While on active duty, I completed several military training programs that were designed to empower me to perform my military duties with courage and effectiveness in combat. No matter how rigorous and realistic the training, I knew my trainers were not going to kill me, at least not on purpose. Until I was directly tested in the 1968 Vietnam TET offensive, where people were trying to kill me, I had no idea what my behavior would be in combat. I passed!
The competence for courage and effectiveness in combat is theoretical until it is tested on a real battlefield. Similarly, Character, Ethics, Leadership, and Religious lessons inculcated in various workshops, seminars, and sermons are also theoretical until they are life-tested.
“Character cannot be fully developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.” (Helen Keller)
As Mike Tyson said: Every fighter has a plan until he is nailed in the face with a left hook!
“Studying courage in textbooks doesn’t make you any more courageous than eating cow meat makes you bovine. Because of some mysterious mental mechanism, people fail to realize that the principal thing you can learn from a professor is how to be a professor—and the chief thing you can learn from, say, a life coach or inspirational speaker is how to become a life coach or inspirational speaker. Remember that the heroes of history were not classicists and library rats (dilettantes), those people who live vicariously in their texts. They were people of deeds and had to be endowed with the spirit of risk taking.” (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
Virtue is wisdom in action, and is the zenith of human behavior, whereby human beings pursue all their objectives, private and public, using only honorable means. Virtue cannot be separated from fact-based reality without itself becoming a principal instrument of evil. (Albert Camus)
The decisive manifestation of human power is not how we behave in times of security and contentment, but how we behave during times of challenge, distress, controversy, and pain. Our character is not revealed by our words that proclaim who we are, but rather through our actions.
Just as I was not certain how I would behave in combat; I was not sure about my fellow GIs. As Albert Schweitzer told us: We wander through this life together in a semi-darkness in which none of us can distinguish exactly the character of our companions. Only from time to time, through some experience that we have of their behavior, or through some remark that they pass, they stand for a moment clearly illuminated as by a flash of lightning. Then we see them as they really are.
Voltaire focused on the individual. He said that it takes more courage to confront one’s true self than it does to confront an enemy on the battlefield. I have done both and I agree. But most of us remain complete strangers to ourselves.
There is no way we can know the whole truth about ourselves if we are not capable of doubting and assessing our own conclusions and certainties about our spiritual strength, determining why we do what we do and the appraising outcomes.
Tragic consequences often ensue from disconnections between our thoughts and our reality. As Socrates said, an unexamined life is not worth living. It is impossible to improve what we fail to acknowledge.
Irrespective of our education, training and external experiences, each of us is responsible for developing our own Selfness. Moral character entails doing the right thing, irrespective of risks that may result in opposition, disapproval or ostracism.
One does not have to wait for some monumental moral crisis to test one’s character — one becomes increasingly courageous by doing the very things that one needs courage to undertake. At first, you will do a little and probably badly. Then bit by bit, you will do more and do it better. (From Audrey Lorde)
Start doing the things you think should be done, and start being what you think society should become. Do you believe in free speech? Then speak freely. Do you love the truth? Then tell it. Do you believe in an open society? Then act in the open. Do you believe in a decent and humane society? Then behave decently and humanely. (Adam Michnik)
Cautious, careful people always casting about to preserve their reputation or social standards will never help develop a better nation. Those who are really earnest are willing to be anything or nothing in the world’s estimation, and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathies with despised ideas and their advocates, and bear the consequences. (From Susan B. Anthony)
