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A Stoic Philosopher in a Hanoi Prison: I am the captain of my soul
- stanrivers 6y agoIt matters not how strait the gate, how charged with punishment the scroll, I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul. Love this poem by William Ernest Henley - “Invictus”
- triangleman 6y agoChuck Swindoll was once a fan of that poem, but came around to a higher truth. I couldn't find the radio sermon where he used it as an example but the truth is that at some point you ought to learn that 1) there's quite a lot directing your fate other than yourself, and 2) you can't save yourself--any more than Baron Munchausen could pull himself out of the water by his own ponytail. Rather than "invictus" I would rather be conquered by the Hound of Heaven: https://www.bartleby.com/236/239.html https://www.bartleby.com/236/239.html
- elmerfud 6y agoStoicism seems to be a lost thing these days when everywhere you turn people wish to play the I'm the biggest victim game. While being stoic may not always be the healthiest way to deal with issues in life, the perpetual victim attitude is also not healthy. It's as if people have adopted the Jehovah's Witness attitude of every rejection being a persecution that they can revel in. Who can be the greatest victim. Let us strive for balance and not the extremes.
- stanrivers 6y agoThat is something that I struggle with - I think people who think you have to take Stoicism all or nothing have it wrong. But, if you accept that it was average people coming up with the best ideas that they could at the time, that they could wrong, and that you could take what is good and improve on that which is deficient - that is the right way to approach anything generally. The same for Stoicism - don’t treat it as religious dogma - treat as ideas to wrestle with and learn from.
- morelisp 6y agoFor a stoic you sure seem to be emotionally invested in other people’s emotional reactions to even further people.
- stanrivers 6y agoInteresting point - I've always thought the stoic ideal was that each individual takes charge / responsibility for their own life and tries to live a good life. THEN, if everyone is doing that, as a society, we are better off. Like it is this "first focus on yourself, and then maybe the world around you might be a bit better for everyone" type mentality. So, the best version of you could involve sharing and hoping that others follow a similar philosophy - but at the same time you need to not define yourself as having failed if others disregard it?
- ByteJockey 6y agoIf I had to boil it down to a quick sentence, I don't think I'd use the personal responsibility approach. I think I'd go with something like "Not putting value on things outside your control."
- bserge 6y agoThat's a great way to summarize it.
- stanrivers 6y agoBut I just think that is not completely correct either - a big part of Stoicism, unless I am missing something, is also being a better person holistically. A world where everyone doesn't care about things generally (like a popular negative generalization of Stoicism) doesn't ever work. A world where everyone is focused on being the best version of themselves might work better than everyone being focused on making the best world. I think that gets looped into Stoic teaching as well.
- ByteJockey 6y ago
- aklemm 6y agoIs there any way to quantify this common objection? If I felt this way, I’d suspect it is more likely that I am either ignorant or intolerant of the struggles of these whiners that so annoy me.
- joduplessis 6y agoWell said.
- lehi 6y agoYes, we who have to hear about victimhood are the real victims.
- Inception 6y ago> Jehovah's Witness attitude I'm not understanding the analogy. If you believe you are being punished for doing something wrong, how is that reveling in persecution? Also, I'm not a Jehovah's Witness, but according to their website, they don't even believe suffering is a punishment for their sins. [0] [0] - https://www.jw.org/en/library/magazines/watchtower-no3-2018-sep-oct/is-suffering-punishment-from-god/ https://www.jw.org/en/library/magazines/watchtower-no3-2018-...
- tumblerz 6y agoI believe the reference is to the JW eschatology, which foresees JWs as undergoing a sort of total persecution as a sign of Judgement Times, or Armageddon, or whatever they call it. And, because their form of ministry involves frequently talking to and attempting to convert strangers, they encounter many and various forms of rejection, including critiques, that are understood as harbingers of coming persecution. In this sense daily life comes to reaffirm a broader millenarian vision of the future. phew. So, I think the analogy is meant to say that our current era's secular glorification of victimhood achieves a similar goal by encoding quotidienne experiences of failure or rejection with a larger meaning, in this case being part of an oppressed group. But that's just how I read it. edit: JW childhood, here.
