By Nathan Stiff
Donna Zuckerberg, founder and editor-in-chief of Eidolon, an online classics publication, spoke on the contradictions of The Red Pill community’s infatuation with stoic philosophy April 23 in Stamp.
Zuckerberg, who wrote the 2018 book, “Not All Dead White Men,” described The Red Pill community as a far-right group of angry men who have deemed white male privilege a myth, and are dissatisfied with today’s common progressive culture. Its name is in reference to the 1999 film “The Matrix,” in which the main character must choose between taking a blue pill, which represents blissful ignorance, or a red pill, which represents painful truth.
“The surviving stoic texts primarily dispense advice on how to respond rationally to difficult situations without getting needlessly upset,” Zuckerberg said. “The Red Pill is a community where angry men fan the flames of each others’ rage and encourage each other to invade feminist spaces and verbally attack women.”
The word “stoic,” in this context, refers not to the more modern use of the word, meaning the ability to conceal pain or emotion, but to an ancient Greek and Roman philosophy that teaches rationality and self-control. Notable stoic writers include Seneca and Marcus Aurelius.
Zuckerberg said some hateful groups, including the alt-right, use stoicism to create a veneer of enlightenment around their movement.
“The adoption of stoicism, as it turns out, works as a legitimizing strategy for The Red Pill community,” Zuckerman said. “It allows them to project the appearance of emotional control in order to establish their moral superiority over groups that they perceive as irrational. These groups include women, the LGBTQ community and people of color.”
It is ironic, according to Zuckerberg, that this community professes stoicism, because although it was pervaded by the “cavalier sexism” of its time and place, the stoics wrote that women were essentially equal to men in their capacity for reason.
“The feminism, if you want to call it that, of [stoic] texts is often far from perfect, but it’s still more favorable to women than almost any other ancient philosophy, ” she said. “Yet it is used by the men of The Red Pill to provide an intellectual and historical underpinning for their sexism.”
Zuckerberg said she considers it an exercise in futility, trying to persuade members of this group that their values conflict with stoicism.
“I think that engaging with them is not an effective strategy,” Zuckerberg said. “So much of their aim is just to get a response — any response — out of people, so they will frame any interaction as a victory.”
Cailin O’Toole, a sophomore computer science and government and politics double major, said she attended the event to learn how members of The Red Pill movement and similar groups think.
“I liked seeing the examples of what people were actually saying, and being able to read the actual posts behind what she’s comparing it to,” O’Toole said.
The most important takeaways for Brittany Starr, a graduate student in the English department, were Zuckerberg’s strategies for limiting the impact of harmful ideologies through de-platforming.
Robert Matera, a lecturer in the classics department, also took interest in the “sideways strategies” Zuckerberg suggested for dealing with The Red Pill community.
“I think that the issues Dr. Zuckerberg brought up are really important issues for us to be thinking about in our field,” Matera said, “to be thinking about as we decide how and what we’re going to write in our research and publications, and as we decide how and what we’re going to teach in the classroom.”
Zuckerberg said she first discovered The Red Pill community’s fascination with stoicism after reading an article written by Chiara Sulprizio on Eidolon, titled “Why Is Stoicism Having a Cultural Moment?”.
According to its mission statement, the publication aims to make the study of classics “political and personal, feminist and fun,” and publishes commentary on ancient Greek and Roman art, literature and philosophy, and the study of classics itself.
The Bahá’í Chair for World Peace, a University of Maryland academic program that researches paths and obstacles to world peace, hosted the lecture. Hoda Mahmoudi, the current chair of the program, introduced Zuckerberg.
“Once agreed upon ethical principles, or right and wrong, are breaking apart,” Mahmoudi said. “Institutions of higher learning and academics have a crucial role to play in society’s path toward human cohesion and constructive solutions to the problems that plague our society.”