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

by James B. Stockdale

What do you do for friends, as you ascend the ladder of intellectual sophistication? Do you hang in with your old pals or concentrate on intellectual peers? “If you do not drink with old friends as you used to drink with them, you cannot be loved by them as much. So choose whether you want to be a boozer and likeable to them, or sober and not likeable.” (Then he makes it clear that in his mind, satisfaction and self-respect are best served by escalating friendships apace with your education.) “But if that does not please you, turn about the whole of you, to the opposite; become one of the addicts to unnatural vice, one of the adulterers, and act in corresponding fashion. Yes, and jump up and shout your applause to the dancer!”

Stoicism is one of those things that, when described analytically, sounds horrible to some modern people. Stoic scholars agree that, to describe it effectively, the teacher must become, for the time being at least, a Stoic.

And so too with your health, your wealth, your pleasure, your pain, your fame, your disrepute, your life, your death. They are all externals, all outside your control in the last instance, all outside the power of where you really live.

To a Stoic, bad luck is your fault; you’ve become addicted to externals. Epictetus: “What are tragedies, but the portrayal in tragic verse of the sufferings of men who have admired things external?”

“A man’s master is he who is able to confer or remove whatever that man seeks or shuns. Whoever then would be free, let him wish nothing, let him decline nothing, which depends on others; else he must necessarily become a slave.”

when I said that even God would decline to intercede as you made self-destructive decisions. That comes from this idea that each man must remain autonomous, a law unto himself. That’s the way the Stoics said the system works.

So on good and evil, where does that leave us? Nothing that is natural can be evil. Death cannot be evil. Disease cannot be evil. Natural disasters cannot be evil. Nothing inevitable can be evil. The universe as a whole is perfect, and everything in it has a place in the overall design. Inevitability is produced by the workings of this divine mechanism.

guilt, in the proper sense, turns on deliberate wrongdoing, it seems that no one can be guilty for the act of another person—there can be no shared or collective or universal guilt. Guilt is incurred by the free choice of the individual. . . . But many have questioned this. Among them are some sociologists who misrepresent in this way the dependence of the individual on society. [At their urging we delight in shouting ‘We should all feel guilty about the conditions of our schools. We should all feel guilty about our dropping the bomb on Hiroshima.’] But the main location of the idea of collective guilt is religion—many forms of doctrines of original sin and universal sin regard guilt as a pervasive state of mankind as a whole.”

Inner tranquility is a goal of the Stoics—mainly so your soul can be calm as you judge the impressions of your mind. The soul is like a bowl of water, the impression like a ray of light that falls on it. When the water is disturbed, the ray of light is distorted. If you judge an impression while your soul is agitated, your judgment cannot be relied on because you are suffering from vertigo. The emotions of grief, pity, and even affection are well-known disturbers of the soul.

Grief is the most offensive; Epictetus considered the suffering of grief an act of evil. It is a willful act, going against the will of God to have all men share happiness. In book 3 he says: “Now another’s grief is no concern of mine, but my own grief is. Therefore, I will put an end at all costs to what is my own concern, for it is under my control. And that which is another’s concern I will endeavour to check to the best of my ability. But my effort to do so will not be made at all costs.

Pity is also an evil; a Stoic would allow it sometimes but only for the person with self-inflicted wounds, like the man who knows he destroyed the good man within him. Affection gets the widest tolerance of the three; if you can love as a man with a noble spirit, okay, but if the relationship requires you to be a slave and miserable, it does not profit you to be affectionate.

What name do we give to those who follow everything that comes to their head? Madmen Well, is that not what so many men do?

But he urges us to acquire a constancy of character that will make it impossible for another to do you wrong. And to get that invulnerability, that inner invulnerability, requires mastering the ability to be continually conscious of whether you are dealing with something you control or something that in the last instance you do not control. The only good things of absolute value are those that lie within your own control. And they are relatively few: things like thought, impulse, our opinions, our desires, our aversions, what we conceive of, what we choose, and so on. Who is the invincible man? He who cannot be dismayed by any happening beyond his control.

In an age when so many seem to cherish the idea that they are “victims” of this or that, it’s nice to hear an old man explain why there should really be no such thing as a victim, that you can only become a victim of yourself. As Epictetus says, “No one can harm you without your permission.”