The Saturday Exhale Episode 13: What Should We Hope For?

Vadim Gershteyn, PhD, MPH served as my editor for StressHacked and contributed writing to my upcoming book The Stone Wall. He joins me for this discussion.

VG: In a reading from StressHacked: The Mind, you recount your chapter “Crisis as Crucible.” Here, you go over the story of James Stockdale, an American lieutenant (and a Stoic) who was tortured as a POW in Vietnam, to elaborate on the paradoxical relationship people have with hope and aspiration. Aspiration, provided certain conditions are met, can be a good thing, as a motivator. Hope, also provided certain conditions are met, can be a very bad thing, like an albatross. Indeed, it was Stockdale who claimed that his buddies who had “hope” never got out of that prison. It was those of his buddies who were “in tune with nature,” to briefly encapsulate Epictetus’ views, and who had low expectations (though maybe not aspirations) as a consequence, that did. In his book on his experiences and on Stoicism, Stockdale had this to say:

In a crucible like a torture prison, you reflect, you silently study what makes those about you tick. Once I had taken the measure of my torture guard, watched his eyes as he worked, watched him move, felt him move as he stood on my slumped-over back and cinched up the ropes pulling my shoulders together, I came to know that there was good in him. That was ironic because when he first came in with the new commissar when torture was instigated after I got there, I had nicknamed him “Pigeye” because of the total vacancy of the stare of the one eye he presented as he peeked through cell door peepholes. He was my age, balding and wiry, quick, lithe and strong, like an athletic trainer. He was totally emotionless, thus his emotionless eyes. He had almost no English-language capability, just motions and grunts. Under orders, he put me through the ropes 15 times over the years, and rebroke my bad leg once, I feel sure inadvertently. It was a court martial scene and he was having to give me the ropes before a board of North Vietnamese officers. The officers sat at a long table before Pigeye and me, and behind us was a semi-circle of soldiers bearing rifles with fixed bayonets at a kind of “dangle” position, the bayonet pointing at the cement floor ahead of them. This was in the “knobby” torture room of “New Guy Village” at Hoa Lo prison in August 1967—so-called because the walls had been crudely speckled with blobs of cement the size of an ice cream scoop in a “soundproofing” attempt. I could tell Pigeye was nervous because of these officers whom I had never seen before, and I don’t think he had, and he pressed me flat over my bad leg instead of the good one he had always put the tension on before. The healing knee cartilage gave way with a loud “pop,” and the officers looked at each other and then got up and left. I couldn’t get off that floor and onto my feet for nearly two months …. In all those years, we probably had no more than 24 hours, one-on-one together. But neither of us ever broke the code of an unvaryingly strict “line of duty” relationship. He never tricked me, always played it straight, and I begged no mercy. I admired that in him, and I could tell he did in me. And when people say: “He was a torturer, didn’t you hate him?” I say, like Solzehnitsyn, to the astonishment of those about me, “No, he was a good soldier, never overstepped his line of duty.”

For the past few months, I’ve been engrossed in documentaries about prison life and the criminal backstories that led certain people into that predicament. One reason for this, besides the catharsis people invariably feel comparing their lives to that of people whose lives are much worse (a factor in why true crime is popular generally, I believe) is to understand human nature when it is reduced to its most basic, crude, and unignorable truths. There is very little of what Judith Butler may call “performance” in prison, though there is very much drama, conflict, and power struggles. It reminds me of Heraclitus’ aphorism, “War is father and King of all.” And, like Stockdale, many of the people interviewed also respect the people who hurt them, provided the people who hurt them were “just doing their job.”

Beyond this, what the various individuals I saw interviewed, from Aryan Brotherhood enforcers (who have read more Friedrich Nietzsche than even me, incredibly) to petty street criminals to international traffickers, offered as advice for people who are incarcerated is, similarly to Stockdale’s, a kind of mindfulness and present-focusedness that was recommended to yet another audience by Zen practitioners who presented at Google offices maybe a decade ago. You know the types: corporate betterment experts. Latte drinkers. And so on. The gist of the advice is to not think about the future or past. Obviously don’t ruminate. And perhaps don’t dream too hard if you know it’s just that: a dream. Is this good advice?

