Embrace the suck but retain your faith.

In his business classic Good to Great, Jim Collins tells the story of Admiral Jim Stockdale, who was the highest-ranking United States military officer in the “Hanoi Hilton” prisoner-of-war camp during the height of the Vietnam War. Tortured over twenty times during his eight-year imprisonment from 1965 to 1973, and often denied medical treatment as a punishment for organising prisoner resistance, Stockdale lived out the war without any prisoner’s rights, no set release date, and no certainty as to whether he would even survive to see his family again. 

Decades later, when asked how he managed to hold out, Stockdale answered I never lost faith in the end of the story. I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end.  That he managed to hold faith for so many years is remarkable; however that faith is very different to the optimism that it might sound like.  When asked about the personal characteristics of prisoners who did not make it out of the camps, he replied the optimists... they were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart … This is a very important lesson. 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.

These last few lines have become known as the Stockdale Paradox, and a lot has been written about them in regard to the pandemic (see here or here for example).  Of course, few are in Stockdale’s extreme position, but there’s a reason people are re-visiting it now; for us here in Singapore for example, with ultra-strict travel regulations the distress around the uncertainty about seeing family again (it’s been nearly two years now) is very real.

So what does it mean to talk about faith that you will prevail and confronting the most brutal facts?

The brutal facts are hard to avoid  - that physical has turned to virtual, that we have missed, are missing, will miss special family moments, joyous and tragic.  And under covid there are more of the latter for many; to be blunt - it sucks. So then the issue is how to have faith, without being optimistic (I write as numbers rise sharply across SE Asia). 

Faith and optimism are similar, for sure, but I have come to think that there really is a difference.  Faith is not naive, but something that makes sense even when uncertain.  For example, most of us can take it for granted that we can walk into a shop and buy a drink, say, knowing that it has not been diluted or tainted, at a reasonable price – and that we can pay with  swipe of a card, even though the shopkeeper has never have seen us before, may never see us again, and knows nothing about us.  And it’s true for almost any product.  This whole edifice on which our society is built does not run on optimism, but rather a type of faith from everyone; it’s a collective faith that yields results: When we all act on that faith it is better for everyone. 

In our current situation, it therefore makes sense to me to have faith in an eventual good outcome; I don’t know when or how (that’s the brutal fact bit) but I know that I am better off with that faith.

An interesting thing about this formulation is it transfers to so many situations.

When Václav Havel (Czech statesman, playwright, former dissident, and last President of Czechoslovakia) was asked whether he saw any hope for his country he replied that he believed hope to be a state of mind, not to be determined by the surrounding circumstances of the world in which we find ourselves. ...It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart... hope in this deep and powerful sense is ...an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. The more unpropitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper that hope is. Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out."    I think his notion of hope is pretty close to what Stockdale meant by faith.

I am also reminded of working with students struggling to master tough ideas; they need to avoid naive optimism that they can succeed without hard work.  They need instead to hold faith that they will, like millions before them, master these ideas if they have patience and apply themselves.  In this case, of course, it’s the teachers' and parents' job to support and nurture that faith; the challenge comes when our children, or we ourselves, have to find the faith alone -  and we will all face that moment at some point.  Collins’ original telling of the Stockdale paradox was oriented around business success; but perhaps the same applies to personal issues like marriages, illnesses and other challenges, because holding faith like this allows us to orient ourselves into an uncertain future, in the full knowledge that we cannot know what will come to pass.  It allows us to focus on what good work we can do in the meantime, and it’s not a new problem.    Over five hundred years ago, Martin Luther spoke to the same idea when he wrote: Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.

Reference

Collins, J (2001) Good to Great. Harper Business

Havel, V. (1986) Disturbing the Peace. Penguin