The Stoics say that the invincible man is he who cannot be dismayed by any happening outside of his span of control, outside his will, his moral purpose.
Does this sound irresponsible to you? Here you have a man who pays no attention as the world blows up around him, so long as he had no part in causing it.
The answer to that depends on whether or not you believe in collective guilt. The Stoics do not. Here is what The Encyclopedia of Philosophy says about collective guilt:
"If guilt, in the proper sense, turns on deliberate wrongdoing, it seems that no one can be guilty for the act of another person—there can be no shared or collective or universal guilt. Guilt is incurred by the free choice of the individual. . . .
"But many have questioned this. Among them are some sociologists who misrepresent in this way the dependence of the individual on society. But the main location of the idea of collective guilt is religion—many forms of doctrines of original sin and universal sin regard guilt as a pervasive state of mankind as a whole."
Speaking for myself, I think of collective guilt as a manipulative tool. It reminds me of the Communist "criticism/self-criticism" technique. Many of the precepts of the Stoics depend on an abhorrence of the concept of collective guilt.
—from James B. Stockdale, The Stoic Warrior's Triad
Hmmm...he mentions both religion and Communism as having a concept of collective guilt.
ReplyDeleteI find it interesting that the first order of business in the Christian life is to annihilate that group guilt (baptism) and put the responsibility on the individual, while the first order in Communistic thought is to assign that group guilt and remove their members from personal responsibility ("it's not my fault I'm like this, it's the people who had power who messed things up for me"). Both acknowledge it as reality, in a way, but take very different approaches to it.