I rather think that modern western culture is about as un-Stoic as it has been at any point since... sometime before Stoicism was invented, and that any explicit endorsement of Stoicism you may find among the remaining sane people is purely a reaction to that.
Stoicism teaches that suffering and misfortune are part of life, and that wisdom comes from learning to deal with this fact. Modern-day Oprah culture teaches that you are a beautiful and unique person and that any suffering or misfortune you may encounter is something that you should probably sue somebody about.
The snowflake syndrome is the modern means of building a minority political bloc - for any underrepresented group or condition, a representative comes along and declares themselves champion of the people(the people that they represent, that is), and encourages shaming of the rest as a form of unification.
It's the shaming that eventually got to me. It's such a prolific and harmful tactic. The people who do it the most tend to lack virtue themselves, when held up to the light. And it doesn't matter how well your internal sense of guilt works - you can always be judged poorly for reasons that become obviously unfair when pushed to far-reaching conclusions. It encourages you to polarize into a completely fanatical or disengaged state, without a healthy middle. If we've improved any, it's in that outright dehumanization is less common now, replaced with convenient euphemisms that diffuse blame.
Stoicism has the appeal of "It doesn't matter how bad the outside world gets - I am going to do my own thing and fix up my own principles and actions." It encourages you to work on small everyday behaviors instead of constantly diverting your attention to the Big Important Problem that the news is currently pushing at you(and that you can't do much about, without derailing your entire life).
Millions or even billions if you accept that many, many attitudes and thoughts attributed to stoicism are taught in the Bible, both testaments.
In fact, the opening of the book of John was partially an appeal to the stoics to see that their philosophy is complete in the Christ.
And for what it's worth, Paul dialogued with the stoics in Athens in Acts 17, saying some of what I'm saying here... that stoicism part of a picture completed by the teachings of Christ.
Hundreds of thousands, absolute minimum. You want to look at the small scale environmentalists as one specific example. Not the "fly my lear jet to the anti-nuclear protest" but the organic home gardener types. Chipsy sounds like he was channeling John Micheal Greer there, towards the end. JMG's blog is well worth reading for other insights, of course.
Modern-day Oprah culture teaches that you are a beautiful and unique person and that any suffering or misfortune you may encounter is something that you should probably sue somebody about.
close, but I'd generalize this more and adapt it so that it also relates more to non-US cultures (less Oprah, less suing), and by removing the action (suing) from it and replacing it with what people tend to think, not how they react to it - something like
"Modern-day culture teaches that you are a beautiful and unique person and that any suffering or misfortune you may encounter is somebody else's, or the system's, fault"
At least that is how I perceive the group I think you are targetting here.
I think it's the opposite, modern day culture celebrates individuals and their achievements as though they created their success on their own, that luck had nothing to do with it. We put people like Zuckerberg on a pedestal when at least some (much?) of their success comes from the luck of having the right parents, being born at the right time, having an interest that happens to be financially valuable and so on.
The downside to this attitude is that we look down on people who weren't lucky, who had the misfortune to be born into an uneducated family, who weren't in the right place at the right time and so on through no fault of their own.
I see no reason to throw Oprah into this discussion. If she said that then quote, else cut the rubbish. If anything Oprah was the one that was sued by the meat industry for speaking about Mad Cow disease.
Modern day "nerd" culture teaches us that we are special snowflakes who are the only rational ones in a land full of sheep, persecuted and looked down upon for our virtue.
I have to agree. It's been my experience at least among certain circles of atheism (Graveyard of the Gods forums) and even social activism (Twitter has a bit of this nonsense going on) where X group is special and isolated from the rest of human kind terms of suffering and/or significance. Frankly, I think it's a lack of empathy that drives this sort of thinking. It's easy to symbolically scream and cluck your pearl necklace than it is to actually do something or to reach out to others when in need. It just seems to me that the Internet just makes it easier to be angry or outraged than to be helpful and empathetic.
I think it's more of a general trend. GG was just one minor spat in the larger scheme of things. Various forms of moral panic/outrage have been around forever. It's just becoming more concentrated into smaller segments of society. It's like targeted advertising but with more screaming and gnashing of teeth.
Was going to type up a similar response. This is exactly how I feel. Stoicism looks like it's gaining in popularity because of people reacting to the oversensitivity running rampant in society today. You can hardly teach people today that feeling bad is OK.
you are correct re: the modern day Oprah culture, but at the same time it is pretty clear that stoicism is having "a moment" precisely as a reaction to the saturation of the "get joy now!" self help book-club glurdge.
I rather think that modern western culture is about as un-Stoic as it has been at any point since... sometime before Stoicism was invented, and that any explicit endorsement of Stoicism you may find among the remaining sane people is purely a reaction to that.
Stoicism teaches that suffering and misfortune are part of life, and that wisdom comes from learning to deal with this fact. Modern-day Oprah culture teaches that you are a beautiful and unique person and that any suffering or misfortune you may encounter is something that you should probably sue somebody about.