Who am I? Why am I here?

(This is an excerpt from my new book The Stoic Edge: How to Overcome Resistance, Build Resilience and Live Your Best Life available now at Amazon.)

Vice Admiral James Stockdale stood before a national television audience at the 1992 Vice Presidential Debate and prepared to make his opening statement. Just a month before, Ross Perot had chosen Stockdale as his running mate for his insurgent third party run for the presidency. Stockdale, then 69 years old, had a shock of white hair and looked like a grandfather next to the young Dan Quayle and even younger Al Gore.

“Admiral Stockdale, your opening statement, please,” said the moderator.?

Stockdale paused for a moment and then with a wry smile said two of the more famous lines in debate history:?

“Who am I? Why am I here?”

The audience laughed. They assumed that Stockdale was making fun of the fact that, as a political neophyte, he was largely unknown to the American people. In the aftermath of the debate, many thought he was senile and didn’t know where he was or why he was even on the debate stage.

But Stockdale wasn’t senile. And he wasn’t lost. In fact, he was exactly where he was supposed to be. As a practicing Stoic, he was asking the most existential of questions: What is his purpose in life? And why should anyone care?

For Stockdale, these were questions that had come to define his life. Shot down over enemy territory in the early stages of the Vietnam War, Stockdale was captured and spent seven long years as a prisoner of war in what became known as the “Hanoi Hilton”. But this was no luxury hotel. Stockdale endured years of privation, solitary confinement, and torture, and did so with the utmost courage and fortitude. This is a man who knew much about “resisting and persisting” through the most trying situations imaginable.

In fact, from the moment he was shot down, Stockdale began to channel his Stoicism into a shield against the trials he was about to face:1

"On September 9, 1965, I flew at 500 knots right into a flak trap, at treetop level, in a little A-4 airplane that I suddenly couldn't steer because it was on fIre, its control system shot out. After ejection, I had about 30 seconds to make my last statement in freedom before I landed in the main street of a little village right ahead. And, so help me, I whispered to myself: "Five years down there, at least. I'm leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus."

Stockdale was indeed entering the world of the great Stoic philosopher Epictetus, himself a man born in captivity and who lived for many years as a slave. As a nine year old, his slave master intentionally broke his leg and mangled it so badly that Epictetus walked with a pronounced limp the rest of his life. To inure himself from the pain and frustration of his station, Epictetus began to outline what he later referred to as the “Dichotomy of Control”:?

"The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control. Where then do I look for good and evil? Not to uncontrollable externals, but within myself to the choices that are my own . . ."

The externals that faced Epictetus – the evil of his slave master, his lack of freedom, the limp from his broken leg – were uncontrollable. He had no agency over them, and complaining or obsessing about them was a waste of his valuable energy. What he did have agency over were his own choices, and his ability to distinguish good and evil inside himself. He couldn’t make his slave master not be evil, but he could prevent himself from getting lost in a sea of negativity and despair. He could decide to focus on the goodness within him, even in the face of pain and misery.

Stockdale put it this way:?

"As I ejected from that airplane I had the understanding that a Stoic always kept separate files in his mind for those things that are ‘up to him’ and those things that are ‘not up to him.’ Up to me, within my power, are my opinions, my aims, my aversions, my own grief, my own joy, my attitude about what is going on, my own good, and my own evil."

Stockdale knew he was entering a new world – one that was without freedom or creature comforts, and that success would depend on his ability to maintain his focus on his inner fortitude. He would need to be his own counsel, his own family, his own friend. But he also had a bigger job; as the senior POW in the prison, it was up to Stockdale to provide the other prisoners with his strength, his unwillingness to give in to the abuse, as an example for them to follow. His message to them was to not give up or give in:?

"We here under the gun are the experts, we are the masters of our fate. Ignore guilt-inducing echoes of hollow edicts, throw out the book, and write your own."

Stockdale took Epictetus with him to the Hanoi Hilton and was never alone and never lost.

1 VADM James Stockdale , Stockdale on Stoicism: Master of My Fate, U.S. Naval Academy.