Episode 87 – James Stockdale: The Stoic in the Hanoi Hilton

This episode tells the extraordinary story of Vice Admiral James Stockdale, an American POW who used ancient Stoic philosophy to survive seven and a half years of torture and isolation in a North Vietnamese prison camp. Stockdale, a fighter pilot, had studied the works of the Stoic philosopher Epictetus at Stanford University before being shot down over Vietnam in 1965. He credited this philosophical training as the "blueprint for survival" that allowed him to endure what he called a "laboratory of human behavior". The core of his resilience was Epictetus’s "dichotomy of control," the principle of distinguishing between what is in our power and what is not.

In the horrific conditions of the "Hanoi Hilton," everything external—his body, his health, his treatment by the guards, and his eventual fate—was outside his control. What remained in his control, however, was his prohairesis: his will, his judgments, and his choice of how to respond internally to his suffering. He saw his duty not as merely surviving, but as maintaining his integrity and leading his fellow prisoners, establishing a clandestine communication network and a code of conduct to resist their captors' efforts to dehumanize them. Stockdale demonstrated that even when stripped of all physical freedom, the freedom of moral choice remains inviolable.

His story is a modern, real-world test of Stoic principles, showing their profound practical application under the most extreme pressure imaginable. The philosophy he learned from Epictetus, a former slave, provided him with an inner citadel that allowed him to transform unimaginable suffering into a demonstration of human dignity and resilience.