When Hope Is Attached to the Wrong Thing

In the last winter of the war, a man told Viktor E. Frankl about a dream. Before being held in the concentration camp the man, whom Frankl names only as F., had been a fairly well-known composer in his previous life. He told Frankl that in his dream a voice offered to answer any question, so he asked when the war would end for him. The voice told him thirtieth of March 1945.

In describing this dream to Frankl, he was full of hope and certain the date would hold, but as March wore on, the war news reaching the camp made liberation by the thirtieth look impossible. On the twenty-ninth of March, F. suddenly fell ill and ran a high fever. On the thirtieth, the day his freedom had been promised, he became delirious and lost consciousness. On the thirty-first he died.

The recorded cause was typhus, but Frankl thought otherwise. Guessing the infection had been in him all along, but kept in check by his hope. When it collapsed on the morning the war was supposed to be over for him, he died. This phenomenon appeared also at scale, as a sharp rise in deaths between Christmas 1944 and New Year 1945 can be seen in the records. Many men had staked everything on being home by Christmas and when Christmas came and the gates stayed shut, their will collapsed and their bodies followed (Frankl, 1946).

Most likely none of us will ever find ourselves in such a situation, but it's worth taking a closer look, as it hides an important lesson applicable to our decision making in everyday life.

Placing hope

Barack Obama in his 2004 DNC keynote evoked an electric energy in the crowd when he spoke: Hope in the face of difficulty! Hope in the face of uncertainty! The audacity of hope! In the end, that is God's greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation. (Obama, 2004) We have a craving for hope, some might even say we need hope. We all have a relationship with hope, but might never have examined it closely.

We all place our hopes on different things and when doing so we need to understand the following: Every decision rests on two readings. Where you want to end up and where you actually stand right now.

The two layers of every decision

The present is measured, the aim is wished.

In February 1945 F. wanted to be outside the camp but stood inside it. So he placed his hope where he wanted to be, outside by the thirtieth of March. It is easy to see why. The present had nothing to offer him, so he placed his hopes on a better future and gave it a date. Hope was his ladder out from the pit he was in, leaned against an imagined brighter day ahead.

When we are unhappy with where we currently are, where do we place our hopes? Against what do we lean our ladder? Maybe on the next promotion. On the next relationship, that will finally be the one. Or maybe on the next month of trying, the one where the test shows two lines. We hope for the future to release us from our current dissatisfaction by bringing us to the things we desire.

If that hope is misplaced there are consequences. We don't die if the relationship that looked so promising fails, but we are disappointed. It takes something from us. It might even be the same something Frankl watched leave the men between Christmas and New Year, in a smaller dose, but drawn from the same account.

Learning from James Bond

Not the James Bond you are thinking of. The one I am referring to is even more badass and actually real. James Bond Stockdale was a US Navy fighter pilot. In 1959 he was in his mid-thirties, the Navy pulled him out of the cockpit and sent him to Stanford for a master's in international relations, as they had plans for him that included more than flying. He did what he was sent to do. But after finishing his studies he wandered over to the philosophy department, where he met Philip Rhinelander, a philosophy professor who had served in the Second World War himself, teaching a course on the problems of good and evil. The course was already half over when Stockdale walked in, but Rhinelander agreed to help him cover the missing ground, one private hour a week, as they took a liking to each other instantly. At the end of the last of those hours Rhinelander reached high into his wall of books and brought one down. I think you will be interested in this, he said. It was the Enchiridion, the encapsulation of Epictetus's work ​Epictetus is most frequently confused with Epicurus due to their similar-sounding names, though they taught radically different philosophies. Epictetus = Stoicism, Epicurus = Hedonism. A strange manual for a fighter pilot, but as it turned out later, a life-saving encounter (Stockdale, 1993).

Stockdale spent many hours over the next years reading all of Epictetus's work. Epictetus had been born a slave in the Roman Empire and was lame in one leg, from a master who broke it willfully. As a slave he owned absolutely nothing and out of that he built a philosophy about the one thing a man under such circumstances still holds. Some things are up to us and some are not. Our judgements and our choices are ours. Our bodies or whether we are free are not (Epictetus, ~125). Stockdale saw something profound in Epictetus, which gets reflected in a pivotal point in his own life.

