Dennis Prager Is a Modern-Day Stoic Leading Us Out of Toxic ‘Therapeutic Culture’

Dennis Prager’s legacy for generations of Americans looking for deeper meaning and happiness can’t be overstated. As Prager turns 78-years-old on Sunday I thought I’d write a few thoughts about why he’s been one of the most significant conservative commentators, at least through my lifetime.

I’m a Millennial, so I became familiar with Prager when my parents put his show on the radio, usually during long car rides. His show was always one of my favorites because of its scope. In a sense, his show style was an early, and I’d say better, version of the podcasts that have proliferated in the last decade.

What set Prager apart from most other radio hosts is his heavy focus on the deeper things in life, on religion and philosophy. He doesn’t just comment on straight politics and the news of the day as important as those things are.

Civilizational Revival

Prager, who is a religious Jew, instead focuses on imparting timeless wisdom to listeners, on connecting what’s happening in the world around us to living a good life. If we are to rebuild Western civilization on a foundation other than the empty, ephemeral values of the postmodern Left then we better know something about the “Judeo-Christian” ideas that preceded it, right?

Otherwise, we become merely the ugly mirror image of the same malformed creature, impotently raging against politically correct pieties of our day. That may be far more appealing than knuckling under the stifling tyranny of the mind that is modern leftism, but it doesn’t help us truly transcend its suffocation of the West.

For many Americans, especially those in the younger generations, the philosophical building blocks of civilization are simply not there. Lessons about the Bible, ancient but prescient philosophers, and the wisdom of the Founding Fathers have disappeared from traditional sources of education.

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And that created a huge opening not just for his radio show and columns, but for the creation of PragerU.

PragerU has become an exceptional resource for those looking to learn about things that should have been taught in school but weren’t.

Petty academics and the legacy media often rage about its influence, but PragerU wouldn’t even have a reason to exist if they had done a better job of upholding our Western traditions and passing them along.

America’s elite institutions have been hollowed out, turned into engines of left-wing propaganda.

We now must recreate those institutions to be what once was and should have always been.

Against Therapeutic Culture

Beyond widening education, Prager’s maybe greatest contribution to the national discourse is his opposition to what is often called “therapeutic culture.”

This is the ubiquitous self-help, ultimately narcissistic and self-centered framework of finding happiness in the modern world.

Perhaps Americans have always struggled on this end. The pursuit of happiness is in our founding creed, and no people have had more opportunity to pursue it in the history of the world. But toward that end we have pathologized unhappiness and discomfort.

When life doesn’t seemingly match our expectations, we look to “therapy” or a pill to solve the problem. In an increasingly secular world, that’s all people feel they have to turn to, but these solutions to unhappiness are ultimately, woefully deficient.

On top of everything else this has become one of the central problems of modernity. How much was the Great Awokening, the explosion of identity groups, and even socialism to a certain extent, a product of widespread, existential misery and loss of meaning?

But Prager has always stressed that finding happiness is “a serious problem,” as he put it in one of his many books, but one that’s truly within our power to address. Happiness is something we can control, he’s argued, and doesn’t have to be dictated by the circumstances around us.

Prager, as far as I know, has never identified as a “stoic.” But he’s been the closest to reinvigorating something of this tradition for our time. Instead of indulgence and perpetual pursuit of validation, Prager stresses self-control and above all gratitude.

People can find joy in life even under the most terrible personal circumstances, Prager has stressed, and he’s demonstrated this fact in dealing with his own personal tragedy. Prager effectively became paralyzed after a fall at the end of 2024. The injuries deprived him the ability to walk and have ensured that he will never live “normally” ever again.

Instead of descending into depression and self-pity, Prager remained committed to his vision of happiness which he wrote about in the Wall Street Journal.

“I still believe happiness isn’t to be awaited but must be pursued. And because I have almost no expectations, I am not battling traumatic disappointment,” he wrote in February.

He continued:

“My condition has reinforced what matters most in my life: my wife, children and grandchildren, my friends, my mind and my mission to deliver ideas that better people’s lives. Why haven’t my views on happiness changed? Because I’ve never believed happiness is solely a function of what happens to us. Catastrophic events will affect us. But even in dire circumstances, we can and should pursue happiness.”

Prager didn’t just preach his message about happiness; he’s clearly lived it, even while dealing with the most trying conditions.

And that now counter-countercultural message about happiness, more than education, or political commentary, or anything else, is what so many Americans need to hear about and understand today.

So, have a happy birthday, Dennis Prager. I know you will.