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

by James B. Stockdale

I don’t subscribe to environmental, genetic, or any simplistic determinism. Will is the thing. Man makes his character here on earth. I am the master of my fate, the captain of my soul.

I believe that all progress is stimulated by an awareness of a heritage.

freedom and organization. At its highest, citizenship achieves a balance between these two elements necessary to the survival of society.

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.

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, that you may gain what is no good, consider how unreasonable and foolish you are.

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.

“Honor,” writes Burckhardt, “is often what remains after faith, love, and hope are lost” (The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, London, 1929, p. 428). From my own experience, I think he’s right. A sense of honor under pressure can outlast them all.

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.

The key to our future leaders’ merit may not be “hanging in there” when the light at the end of the tunnel is expected. It will be their performance when it looks like the light will never show up.

In Don Quixote, we have, on the other hand, a man who wishes to reform reality. Such men aim at altering the course of things; they refuse to repeat the gestures that custom, tradition, or even biological instinct try to force them to make.” Ortega’s hero is so idealistic that he will not even tolerate reality.