This is so important in what we are facing today with the insurgencies that are trying to destroy our civil society with the intent to take ultimate power for control of all out comes.
The tyranny of the few controlling the many. But for the to maintain success they must understand the reality of the power of the many to maintain order in a civil society. It's not easy. Stay the course, work hard and know the meaning of what brought success in the first place. In the end, good leadership in difficult times will prevail! A steady hand on the levers of power.
And like it's stated here concerning those prisoners that believed they would be soon be saved but their beliefs were never to come true, perished. So to many among us, individuals, corporations and institutions of higher learning, believe if they join in with the tyrants they will survive to enjoy a better position in the ''New reality''. In turth they will find only to be disappointed with ultimate failure and destruction.
Jim
Collins - Management Researcher,
Consultant, and
Author of Good to Great: Why Some Companies
Make the Leap and Others Don
Admiral James Bond Stockdale was the
highest-ranking United States military officer in the “Hanoi Hilton”
POW camp during the Vietnam War. His jet was shot down in 1965, and
after parachuting into a small village, he was taken as a prisoner
of war. He was tortured over 20 times during his nearly eight-year
confinement. Despite the uncertainty as to whether he would survive
to ever see his family again, he endured.
Not only did he survive, but Admiral
Stockdale was resolute in opposing his captors to the fullest extent
(at one point, he even beat himself with a stool and cut himself
with a razor so that he could not be taped for propaganda purposes).
He also led the other POWs in resisting torture and set up an
elaborate communications system amongst the camp prisoners. What is
amazing and applicable to our current crisis is the stoic
resoluteness of Stockdale (influenced by his study of Epictetus, a
Greek stoic philosopher, and Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, which
details the stoic precepts used by the Roman emperor to manage his
various responsibilities) that was essential to his survival and
leadership.
In the process of writing Good to Great,
management researcher and consultant Jim Collins interviewed Admiral
Stockdale and adapted his insights for business. Collins’s focus was
not just on extracting leadership lessons, but more specifically on
understanding how Stockdale was able to remain steadfast in the face
of such an ordeal with no certainty that he would survive.
Stockdale’s response (quoted from Good to Great)
was:
“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 responded with the following:
“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. 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.”
Herein lies the Stockdale Paradox, as
distilled by Collins:
“Retain faith
that you will prevail in the end regardless of the
difficulties
and
at the same
time confront the
most brutal facts of your current
reality,
whatever they may
be.”
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