My power, or our power?
On the axis: Scope of action · collective power
What is not up to me alone, illness, injustice, the course of the world, may be up to us together: by seeking power in the inner self alone, does the dichotomy ignore the collective action that shifts the limits of the possible?
Justification
The root of all unhappiness, Epictetus argues, is to expect one's happiness from things that are not in our power. Hence the opening move of the : sorting our concerns into two classes by the single criterion of mastery, what is wholly up to us (judgments, desires, aversions) and what is not (body, goods, reputation). The is not one thesis among others but the operation that conditions everything that follows: all disturbance arises from having claimed a hold on what eludes us. Where the older Stoics dwelt on cosmic fate, Epictetus brings the division down to the concrete use, here and now, of what is properly mine.
Of things, some are in our power, and others are not.Enchiridion, §1
Enchiridion, §1 · Discourses, I.1