Crisis is the crucible in which we’re forged. In StressHacked, you outline how we can choose that crisis, perhaps as a preparation for a coming crisis not of our own choosing. But, what do you say to those individuals who are in a crisis now (perhaps) not of their own choosing (or at least it’s a crisis they can’t control—like prison)? Do they have hope? Should they? Can anything ‘beautiful’ ever arise from situations like these? If not, what’s the point of humanity (Nietzsche says: it’s art)? Have you ever been in a situation where you feared for your life and how did you react to it?

AT: I don’t think this is a simple answer. What is a crisis to one, is a normal day to another. When in a crisis, I do not believe it is advisable to look forward in hope. One must act, using every tool at their disposal, to emerge from the crisis. Once emerged from this chaos that tests our limits, our capacity is likely to increase, and the same situation presented in the future will cease to be a crisis. This is the purpose in pursuing strength, so that the situations that risked breaking us in the past will eventually barely even register as memories in the future.

Importantly, when one is not in crisis, they must oscillate between envisioning hopeful futures, and catastrophe. They must use mental projections of both the carrot and the stick, so to speak, in order to light a fire in them to push forward, pursuing greater strength and capacity, moving in the general direction of their hopeful aspirations. In this way, when they are inevitably delayed and knocked off course by the chaos of existence, some unexpected crisis they did not expect, they will at least have more tools to potentially overcome it. This is not a guarantee, in life there are no guarantees, but it will unquestionably increase the odds of success. Still, when a crisis arrives, these future projections must stop—because no matter how strong one is, how many times they have overcome crisis, complacency and inattentiveness hold the power to undermine it all. Each time a crisis presents, only the moment matters, and the moment demands our full consideration. This remains true until the crisis resolves, no matter how long that takes.

VG: It seems to me what you’re saying is that the mode of activity is the same for resilience-building whether one is pursuing a life of flourishing on the “outside” and trying to survive prison on the “inside.” (I say this just by virtue of you not differentiating your advice to be hopeful outside of a crisis but attending to reality during a crisis based on audience—though you acknowledge prison may be a ‘crisis’ for you wherein it’s someone else’s day-to-day experience, just like someone else’s experience of your day-to-day would a ‘crisis’ for them). There are ways to be successful and demonstrate excellence in any context, and some contexts are way, way worse than others. Just from my experiences as a consultant, I have spoken to people who wanted to share incarceration stories. Some of these persons got educated in prison and took advantage of a bad situation by making use of the available resources. This would be demonstrating excellence, though so is, in a morally-neutral universe, being ‘good’ in whatever gang you’re a member of, and being valued as an enforcer there.

The reason I asked you about life-or-death situations is that this is sometimes a situation where no resilience training seems to prepare us for it (or maybe not, since there is always memento mori). I got robbed at gunpoint, for instance. And my reaction to it wasn’t that of mindfulness, like Stockdale (via Epictetus), the ex-prisoners, and Google wellness consultants recommend; it was a comedy. “This is it?” I pondered. “Well, alright.”

You’re right nothing is guaranteed in this life, and it is not an easy question how to prepare for the unexpected. My overall pondering, or proposition to you, is what does this say about the human condition (to put in the words of Hannah Arendt)? If you, Stockdale, the Aryan Brotherhood enforcer, Epictetus, Nietzsche, and Jon Kabat-Zinn (who is the Zen mindfulness consultant for Google I was thinking of earlier) all agree that the best way to respond to a crisis is to keep moving, always forward, when do you find time to reflect? And what’s the nature of this reflection? Are you reflecting on how to get better at keeping moving?

You have already crushed philosophical pessimism, like that of Arthur Schopenhauer’s, in this newsletter, and perhaps we are better off for it. But how is your view of resilience-building more optimistic than those who claim, like Schopenhauer, and perhaps the Stoics, that we are slaves to our passion? What are we building resilience toward if not more slavery?

