Epicurus’s self-reform first was rejected as abandoning responsibility to nonmembers

Evidence

The Epicureans’ rebuttal might have been similar to Houriet’s: They were changing themselves first. How could accusations of selfishness be leveled on a school that taught altruism to the degree that one was expected to die for a friend? More practically, in order to build the kind of world that Epicurus wanted, he needed to close it off from the world. But his critics didn’t see it that way. Clearly the students of The Garden felt deep responsibility to one another, but responsibility to everyone else was left out of the question. They had forsaken the world. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 175

Categorization

• XREF: This exactly stages the tension Odell addresses throughout: the charge that focusing on one’s own attentional life is mere withdrawal from civic responsibility — it lets her test where ‘changing yourself first’ stops being defensible. Relevant to the reader’s need to answer whether Odell’s solutions require privilege. — connects to: Internal criticism of tradition does not prove rejection of that tradition
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Internal criticism of tradition does not prove rejection of that tradition