Stop using Epictetus to win your corporate staring contests

7th November: How To Be Powerful | Subverting Moral Liberation into an Elite Dominance Game

1. THE DUAL-TRANSLATION HEADER

The Text in Question

The Daily Stoic Rendering

“Don’t trust in your reputation, money, or position, but in the strength that is yours, namely, your judgments about the things that you control and don’t control. For this alone is what makes us free and unfettered, that picks us up by the neck from the depths and lifts us eye to eye with the rich and powerful.” - Epictetus, Discourses, 3.26.34

35

Standard Academic Translation

“Do not place your confidence in what is not your own, whether it be wealth, reputation, or offices, but in what is yours, namely, in your judgments regarding what is in your power and what is not. For these alone are what make people free, unimpeded, and capable of holding their heads high; these alone pull us up by the scruff of the neck, as it were, and set us face to face with the rich and powerful on equal terms.” - Discourses 3.26.34-35 (trans. Robin Hard)

ACADEMIC CONTEXT & BREAKDOWN

Epictetus delivered these words in his austere schoolhouse in Nicopolis, leaning on his walking stick, his body permanently crippled from his years as a slave in the imperial palace of Rome. He was looking into the faces of ambitious young aristocrats sent by their wealthy fathers to be polished for political careers, young men obsessed with magistracies, senatorial rank, and imperial favor.

In Hard’s translation, Epictetus is attacking the core illusion of Roman hierarchy: that status, office, and money make a man superior. Freedom (eleutheria) and true equality do not come from competing with the powerful on their own terms, but from recognizing that external positions are morally indifferent (adiaphora). By mastering your judgments (dogmata), you do not become a bigger conqueror; you simply refuse to bow to tyrants, standing on equal moral footing because neither their gold nor their executioners can touch your moral will (prohairesis).

THE OPENING COUNTER-PUNCH

The commentary guts Epictetus’s call for moral autonomy and degrades it into an executive power-play for winning an alpha-male staring contest. It hijacks a former slave’s profound declaration of human dignity and twists it into a tactical method for conquering rivals and hoarding “real and lasting power.” A philosophy designed to dissolve imperial vanity is shamelessly rebranded as a psychological weapon to achieve it.

THE BREAKDOWN

• The Competitive Distraction — The commentary frames Diogenes staring down Alexander to argue that “the philosopher was more powerful than the most powerful man in the world.” Epictetus was not coaching his students to defeat kings in a flex of psychological dominance; he was showing them how to become morally untouchable so they would stop worshipping kings altogether. Swapping moral equality for a superior claim to "power" completely inverts Epictetus's assault on competitive ambition.

• The Seduction of Mastery-for-Status — The modern writer lures the reader’s vanity by whispering that “you can have that too. It just means focusing inward on acquiring power rather than outward.” Epictetus never told anyone to look inward to "acquire power"; he commanded them to look inward to root out false values and sever attachment to the world's rewards. Rebranding self-restraint as an inward acquisition strategy merely repackages vulgar acquisitiveness in the language of asceticism.

• The Imperializing of the Soul — The commentary caps its advice with an imperial slogan: “‘Would you have a great empire? Rule over yourself!’” Epictetus had witnessed the bloody paranoia of Nero’s court firsthand and despised the delusions of empire. Reducing freedom from tyrannical impulses to the fantasy of running an internal "great empire" panders to the very megalomania that ancient Stoicism was meant to cure.

What is the lesson we can learn from "Standard Academic Translation"? And how can we apply or practice it?

The lesson from the standard translation is that human dignity depends entirely on the integrity of your moral choices, never on your social rank, bank balance, or resume. When you measure your worth by the things outside your control, you hand your neck over to anyone who controls those things; when you anchor your confidence in your own judgments, no title or billionaire can make you inferior.

To practice this, identify a setting where you routinely feel intimidated a meeting with high-status executives, an encounter with wealth, or a high-stakes performance review. Strip away the titles, luxury clothing, and authority of the people in the room, recognizing that these external trappings hold zero moral weight. Refuse to grovel for their approval or envy their status, and stand before them on equal terms by holding strictly to your own honesty, reason, and self-respect.

HOW THE PHILOSOPHER WOULD RESPOND

Epictetus would fiercely mock the notion that philosophy exists to help modern readers feel "more powerful" than emperors, reminding them that anyone still chasing supremacy is nothing more than a slave begging for chains.

“Who is your master? Whoever has authority over the things that you seek or try to avoid. Whoever wants to be free, then, let him neither wish for anything nor avoid anything that depends on others; if he does not, he must necessarily be a slave.” - Epictetus, Discourses, 2.2.26