Weapons to combat adversity
”To live without hope is to cease to live” — Fyodor Dostoyevsky[i]
What do an Austrian psychiatrist, an US Navy fighter pilot and a South African political prisoner have in common ? Each man imparted profound insights in how to combat adversity.
Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl survived four Nazi concentration camps during World War 2. Camp conditions were grim with prisoners forced to do manual labour, digging in the frozen ground whilst clothed in rags having eaten only watery soup. Based on the appearance of prisoners, camp guards would decide whether they lived or were sent to the gas chamber[ii]. Frankl later calculated that “the odds of surviving the camp were no more than one in twenty-eight”.
In Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl tells the story of a fellow prisoner who dreamt that he was granted a wish to know when he would be freed. The voice in his dream told him that his suffering would end on March 30th, 1945. When it did not seem like the camp was going to be liberated on March 29th, the man fell ill and died the next day. Frankl noticed the death rate in the camp between Christmas 1944 and New Year 1945 was higher than at any other time of year — “The prisoner who had lost faith in the future — his future — was doomed. With his loss of belief in the future he also lost his spiritual hold; he let himself decline and become subject to mental and physical decay.”
Witnessing those prisoners who didn’t survive the camps Frankl observed how “close the connection is between the state of mind of a man — his courage and hope, or lack of them — and the state of immunity of his body” and he found that “the sudden loss of hope and courage can have a deadly effect”. Prisoners who didn’t make it “died less from lack of food or medicine than from lack of hope, lack of something to live for”.
Frankl realised “those who knew that there was a task waiting for them to fulfil were most apt to survive”. He wrote “woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on. He was soon lost.”Throughout his imprisonment Frankl was determined to see his wife Tilly again.
There was a second important reason to survive — completing the manuscript for a book[iii] which had been taken from Frankl when he arrived in the camp. “When I was taken to the concentration camp of Auschwitz” he recalled, “a manuscript of mine ready for publication was confiscated. Certainly, my deep desire to write this manuscript anew helped me to survive the rigors of the camps I was in.”
Frankl later wrote “A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life.” Frankl quotes Nietzsche to explain “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”
After being shot down over Vietnam in 1965, US Navy fighter pilot James Stockdale[iv] survived seven and a half years as a POW inside Hỏa Lò prison[v] in Hanoi. Stockdale had been badly injured whilst ejecting from his aircraft, incurring a crippling leg injury. As the highest ranking Naval officer of 300 prisoners, Stockdale was kept in solitary confinement for years and was brutally tortured[vi] and denied medical attention by the North Vietnamese. Prisoners were kept inthree foot by nine foot windowless cells with the lights on 24 hours a day. They had their ankles shackled to leg irons embedded in the concrete floor forcing them to lie prone or sit erect.
Stockdale had read about Korean War POW’s in North Korea and China who, confused and scared, had reverted to “every man for himself”. Realising he would be the senior POW in Hanoi he remembered the US Fighting Force Code of Conduct (Article IV) which states “If I become a prisoner of war, I will keep faith with my fellow prisoners … If I am senior, I will take command. If not, I will obey the lawful orders of those appointed over me and will back them up in every way”. He wrote that “during the time interval between pulling the ejection handle and coming to rest on the street, I had become a man with a mission.” The mission for Stockdale and the other prisoners became to “return with honour”[vii].
When asked how he maintained his sanity Stockdale replied “Are you going to go crazy? I say: no such luck. You’ve got to get used to yourself, and you’ve got to discipline yourself to make your life and your activities a part of a regimen, a coordinated thing. You don’t just lie there and wait for somebody to open the door to get up. You’ve got things to do.”Stockdale was eventually freed in 1973 and would be elevated to Admiral and become an author, stoic philosopher and Vice Presential candidate.
In Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t, author Jim Collins writes about Stockdale’s coping strategy as a POW. Stockdale told Collins “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 and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade. When asked who didn’t make it out, Stockdale replied “Oh, that’s easy, the optimists. Oh, 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.” Stockdale explained, “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.” [viii]
Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for his political beliefs for twenty seven years, eighteen of them in the penitentiary on Robben Island. Becoming Prisoner 466/64[ix], the prison warder’s first words to Mandela when he arrived were “This is the Island. This is where you will die”. The spartan cells were seven foot by nine foot with only a bed and a slop bucket in the corner. Mandela wrote “I could walk the length of my cell in three paces. When I lay down, I could feel the wall with my feet and my head grazed the concrete at the other side.” The island prison was harsh, the daily routine requiring prisoners crush stones to gravel with a hammer in the quarry.
Mandela would not only survive, he would go on to become the first President of South Africa at age 75 and receive the Nobel Peace Prize for unifying the nation. Mandela never retaliated against those that imprisoned him and to the South African people he came to be known by his Xhosa clan name “Madiba”, meaning father.
How was he able to do this ? “The challenge for every prisoner, particularly every political prisoner,” Mandela said, “is how to survive prison intact, how to emerge from prison undiminished, how to conserve and even replenish one’s beliefs … The authorities’ greatest mistake was to keep us together, for together our determination was reinforced. We supported each other and gained strength from each other.”
Mandela never knew how long his imprisonment would last — he had been sentenced to life by the apartheid regime who insisted that he would die behind bars. During his “10,000 days” of imprisonment, Mandela’s mother Noqaphi passed away and his 24 year old son Thembekile was killed in a car accident. He was denied the chance to bury them or even to visit their graves. Mandela read widely during his imprisonment including The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale. In one of the letters to his wife Winnie[x] he wrote “Hope is a powerful weapon and no one power on earth can deprive you of … that it is not so much the disability one suffers but one’s attitude to it. The man who says: I will conquer this illness and live a happy life, is already halfway through to victory.”