In September 1965 his plane, an A-4 Skyhawk, was shot down over North Vietnam and after ejecting from his burning fighter jet into a village where he knew he would be captured, he whispered to himself during his parachute descent: "I'm leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus." For the next seven and a half years he was a prisoner of war in Hanoi. He spent about four years in total in solitary confinement, endured torture over twenty times and was kept in leg irons for two years. His leg was broken twice, once at capture and again under torture, leaving him with a limp for life.

While enduring all of that Stockdale inside the camp witnessed something close to what Frankl saw. The optimists were sure they would be home by Christmas. Christmas would come and the gate would stay shut. So they would move the date to Easter and Easter would pass the same way and then Thanksgiving. Every date that failed took something out of them, making the optimists the first ones to die.

What does it mean for decision making?

As pointed out before every decision has two layers and its fundamental goal is to bridge the gap between your current reality and a desired future state. Therefore every decision carries the bet that you will still be there when the desired future arrives. If you are hungry, putting away grain in autumn to plant it in spring only makes sense if you think you will survive winter.

Or imagine you wait ten minutes at the bus stop and then decide it isn't coming and start walking, only to then get passed by the bus two minutes later. This shows that every bet has two ways to fail. The world can refuse the possibility, which was never up to you or the possibility can arrive and find the person who placed it gone.

The bet inside decisions

Some bets land on the time frame that you experience. Some land beyond.

It would have been possible for F. to survive the camp as on April 27, 1945, American troops reached Türkheim, the subcamp of Dachau where they were held (Frankl, 1946). His freedom was only twenty-seven days away when he died, but an open-ended future is hard to live in. So the psychological value of the voice in his dream was a relief from uncertainty. Replacing the vagueness of not knowing for how long with a clear, though wrong, horizon.

So we need to be aware of this tendency in us all to remove the discomfort of uncertainty, reaching almost any conclusion in order to have one.

Stockdale Paradox

Stockdale's story bends back to Stanford decades later. He had come home in 1973 and by the eighties he was on the old campus again, now a vice admiral as well as a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution, still working on the Stoics he had first met in Rhinelander's study. Across the street a business professor named Jim Collins was teaching at the graduate school of business. One of Collins's students wrote a paper on the admiral and Stockdale invited them both to lunch.

Collins asked at lunch how Stockdale had dealt with all the horrors he had to endure and what he did differently from the men who broke and did not make it. Stockdale said: You must never confuse the faith that you will prevail in the end, which you can never afford to lose, with the discipline to face the most brutal facts of your present, whatever they turn out to be. Collins put the exchange into his book Good to Great and gave the lesson a name. The Stockdale Paradox (Collins, 2001).

Stockdale Paradox

Maintaining unwavering faith that you will succeed in the end while simultaneously having the strict discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality.

The first half is faith that you will prevail, with no date on it. The second half is looking reality in the eye, which might leave a feeling of hopelessness. Holding them at the same time is uncomfortable and therefore most people collapse into one.

The optimists in Hanoi collapsed the present into homecoming. Their reading of the present was manufactured downstream from their hope and when the gate stayed shut it took both. The mirror version is someone who faces every brutal fact with no faith, who reads their position accurately but concludes there is nothing worth doing about it.

So the paradox is an instruction for how to stand when you cannot see the end. Which happens to be the exact condition most real decisions get made under. Undated faith keeps you inside the time frame, so you are still standing there. The brutal facts keep your moves attached to where you actually are, so the enduring doesn't get spent on a fiction. These two entities also need no information about the future, which is convenient, since often none is available.

So why don't we all use it all the time?

Two tiers of problems

I heard about the Stockdale Paradox many years ago, but although charmed by its intellectual beauty, I could never really grasp it emotionally. It took me a long time to figure out why. Over the years I found six problems and clustered them into two tiers.

Tier two are the moves the mind makes on its own to turn the paradox into something easier:

Holding a vivid desired future next to a bleak present creates tension and the mind resolves tension by the cheapest route available. So the wish leaks into perception. The business is "about to turn," the relationship is "basically fine." We dress up the bleak present so it cuts a better figure next to the desired future.