AT: I think we need to take a step back, and delineate the nature of crisis, as there are 4 distinct scenarios which need to be considered. First, there are situations which affect our physical life, and those that affect our mentality, meaning, hold the potential to derail our future aspirations. Second, within each of these two categories, there are situations which acutely do this, and then there are situations which become chronic, potentially permanent, and often exist outside of our control.

Being held at gunpoint is an acute situation which threatens your physical life. I have had guns drawn on me, also. What I recall was everything slowed, or rather, my thinking did. I didn’t ponder “is this it,” I searched for words to make sense of a situation that was unexpected and for me felt unjustified. In each instance the crisis resolved quite quickly, and what emerged I can only describe as a bit of excited energy. The same has been true for me in situations where I have been in bad car crashes, or narrowly avoided them. In an emergency, a crisis threatening one’s life, we can only think about the present. If we deviate, we put ourselves at great risk of death.

Stockdale’s experience as a POW could be termed as a chronic crisis in which our mentality is under attack. This is precisely why hope kills. In fact, during my health crisis, hope killed me. I ignored the reality of my situation, believing I would be cured and return to my former athleticism, just to slowly descend into obesity, alcoholism, and depression. It was only when I accepted my fate, and that my future would never look like my past, that I freed myself to focus on the present. In time, my future became one I learned to appreciate and enjoy more than any period of my past, despite never overcoming my permanent physical limitations. There is a nuance here, though. I believe that in this chronic situation, hope is possible, but not the hope most turn to. Most will turn to, as Stockdale reported, freedom. Freedom for these POWs was out of their control, and since they did not have control, each date in which they lied to themselves as the date they’d be free again passing by with no change served to break down their resolve. Instead, in a situation like this, I would advise to think to a future, within the confines of one’s predicament, in which life could be improved. What can be done to inspire hope, even if it small and to an outsider astoundingly insignificant? This type of hopeful aspiration, these tiny victories, are something that can, in fact, be achieved, and as such, clung to.

In an acute situation that threatens our mentality, such as a devastating breakup, a death of a loved one, or the collapse of a dearly held plan, we must move forward. We must mourn, of course, and work through the loss, but never stop moving forward. If we linger in the loss, we become trapped in the past, ruminating on the pain of the loss, imprisoning ourselves within ourselves, within our own despair.

Finally, I have never faced accelerated mortality, a chronic situation in which physical death looms, at least no more than any of us do with the march of time and entropy. I can only speculate, and project myself into this situation—something I have done many times in the past—and ask myself what do I hope for? Selfishly, I would want to spend as much time with loved ones, doing what I enjoy. But is that fair to them? Would I be passing the burden of my tragedy onto them, increasing the risk that they would, in turn, trap themselves into a tragic ruminative state? Or, do I double down on what I view my purpose is, the goals I hope to achieve in my life? In this way, I may save my loved ones of painful and conflicting memories that will always be linked to my death, instead replacing it with doubt—by neglecting them in my dying days, did I ever truly care about them? This is a type of pain I would likewise wish to avoid passing on to those I care about.

So instead, I have hypothesized that if I ever face this crisis, I will change nothing. I will divide my priorities between my purpose, and those I love and care for, as I always do, in the hopes that for them their memories of me at the end hardly differ from other periods. But, I also contend that this type of commitment only works if one is already living a life of purpose, as you like to quote from Heidegger being-towards-death, or the Vedic philosophy which we will touch on in The Stone Wall that posits the world would be a better place if we all lived and acted as we do after a funeral, keenly aware of our mortality and the finitude of our existence. As we also discuss in The Stone Wall, the Yamnaya people, the first that buried their dead, did not bury them all. Most were burned, in preparation for the next stage of existence. Those who were buried were those where their people determined they had accomplished everything they could in their life, lived a life of purpose, duty, and contribution. This is a thought that inspires me, or haunts me, perspective dependent. Would those around me bury me, or decide I need to enter the flames? Whether my final day is tomorrow, or many decades from now, my answer is always the same: all I can do is live with purpose, moving forward relentlessly, one step at a time, while maintaining hope that my actions, and the consequences of them, will be enough.

