This Is How Smart People Get Smart (And Fools Get More Foolish)
In the fall of 1961, Commander James Stockdale began a course at Stanford he had eagerly anticipated on Marxist theory. “We read no criticisms of Marxism,” he recounted later, “only primary sources. All year we read the works of Marx and Lenin.”
It might seem unusual that the Navy would send a 36-year-old fighter pilot to get a master’s degree in the humanities, but Stockdale knew why he was there. Writing home to his parents that year, he reminded them of a lesson they had instilled in him, “You really can’t do well competing against something you don’t understand as well as something you can.”
At the time, Marxism was not just an abstract academic subject, but the ideological foundation of America’s greatest geopolitical enemy. The stakes were high—the Soviets pushed a vision of global communism and the conflict in Vietnam was already flashing hot, the North Vietnamese fueled by a ruthless mix of dogma and revolutionary zeal. ‘Marxism’ was, like today, also a culture-war boogeyman used by politicians and demagogues.
Just a few short years after completing his studies—September 1965—Stockdale was shot down over Thanh Hóa in North Vietnam, and as he parachuted into what he knew would be imprisonment and possibly death, his mind turned to the philosophy of Epictetus, which he had been introduced to by a professor at Stanford.
The North Vietnamese had many prisons and prison camps, but the Hỏa Lò Prison was famously the worst. Hỏa Lò means “fiery furnace” or “Hell’s hole,” which is what it was—a dark dungeon where captives were physically and mentally tortured to the unimaginable extreme. Stockdale would spend the next seven years in Hỏa Lò—or the “Hanoi Hilton,” as his fellow inmates would come to call it—in various states of solitary confinement and brutal torture.
His captors—sensing perhaps that he held terrible secrets, including having flown in the Tonkin Gulf the night of the so-called “incident”—sought desperately to break him. Stockdale famously drew on the Stoicism of Epictetus, but he also leveraged his knowledge of the practices and the mindset of his oppressors.
“In Hanoi, I understood more about Marxist theory than my interrogator did,” Stockdale explained. “I was able to say to that interrogator, ‘That’s not what Lenin said; you’re a deviationist.’”
This was a story I intended to tell the midshipmen at the U.S Navy Academy a couple of weeks ago, where Stockdale, as a graduate of the class of 1947 and Medal of Honor winner, is revered. For the last four years, I’ve been delivering a series of lectures on the cardinal virtues of Stoicism and was scheduled to continue on April 14th with a talk to the entire sophomore class on the theme of wisdom.
But roughly an hour before my talk was to begin, in my hotel room getting ready, I received a call—Would I be willing to refrain from any mention in my remarks of the recent removal of 381 supposedly controversial books from the Nimitz library on campus? My slides had been sent up the chain of command at the school, who was now, as they explained, extremely worried about reprisals from the Secretary of Defense or appearing to openly flout Executive Order 14151 (an anti-DEI order.)
When I declined, my invitation—as well as a planned speech before the Navy Football team, with whom my books on Stoicism are popular—was revoked.
In his writings and speeches after his return from the Hanoi Hilton, Stockdale often referred to what he called “extortion environments” to describe his experience in prison. He and his fellow POWs were pressured to comply with demands—answering simple questions, performing seemingly innocuous tasks, appearing in propaganda videos, confessing to war crimes—under the threat that if they declined, there would be consequences.
No one at the Naval Academy intimated any consequences for me, of course, but it was extortionary all the same—I had to choose between my message (to say nothing of my rights as a private citizen) or my continued access and welcome at an institution it has been one of the honors of my life to be associated with.
As an author, I believe deeply in the power of books. As a bookstore owner in Texas, I have spoken up about book banning many times already. In fact, when they tried to remove certain books from the high school library in our town, my wife and I partnered with Scribd to give out hundreds of copies of them to local residents. That’s why the window of our store currently features this quote from one of my favorite Rage Against the Machine songs:
But setting all of that aside, even if I had no previous connection to this issue, I had been invited to the Naval Academy to deliver an address on the virtue of wisdom. How could I not mention what had gone on just a few hundred yards away?
As I explained repeatedly to my hosts, I had no interest in embarrassing anyone or discussing politics directly (although they had had no issue with the talk I gave at this very lecture series entirely about Jimmy Carter, another Academy graduate, one year earlier). Nor did I want to cause trouble or put someone’s job at risk. I did, however, feel it was essential to make the point that the pursuit of wisdom is impossible without engaging with (and challenging) uncomfortable ideas.
Seneca, another Stoic philosopher, used a military metaphor to make this very argument. We ought to read critically and dangerously, he said, “like a spy in the enemy’s camp.” This is what Stockdale was doing when he studied Marxism on the Navy’s dime. It is what Seneca was doing when he read and liberally quoted from Epicurus, the head of a rival philosophical school.
The current administration is by no means unique in its desire to suppress ideas it doesn’t like or thinks dangerous. As I intended to explain to the midshipmen, there was considerable political pressure in the 1950s over what books were carried in the libraries of federal installations. When asked if he would ban communist books from American embassies, Eisenhower, however, resisted.
