The Stoic Case for Widening Your Circle
The Stoics described moral concern as a series of concentric circles, radiating outward from self to family to community to all of humanity, and taught that widening those circles was a discipline to practice. Here is what that means for a feed built to narrow it.
Open any feed for thirty seconds and you will find someone being written off. Not disagreed with — written off. Reduced to the worst thing their side has done, filed under a label, and dismissed. The algorithm rewards this because contempt is more engaging than complexity. It is also, in Stoic terms, a failure of a very specific kind: a failure of oikeiosis, the natural process by which concern is supposed to expand outward, not contract.
The Stoics had a name for the shape this concern takes, and a discipline for practicing it deliberately rather than leaving it to whatever an algorithm decides to reward.
Hierocles' Circles
The clearest picture comes from Hierocles, a Stoic writing in the second century AD, whose account survives in fragments preserved by the anthologist Stobaeus. He described moral concern as a set of concentric circles. At the center is the self. The next circle out holds immediate family. Beyond that, extended family. Beyond that, neighbors and fellow citizens. The outermost circle, encompassing all the rest, is the whole of humanity.
This is not a claim that all circles deserve identical treatment — the Stoics were not asking you to love a stranger exactly as you love your own child. Closer relationships generate stronger, more specific obligations, and Stoic ethics never pretended otherwise. The task Hierocles set was different: to work at drawing the outer circles inward, treating people further from the center with something closer to the regard you extend to people near it, rather than leaving that regard to fall off a cliff at the edge of your own tribe.
A Discipline, Not a Feeling
It matters that the Stoics treated this as something you do, not a sentiment you either happen to have or don't. Cicero, reporting Stoic doctrine in On Ends, starts from the most basic form of this orientation — the self-concern present in every living thing from birth:
"Every animal, as soon as it is born, feels an attachment to itself, and an impulse to preserve itself and to feel affection for its own constitution and for those things which tend to preserve that constitution."
— Cicero, On Ends, III.16, trans. H. Rackham
The Stoic claim is that this same orientation is meant to extend outward through reason — not automatically, and not without effort. Recognizing a stranger as genuinely part of your concern is not a feeling that arrives on its own. It is a conclusion you have to keep arriving at, against the pull of instinct and, now, against a feed engineered to make the opposite conclusion feel obvious.
What Injures the Hive
Marcus Aurelius returns to this constantly in the Meditations, usually while reminding himself not to be contemptuous of the people he governed:
"Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busy-body, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial... But I who have seen the nature of the good... I can neither receive injury from any of them... nor can I be angry with my kinsman, nor hate him. For we are made for co-operation."
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, II.1, trans. George Long
And more bluntly, on what happens when you treat the wider community as disposable:
"What injures the hive injures the bee."
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, VI.54, trans. Gregory Hays
Notice what Marcus is not doing here. He is not pretending the people who annoyed him were secretly wonderful. He is doing the harder thing: holding the annoyance and the recognition of shared membership at the same time. Contempt for an outgroup requires collapsing that distinction — deciding that people who are difficult, wrong, or opposed to you have thereby exited the circle of your concern entirely. Marcus's discipline is refusing that collapse.
A Citizen of the World
Epictetus, who had been a slave and therefore had no illusions about how easily people get written out of a community, pushed the outermost circle further than most:
"I am a citizen of the world."
— Epictetus, Discourses, I.9, trans. Robin Hard
Marcus makes the same move without abandoning his actual obligations closer in:
"My city and country, so far as I am Antoninus, is Rome, but so far as I am a man, it is the world."
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, VI.44, trans. George Long
This is the structure of Hierocles' circles in a single line: the local, particular obligations remain — Marcus did not stop being emperor of Rome — but they sit inside a larger one that does not disappear just because it is harder to feel. Cosmopolitanism, for the Stoics, was not a rejection of local loyalty. It was a refusal to let local loyalty be the whole of the story.
The Practice: Drawing the Circles Inward
None of this is abstract if you treat it as a discipline instead of a mood. A few concrete versions of the practice:
Name the circle before you react. When a piece of content is engineered to make you angry at a group of people, notice explicitly that you are being asked to treat an outer circle as if it were outside all circles. That is the specific move oikeiosis asks you to resist.
Separate the claim from the person. You can think an argument is wrong, even dangerous, without concluding that the person making it has forfeited membership in the human community. The Stoics kept these as separate judgments. Modern feeds mostly do not.
Do the thing Hierocles actually recommended. Practice treating one circle slightly further out than the one you are comfortable with as if it were slightly closer in. Not all circles at once, and not by pretending the circles are equal — just the next one out.
Notice who benefits from the circle shrinking. Outrage-driven engagement depends on the outer circles collapsing into contempt. That collapse is not a neutral fact about human nature; it is, in Stoic terms, a failure you can identify and decline.
The Stoics did not think universal benevolence was easy, and they did not pretend the obligations of family, city, and stranger were identical. What they insisted on was that the circle keeps going — that the boundary of your concern is not fixed by instinct, algorithm, or tribe, but by how much work you are willing to do to draw it wider.
For the philosophical foundations behind this post: oikeiosis, sympatheia, what is Stoicism.
Sources
- Cicero. On Ends (De Finibus), Book 3. Trans. H. Rackham. Loeb Classical Library.
- Epictetus. Discourses, Book 1, Chapter 9. Trans. Robin Hard. Oxford University Press, 2014.
- Marcus Aurelius. Meditations. Trans. George Long / Gregory Hays. II.1, VI.44, VI.54.
- Diogenes Laërtius. Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, Book 7. Trans. R.D. Hicks. Available via Perseus Digital Library.
- Long, A.A. Hellenistic Philosophy. University of California Press, 1986.