Thoughts of a Philosophical Fighter Pilot (Hoover Institution Press Publication Book 431)

by James B. Stockdale

you can sometimes sense that you’re undergoing a “melting” experience. Some of your inhibitions and preset feelings, fears, and biases melt as you come to realize that, under the gun, you must grow or fail—in some cases, grow or die. A sort of transformation takes place under pressure—under what the alchemists of the Middle Ages called the “hermetic.”

That idea is you are your brother’s keeper. That’s the flip side of What’s in it for me? If you recognize the first as an expression of virtue and the second as an expression of vice, as I’m sure any student of Father O’Malley would, let Bacon’s distinction add relevance to my concentration on adversity on this graduation day of joy: “Adversity doth best induce virtue . . . while luxury doth best induce vice.”

Friendship is not just a more intense form of comradeship. It is its very opposite. While comradeship wants to break down the walls of self, friendship seeks to expand these walls and keep them intact. The one relationship is ecstatic, the other wholly individual.

“freedom and equality are sworn enemies,” say Ariel Durant and Will Durant in their little book The Lessons of History, “and when one prevails the other dies” (New York, 1968, p. 20). This is a hard saying. I will let you decide what measure of truth it has.

Stress is essential to leadership. Living with stress, knowing how to handle pressure, is necessary for survival. It is related to a man’s ability to wrest control of his own destiny from the circumstances that surround him or, if you like, to prevail over technology. Tied up with this ability is something I can express in one word, “improvisation.” I mean man’s ability to prepare a response to a situation while under pressure.

George Bernard Shaw said that most people who fail complain that they are the victims of circumstances. Those who get on in this world, he said, are those who go out and look for the right circumstances. And if they can’t find them they make their own.

one learns to accommodate the shocks of a stressful existence, his adrenalin, will power, and imagination are going to start churning to provide the maximum performance of the human mind.

want you to see with me that our whole culture, even what we call Western civilization itself, is founded on the sufferings and greatness of human beings and human societies under pressure.

The lesson I take from Job is simpler. Life is not fair. There is no moral economy or balance in the nature of things such that virtue is rewarded and vice punished. The good man hangs on and hangs in there.

Today some educators talk about the evil effects of competition on our children, of the need to avoid developing a competitive spirit in our youth. But the Greeks, whose humanism these same experts profess to admire, were the most competitive people that ever lived. They wanted to excel in everything. Their motto was ai en aristeuein, “always to be the best.”

She is Lady Philosophy. She comforts him by telling him that the world is governed by divine wisdom, not by blind chance, that we must not give too much importance to Fortune, for she is a fickle lady, taking away with one hand what she has given with the other. We must not become upset when she takes good things away from us; they were never ours to begin with. True happiness does not come from externals, she reminds him, but from within. True, life with its sudden falls of fortune is no easy thing. But would a good soldier fighting a tough battle stop to say to himself how unhappy he is?

The stress situation was thus framed in the above context. I was crippled (knee broken, partial use of arm); alone; sick (weight down 50 pounds); depressed (not so much from anticipating the next pain as from the prospect of eventually losing my honor and self-respect); and helpless except for will. What conditions could be more appropriate for Epictetus’s admonitions? As a soldier, I had bound myself to a military ethic: Enchiridion 17: Remember that you are an actor in a drama of such sort as the author chooses—if short, then in a short one: if long, then in a long one. If it be his pleasure that you should enact a poor man, see that you act it well; or a cripple, or a ruler, or a private citizen. For this is your business—to act well the given part; but to choose it belongs to another.

I was crippled: Enchiridion 9: Sickness is an impediment to the body, but not to the will unless itself pleases. Lameness is an impediment to the leg, but not to the will; and say this to yourself with regard to everything that happens. For you will find it to be an impediment to something else, but not truly to yourself.

I was dependent on my extortionists for life support and soon learned to ask for nothing to avoid demands for “reciprocity”: Enchiridion 14: Whoever then would be free, let him wish nothing, let him decline nothing, wh...

I could stop misery at any time by becoming a puppet; was it worth the shame? Enchiridion 17: If some person had delivered up your body to some passerby, you would certainly be angry. And do you feel no shame in delivering up yo...

Relief from boils, heat, cold, broken bones was “available” for the asking—for a price. What should I say? Enchiridion 24: If I can get them with the preservation of my own honor and fidelity and self-respect, show me the way and I will get them; but if you require me to lose my own proper good, th...

But my “secret weapon” was the security I felt in anchoring my resolve to those selected portions of philosophic thought that emphasized human dignity and self-respect. Epictetus certainly taught me that.

The classics have a way of saving you the trouble of prolonged experiences. You don’t have to go out and buy pop psychology self-help books. When you read the classics in the humanities, you become aware that the big ideas have been around a long time, despite the fact that they are often served up today in modern psychological “explanations” of human action as novel and “scientific.” We didn’t have to wait for Horney, Erikson, and Maslow to give us the notion of self-fulfillment or self-actualization. They were there in Aristotle’s treatises on psychology and ethics all along.

