Big Idea Daily | Thoughts of a Philosophical Fighter Pilot
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by James Stockdale |
“The turning point in anybody’s life, he said, is when you come to that fork in the road where you have to decide whether to risk your life or to lose your conscience. One road leads up, one down. To survive at any cost is to think me first, to lose your conscience, to take the low road. To support others at any cost, is to risk your life, to take the high road.”JAMES B. STOCKDALE |
BIG IDEA
You Are Your Brother's Keeper (Virtue + Vice)
FROM THE BOOK“Father O’Malley asked that I talk about ethical notions of the sort that would qualify as growing within a person’s interior self and not simply a set of lessons learned from without.
Be assured that I’m not just building a set of guideposts for prison or for a more general military setting. My conclusions are infinitely general. From this eight-year experience, I distilled one all-purpose idea, plus a few corollaries. It is a simple idea, an idea as old as the scriptures, an idea that is the epitome of high-mindedness, an idea that naturally and spontaneously comes to men under pressure. If the pressure is intense enough or of long enough duration, this idea spreads without even the need for enunciation. It just takes root naturally. It is an idea that, in this big easy world of yakety yak, seems to violate the rules of game theory, if not of reason. It violates the idea of Adam Smith’s invisible hand, our ideas of human nature, and probably the second law of thermodynamics. That idea is that you are your brother’s keeper.
That’s the flip side of What’s in it for me? If you recognize the first as an expression of virtue and the second as an expression of vice, as I’m sure any student of Father O’Malley would, let Bacon’s distinction add relevance to my concentration on adversity on this graduation day of joy: ‘Adversity doth best induce virtue... while luxury doth best induce vice.’”
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Brian's Notes
That’s from the first chapter—a commencement address Stockdale gave in 1981 called “The Melting Experience: Grow or Die” in which he talks about how his 8 years in prison shaped his character.
Rule #1?
You are your brother’s keeper. Period.
The question is NOT “What’s in it for me?”
The question is “How can I help?
As Martin Luther King, Jr. taught: “The first question which the priest and the Levite asked was: ‘If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?’ But… the good Samaritan reversed the question: ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?”
Christopher McDougall tells us that leading with love and compassion is at the root of the ancient Greek word for “hero.”
In Natural Born Heroes he says: “And what Plutarch taught them is this: Heroes care. True heroism, as the ancients understood, isn’t about strength, or boldness, or even courage. It’s about compassion.
When the Greeks created the heroic ideal, they didn’t choose a word that mean ‘Dies Trying’ or ‘Massacres Bad Guy.’ They went with hÄ“rŨs—‘protector.’ Heroes aren’t perfect; with a god as one parent and a mortal as the other, they’re perpetually teetering between two destinies. What tips them toward greatness is a sidekick, a human connection who helps turn the spigot on the power of compassion. Empathy, the Greeks believed, was a source of strength, not softness; the more you recognized yourself in others and connected with their distress, the more endurance, wisdom, cunning, and determination you could tap into.”
Heroes care.
They’re willing to go beyond the call of duty to protect and to love.
In the Age of the Selfie it’s more important than ever for us to shift our focus from “What’s in it for me?” to “How can I be my brother’s keeper?”
Which begs the question: How can YOU help more today?
Big Ideas
01: YOUR BROTHER’S KEEPER
02: CHISELING OUR INTEGRITY
03: COURAGE
04: HOW TO BE INVINCIBLE
05: HEROES VS. BUMS
“Remember, you are an actor in a drama of such sort as the Author chooses—if short, then in a short one; if long, then in a long one. If it be his pleasure that you should enact a poor man, or a cripple, or a ruler, see that you act it well. For this is your business—to act well the given part, but to choose it belongs to Another.”EPICTETUS |
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