VG: We are back to Nietzsche, namely the cosmological argument he makes in Will to Power that is often interpreted as a self-help mantra: the eternal return of the same.

To briefly summarize it, Nietzsche is making a perhaps fallacious argument that the universe cannot be infinite (in time or space) because the infinite repetition of finite “particles” necessitates strange and eerie contradictions, i.e., “the eternal return of the same [stuff]”, like you and having the same conversation, except we’re purple (or we don’t even need to be purple; we could just be having the same conversation again and again and again). But the other way to read this passage from Nietzsche, or what it’s conflated into via his other writings, is the question: would you live your life a different way if you were made to revisit it again and again? (Would you be buried or thrust into the fire if you were the judge of your own life?). For me, I would live it a different way—or perhaps not, depending on what day of the week you ask me this question. On a day whether I worked out or not, perhaps I would answer differently. But I don’t think, as Nietzsche, we should aspire to be like me: we should aspire to confidently say ‘no, I would not do it different.’

The being-for-death aspect from Heidegger is interesting and I’ll end on this. In The Stone Wall, we address Aleksandr Dugin’s interpretation of this concept and I concede maybe Dugin is right about this. In this newsletter, you are speaking about living a life of purpose from an Aristotelean perspective, one that I would argue is grounded in (pagan) Western civilization, wherein there is a real sense of cause-and-effect and personal responsibility. Having read Ian Stevenson’s work Children Who Remember Previous Lives, I think it’s plausible that human beings are involved in some sort of “soul”-cycling system (being agnostic on what this “soul” entails; it is something like ‘code’), namely reincarnation (which is a fundamental aspect of Kabbalistic Judaism, so I’m not even a stranger among my people). If so, we could be paying off “cosmic” debts earned in past lives we are unaware of. If you ascribe to the Hindu worldview, for instance, you may be suffering to “pay off” those debts (alternately, you may be flourishing because you did something good in the past life—or Krishna was just having a temperamental day when he makes a given assignment). The point of whether or not reincarnation takes place is not even that important, rather what is important is that many people believe this and this changes their perspective on death. If you believe you will be rewarded in heaven with 72 virgins (I believe a misreading of a Qu’ranic passage but I am not an expert here), death takes on a different meaning, perhaps a desired one. In this newsletter and in your other writings, you are speaking to individuals with a horizon of the future and the past, who know how they place in the civilizational project of their community. This is a minority (though a critical one); some people cannot see that far down the distance. To quote Louis Althusser, “the future lasts forever” but what we do today determines what kind of future we spend eternity in.

AT: Regarding Nietzsche, we discuss this at length in The Stone Wall, so I find little value in rehashing here. Regarding Althusser, this is the tragedy: those of us who try to look into the future, knowing it lasts forever, envision wildly different futures. Some are closer to what reality allows than others. But, how do we know for certain? Of course, we can’t. We can only try to understand ourselves, each other, and work to build something that works in a manner aligned with our greater nature. I would argue Althusser did not understand our nature. If he were alive today, I would debate him on this topic without hesitation. But, this is why we need to read each other’s work, especially those we strongly disagree with. If we don’t, we can never assess the totality of human thought, behavior, ideological progression, and societal mutation. Back to the topic at hand, crisis. Crisis is an inextricable component of our existence. How we respond to crises speaks volumes about who we are as individuals, and collectively as a society. To work towards a better, more functional society, we must understand this about ourselves as individuals, and the landscape of society, which is built by the current individual actors within it. If we do not, we will create grand plans, structures, and systems that perhaps work when times are good, just to collapse as soon as catastrophe strikes. This is a tale as old as time, because inevitably, catastrophe will always strike.