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Chapter 1: What events led to the significance of D-Day?
Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.
Out on the English Channel 82 years ago, the ocean hosted a moving city. Thousands of ships and vessels holding some 150,000 tense young men bob in the sea under gloomy skies. Some of them begin to vomit in anticipation of what lies ahead. It's nearly six in the morning when the flashes start. The whole horizon lights up. British and American battleships begin an enormous barrage
raining fire down on the French coast where these soldiers will soon land. As the boats approach shore, the ramps drop. Machine guns from the bluffs begin to rake and sweep the boats and the men with horrendous fire. Many of the men die before their feet even touch the water, let alone the beach. Some men jump over the sides and are dragged down by their packs and gear.
The ones who do land have to make a mad dash across 200 feet of open sand in some of the most hostile territory imaginable. By nightfall, almost 5,000 men are dead, and yet most of the beaches in Normandy are taken. These are the events of June 6th, 1944, one of the most momentous days in world history.
General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces at Normandy, has pulled off one of the most stunning and impressive victories in all of military history. And in this moment, he turns the tides not just of the war, but of the 20th century and Western civilization. He changes the world as we know it.
And that's the story filled with a number of Stoic lessons that we're going to talk about in today's episode. So the Stoics have this phrase called premeditatio malorum, which is a premeditation of evils. It's basically the idea of doing a premortem rather than a postmortem. Postmortem is when you look after the fact at what went wrong, what you can learn from it.
The Stoics try to think in anticipation of what could happen and prepare for it. Rehearse it in your mind, Seneca famously said. Exile, torture, war, shipwreck, he says, all the terms of the human lot should be before our eyes. He quotes a famous military historian from the ancient world, in fact, who said that leaders are never allowed to say, wow, I didn't think that would happen.
For the Stoics, it's the unexpected who are crushed. It's the unexpected blow that lands heaviest. And if you want to be resolute, if you want to be successful, if you want to be victorious, you can't be naive. And you have to understand that hope is not a strategy.
And so by doing this exercise, Seneca is trying to prepare for what could go wrong, trying to mentally manage his expectations, but he's also trying to anticipate, toughen himself up, put into place what he needs to be in place in order to handle defeat or victory. And I think this pertains to Eisenhower at D-Day because he uses a version of this practice there as he prepares for the invasion.
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Chapter 2: How did Eisenhower prepare for potential failure on D-Day?
Patton grasps this quite clearly, too. He says, oh, I get it. You know, the Nazis have stuck their head in a meat grinder. I think this is actually quite similar to what Marx really talks about in meditations where he says, you know, the impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.
If you're only seeing what they're doing to you and not what you can do in response to them, if you don't see how you can work with this, you're going to miss what's in front of you. And Eisenhower doesn't.
Chapter 3: What is the Stoic concept of premeditatio malorum?
So by allowing this sort of German wedge to come at them, And then attacking from the sides, the Allies basically encircle the Germans and win the war. And look, I don't mean to be glib about this. This was an extremely difficult thing to do, and it cost thousands and thousands of lives, and it was waged over many, many weeks. But if you've heard of the Battle of the Bulge,
The word bulge there is illustrative. Basically, by absorbing the energy of this giant thrust of German men and material, eventually they encircle and ensnare something like 50,000 German troops. And actually, my grandfather landed at Normandy, I believe, two days after D-Day. He fights in the Battle of the Bulge. He wins the French Croix de Guerre, the invincible battle.
devastating, unstoppable German panzers become not just impotent, but it's a suicidal overreach, a textbook example of why you can't leave your flanks exposed. I think of this moment, this choice that Eisenhower makes to see the opportunity instead of disaster in a moment to be kind of the definition of stoicism in action.
Here he is the commander of this enormous army, more manpower and firepower than you can really wrap your head around. And yet what he's thinking about is not that he is invincible and indestructible, but he's thinking about the unpredictable nature of war. He's thinking about all the things that could go wrong. He's thinking about how narrow run the whole thing is.
I talk about him in Discipline is Destiny as the model of this kind of emotional and physical discipline that we need. I say, in 1944, when he was appointed Supreme Allied Commander of the Allied Forces in World War II, he suddenly controlled an army of some 3 million men, the tip of a war effort that ultimately involved more than 50 million people.
And there, at the head of an alliance of nations totaling an upward of 700 million citizens, he discovered that far from being exempt from the rules, he had to be stricter with himself than ever. And he came to find that the best way to lead was not by force or fiat, but through persuasion, through compromise, through patience, by controlling his temper, and most of all, by example.
and he recalls in this moment and moments throughout his life something that his mother used to quote from the book of proverbs in the bible that he that is slow to anger is better than the mighty and he that rules his spirit is better than he that taketh a city and this is something the stoics talk about that that to be in power you have to first be under your own power
and so we have to understand that eisenhower conquers the world he is victorious at d-day you know over eight decades ago because he is first victorious over himself victorious over you know delusions of grandeur wishful thinking and then later victorious over pessimistic thinking, over panic, over doubt, over fear.
But when we control our emotions, when we can see things objectively, when we can stand steadily despite everything that's happening around us, it becomes possible to do that mental flip, to not just see what's bad about a situation, what's hard about a situation, what's going wrong, but the opportunity within it. I mean, imagine being in Eisenhower's shoes. This enormous army is racing on you.
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