Stoicism vs broicism: what the manosphere gets wrong

Executive overview

Stoicism is resurging in popularity, but a corrupted version — stripped of its ethical core — has taken hold in online male spaces. The Stoics taught four cardinal virtues: courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom. Broicism keeps the first two and discards the third entirely.

Ryan Holiday and Hasan Minhaj trace why Stoicism resonates in chaotic times, why its moral dimension is non-negotiable, and how to hold flawed historical figures as both inspiring and hypocritical.

Why Stoicism fills a modern gap

• No cultural institution reliably teaches young men how to live — not school, not church, not family
• Stoicism offers a rational framework: don't do this because your life will become a form of hell, not because God will punish you
• The four cardinal virtues (courage, discipline, justice, wisdom) predate Christianity and are shared by Catholic tradition
• Stoicism peaks in popularity during collapse — the fall of Rome, the Enlightenment, the Civil War, and now

Stoicism and the common good

• The phrase "common good" appears roughly 80 times in Marcus Aurelius's Meditations — it is the dominant theme
• Stoicism was always a philosophy of obligations to others, not just personal self-improvement
• Mussonius Rufus argued virtue is the same regardless of gender — grappling with questions still unresolved today
• Its elite appeal is historically consistent; what's new is its spread to ordinary people

Broicism: stoicism without ethics

• Broicism = Stoicism with the moral and social obligations removed
• The manosphere selects courage and discipline while discarding justice — the obligation to care about other people
• At 19, "what can this do for me?" is a natural entry point; the problem is never moving past it
• Removing the ethical core turns the framework into a recipe for becoming a better sociopath
• Pete Hegseth's version of Stoicism is not what the philosophy actually teaches

Holding the Stoics to account

• Marcus Aurelius wrote beautifully about equal rights and personal liberty — and presided over an empire that embodied neither
• Seneca can be held up simultaneously as an inspiring figure and a tragic hypocrite; both are true
• Jefferson's "all men are created equal" operates the same way: the ideal matters even when the author falls short
• Studying the past requires accepting that admirable ideas and inexcusable actions can coexist in the same person