“Generally speaking,” he told a reporter from the New York Herald Tribune at a press conference shortly after his inauguration, “my idea is that censorship and hiding solves nothing…” He explained that he wished more Americans had read Hitler and Stalin in the years previous because it might have helped anticipate the oncoming threats. “Now, gentlemen,” he concluded, “…let’s educate ourselves if we are going to run a free government.
The men and women at the Naval Academy will go on to lead combat missions, to command aircraft carriers, to pilot nuclear-armed submarines, and run enormous organizations. We will soon entrust them with incredible responsibilities and power. But we fear they’ll be hoodwinked or brainwashed by certain books?
It is good that Mein Kampf was not one of the books removed from the Naval Academy library…but this makes the fact that Maya Angelou was, all the more inexplicable. Whatever one thinks of DEI, we are not talking about the writings of external enemies here, but in many cases, art, serious scholarship and legitimate criticism of America’s past. One of the books is about black soldiers in WWII, another is about the memorialization of the Holocaust. Another was written by a person I had interviewed on the Daily Stoic podcast, and had been interviewed by a week earlier! No one at any public institution should have to fear losing their job for pushing back on such an obvious over-reach, let alone veterans who have served this country in combat, yet here we are.
Indeed, the decision not to protest the original order—which I believe flies in the face of basic academic freedoms and independence—is what put the current leadership in the academy in the now even stickier position of trying to suppress criticism of that decision. “Compromises pile up when you’re in a pressure situation in the hands of a skilled extortionist,” Stockdale reminds us. “You can be had if you make that first compromise, offer to make that ‘deal,’ or ‘meet them halfway.’”
Of course, I write about many of these topics—holding the line, developing competence, having integrity, not compromising—in Right Thing, Right Now. I have not always managed to do this in my own life and career (as I confess to my regret and shame in the Afterword to Courage is Calling). These decisions are not easy nor are they always clear. I very much sympathize with the leadership (in uniform and otherwise) who have been put in this impossible situation. I also know firsthand, it is very difficult to go along with policies that compromise your values without becomingcompromised.
As I say in the preface to each book in the series, the virtues are interrelated and inseparable. Yet, there’s a reason that wisdom is considered the mother of the virtues. It is wisdom that helps us find what Aristotle called the “golden mean” between two vices. It is wisdom that tells us when to apply courage, the midpoint between cowardice and recklessness. It is wisdom that teaches us how to stand firm and persist when we know we are doing right. And it is wisdom that finds the line between good and evil, right and wrong, fair and unfair, ethical and unethical.
I felt I could not, in good conscience, lecture these future leaders and warriors on the virtues of courage and doing the right thing—as I did in 2023 and 2024—and then fold when asked not to mention such an egregious and fundamentally anti-wisdom course of action. I could not give a talk on the subject of wisdom and not address a very timeless and unfortunately, very prevalent tendency to get rid of books that we disagree with or think controversial. What good is it to speak about leadership and character in the abstract and avoid the very real challenges in front of us? As our constitutional order and our very laws are being placed under incredible strain—to say nothing of our basic morals and decency.
In many moments, many understandable moments, Commander Stockdale had an opportunity to do the expedient thing as a POW. He could have compromised. He could have obeyed. It would have saved him considerable pain, preventing the injuries that deprived him of full use of his leg for the rest of his life, perhaps even returning him home sooner to his family. He chose not to do that. He rejected the extortionary choice and stood on principle.
For me, with slightly less on the line, to do the expedient thing, it would have been a betrayal not just of Stoicism, the philosophy I have tried to apply in my life, but also a betrayal of Stockdale in whose name I was giving the lecture and whose story I was telling in the talk that I was going to give.
And so there in the hotel after receiving the phone call and having my talk cancelled, I packed up and headed to the airport. On my flight home, I decided I wasn’t going to go quietly. In line with the idea that the obstacle is the way, I was going to try to use this. Mid-flight, I took out my computer and wrote a piece that ended up running in The New York Times and getting picked up by many other outlets and publications (CNN, The Free Press, The Preamble, ABC, Yahoo News, and more).
After finishing the draft and turning the slides I had prepared over in my mind, I thought, they can prevent me from going on stage but they can’t prevent me from delivering the talk. So in my studio in Texas where we record The Daily Stoic Podcast, I gave the talk that I was going to give at the Naval Academy. It was obviously a slightly different environment—no stage, no slides on a projection screen behind me, no live audience—but it is more or less the talk that I would have given to those midshipmen.
“The greatest educational fallacy,” Stockdale would write, “is that you can get it without stress.” The road to wisdom, to living the philosophical life, living by those four virtues, leads through a long path of stress and toil and struggle.
It takes work, as I put in the title of the new book.
It is the work of our life.
Stockdale’s example—forged by his liberal education at two of America’s best institutes of higher learning—stands there for all of us to follow in matters big and small.
For the last six years, I’ve been working on The Stoic Virtues Series. And now, the fourth and final book—Wisdom Takes Work—is complete.
I wrote this book because wisdom—true wisdom—is the commitment of a lifetime. It is a battle to be won over ego, over ignorance, over the self. It takes study, it takes reflection, it takes experience. Most of all, it takes work. I hope you’ll do that work with me. The book comes out in the fall, but you can preorder it today.