- elmerfud 6y agoYou are correct, that's what I was referencing.
- heavenlyblue 6y agoYou seem to be 50 years old
- johnchristopher 6y ago> everywhere you turn people wish to play the I'm the biggest victim game. > Let us strive for balance and not the extremes.
- yelloweyes 6y agoLife is dangerous as shit. Playing victim is a way to protect one's self. If you let it, capitalism will tear you apart, eat your entrails, and blame you for being weak.
- watwut 6y agoHow is stoicism lost when people talk about it on hackers news like every day. Also, sometimes people are actually victims of s something, even if small injustice. And from experience, trying to act like it is no issue never solves it.
- waihtis 6y agoThings happen and time can only move in one direction. What use does it serve to wallow in victimhood and self-pity VS adopting a stoic attitude to events?
- watwut 6y agoCause people who adopt stoic attitude to evens do not make change. They don't get what they were supposed to, they don't make world better. They are passive. They easily turn into enablers. They end up tempted to claim injustice does not happen further gasslighting victims trying to fight. Speaking as someone who used to think stoic attitude is superior.
- waihtis 6y agoSounds like you’ve misunderstood stoicism as a concept, but curious how you approach life post-stoicism?
- watwut 6y agoThe person i responded to is misunderstanding it the same way when he is building taboo around word victim. As for what after, it would be complicated to answer. I am changing attitudes toward more activity, more willing to show up anger or other emotions when not showing them is the passivity road.
- waihtis 6y agoFYI I'm the same person, and I'm not building a taboo around the word victim. Stoicism doesn't advocate for you to be less active. Again, you're misunderstanding the base definition of stoicism. This is much of the same argument I hear about buddhism over here where people somehow think it's a religion of nihilism. Be a victim or more angry or whatever you like, but it's not going to provide solace, meaningful help or generally better outcomes to you in any situation, plus other people will respond less effectively to it.
- kthxbye123 6y agoI'm more interested in hearing about the philosophy which comforted Vietnamese civilians who had to live their lives under constant American terror-bombing than I am in hearing about the philosophy which comforted the bombers.
- stanrivers 6y agoSlightly unfair, to discredit the suffering of either side, though, right? Regardless of whether your views on the U.S. involved (Stockdale, who this article is about, believes the US gave up its moral high ground amongst the nations of the world by participating, for what it is worth - so he wasn't a fan of being there) Human, generally, are really great at making people suffer. Was it right to be bombing North Vietnam? Was it right to be torturing people in prison camps? Overall, I do agree that it would be interesting to learn from an memoirs from North Vietnamese at this time. I have never thought to look for that. So thank you for highlighting.
- nabla9 6y ago"Grandstanding: The Use and Abuse of Moral Talk" https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/oso/9780190900151.001.0001/oso-9780190900151 https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/o... >People used to hold out great hope for a public square in which individuals put petty disputes aside and engage in rational discussion about important issues. Unfortunately, public discourse today—especially on the internet—is full of adults behaving like poorly socialized children, acting out to show off for people they want to impress. In short, they engage in moral grandstanding, or the use of moral talk for self-promotion. Drawing from work in psychology, economics, and political science, this book develops an explanation of why people grandstand when they talk about morality and politics. Using the tools of moral philosophy, it argues that grandstanding is not just annoying, but morally bad. And finally, it explains what we can do to encourage people to support a public square worth participating in, by avoiding grandstanding.
- kthxbye123 6y agoOP posted a dumb motivational essay based on a bullshit hagiography of a guy whose day job was to mass murder civilians. If you’re cool with that then your moral framework has a screw loose, sorry.
- nabla9 6y agoJames B. Stockdale was Ross Perot's VP candidate in 1992. He didn't want to brag about his past and he was made fun in the TV because he had bad hearing (due to the beatings he received in Hanoi).
- stanrivers 6y agoAnd then we lost him to Alzheimer's disease... just seems like he suffered all too much for one individual.
- disown 6y agoYou are talking about one of the most privileged people on earth. Not to mention the guy caused immense suffering on innocent vietnamese people. The guy certainly deserves no sympathy cause his "suffering" was a result of murdering people.
