Day 22 of 30 — 30 Days of Stoicism series
Marcus Aurelius wrote one of the most disarming sentences in all of philosophy:
“If someone is able to show me that what I think or do is not right, I will happily change, for I seek the truth, by which no one was ever truly harmed. It is the person who continues in his self-deception and ignorance who is harmed.”
~ Marcus Aurelius
Read that carefully.
The emperor of Rome, writing to himself, about his genuine willingness to be shown he was wrong.
Not performing humility.
Actually meaning it.
The person who shows him his error is doing him a favour.
The person who lets him continue in error, or the version of himself that resists correction, is doing him harm.
That’s the Stoic position on criticism.
And it’s considerably harder to actually hold than it sounds.
The default human response to criticism is one of two things: collapse or defence.
Either the criticism lands as an attack on the self and produces shame, capitulation, and the need to reassure whoever delivered it that you’ve heard them and you’re sorry.
Or it lands as a threat and produces rationalisation, counter-attack, and the elaborate mental work of demonstrating that the critic is wrong, biased, or doesn’t understand.
Both responses have one thing in common: they’re about the self, not about the truth of the criticism.
The Stoic practice is different.
It starts from a single question: is the criticism accurate?
Not: does this person have the right to say this?
Not: do I like them?
Not: is this fair given everything else I’ve done?
Just: is it accurate?
If yes, it’s information; useful, actionable, worth acting on regardless of how it was delivered.
If no, it’s noise; still worth examining briefly to check, and then worth releasing.
The delivery, the tone, the relationship between you and the critic, the circumstances of the criticism; none of these change whether the content is true.
Epictetus was particularly sharp on this.
He pointed out that we get upset about criticism largely because we care too much about our reputation, which lives in other people’s minds and is therefore outside our control.
The Stoic who has genuinely released attachment to reputation doesn’t need to defend it.
True criticism is information.
False criticism is irrelevant.
Neither requires the emotional expenditure most people pour into their response to being criticised.
For vegans, criticism takes a specific and recognisable form.
Most of it isn’t about your personal conduct, it’s about your position.
Someone tells you veganism is extreme, impractical, culturally imperialist, nutritionally inadequate, or irrelevant to real environmental change.
Someone makes a joke.
Someone delivers a critique that is partly valid and partly lazy.
Someone challenges you with a counter-argument you haven’t fully worked out.
The Stoic practice here has three steps, and they happen in order.
First: pause.
The impulse to respond immediately, to defend, to counter, to explain, is almost always a mistake.
The pause creates the space in which the actual question can be asked: is this accurate?
Second: examine the content honestly.
Strip the delivery away.
If you can, imagine the same criticism coming from someone you respect deeply.
Does it have merit?
Even partial merit?
Even a kernel of something worth examining?
Take what’s useful.
The person who delivered it doesn’t get credit for the useful parts, and the useful parts don’t disappear if the delivery was poor.
Third: respond from that examined position, not from the initial emotional reaction.
If the criticism was partly valid, you can say so.
If it was mostly invalid, you can say that too, calmly, specifically, without the heat of having been threatened.
The response from clarity is almost always more effective than the response from defensiveness, regardless of what the goal of the conversation is.
The harder version of this practice is the internal one: the criticism that comes from yourself.
The awareness, during the evening review, that you handled something badly.
That you said the wrong thing.
That you were less consistent today than you claimed to be.
The Stoic response to self-criticism follows the same structure, examine it for accuracy, take what’s useful, release the rest, don’t punish yourself beyond what serves clarity.
Seneca was explicit: the evening review is calibration, not contrition.
Marcus’s willingness to be shown he was wrong was not weakness.
It was the strongest possible position, the position of someone who cared more about truth than about being right.
That’s a genuinely hard place to get to.
It’s also, the Stoics would say, the only position from which you can actually improve.
Practice for today
Think of a criticism you’ve received recently, about veganism, about how you handled something, about anything that stung.
Apply the three steps: pause, examine the content stripped of its delivery, identify what’s accurate and what isn’t.
Write what you find.
Then write: if the accurate part is true, what follows?
Cameron Blewett has been vegan for thirty years. He spent over a decade living by Stoic principles before he found out that’s what they were called.
He writes about food safety, vegan ethics, and the overlap between Stoic philosophy and plant-based living, work that doesn’t fit the modern secular Stoic mould, and isn’t trying to.
Based in Melbourne, Australia, he also writes at CameronBlewett.blog, greybeardedvegan.blog and foodsafety.ist.