The Basis of Stoicism — The Decision Loop
Scenario → Action → Output, Scenario → Action → Output, Scenario → Action → Output. Over, and over, and over again. That’s what life is. A series of Scenarios, actions, and outputs, repeating endlessly. Everything can be looked at in terms of this infinite loop.
This loop is the basis of Stoic philosophy.
What is Stoic philosophy, you might ask? Well, I’ll tell you. The basic rundown is that stoicism is a school of thought founded by Zeno in 300 B.C.E, and it focuses mainly on the belief that virtue is the only path to true happiness (what they call “Eudaimonia”) and that we can only control our own selves.
Let me go into more detail by first defining a few terms.
Virtues — The only inherent good in Stoicism. The four virtues are wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice.
Vices — The only inherent bad in Stoicism. The four vices are foolishness, cowardice, intemperance, and injustice.
Indifferences — Everything else, and they have no inherent goodness or badness to Stoics. Indifferences are subdivided into preferred and nonpreferred indifferences. For example, a big house is preferred, because you want it, but ultimately, is meaningless to Stoics.
Now, Stoics believe that everything that matters is found within the means, not the ends. Here’s an overly simple example — let’s say you were given two choices:
- A city has a 99.99999% chance of being completely eradicated, along with its citizens
- A city will be eradicated, along with all of its citizens — no cuts, buts, or coconuts in this scenario
Both choices are awful. But, a stoic would choose the first, because although there is a 99% chance a bunch of people will die, it is still the better choice.
To a Stoic, you would have made the right choice — the outcome shouldn’t matter to you, but the choice you made should.
By continuously making virtuous choices within the decision loop, the Stoics believed that you achieve Eudaimonia, or their belief of true happiness. This is the fundamental principle of Stoicism. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t dissect the decision loop even more.
The Scenarios:
An important understanding that the Stoics had was knowing what you can and cannot control. They came to understand that the only thing which you truly have control over is yourself.
Well, duh. That sounds super obvious. But one would be surprised how often we let what we do not control, control us.
Let’s say, arbitrarily, that your phone, by some stroke of rather bad luck, conks out.
But, you didn’t have any control whether or not your phone broke. Understanding that we are not God, and can not control everything is an integral mindset for Stoics.
So, you can’t control the Scenarios within the decision loop, and it’s foolish to dwell on them or take responsibility for them — you must simply accept them as they are, and move on.
The Actions:
It is important, however, to take responsibility for your actions.
I say actions, but truly they’re more like reactions — the Scenario, whatever it is, could not be controlled and cannot be changed, so now it’s up to you to decide what happens next.
Actions as a whole can be broken down into two subcategories — judgement and actions themselves.
Judgement is simply an interpretation of Scenario, and is most often expressed as emotion: anger, pain, sadness, ecstasy, elatedness, etc. When making judgements, we must understand that it’s impossible to view anything entirely objectively — our entire basis of reality is a perception — but we can attempt to make as objective judgements as possible.
Example time: Let’s say your mother dies, this is the Scenario. You’d be devastated — your judgement. But, if your friend’s mother dies, although you would sympathize and understand sadness is natural, you’d simply assure him that it’s only human and he should not get extremely hung up.
That’s the concept of “otherizing.” Taking a step back and looking at an Scenario as if it had happened to someone else in order to create objective judgements.
In terms of the actions themselves, they are very simple. Understand your judgement, and choose how to respond given some guiding force or moral — you’d make an action that is most in tune to what you believe in or what you desire. For Stoics, their guiding compass were the four virtues, but individually, they can be whatever.
The Output:
The output is very similar to the Scenario, in that Stoics believed that it could not truly be controlled either — only influenced given your action.
You can spend countless hours preparing for a sports game only to get completely obliterated. Likewise, you can not put in any effort at all and still emerge victorious (Mayweather reportedly barely trained for his bout against McGregor in 2017, and TKO’d him in the 10th round).
What’s interesting is that output will eventually become Scenario as the feedback loop continues. The difference is that in the Scenario phase, you simply need to decide where to go from there, but in the output phase, you have an opportunity to learn and to reflect.
Take these learning and reflections and optimize for the next time you find yourself in the decision loop.
So, to sum up everything that was said, Stoicism is basically viewing the world as a decision loop, in which you can’t control anything but your actions. And, those actions must always be the virtuous choice.
Obviously, there is more to Stoicism than just that, but this is the simplest understanding of how Stoics view the world — Understanding you don’t control what happens but do control yourself, and making good choices in accordance with the four virtues.
If you’d like to know more about Stoicism, the three primary texts I’d recommend are Letters from A Stoic by Seneca, Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, and Discourses by Epictetus. Cheers!
Hi! My name is Imran Iftikar. I’m a middle schooler who’s passionate about Reinforcement Learning, Star Wars, and making the world a better place.
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