- imwillofficial 6y agoYeah, I’m going to need some sources for that. Who did He murder? Can you give me a name? You can’t? You have no verifiable War Crimes? I thought as much.
- disown 6y ago> Yeah, I’m going to need some sources for that. You need a source that millions of vietnamese were murdered? > You have no verifiable War Crimes? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%E1%BB%B9_Lai_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%E1%BB%B9_Lai_massacre But of course, nothing we do is war crime. How convenient. The entire vietname war was a war crime and crime against humanity.
- pessimizer 6y agoLiterally the only thing people knew about Stockdale is that he had been a POW and cared about POWs, and the problem that people had with him is that they couldn't recognize any other qualifications that he had for the office. He started a debate by asking a question that everybody had, and didn't answer it in a way that convinced anyone.
- ALittleLight 6y ago>hardly an American came out of that without responding something like this when first whispered to by a fellow prisoner next door: "You don't want to talk to me; I am a traitor." Several times the article talks about how the American prisoners felt guilt that torture was able to compel them to confess or divulge information or similar. That really surprised me. I can't imagine feeling guilty that I divulged secrets under torture.
- stanrivers 6y agoPart of what was so effective about the Vietnamese, and Chinese in the Korean War, was getting the prisoners of war to feel shame. Any shame was what they wanted. Shame that they were captured. Shamed that they were attacking villages. Shame that they gave up secrets. So not only were you saying things that a romanticized view of the military has pounded into you that you would never do... but your captors are trained and specifically trying to make you feel shame / degrade your sense of self value. So I think it is more than just physical torture, but unfortunately adept mental torture as well, that leads to men having those emotions.
- howlgarnish 6y agoUS doctrine at the time was that soldiers were only supposed to reveal their name, rank and serial number, so soldiers naturally felt they had failed if they revealed anything else.
- srik 6y agoThis is a very timely article as an annual event called Stoic Week begins on Monday. It is online and free to attend, so if Stoicism piques your interest you should consider participating, I am. https://learn.modernstoicism.com/p/stoic-week https://learn.modernstoicism.com/p/stoic-week Also, Stockdale's original article quoted in this article is well worth a read. This is a PDF link. https://www.usna.edu/Ethics/_files/documents/Stoicism2.pdf https://www.usna.edu/Ethics/_files/documents/Stoicism2.pdf
- stanrivers 6y agoInteresting and thank you for the link. 100% agree that both of the articles linked in the write-up should be read. #1 is a little wordy, but worth it to understand how Stockdale is thinking. #2 is more fun to read.
- deesep 6y ago> This is a very timely article as an annual event called Stoic Week begins on Monday. It is online and free to attend, so if Stoicism piques your interest you should consider participating, I am. I am glad you shared this. I just registered. Thank you.
- feralimal 6y agoStoicism, as a philosophy, is indeed personally valuable and an interesting way to view the world. But no, I have little respect for this eulogy of a vice-admiral in the army. I expect that he is another faker, like John McCain, whose father was a full admiral. Were either of these characters even PoWs? I doubt it. These people are not to be respected. They are our governors. They tell stories and lies. To manipulate us into thinking we deserve to be governed by them. And they like to portray themselves as heroes to be worshipped. All lies. If we use some skepticism - which, I know we all profess to do - we don't know that any of this is true! Its not true because it says so in some online source. All I can see is another soft-sell, soft-spin of some character, that in a more moral dimension, would likely have been sent to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity.
- pbourke 6y ago> Were either of these characters even PoWs? I doubt it. What’s your basis for doubting that McCain was a POW?
- feralimal 6y agoI've explained one reason, in a comment above, fyi.
- qqj 6y agoSkepticism is thinking they exaggerated some facts and perhaps over emphasized the importance of Stoicism and his mental fortitude to paint a prettier picture. What you're describing is unfounded paranoia. The elites are out to get us? McCain is a hoax?
