"Imagine that you had dedicated yourself to helping others think a little differently about life so they'd be happier and better off. You've put your whole heart into this work and made a lot of sacrifices in doing so. But you've gotten no appreciation from others-on the contrary, everyone's said your ideas are garbage and you're a rotten person for suggesting them. No doubt, you'd be bitter and disheartened."
"But Spinoza was, in the words of his biographer Bertrand Russell, "considered, during his lifetime and for a century after his death, a man of appalling wickedness." For his work, he was rejected by his own Jewish community in Amsterdam for questioning the literal truth of the Bible; despised by Christian leaders for denying the personal, interventionist nature of the Divinity; and condemned by the civic-religious authorities as a threat to social stability. In today's terms, Spinoza got canceled."
Baruch Spinoza advocated that God pervades nature and that humans are one with the Divine, provoking excommunication and denunciation from Jewish, Christian, and civic authorities. He avoided economic harm by earning a living as a lens, microscope, and telescope maker, yet social repudiation inflicted emotional pain. Spinoza developed an intuitive insight into how emotion and reason interact in the brain and cultivated practices to preserve equanimity in the face of censure and contempt. Those facing modern social ostracism can draw on his approach to manage emotions and sustain composure.
Read at The Atlantic
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