Week 3 — Scylla and Charybdis: Choosing the Lesser Evil in Modern Life
“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” — Marcus Aurelius
This is Week 3 of The Stoic Odyssey, our weekly series on Homer’s epic as a Stoic text. This week: the strait that fed the proverb — caught between Scylla and Charybdis.
The Choice That Was No Choice
After the Sirens fade, the sea narrows into a strait between two horrors. On one side, beneath a high cliff, lives Scylla — a many-headed creature that reaches down and plucks sailors from the deck. On the other, the whirlpool Charybdis, which three times a day sucks the entire sea down into a vortex and will swallow a whole ship whole.
There is no going around. There is no third path. There is only forward.
Odysseus, brilliantly, asks Circe which is worse, and gets one of the grimmest pieces of advice in literature: steer closer to Scylla. Lose six men, and lose them quickly and certainly, rather than risk the whole ship and every soul aboard in the whirlpool. He does it. Six of his crew die in a moment, snatched to the cliff, and the ship survives.
The Two Kinds of Bad Options
Most ethical systems assume that a good choice exists. The Stoics were more honest: when reality offers only bad options, virtue is not found in escape — it is found in judgment. You choose the option that best preserves what matters most, and then you do not spend the rest of the journey mourning the choice.
It is worth distinguishing a fake dilemma from a real one. A fake dilemma is manufactured by fear or laziness — “I must either quit abruptly or stay miserable forever” — and usually dissolves the moment you widen the frame. The Stoic is suspicious of anyone who presents life as a locked cell.
But a genuine dilemma is different. It arrives when the strait narrows and the weather does not care. Then the choices are: do nothing and be destroyed, or pick the least destructive path and accept its price. The quietly heroic act is to notice when you are actually in the strait — and to choose. Indecision, the Stoics knew, is not a vote for neither; it is a vote for the whirlpool.
What Not-Choosing Costs You
In stocks, in careers, in relationships, in health, we meet the strait all the time. A role is burning you out, but leaving feels like a betrayal. A marriage has quietly failed, but ending it hurts people. A market is falling, and both selling and holding feel wrong. We wait for a third option that never appears, and the waiting is itself a decision — usually the worst one available, made by default.
Odysseus could not refuse to sail. You may not be able to refuse to decide. The Stoic test is the same in every strait: which consequence can I live with in accord with my values? Not which is comfortable — which harms the fewest people, preserves the most good, holds your character intact. Then decide, and do not look back.
Regret is the luxury of people who had another choice. In the strait, there was no other choice. Six men, and on.
Practical Application: Navigate a Strait This Week
Think of the one dilemma you are currently circling without resolving. Write down each horn of it in plain language: what exactly is lost on block of each? What exactly is preserved? Then ask the Stoic question for each — can I live with this, and can I own it?
If one horn fails the test, you have a decision, not a dilemma. If both pass, pick the one that preserves more of your character, tell the people who need to know, and refuse to reopen the file. A decision examined once is deliberation. The same decision re-examined a hundred times is the whirlpool — and it takes the whole ship.
This Week’s Line from the Epic
“Two dreadful perils lie before me, and I must make my choice.”
Next Week
Past the strait, the shore offers a fruit that makes men forget their home. Week 4: the Lotus Eaters, and the modern art of distraction.
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