- feralimal 6y agoNo. Skepticism is refusing to believe in something until it has been shown to be true. What commonly passes as skepticism is a very tame effort. To say accept 50% of the claims, rather than 100%. You should accept 0% of claims that you have not verified. This is also known as the scientific method. (But don't look to science to be upholding it...) The elites govern us. They have always governed us. One of the methodologies is that is to sell us on stories from the cradle that allow them to operate in reality, while we are living in unsubstantiated stories. When we take no action to verify, when we trust our experts, politicians, anyone apart from ourselves, when we accept the authority of another over our own experience, we are badly lost. Do you recollect when it was going to be 2 weeks to flatten the curve? Do you think the curve will be flattened? Do we need to 'mask harder'? Get vaccinated? Why didn't we have cold vaccines previously? Do we need to isolate healthy people, is that how it works? The contradictions in the current narrative are impossible to resolve if you are a thinking person with authority over your own thinking. McCain is clearly from the governance clique. His father was an admiral. He then does a dog and pony show in the intimidating country of 'Vietnam', and comes back into governance and plays his role. He is an actor. We get indications of this, eg the broken leg that changes legs! Here's the explanation: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5113233/John-McCain-solves-riddle-moveable-leg-brace.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5113233/John-McCain... He says: "Finally on Thursday, McCain himself took to Twitter to put the conspiracy theories to rest. 'My left leg was doing extra work to compensate for the boot, so I'm giving it a break,' the senator tweeted. 'I still hate wearing this boot, but it won't slow us down from frying 7 turkeys today!'" That explanation explains nothing. NOTHING. But the headline says it "solves the riddle of his moveable leg". Maybe you read it wrong? Perhaps you had better doubt yourself, and trust the experts! And then you have to read a load more soft spin and fluff about how wonderful man, what a wonderful family, etc, etc, and nothing about him being a criminal that should have spent most of his time in jail for being an enemy of humanity - being part of the governance system. The reality unfortunately is that no one is checking anything, and that people's brains are turned off. Especially well educated brains. They have fully accepted the stories, and are better at filling in the blanks, rather than letting the evidence do the talking. All the best.
- calcsam 6y agoThis is a significant misreading of Stockdale's actual experience. Michael Gibson wrote an article on the same situations: https://www.1517fund.com/post/the-inadequacies-of-the-invincible https://www.1517fund.com/post/the-inadequacies-of-the-invinc... -------- The truth was, despite the consolation it gave him, Stockdale never thought Stoicism would help his tortured cellmates. He never tapped Epictetus’s maxims in code through the prison walls to his friends. “You soon realized that when you dared to spout high-minded philosophical suggestions through the wall, you always got a very reluctant response. No, I never tapped or mentioned Stoicism once.” Still, years later, people would want to know what kept the captured pilots going. How did they survive for so long? Stockdale’s answer was not Epictetus and the Stoics. His answer was always, “The man next door.”
- AndrewKemendo 6y agoI think this is entirely too simplistic of an analysis. In the same way that a carpenter does not need to know how to derive moments for static equilibrium of a 2x4, the application of stoic philosophy need not make reference to the original writings or the teaching of the philosophy itself. In fact I would argue that Stockdale's "compression" of the philosophical principles into something tangible and actionable in such a scenario - which both articles demonstrate he did - meant that he had a fundamental understanding of the applicability of Stoicism.
- stanrivers 6y agoI would agree with this - while Stockdale does say he never used the words stoicism or shared those specific ideas - he was the highest ranking officer and in charge of how the men operated. In the situation that they were in, if you had someone that was holding up fine and doing what you thought should be done - there is no reason to tell them the stoic terminology for what they are doing. If you are trying to share knowledge and best practices throughout the camp, you don't need to explain how the ideas came from someone dead for thousands of years. But saying that Stockdale is turning in his grave because we associated him with Epictetus I think is actually the opposite of what is true.
- libraryofbabel 6y agoFor a comparable example, there is Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl, which uses his experience of surviving the holocaust in four concentration camps to argue for an existential, meaning-centered view of the purpose of life. He doesn’t reference Stoicism directly but Epictetus is certainly in the background. As, for example, in this passage: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.”
- stanrivers 6y agoI have this on my bookshelf but hadn't read it yet - thank you for the reminder. That is a great quote. I often view my own small problems as insurmountable. I have a bad attitude about them more often than not. Not to trivialize small sufferings in the least, but man do people, at least me, get stuck in negativity by comparatively insignificant things.
- DantesKite 6y agoLovely read. Thank you.