Roll with insults
How much do you care about what other people think of you? Taking people’s opinions of you into account is an important part of the Discipline of Action. However, we must care in the right way. Emil takes it personally when people criticize him to his face or when he hears through the rumor mill that somebody thinks badly of him. It stings, and it provokes Emil to use a great deal of time and emotional energy to defend himself. This week, you’ll practice a simple technique to better respond to criticism and rumors.
"If some one tells you that so and so speaks ill of you, do not defend yourself against what he says, but answer, ‘He did not know my other faults, or he would not have mentioned these alone.’”
Epictetus, Enchiridion, 33.9
We’re easily offended these days—and our society takes insults seriously, going so far as to enforce strict rules of conduct within organizations and governments, and on university campuses. This would have been rather puzzling to the Stoics, because insults are a perfect example of the dichotomy of control, and provide us with a very good chance to exercise it.
An insult is, in effect, a three-step process: First, someone has to say something to you that is meant to be offensive. Second, you have to take whatever has been said as offensive. Last, you have to react to the insult, since without a reaction the insult falls flat. Eliciting your reaction is precisely what the other person wants; it is the very point of the insult. Let’s take the three steps in turn and analyze them from a Stoic perspective.
The first step is clearly not in your control. It is entirely up to the one who insults to decide to say those words. Which brings us to the second step: internalizing what is said to you, which is entirely under your control. There are two possible ways to understand the insult: either your interlocutor did mean to insult you, or they meant to convey a criticism but not an insult. Which brings us to step three: how you respond. In the scenario of conveying criticism, the reasonable response would be to thank the person for alerting you to a possible mistake—that is, to take what they are saying as constructive criticism. But what about the first case? If what they are saying is in fact incorrect, or obviously not meant constructively, the joke is on them: It’s no skin off my nose if you say something about me that does not correspond to the truth; it is you who will look like a fool. Epictetus uses the analogy of a syllogism, a basic type of deductive logical inference: If someone gets a syllogism wrong, it isn’t the syllogism that is going to suffer, it’s the one who made the reasoning mistake.
So, then, how do we respond, as Stoics, to an insult? Here, too, there are two options. One, which is mentioned by Epictetus elsewhere, is to behave like a rock—that is, do nothing.1 Try this one out on your own. Pick up an actual rock, and hurl some good and satisfying insults at it. Done? Good. Do you feel like an idiot? Of course you do, because the rock did not react, thus entirely nullifying the very reason for the insult. The second, more sophisticated option, is to do what Epictetus says and engage in good old-fashioned self-deprecating humor: “Oh, you think that’s the worst you can say about me? Then you obviously don’t know me well.” This completely disarms your opponent, and makes them feel like a fool. But you need to be mentally prepared for this sort of reaction; it isn’t always easy to pull off in the middle of a heated situation.