Politics matters. It cannot save us, but it can shape the conditions in which we attempt to save ourselves. It can’t make us wise or kind or brave, but it can make space for those virtues to thrive. Conversely, it can crush them underfoot. At its best, politics protects the vulnerable, restrains the powerful, distributes responsibilities we cannot shoulder alone. It builds the civic scaffolding on which a life can be led with its dignity respected.
And yet, in recent years, we’ve asked politics to do much more than this. We’ve turned to it for meaning, identity, even personal salvation. We expect our leaders to soothe, to rage, to reflect us emotionally. They are asked to be avatars of feeling rather than stewards of morality—even when morality is what’s most needed. And by morality, I don’t mean the theatre of outrage or the ambient hum of social media judgement. I mean morality in the older, harder sense: a commitment to the good, to justice, to character. Not a purity contest or a branding exercise, but an orientation towards what is right, even when it is costly or dull or unglamorous. Without this, we’re left with a politics heavy with symbolism and light on substance.
Of course, words like ‘virtue’ and ‘morality’ now come with baggage. In many circles, simply raising the idea of a universal good is enough to mark you out as naïve—or worse, oppressive. Moral relativism, the belief that values shift with culture and that truth depends on perspective, has become less a philosophy than a reflex. Its close companion, deconstruction, has been remarkably successful in showing how meaning is made and undone by power, language, and history.
Up to a point, this has value. It’s good to question received wisdom, to ask who benefits from so-called universals, to resist the lazy arrogance of dogma. But relativism, taken to its limit, doesn’t just challenge morality—it hollows it out. And deconstruction, if allowed to crowd out every other mode of thinking, reduces all ideals to illusions and all convictions to covert power plays. At that point, what’s left? Not justice, but fashion. Not principle, but preference.
It’s no coincidence that this ideological soil often yields a politics of aesthetics: outrage, irony, performance. If there’s no shared vision of the good—only competing narratives—then why not simply curate the most compelling one? Why not feel right, instead of be right?
And yet, we still hunger for meaning. We care, stubbornly, about justice, about truth, about how to live.
This is where Stoicism can potentially make a return, not as a totalising system or new orthodoxy, but as a reminder that virtue might still matter. Some things may be worth aiming for, even if they’re hard to define. Even if they’re not trending.
Hegel described history as a dialectical process: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. But today, we seem stuck in the first two, lurching between opposing extremes without reaching any resolution. The wild swing from Obama to Trump wasn’t just ideological whiplash, it was temperamental. One offered hope as aesthetic, the other rage as authenticity. Both, in their way, turned politics into theatre: feeling as governance, performance as policy.
Substance gets lost in these spectacles. Commitment to principle, to the good, regardless of whether it flatters us or wins applause evades us. This is why I want to propose that politics could use more Stoicism. Not the meme-ified masculinity of cold plunges and hustle, nor the caricatured version of emotional constipation. I mean Stoicism as the ancients meant it: a moral discipline grounded in the pursuit of aretē: virtue, excellence, character.
Aretē isn’t about suppressing feeling, but it doesn’t mistake feeling for truth. Ours is a political culture soaked in powerful emotions. Intensity is taken as virtue and volume as conviction. Leaders are praised not for being just, but for being “relatable”, “authentic”. Entire teams are employed to help them appear this way. The results? Blair rolls up his sleeves and wears cowboy boots. Putin goes bear hunting, shirtless. Trump puts on a baseball cap. Obama releases Spotify playlists.
The Stoics, who prized character over charisma, would be sceptical.
To them, aretē was not a posture. It was a discipline. Something practised, refined, earned. The measure of a person wasn’t how they felt, but how they lived. What if politics took its cue from that? What if we judged public life not by how it makes us feel, but by whether it aligns with justice, courage, temperance?
If politics is to be more than a feedback loop of mood, it must rediscover moral seriousness. Aretē before affect. Character before charisma. Not because feelings don’t matter, but because, without a sturdier foundation, they end up running the show. And the show is wearing thin.
It’s no accident that a large and growing number of young men are turning to a kind of internet Stoicism—albeit in a cracked mirror form. Scroll the algorithms and you’ll find Marcus Aurelius quoted next to protein shakes and cold plunge routines. Discipline equals freedom is the mantra, but the moral scope has narrowed. Virtue, the common good, the civic dimension are all lost in the blur.
This movement is often dismissed as mere posturing. But beneath it lies something worth listening to: a rebellion, however clumsy, against the idea that emotional expressiveness is the only measure of authenticity. Many of these young men aren’t trying to suppress emotion—they’re trying to find something sturdier than mood to live by.
That they turn to Stoicism is telling. Not because it’s inherently masculine—it isn’t—but because it offers a vocabulary missing from today’s cultural toolkit: restraint, purpose, duty. These are not fashionable ideas. But they are profoundly human ones.
And yet the tragedy of this revival is how small it’s allowing itself to be. Reduced to productivity hacks and advice on how to be sexually attractive, its moral vision is narrowed, its civic spirit lost. The ancients didn’t study Stoicism to optimise their schedules, nor to seduce potential lovers. They studied it to learn how to die well, how to govern wisely, how to be just when it was easier to be cruel. It was never just self-help. It was public philosophy.
Zeno, the school’s founder, taught in the open air of the Stoa Poikile, a public space. Stoicism was civic, inclusive (for its time), and radically democratic in its moral assumptions: all human beings possess reason, and thus all are capable of virtue. It was taught to men and women, slaves and emperors alike. Musonius Rufus, a practical and underrated Stoic, even argued explicitly for the equal philosophical education of women—centuries before anyone dared write such things in Latin.
So while today’s Stoicism is wearing a masculine toga, the philosophy itself belongs to anyone drawn to the idea that character matters. That justice is worth pursuing, even when unpopular. That self-mastery is not self-negation, but self-respect. And that the good life is aligned not with our passing feelings, but with our enduring values.
This is the Stoicism our politics needs. Not a rejection of emotion, but a redirection of it. Not a bulwark against vulnerability, but a framework for integrity. Not an aesthetic, but an ethic.
And if we need an image to accompany this idea, imagine Marcus Aurelius, Emperor of Rome, writing in his notebook. He did this each evening to remind himself to be just, to be humble, to be patient. He didn’t do this because it made him popular. He did it because he believed good governance started with how well leaders can govern themselves.
Imagine a world led by people who thought the same.
Consilium 
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