On the tactical side, the main idea I bring away from Epictetus is to "stay off the hook."
If a prisoner demands conveniences, accepts favors, pleads for relief, aspires to status, attempts to prove something about himself to others, this means giving a manipulator an opening through showing need for "externals."
The smart inmate makes it his business to find his tormentor’s exact limits, to know his own, and to demonstrate a commitment his adversary finds it unprofitable to challenge.
A man’s master is he who is able to confer or remove whatever that man seeks or shuns. Whoever then would be free, let him wish nothing, let him decline nothing which depends on others; else he must necessarily be a slave.
Shun externals, yes. But a man must concern himself in the world of Epictetus and in the world of extortion and manipulation with "internals," or those matters that are "up to him," and only to him.
Our opinions are up to us, our impulses, desires, aversions—in short whatever is of our own doing.
Viktor Frankl, in Man’s Search for Meaning speaks of the "freedom" he found, even in the depths of terror in his Nazi prison, in realizing that there was one thing they could never take from him: his attitude and his opinion of what was going on.
As Jean-Paul Sartre said to a priest in another Nazi prison, "Remember, the important thing in here is not what they do to you, but what you do with what they do to you."
—from James B. Stockdale, Epictetus' Enchiridion: Conflict and Character
IMAGE: Margaret Bourke-White, The Living Dead of Buchenwald (1945)
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