Michael, I respect your opinion. But nobody is second guessing Stockdale. He writes about Tonkin in his biography, and he explicitly says he knew the war started on false pretense. You mention all the Stoic virtue except the crucial one in this context: justice. Stockdale acted unjustly, and knowingly so. That’s not what I except from a role model.
As for Seneca and Marcus. Nobody brings up Seneca as a role model. And I don’t think Marcus could have avoided defense frontier wars. Besides, as I explain in my recent article on presentism, it is a mistake to project our current ethical standards back two millennia. But Stockdale didn’t live in the first or second century, so it’s fair to evaluate him according to modern standards. There, he clearly failed.
Also, it is irrelevant whether you or I would do better than Stockdale. Neither you nor I have ever been brought up as role model. In Stoicism a role model is pretty close to a sage. Think of Seneca’s praise of Cato, or Epictetus’s regard for Socrates. Do you really want to compare Stockdale to Socrates?
Michael, I respect your opinion. But nobody is second guessing Stockdale. He writes about Tonkin in his biography, and he explicitly says he knew the war started on false pretense. You mention all the Stoic virtue except the crucial one in this context: justice. Stockdale acted unjustly, and knowingly so. That’s not what I except from a role model.
As for Seneca and Marcus. Nobody brings up Seneca as a role model. And I don’t think Marcus could have avoided defense frontier wars. Besides, as I explain in my recent article on presentism, it is a mistake to project our current ethical standards back two millennia. But Stockdale didn’t live in the first or second century, so it’s fair to evaluate him according to modern standards. There, he clearly failed.
Also, it is irrelevant whether you or I would do better than Stockdale. Neither you nor I have ever been brought up as role model. In Stoicism a role model is pretty close to a sage. Think of Seneca’s praise of Cato, or Epictetus’s regard for Socrates. Do you really want to compare Stockdale to Socrates?