This Is How Smart People Get Smart (And Fools Get More Foolish)

In the fall of 1961, Commander James Stockdale began a course at Stanford he had eagerly anticipated on Marxist theory. “We read no criticisms of Marxism,” he recounted later, “only primary sources. All year we read the works of Marx and Lenin.”

It might seem unusual that the Navy would send a 36-year-old fighter pilot to get a master’s degree in the humanities, but Stockdale knew why he was there. Writing home to his parents that year, he reminded them of a lesson they had instilled in him, “You really can’t do well competing against something you don’t understand as well as something you can.”

At the time, Marxism was not just an abstract academic subject, but the ideological foundation of America’s greatest geopolitical enemy. The stakes were high — the Soviets pushed a vision of global communism and the conflict in Vietnam was already flashing hot, the North Vietnamese fueled by a ruthless mix of dogma and revolutionary zeal. ‘Marxism’ was, like today, also a culture-war boogeyman used by politicians and demagogues.

Just a few short years after completing his studies — September 1965 — Stockdale was shot down over Thanh Hóa in North Vietnam, and as he parachuted into what he knew would be imprisonment and possibly death, his mind turned to the philosophy of Epictetus, which he had…