Managers, teachers, principals, when they receive reports of bullying from staff, or when they receive reports alleging others’ misconduct which could themselves be vexatious, will have to manage their responses, their emotions, and treat others fairly.

All of these are subjects about which Stoicism has plenty to say.

When a teacher or manager hears reports of bullying, or allegations by one party of the same, they will potentially feel a mix of emotions. The people reporting these things will often be emotional. People who really have been harassed and who might be fearful of speaking out can be greatly distressed.

It is not the task of the manager, any more than the therapist in the clinic, to share this emotion. This sounds cold, but the full thought here is different. One should empathize with the person, that they are feeling these things. One should help to comfort or calm them. One should hear them out and take any allegations of misconduct seriously.

However, to empathize with someone is not the same as fully agreeing with them before hearing both sides of the story. Their emotion may be real, but based on a subjective, contestable assessment of what has happened. These things need to be responsibly investigated, as ultimately justice is the best means to assist all parties.

A manager, in a situation of potential conflict, is responsible to more than one person or party: the person bringing the allegation and also s/he about whom the allegation is made. A kneejerk, one-sided response with either party risks seriously exacerbating the problem.

Here, again, the Stoic practice of examining representations can play a key role, Donald argued. We recall the Epictetan practice of training ourselves to say to each representation, including the emotional reports of others: ‘you are only an appearance, and not at all what you purport to be’.

If the report is vexatious for example, and a manager takes the side of the reporter of the slander without looking at all of the evidence and allowing the accused to speak, the person targeted will face not only accusations which are unfair. S/he will also bear the additional burden of knowing that their manager/s have accepted the calumnies on face value.

They have hence been doubly let down. This adds injury to the insult of a colleague making a vexatious claim, and seriously increases the possible harm, when a more philosophical, Stoic response would avoid this.

Let’s end on a high note. What about hope? Does this all mean there is no place for hope in Stoicism? But don’t people in hard times above all need hope for the future, to help them in their present situations?

In classic Stoic fashion, Donald responded here that we should begin thinking about this question by distinguishing between good and bad kinds of hope. (Virtue alone is wholly good, and hope is a state of mind, but not a named virtue, for Stoicism, as against Christianity).

Seneca comments to Lucilius that fear keeps pace with hope. What he was intending was hope that the external world will change, and must change, for one to be better or happier. Such a perspective is not Stoic. We are making our happiness rest on things we can’t control, and deferring it — a false economy based on a mistaken ontology.`

But this does not mean there is not in the Stoic purview a more positive kind of hope. This hope comes from knowing, once again, that whatever happens, taking in and premeditating the very worst, we have the resources to be strong and happy.

This is a kind of Stoic optimism, if not of hope, and recalling it is arguably the strongest measure to assist people in difficulties to be able to endure and overcome.