Less Downside from Life

Less Downside from Life

We start with the following conflict. We introduced Seneca as the wealthiest person in the Roman Empire. His fortune was three hundred million denarii (for a sense of its equivalence, at about the same period in time, Judas got thirty denarii, the equivalent of a month’s salary, to betray Jesus). Admittedly it is certainly not very convincing to read denigrations of material wealth from a fellow writing the lines on one of his several hundred tables (with ivory legs).

The traditional understanding of Stoicism in the literature is of some indifference to fate—among other ideas of harmony with the cosmos that I will skip here. It is about continuously degrading the value of earthly possessions. When Zeno of Kition, the founder of the school of Stoicism, suffered a shipwreck (a lot of shipwrecks in ancient texts), he declared himself lucky to be unburdened so he could now do philosophy. And the key phrase reverberating in Seneca’s oeuvre is nihil perditi, “I lost nothing,” after an adverse event. Stoicism makes you desire the challenge of a calamity. And Stoics look down on luxury: about a fellow who led a lavish life, Seneca wrote: “He is in debt, whether he borrowed from another person or from fortune.”1

Stoicism, seen this way, becomes pure robustness—for the attainment of a state of immunity from one’s external circumstances, good or bad, and an absence of fragility to decisions made by fate, is robustness. Random events won’t affect us either way (we are too strong to lose, and not greedy to enjoy the upside), so we stay in the middle column of the Triad.

What we learn from reading Seneca directly, rather than through the commentators, is a different story. Seneca’s version of that Stoicism is antifragility from fate. No downside from Lady Fortuna, plenty of upside.

True, Seneca’s aim on paper was philosophical, trying to stick to the Stoic tradition as described above: Stoicism was not supposed to be about gains and benefits, so on paper it was not at the level of antifragility, just about a sense of control over one’s fate and the reduction of psychological fragility. But there is something that commentators have completely missed. If wealth is so much of a burden, while unnecessary, what’s the point of having it? Why did Seneca keep it?

As I said concerning the psychologists who in Chapter 2 ignore post-traumatic growth but focus on post-traumatic harm, intellectuals have this thing against antifragility—for them the world tends to stop at robustness. I don’t know what it is, but they don’t like it. This made them avoid considering that Seneca wanted the upside from fate, and there is nothing wrong with it.

Let us first learn from the great master how he advocated the mitigation of downside, the standard message of the Stoics—robustness, protection against harm from emotions, how to move away from the first column of the Triad, that sort of thing. Second step, we will show how he truly proposed antifragility. And, third step, we will generalize his trick into a general method of detection of antifragility in Chapters 18 and 19.