Socrates raised the question in the Meno and declined to give a straight answer. His pitch went something like this: It seems that moral values can’t be taught, for if they could, why is it that fine men like Pericles, who have given their children the best home environment and schooling, have no-good sons? “Up to the present at least,” he said, moral excellence must be considered as something we are endowed with, a gift from the gods, like personal beauty or blue eyes and curly hair. But that “up to the present” is important. Socrates does not close the door entirely on the question. Maybe if we could work out a science of the good, in which a model state based on justice will help us understand how to educate for the good, we might just do it, we might just be able to teach something about moral excellence and make it stick.

We are not born good, but we naturally are adapted to become so. And this adaptation means building character by habit and training on a basis of free choice. “Neither by nature nor contrary to nature do the moral excellences arise in us,” Aristotle says, “rather we are adapted by nature to receive them, and made perfect by habit” (Nichomachean Ethics, 1103a 24–26). Aristotle was much interested in the role of stress and pressure in life situations because of his profound concern with the distinction between actions that are performed in force situations and those that are freely chosen.

the sine qua non of a leader has lain not in his chesslike grasp of issues and the options they portend, not in his style of management, not in his skill at processing information, but in his having the character, the heart, to deal spontaneously, honorably, and candidly with people, perplexities, and principles.

True leaders must be willing to stake out territory and identify and declare enemies. They must be fair and they may be compassionate, but they cannot be addicted to being loved by everybody. The man who needs to be loved is an extortionist’s dream. That man will do anything to avoid face-to-face unpleasantness; he will sell his soul down the river for praise. He can be had.

Ibn Kahldun wrote that no amount of knowledge of the head by itself can give a sense of what is good, what is true, or what is beautiful.

The notion that human beings are always victims of their circumstances is an affront to those bold spirits who throughout history have spent their lives prevailing over adversity.

Although conventional wisdom has it that the human condition is optimized when each individual has a maximum of autonomy, when true crisis prevails, when life really gets chaotic, when the dividing line between good and evil ceases to be clear-cut, when no consensus exists as to what is the right and what is the wrong thing to do, people demand to be led, regimented, and guided.

A fifth requirement of a good leader is a philosophical outlook. At least he should understand and be able to compassionately explain, when necessary, that there is no evidence that the way of the world assures the punishment of evil or the reward of virtue. The leader gives forethought to coping with undeserved reverses. As he is expected to handle fear with courage, so also is he expected to handle calamity with emotional stability or—as Plato might say—with endurance of the soul. Humans seem to have an inborn need to believe that virtue will be rewarded and evil punished. Often, when they come face to face with the fact that this is not always so, they are crushed. The only way I know to handle failure is to gain historical perspective, to think about people who have successfully lived with failure. A verse from the Book of Ecclesiastes perfectly describes the world to which I returned from prison: “I returned and saw that the race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise nor riches to men of understanding, nor favors to men of skill, but time and chance happeneth to them all.”

In other words, what we dispense resolve on depends on how we feel about ourselves. How we behave and think depends on who we think we are. If we have a low opinion of ourselves, if we deserve a low opinion of ourselves, our resolve is not likely to flourish. For contrast, look at Socrates. Socrates thought it unworthy to himself to pander to the Athenians because all they could do was extend his life, and pandering to extend his life was an affront to his own sense of behavior worthy of him. His resolve was, as with all of us, directly tied to his own self-respect and the terms on which he could preserve it.

Always striving for true education is the best insurance against losing your bearings, your perspective, in the face of disaster, in the face of failure.

Aristotle: “Education is an ornament in prosperity and a refuge in adversity.”

in peacetime we’re all trapped in a feeling that life is just one damned checkoff list.

“Survive at any cost,” he kept repeating to himself at first. But as he got into the underground (and anybody worth his salt does so), he realized that to survive at any cost was as often as not to survive at the cost of someone else—at the cost of a comrade.

The turning point in anybody’s life, he said, is when you come to that fork in the road where you have to decide whether to risk your life or to lose your conscience.

Solzhentsyn

So I say, “Bless you, prison, bless you, shootdown, bless all the close shaves, all the torture, and all the hairy night landings, and those ready room memories, for having been in my life.” Some of my friends left navy flying early and went out and made big money—but in hindsight I wouldn’t trade places with any of them. There is no doubt in my mind that to have been diverted from this naval aviator’s life would to have been to be disdained by destiny. You all know as well as I do that it’s worth the trip.

It is crucial for the United States in the 1990s to reverse civilian government officialdom’s steady drift toward shirking its duties to civic virtue, public virtue, the habitual taking of personal responsibility, and the placing of the overall good of the body politic above personal ambition and gain.

A philosopher has warned us that, of all forms of caution, caution in love is the most fatal to true happiness.

