On 9 September 1965 James Stockdale was shot down over North Vietnam. He was a wing commander and naval aviator, and in the years before he had studied philosophy at Stanford, where a professor had given him the Enchiridion of Epictetus.
Hanging from his parachute, knowing he would be captured within minutes, he thought, by his own account: I am leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus.
He was held until 1973, largely in the prison the Americans called the Hanoi Hilton. Four years in solitary confinement, two in leg irons. As the senior officer among the prisoners he was responsible for men he rarely saw and could never speak to freely.
He devised a code of conduct for his fellow prisoners setting out how much a man could give up under torture before he was permitted to yield. That was not a softening but a necessity: without such a line everyone broke in the end, and then broke again from guilt. By drawing the line in advance, he took from them the guilt over what they could not have prevented.
After his release in 1973 he taught at universities and wrote about Epictetus. His best-known insight came out of a conversation about who did not make it. Those, he said, were the optimists: the men who kept expecting to be home by Christmas, and who gave way under the accumulation of disappointments.
Eight years, no end date, no influence on what is done to you, and responsibility for men you cannot reach.
The tempting sorting is that he held out by believing it would end well. He said explicitly the opposite, and that is the heart of the matter.
The date of your release, the treatment, the duration: all outside you. Whoever pins hope on those hands his mood to a guard with a calendar. What was within reach was something smaller: how you responded today, what you offered your fellow prisoners, which line you drew for yourself.
His formulation is more exact than most Stoic maxims. You must never confuse the confidence that you will prevail in the end with the sobriety about the facts of today. The first without the second is optimism, and that breaks. The second without the first is despair. Both at once is what endures.
His code of conduct is the social application of it. He removed the guilt from men who had done something they could not have prevented, which is exactly applying the sorting to someone else's boxes instead of your own.
Stockdale had preparation almost nobody has: a military training, a position of authority, and by chance a book he had read years earlier. That makes his story hard to transfer. And the teaching did not save everyone; men who followed the same code came out worse, and some did not come back.
What the story is for, then, is not to prove that philosophy carries you through. It shows only that a distinction that looks like hairsplitting on paper made a practical difference in the heaviest circumstances.
Stockdale combined sober honesty about the facts with confidence in the ending. Where in your life do you confuse hope with a deadline, and what would change if you pulled those two apart?
Yours, Not Yours · A Stoic practice ground · All cases · Questions or suggestions