Two Judgments: Suppression, the Lowercase Stoic, and the Boy’s Own Assent
Two Judgments: Suppression, the Lowercase Stoic, and the Boy’s Own Assent
Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.
Amendment (26 September 2026). §3 said that the boy who weeps for his friend “has done nothing wrong: tears are not a verdict,” and the Final Benchmark said “Let him weep for his friends.” Both were errors, and both contradicted the Benchmark’s own line that “anger is no more appropriate than tears, because both rest on the same false first judgment.” Grief (lupē) is distress at a present supposed evil. It is the false value judgment or its affective component, and the corpus admits no appropriate grief (Sterling, Nine Excerpts, Excerpt 2; The Correct Stoic Attitude, ch. 5). Both passages are corrected below.
Ronald Levant noticed something in the men he treated. Many of them could not say what they felt. “Only with great difficulty and practice” could they find the words. He called the condition “normative male alexithymia,” and he traced it to boyhood. Boys start life more emotionally expressive than girls. They are then “discouraged … from expressing their emotions by parents, peers, teachers, or coaches, and some were punished (some very severely) for doing so.” So they grow into men who “restrict the expression of emotions” and “be extremely self-reliant,” which his field calls traditional masculinity ideology. His verdict is that it is “hazardous to men’s health.”
This is the fifth essay in a series that has audited the leading accounts of boys’ development against Grant C. Sterling’s reconstruction of Stoicism. Each of the others has met, somewhere, the idea that Stoicism means shutting down feeling. Levant names that idea precisely, and the corpus can take it apart precisely.
The Beginning
Everyone wants happiness. Incomplete happiness is not worth accepting if complete happiness is available. Complete happiness must lie wholly within the agent’s control. Only his assent lies wholly within his control. Happiness is therefore correct assent, and assent is correct when it matches the truth about value: only virtue is good, and only vice is evil.
Every instruction below is derived from that chain.
1. What Levant Gets Right
Levant is right that boys are taught to hold their feelings down, and that the teaching often comes with a fist or a laugh. He is right that the resulting silence is not strength. He is also honest about his own school. Its theorists, he writes, “may have overestimated the damaging effects of the male emotional socialization process for most men.” A founder who says that about his own field is holding his theory answerable to the facts.
He also found something he did not need to find. In a 2014 study, the point at which men’s emotional processing broke down came at five hundred milliseconds, “slow enough for conscious processing.” For most men, suppression is not a reflex wired in by training. It is something a man does.
And he states an obligation that the corpus shares. Psychology, he writes, “provided legitimacy (and, therefore, is partially responsible) for the hegemonic masculinity narrative,” and it owes a correction. Lending authority to a false account of what men are is a wrong. The corpus agrees, and it adds a second false account that needs correcting: the one that calls that silence Stoic.
2. Two Judgments
Sterling’s account of what a practitioner strives for has two clauses at its centre:
a) Don’t assent to impressions that depict externals as either good or evil.
b) If we fail ‘a’, don’t assent to subsequent impressions that depict immoral responses to the good or bad thing as being appropriate.
The ancient Stoics described the same two steps in a passion. As Cicero reports Chrysippus’s account, a passion joins two judgments. The first is that something good or evil is present. The second is that it is appropriate to react: to weep, to cower, to strike back.
Read in these terms, the socialization of boys works almost entirely on the second judgment. A boy who loses something he loves still judges the loss an evil, and no one touches that judgment. What he is given is a reason the reaction is not appropriate: big boys don’t cry; crying is girly; they’ll laugh at you. So he keeps the first judgment, reverses the second, and holds the passion down.
That is what the literature calls suppression. It is not a correction, because the reason he is given is itself false. Nobody tells him the loss is not an evil. He is told showing it will cost you standing, and a second false value judgment is laid on top of the first.
The pattern runs both ways. Grief and fear are declared inappropriate, and anger is declared appropriate: hit him back; don’t let him get away with it. Levant’s own summary of the ideology tells boys to restrict their emotions and to “be aggressive and dominant.” In the terms of the two judgments, that is one instruction: override the second judgment for the vulnerable passions and endorse it for the aggressive ones. It explains the men he describes, whose anger comes out and whose grief does not.
3. The Lowercase Stoic
This is the confusion the whole series has been working to separate from Stoicism. The shut-down man is not a Stoic. He has kept both of the false judgments Stoicism exists to correct. He still takes the loss to be an evil, and he now takes showing it to be an evil as well. His calm is a lid on a passion, not the absence of one.
Stoicism starts with the first judgment. It does not ask a boy to hold his grief down. It asks him to see that what he lost was not an evil. Once the first judgment is corrected, the second has nothing left to govern, and there is nothing to suppress. The boy who weeps for his friend has assented to one falsehood: that the loss is an evil. His grief is that assent. The boy who abandons his friend so as not to be seen crying has assented to that falsehood and to a second one besides, and has acted disloyally on them. The first boy is nearer the Stoic than the second, but neither has arrived. Stoicism admits no appropriate grief. It removes the judgment grief is made of.
4. What Growing Up Does, and Does Not Do
For most boys, suppression does not last. Levant’s own correction suggests as much, and so does experience. A boy who finds, over and over, that the insult did not wound him and the loss did not end him is gradually refusing the first judgment. Sterling says a refused impression becomes “less common and weaker.” As the first judgment weakens, the second has less to hold down, and the suppression lapses because it is no longer needed.
But what growing up usually delivers is a correction of degree: it wasn’t as bad as I thought, or I can handle it. The corpus correction is one of kind: it was never an evil. A man who has got only as far as “I can handle it” still takes the thing to be bad and relies on his strength to bear it. When something larger comes, the old judgment returns at full strength, and the need to suppress returns with it.
Training does not need to start this movement, because boys start it themselves. It needs to finish it.
5. Words for What He Feels
Levant’s remedy is to teach men to name their emotions, which gives them, in his words, “more choices than you have now.” The corpus agrees that the naming comes first. A boy who cannot say what he feels cannot examine the judgment inside it.
But the naming is where the work begins, not where it ends, and the reason for doing it is not his health. It is the truth.
- The false proposition. “This loss is an evil, and to show it would be another.” Neither is true. What he lost was not up to him, and neither is how others see him.
- Clause (c), the truth. Teach him the true judgment and teach him to assent to it: this is not an evil; what is mine is what I do next.
- Clause (d), recovery. When he has already clamped down, or already struck out, teach him to work back from the act to the judgments that produced it, both of them, and to form the resolve that goes in their place.
The Final Benchmark
Levant has shown how boys are taught to hold their feelings down, and that the holding is something they do. The corpus asks what they should do instead.
- Teach him that every passion carries two judgments: that something bad has happened, and that he should react to it.
- Never give him false reasons against the second. Big boys don’t cry teaches him a new falsehood without removing the old one.
- Take him to the first judgment and show him that what he lost was not an evil.
- Teach him that anger is no more appropriate than tears, because both rest on the same false first judgment.
- Never teach him to hide his grief. Teach him to stand by his friends, and to correct the judgment his grief is made of.
A boy formed this way is not a lowercase stoic. He has nothing to suppress, because he has stopped believing the things that needed suppressing.
Coda to the Series
Five accounts of boys’ development have been audited, and each placed the source of a boy’s trouble somewhere:
- in his belief about his peers;
- in the culture and the adults who carry it (Way);
- in institutions and privilege;
- in the relationship between the boy and the adult;
- in norms learned in the body.
Each is partly right about where his impressions come from. The corpus places the error in one place only: the boy’s own assent. That is not the harshest of the answers. It is the most hopeful, because it is the one place where the boy himself can set things right.
Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.
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