Open-ended hope is genuinely hard to hold as the mind hates this kind of uncertainty. Take ...that you will prevail in the end... What does end mean? When will I experience the end and in which condition will I be? The optimists weren't stupid when hoping to be out by Christmas, their minds just gave the end a date. Holding undated faith is an unnatural discipline.

Anticipation is itself rewarding as you get to feel some of the future arrival now, kind of like advance payments. Undated faith pays a lower emotional dividend every single week, so an advance is a loan and the missed date is the margin call. The warm feeling of pre-arrival is borrowed money.

Tier one goes after the person doing the holding:

Why do we flinch from the brutal facts of reality? Because admitting them indicts the past and forecloses an imagined future self (the parent by thirty, the founder). A brutal fact is a small funeral for a person you were going to be and we don't like these.

Facing the brutal facts isn't merely uncomfortable, it's corrosive when faith isn't there to metabolize it. "This is bad" can slide into "this stays bad," which can slide into "I am someone this happens to." The fact generalizes from the situation to the self and once it lodges there, the organism stops emitting responses. That's Seligman's learned helplessness and it's the deep reason facts need faith (Seligman, 1975).

And after enough painful shatterings the mind jumps to an intellectually elegant move. It stops auditing the individual hopes (wrong company, wrong person, wrong timing) and does a meta-critique: "It wasn't my hope that was wrong, hoping is wrong." It's an insurance policy against the next one and the cost is invisible at first, as it reads as wisdom, as having learned from experience. But it is the end of learning, which is what makes it the most dangerous of the six.

The six forces against the hold

Tier two is the mind escaping the tension by the cheapest route available, tier one is why the brutal facts themselves are so hard to face.

If you struggle with applying the Stockdale Paradox, it is completely normal as the six forces fight anyone who tries to hold the ambiguity of the paradox.

So, where to place hope?

Naming the forces does not defeat them. What helps more is being careful about where hope sits in the first place. As far as I can see, there are two things to keep in mind.

First, if you keep your hope on the outcome, you might want to undate it and strip the timeline off. The hope stays aimed at the promotion, the person, the child. What goes is the date by which any of it must arrive. This is Stockdale's faith that he would prevail in the end, with the end left blank and it keeps every future window in which the possibility might land open.

Second, which is the stronger, but also harder move, take hope off outcomes entirely and move it into Epictetus's column, onto what is really up to you.

Moving hope off the outcome

Hope moves out of the column you do not control into the one you do.

For Stockdale it was to turn the captivity into the defining event of his life. Frankl made the same move in the camp. While F. waited for the thirtieth of March, Frankl lay in the typhus block himself. At Auschwitz they had taken the manuscript of his life's work from him and he had resolved to write it again. So he fought to stay awake through the fevered nights, reconstructing the book in shorthand on stolen scraps of paper (Frankl, 1946). Whether he would live to publish it was not up to him. But whether he wrote another page that night was. He later called this the real lesson of the camps, that it did not matter what he still expected from life, only what life expected from him.

Both men made the move with everything else stripped away. Frankl had no promotion coming and no other everyday milestones to look forward to. You are in a different situation, as a new spot might open next quarter. Therefore outcomes still have a gravitational pull on you and your thoughts will therefore probably end up circling them. Furthermore your environment reprices your outcomes every week. Your salary, the car you drive and the vacations you go on can all be viewed as scoreboards, made from outcomes you don't have full control over.

There is a harder problem underneath. Epictetus sorted the world into two columns from the position of a slave and the sorting was relatively easy for him because almost nothing landed in the column he controlled. For you it is different, as you have a say in quite a few things. Effort really does move some outcomes some of the time and the promotion is genuinely part yours, which means the question of what is up to you has no honest answer at the resolution you need it at. In The Geometry of LuckLuckThe Geometry of LuckRead the essay↗, I offer some heuristics that survive at any resolution, giving you places to put hope without lying to yourself.

But at the end of the day, holding the ambiguity of the Stockdale Paradox is not easy and I still struggle with it. Naming these things helped, but I probably never will move fully beyond them. But hey, it is called the Stockdale Paradox.

This was a heavy meal. Might I offer you a digestivo? One sip for each move.

Are you confusing a destination with a timeline?

How much of your hope sits on things that aren't up to you?