"Should have been a blogpost"

"Ryan Holiday first rose to fame with his book The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living. It is a great volume that shares thought provoking quotes from various Stoic philosophers. He followed this up with some more great books like Stillness Is the Key and Ego Is the Enemy. He turned Stoicism into his own cottage industry, but has perhaps begun to lapse into the territory of the grifter. He has the Daily Stoic podcast, YouTube channel, and a website full of merchandise. His Stoic virtues series has been a disappointment, and Right Thing, Right Now: Justice in an Unjust World is nearly unreadable. At times, it is nothing but using Stoicism as platform for political activism.

Beginning with his premise of Justice as a virtue, his definition of justice doesn’t match any of the commonly held definitions throughout time. He seems to say that justice is harnessing outrage to perform political activism in service to a cause – and if you’re not on board with his causes, then you’re a racist who is on the side of tyrants (which is in direct opposition to his stated aims in the afterward of preaching empathy and understanding of others).

Holiday continues his writing style of five page chapters discussing six historical figures who embody the point he’s making in the chapter title (ex. “Make Good Trouble”) without smooth transitions or connective tissue between the people. This staggers the reader and prevents any kind of analytical depth of how any of these figures embodied or didn’t embody Stoic virtues. To top things off, most of the figures are from the last two centuries, so very few quotes or biography from actual Stoic philosophers are used. Some of the assertions he makes are laughably bad for someone who has read as much history as Holiday has. Among them are “slavery is the product of capitalism” (never mind that slavery existed millennia before capitalism) and that the evidence from KGB files that Alger Hiss was a Soviet agent is “not favorable” to his defenders.

This review may sound harsh, but that’s a result of my disappointment. Ryan Holiday performed a good service by introducing Stoicism to a large number of people. It would be nice if he used this book to introduce readers to the various ways the Stoics thought about justice instead of preaching his particular point of view."