The Stockdale Paradox

16 September 2023

Learning about Admiral James Stockdale (1923-2005) was one of my earliest exposures to Stoicism, a philosophy I have never studied in a philosophy faculty, despite having a degree in that discipline.  (Such courses weren’t offered.)  As I recall the legend, Stockdale was shot out of the naval plane he was piloting while over Vietnam.  As he hit the air, he reportedly said to himself, “Now I enter the world of Epictetus.” 

He was tortured over 20 times and survived that and eight years of imprisonment with no rights, no release date, and only his fellow prisoners—and his knowledge of Stoicism—to guide him through (Collins, 2023).  Jim Collins provided a good backgrounder in his 2001 book, Good to Great.  The theme of that book is an emphasis on the ability to confront the brutal facts of your current reality which is the second part of the Stockdale Paradox:

“You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be”

--Collins (2001) 

As a dimension of the human psyche, we would measure this by asking for self-ratings along the following scale.

Figure 1: Self-rating of realistic faithfulness.

It’s an interesting measure because most such scales put healthy behaviours at one end and unhealthy behaviours at the opposite end.  As such, this scale is similar to Aristotle’s virtues and vices in the Nicomachean Ethics in which moderation is the optimum, with one side being self-indulgent and the other small-souled.  In the scale above, an optimum score is five as one is balancing faith in self with faith in realism.  If we slide to the left, we are losing faith.  If we slide to the right, we are being less realistic.

Some readers may jump at the faith-in-self statement.  I have inferred that emphasis from the wording of the paradox.  “You” or the possessive “your” appear four times in that sentence.  This is about you and your life.  But…our lives occur in contexts not in vacuums.  Can a person have active faith in themselves without having that same faith in life?  My mind jumped to Viktor Frankl, the Jewish psychiatrist who lost his wife, parents, and brother in the death camps run by the National Socialists. 

In a previous blog (January 2021) I wrote “It’s hard to argue with a man who, during a three-year imprisonment in a Nazi death camp, insisted that we choose our status as victims...No matter the circumstance, you always have the last of the human freedoms: to choose your attitude.”  How many attitudes can there be?  Fundamentally, only three: positive, neutral, or negative. 

Contextualizing that statement, the question above, concerning faith in self versus faith in life, becomes academic in the sense that it takes us beyond practical concerns.  Practically, to actively maintain a positive, negative, or neutral attitude is to be positive, negative, or neutral about your life on this planet. 

Writing this, knowing that my nature is to view the world through the introvert’s downside, I feel duty-bound to report that most of the psychology I read indicates that extraverts are better connected to others, happier, and more optimistic.  They also live longer.

Bottom line: Assess yourself over a month or so by recording your rating on the scale above (Fig. 1), averaging those ratings, and then making a written plan to move yourself toward the middle.  The realist in me says most people won’t do it; the starving optimist in me thinks, have some faith, some people will.  I hope you’re one of those people.

Dan Chalykoff is a Registered Psychotherapist (Qualifying).  He works at CMHA-Hamilton and Healing Pathways Counselling, Oakville, where his focus is clients with addiction, trauma, burnout, and major life changes.  He writes these blogs to increase (and share) his own evolving understanding of ideas.  Since 2017, he has facilitated two voluntary weekly group meetings of SMART Recovery.  Please email him (danchalykoff@hotmail.com) to be added to or removed from the Bcc’d emailing list.