Stoicism is one of the West’s most influential philosophical traditions, and author Ryan Holiday is its greatest advocate. And so, when he says that Ivanka Trump’s praise of Marcus Aurelius is “as cringe as it possibly gets, because it’s not real and it’s totally missing the point,” anyone who cares about Stoicism should pay attention. While Ivanka’s quotation of Marcus, on how “the soul becomes dyed the color of its thoughts,” reproduces the sentence accurately, explains Holiday, she fails to live up to the philosophy because she has not, in his terms, staged “an intervention with your dad whose life would be dyed with his horrible, negative, mean bullying thoughts all the time.”
But what Holiday demands of Ivanka contradicts the stoic philosophy he claims to teach. “A man must know many things first,” wrote Marcus Aurelius in Book 11, “before he be able truly and judiciously to judge of another man’s action.” And yet Holiday does not entertain the possibility that Ivanka has thought carefully about her relationship to her father, that she has considered and rejected the path of public denunciation, or that her loyalty might itself reflect a moral commitment. Instead, he assumes that her silence about her father proves her unethical.
Donald Trump’s tweets, his rallies, his rhetorical style, and his political career are not Ivanka’s to control. The very first sentence of Stoic Epictetus’s Handbook says, “Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.”
