"It is no accident that Stoicism figures so prominently in Foucault’s The Care of the Self. It is, in the most literal sense, a self-centered philosophy. As such, it is at its strongest in addressing the challenges we face alone: anxiety, grief, disappointed ambition, the fear of death. This makes sense given the system’s basic tenets: we should direct our efforts to things within our control, and not things outside them. But it also makes it easy to persuade ourselves that the suffering of others is not our problem but theirs. Conrad Hensley wrestles with this issue when his future tormentor targets another prisoner, one even lower in the jailhouse pecking order. “What was his duty toward this sad, strange, friendless soul, if worse came to worst?” he asks, and falls back uneasily on a chapter of Epictetus headed “That We Ought Not to Spend Our Feelings on Things Beyond Our Power.”"