If You Break on the Outside
On 9 September 1965, the young American Marine pilot James Stockdale set off in his fighter jet from the aircraft carrier USS Oriskany, bound for North Vietnam. Returning from a successful routine attack on Communist emplacements, he flew inadvertently into anti-aircraft fire. The ejector seat catapulted him out of the plane. “I was below a thousand feet, I had about twenty seconds in the parachute, and I looked down and I was going to land right over the main street of a little town… [T]hey were firing guns at me, holding up their fists.” Stockdale was promptly captured and thrown into the infamous Hanoi Hilton, where other American prisoners of war were already being held. He was interrogated. He was beaten. He was tortured. Stockdale spent seven and a half years in prison, four of them in solitary confinement—until the end of the Vietnam War.
Stockdale could have avoided this abuse by cozying up to his tormentors somewhat. The occasional anti-American statement and they would have treated him like an ordinary inmate. No torture. Yet it never crossed his mind. He willingly gave himself up to his tormentors. As he later explained, it was the only way he could maintain his self-respect. He didn’t do it for love of his country. Nor was it about the war, which he no longer believed in. It was purely about not breaking down inside. He did it solely for himself.
At one point they were planning to transfer him to another prison. He was due to be marched through the city, paraded before the international media clean and well nourished. Before leaving the prison, however, Stockdale grabbed a stool and bashed it into his own face until blood ran down his body and his eyes swelled shut. They could hardly present him to the world in that condition. “I laid down and I cried that night, right on that floor. I was so happy that I had had the guts to get it all together and make it impossible for them to do what they were going to try to do.”
Viewed from the outside, it sounds absurd. In Stockdale’s situation, it would have been sensible to do as his tormentors instructed. Take orders. Go with the flow. Not stand out. Question the American invasion. After his release he could believably have claimed that otherwise they would have tortured him to death. Everybody would have understood why he acted as he did, and nobody would have blamed him. But would Stockdale have had the strength to withstand seven and a half years? And if so, looking back, would he have described his time in prison as “priceless beyond measure”?
If you don’t make it clear on the outside what you believe deep down, you gradually turn into a puppet. Other people exploit you for their own purposes, and sooner or later, you give up. You don’t fight any more. You don’t hold up to stresses. Your willpower atrophies. If you break on the outside, at some point you’ll break on the inside too.
There’s a whole genre of prison literature, from Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago to Elie Wiesel’s Song of the Dead, from to Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man to Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. These books are frequently misread. People scan them for survival tips in horrendous situations, even though survival is largely a matter of chance. In Auschwitz there were no survival strategies. If you were interned toward the end of the war, you had a higher probability of making it out than if you’d been brought there in 1942. It’s that simple. Then there’s the fact that only survivors can write about being a POW. The dead don’t write books. Stockdale was lucky he wasn’t hit by a bullet as he seesawed down into the enemy village in his parachute. And yet!
And yet one fundamental principle does emerge from all this literature. Those who braced themselves to make it through the day—and the next, and the next—increased their chances of survival step by step. Eventually Auschwitz was liberated. At some point every imprisonment is ended. You just have to persevere, assuming that’s possible. And only someone who refuses to break, within or without, will be able to do that. Someone who never gives up, who cherishes their own will, no matter how tiny their leeway.
All of this, as I said above, can only be understood as subject to chance. Personal stories from extreme situations are relevant even to ordinary citizens like us. We’re unlikely to be tortured, thankfully; nor do we have to endure solitary confinement or freezing ice in Siberia’s gulag. But we are assailed every day by attacks on our wills, our principles, our preferences—on our circle of dignity. These attacks aren’t as overt as torture. Rather, they’re so subtle that often we don’t even notice them: advertising, social pressure, unsolicited advice from all angles, soft propaganda, fashion trends, media hype and laws. It’s as though arrows are being shot every day into your circle of dignity. Sharp, poisoned arrows—none of them fatal, but each keen enough to injure your self-esteem and weaken your emotional immune system.
Why is society bombarding you with arrows? Because its concerns are not your concerns. Society cares about cohesion, not about the private interests of a single member. Individuals are dispensable, and quickly perceived as threats to the collective—especially if they hold divergent principles. Society only leaves people in peace if they conform. So brace yourself for those arrows and shore up your circle of dignity.
Your circle of dignity, the protective wall that surrounds your pledges, can only be tested under fire. You might lay claim to high ideals, noble principles and distinctive preferences, but it’s not until you come to defend them that you will “cry with happiness,” to paraphrase Stockdale.
The worst attacks—you’ll know this from experience—are often not physical but verbal. So let me give you a defensive tactic. Say you’re in a meeting and somebody starts going for you, really getting vitriolic. Ask them to repeat what they’ve said word for word. You’ll soon see that, most of the time, your attacker will fold. The Serbian president Aleksandar Vuˇci´c once asked a journalist who’d insulted him on his website to read his own words aloud during an interview—the journalist, ashamed, cut the meeting short.
People with a clear circle of dignity fascinate us, in literature as in film—like Todd Anderson in Dead Poets Society, who stood on a desk to defend his teacher. Or think of Socrates, who refused to recant his teachings. He was sentenced to death, and drank his cup of hemlock in utter serenity.
For most people, the circle of dignity is not a matter of life and death but a battle to maintain the upper hand. Make it as hard as possible for your assailants. Keep the reins in your hand as long as possible when it comes to the things you hold sacred. If you have to give up, then do so in a way that makes your opponent pay the highest practicable price for your capitulation. There’s tremendous power in this commitment. It’s one of the keys to a good life.