Bertrand Russell

all good combat leaders have always labored under the same five imperatives vis-à-vis the men they lead. They are the imperatives of kinship (taking care never to leave any doubt in the minds of your troops that you and they are, in the last analysis, comrades in arms), prescription (having a personal, authoritative style of laying down rules and direction), sanction (being perceived as a person who has, and follows, some cogent theory of reward and punishment), action (being able to show your men that you do know how to fight), and example (showing by your every move and whole being that you subscribe to the principle that those who impose risk should be seen to share it).

perhaps, but the most thoughtful authors I’ve read on the subject of why heroism is distorted or muted or dead in the twentieth century stress the lack of the uncertainty factor in modern industrial states.

READING LIST These were the reading assignments for Foundations of Moral Obligation. This list, except for minor revisions, is the same one offered when the Stockdale-Brennan team taught the course for the first time in the fall of 1978. Week One: From 20th-Century Technology to the World of Epictetus. The Meaning of Moral Philosophy. J. B. Stockdale, “The World of Epictetus.” Atlantic Monthly, April 1978. A. Koestler, Darkness at Noon. R. A. Gabriel, “The Nature of Military Ethics.” M. Walzer, “Prisoners of War.” Week Two: The Book of Job. Life Is Not Fair. The Problem of Evil. The Book of Job. Old Testament. A. Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Week Three: Socrates. Doctrine and Example. Civil Disobedience. Can Virtue be Taught? Soul and Body. Plato, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo. Week Four: Aristotle. Happiness as Living Well and Faring Well. The Moral and Intellectual Virtues. Courage as Balance and Endurance. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics. J. Conrad, Typhoon. Week Five: Kant and Hart. Ethics of Moral Duty and Civic Law. Motives and Consequences. “Ought” and “Right.” The Meaning of Natural Law. I. Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals. H. L. A. Hart, The Concept of Law, chapters 8 and 9. Week Six: Mill. Morality as Social Utility. Justice and the Greatest Happiness Principle. J. S. Mill, Utilitarianism and On Liberty. F. Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground, part I. Week Seven: Individualism and the Col...

“A good education,” said Phil, “is one that includes the pointing out of the lack of a moral economy in the universe.”

Each individual brings about his own good and his own evil, his good fortune, his ill fortune, his happiness, and his wretchedness. And to top all this off, he held that it is unthinkable that one man’s error could cause another’s suffering. Suffering, like everything else in Stoicism, was all down here—

Enchiridion: “Remember, you are an actor in a drama of such sort as the Author chooses—if short, then in a short one; if long, then in a long one. If it be his pleasure that you should enact a poor man, or a cripple, or a ruler, see that you act it well. For this is your business—to act well the given part, but to choose it belongs to Another.” “Every

“Evil lies in the evil use of moral purpose, and good the opposite. The course of the Will determines good or bad fortune, and one’s balance of misery and happiness.” In short, what the Stoics say is “Work with what you have control of and you’ll have your hands full.”

the truth of that linchpin of Stoic thought: that the thing that brings down a man is not pain but shame!

“No injury but that of not doing what you ought; to destroy the man of fidelity in you, the man of honor, the man of decent behavior. Do not look for any greater injuries than this.”

Epictetus

Like Epictetus, he says that if we will just trust them, we all have great built-in moral choice backup systems within us. What is right and what is wrong are manifested as strong and telltale inner feelings.

That oracle resides in the deep emotional centers of the brain, just beneath the “thinking portion” of the cerebral cortex. To put the matter in somewhat more mechanical terms than is customary for ethical phiolosophy, you play your scenarios in the conscious mind and note the emotions connected to the alternative courses of action. You think, and feel—and then choose the most satisfying scenario, knowing you have done the “right” thing.

E.O. says it is mainly genetically driven passions. “It is human nature and not pure reason that lifts us above the animals,” he stresses. I think this follows from his view of IQ scores. He says they reflect only one component of intelligence. They ignore leadership traits, mental stamina, drive, and creativity. Makes you wonder why we put such emphasis on SAT scores to get into this school.

Here is what Conan Doyle had Sherlock Holmes say to Watson on that subject: “When one tries to rise above nature, one is liable to fall below it. The highest type of man may revert to the animal, if he leaves the straight road of destiny. Consider, Watson, that the materialists, the sensualists, the worldly, would all prolong their worthless lives. The spiritual would now avoid the call to something higher. It would be the survival of the least fit. What sort of cesspool may not our poor world become?”

Epictetus had said, “Remember, you are an actor in a drama of such sort as the Author chooses—if short, then in a short one; if long, then in a long one. If it be his pleasure that you should enact a poor man, or a cripple, or a ruler, see that you act it well. For this is your business—to act well the given part, but to choose it belongs to Another.” (The upper-case As on Author and Another make them Stoic code words for God.)

It sort of fell out of Epictetus’s proclamation that “difficulties are what show men’s character. Therefore, when a difficult crisis meets you, remember that you are the raw youth with whom God the trainer is wrestling.” But our bottom line was this: The challenge of education is not to prepare people for success but to prepare them for failure. I think that it’s in hardship and failure that the heroes and the bums really get sorted out.