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This episode of The Daily Stoic explores the transformative power of Epictetus's teachings through the story of Navy pilot James Stockdale,

Key takeaways

• Our external circumstances are often beyond our control, but our responses to them always remain ours.
• Epictetus's teachings offer a 'ticket to freedom' by helping individuals maintain inner peace regardless of external conditions.

Main topics

• Epictetus and his teachings on control
• James Stockdale's experience as a POW

Notable quotes

Life is not fair. Circumstances are not ours to command. What remains is the power to choose how we meet them.

Conclusion

This episode underscores that Stoicism—particularly through Epictetus—is not just

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. Speaker 2 (0:14) This is your ticket to freedom. In 1962, as this Navy fighter pilot prepared to leave graduate school and return to duty, his philosophy professor handed him a worn, thin volume. I think you'll be interested in this, Philip Rhinelander, the Dean of Philosophy at Stanford, told Commander James Stockdale. That night, Stockdale opened the Incaridian. a short handbook containing the teachings of the formerly enslaved Stoic philosopher Epictetus. At first, Stockdale struggled to understand these writings from the first century AD. What could this possibly teach a fighter pilot, he thought. But he kept reading. He carried the book with him. He kept it at his bedside table aboard the USS Ticonderoga as it steamed across the Pacific less than a year later. He read and re-read the teachings of Epictetus. He committed many of its passages to memory. And slowly, the lessons began to take hold. Life is not fair. Circumstances are not ours to command. What remains is the power to choose how we meet them. Speaker 2 (1:27) Epictetus, Rhinelander had told him, saw the world as a kind of buzzsaw, and that his teachings were a means by which a man could live with himself, resist being ground down. I began to realize, Stockdale said, that for me, Epictetus offered that ticket to freedom. On September 9, 1965, Stockdale's plane was shot down over North Vietnam. He ejected, landed in a village, and was badly beaten. His leg was severely broken. He lost control of his body, his surroundings, his status, and his physical freedom. In a matter of minutes, the commander had become a prisoner. He would remain in the Hanoi Hilton for the next seven and a half years, tortured, held in solitary confinement, and repeatedly denied even the most basic control of his life. Yet he continued to lead his fellow American prisoners, organizing their resistance and helping them preserve their dignity against their captors. In the buzzsaw of life, he turned to Epictetus and it saved his life and changed the lives of the men he led. Most of us will never experience slavery, and few will ever face the danger of becoming prisoners of war. But we will face adversity. We will encounter people who have power over our careers, our circumstances, even our physical freedom. We will lose things we value. We will be treated unfairly. We will find ourselves in situations we did not choose and cannot immediately escape. Yet there is one thing that remains always in our control. Our will. This is why the teachings of Epictetus mattered to the emperor Marcus Aurelius, who first encountered them through a copy shared by his teacher. This is why they mattered to a fighter pilot facing war nearly 2,000 years later, and why they still matter to us today. We may not control what happens to us, what other people decide, or what circumstances take away. but we can still choose what we believe, how we respond, Speaker 1 (3:37) and who Speaker 2 (3:38) we Speaker 1 (3:39) become. Speaker 2 (3:41) And Speaker 1 (3:42) if you Speaker 2 (3:42) haven't read Epictetus yet, I don't blame you. He can be intimidating, can be difficult to get into. I was actually turned on to Epictetus first before Mark Surrealist, but I looked at it and I said, I don't think this is for me. So we've been thinking a lot about that here at Daily Stoic. We put together what we've been calling Epictetus Month. We're spending all month doing a deep dive into Epictetus. And we built this sort of guide module course thing. Basically, if you grab a copy of Epictetus from the Painted Porch, we'll throw in this digital guide. There's all this other awesome stuff. You work through it at your own pace. We break down all the big lessons. We don't all have a Rhinelander to walk us through Epictetus, but this is close enough, right? And we're going to be doing a Q