Many years later[xi] Mandela revealed “I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear … For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.”
When asked how he “survived” those years Mandela said he didn’t survive, he “prepared”[xii]. He reframed the solitude of his cell as “an ideal place to learn to know yourself, to search realistically and regularly the process of your own mind and feelings.” The isolation, Mandela explained, “gives you the opportunity to look daily into your entire conduct, to overcome the bad and develop whatever is good in you.”
“I went on a long holiday for 27 years” Mandela said after his release.
The stories of Frankl, Stockdale and Mandela reveal, in Frankl’s words “weapons in the fight for self-preservation” which can be wielded to combat adversity.
- Hope
“The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.” — Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Like Stockdale, Václav Havel[xiii] was imprisoned and made a similar distinction between hope and optimism -“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. … Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good.” Hope stems from having a “why”, someone or something else to serve[xiv] which provides a focal point beyond current circumstances. Frankl believed “What man actually needs is … the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him.”
2. Perspective
“every storm runs out of rain” — Maya Angelou[xv]
In the long term, confront reality and don’t bank on current circumstances changing within a specific timeframe. Trust that eventually, everything passes. In the short term, find small aspects of daily life, simple tasks, which can provide “micro” fulfilment. Mandela was able to do this on Robben Island -“To survive in prison one must develop ways to take satisfaction in one’s daily life. One can feel fulfilled by washing one’s clothes so that they are particularly clean, by sweeping a corridor so that it is free of dust, by organising one’s cell to conserve as much space as possible. The same pride one takes in more consequential tasks outside prison, one can find in doing small things inside prison.”
3. Connection
“when you choose to connect with others under stress, you can create resilience” — Kelly McGonical[xvi]
Studies[xvii] have shown that connection with others increases longevity and reduces stress. Your support network is like a load bearing stone arch — the more cohesive it is the stronger the arch becomes and the higher the load it can support. Frankl describes how “If architects want to strengthen a decrepit arch, they increase the load which is laid upon it, thereby the parts are joined more firmly together”. Stockdale would later say that “unity was our best hope”. It may be necessary to improvise in order to maintain these relationships. As a POW in solitary confinement Stockdale devised signals[xviii] to communicate with other prisoners. Stockdale explained “When the man next door is sick, or he’s got troubles at home, that’s what we all said: “I am my brother’s keeper.” That’s your most important job, to make sure that you contact him daily. Don’t give him your philosophy of life. That doesn’t work in those isolated circumstances. The last thing he wants to hear is your philosophy of life. He’s got all his ducks in line. He’s got a program. They’re working well enough, so don’t preach to him but let him know you are worried about him, and you’re pulling for him.”
4. Humour
“the human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter” — Mark Twain
Humour is a form of courage and Gordon Livingston[xix] explained “Of all the forms of courage, the ability to laugh is the most profoundly therapeutic”. Alongside purpose, Frankl wrote that humour is “another of the soul’s weapons in the fight for self-preservation … It is well known that humour, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds. … The attempt to develop a sense of humour and to see things in a humorous light is some kind of a trick learned while mastering the art of living. Yet it is possible to practice the art of living even in a concentration camp, although suffering is omnipresent.”
Notes
[i] Dostoevsky was exiled for four years in wretched conditions in a prison camp in Siberia.
[ii] Frankl was camp inmate №119,104. He survived Theresienstadt, Kaufering and Turkheim and the infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau camps.
[iii] At the time of Frankl’s death in 1997, his book Man’s Search for Meaning had been translated into 24 languages and had sold over 10 million copies.
[iv] James Stockdale was one of the most highly decorated Naval officers in history with twenty six combat decorations including four Silver Stars and two Purple Hearts. He was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor in 1976.
[v] Translated as “stove” or “Hells Hole” and nicknamed the “Hanoi Hilton”.
[vi] On one occasion Stockdale’s already broken leg was re-broken by his North Vietnamese captors.
[vii] Lessons from the Hanoi Hilton: Six Characteristics of High Performance Teams by Peter Fretwell and Taylor B. Kiland
[viii]Collins went on to describe this philosophy as “the Stockdale Paradox” https://www.joined-up.com.au/blog/2020/3/8/covid-19-and-the-stockdale-paradox
[ix] Mandela was the 466th prisoner to arrive on Robben Island in 1964.
[x] Winnie was also persecuted and imprisoned including a period where she was deprived of a shower for 200 days.
[xi] Mandela’s favourite poem was reported to be “Invictus” by William Ernest Henley.
[xii] From an interview with Anthony Robbins.
[xiii] Vaclav Havel was a Czech political dissident who was imprisoned multiple times prior to becoming the first President of the Czech Republic from 1993 to 2003.
[xiv] Leo Tolstoy asserted that service is the highest calling when he wrote “The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity”. There is a large number of books describing the benefits of service to others including The Leader as Servant by Robert Greenleaf.
[xv] Maya Angelou endured great hardship including being abused as a young child. Despite this she went on to become a successful poet, singer, writer and civil rights activist.
[xvi] Kelly McGonical TED talk “How to make stress your friend” June 2013.
[xvii] In the book Ikigai, The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life, authors Hector Garcia and Fracesca Miralles discuss the concept of a “Moai” in Okinawa Japan and the link between social support and longevity. A Moai is a group that looks out for each other and where “the support gives the individual a sense of security and helps increase life expectancy”.
[xviii] https://www.usna.edu/Ethics/_files/documents/Stoicism2.pdf
[xix] From Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart by physician, psychiatrist and writer Gordon Livingston.
