Lead with Courage
It is all too easy to succumb to fear. To be effective, courage requires action.
“Great self-destruction follows upon unfounded fear.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin, 2008
Courage is the virtue we praise most loudly and practice least often. It is one of the lynchpins in Aristotle’s ethical system (the others being prudence, justice, and temperance).
It appears in political speeches as a kind of stage prop, a word invoked to lend gravitas to policies hedged with cowardice. Corporate mission statements claim it as a “core value,” though rarely at the expense of a quarterly report.
Yet courage, properly understood, is not a posture or a marketing asset. It is the willingness to hazard one’s body, reputation, or fortune against the odds, knowing that fear cannot be eliminated but merely mastered.
“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear — not absence of fear.”
— Mark Twain, 1893
The Man Who Volunteered for Auschwitz1
In the annals of courage there are deeds so strange and so radiant that they sound less like history than myth. The story of Witold Pilecki belongs to this category, the realm where Homer’s heroes, Dante’s pilgrims, and the martyrs of old reside.
He was a cavalry officer, a man of faith and honor, who chose a path no sane person would choose. When others ran from the horror that was Auschwitz, Pilecki walked willingly into it.
He allowed himself to be arrested in a Warsaw street raid, knowing the destination of that train would be a place already whispered about in terror. There, in that factory of starvation and smoke, he did not collapse into despair as so many did.
He organized. He whispered courage into the ears of the dying. He built networks of defiance, gathering scraps of bread and scraps of hope, and from them forged a brotherhood of resistance.
Through hidden radios and smuggled scraps of paper, he became the voice of the condemned. His reports told the outside world what few could imagine: that Auschwitz was not merely a prison, but a slaughterhouse designed for the erasure of whole peoples. These dispatches, carried by couriers across occupied Europe, were the first clear warnings of the Holocaust.
Two years passed — two years of mud, lice, unimaginable hunger, and the death of thousands, endured not only with fortitude but with a kind of luminous will. When the moment came, he and two comrades slipped through the wire under the cloak of night, escaping not for his own freedom but to make his testimony undeniable.
And still he was not done. He fought in the Warsaw Uprising. He took up arms again when Poland fell beneath the shadow of Soviet rule. When the communists seized him, they could torture his body but not his spirit. His final words were not of fear but of a man who had lived as he intended:
“I have tried to live my life such that in the hour of my death I would feel joy rather than fear.”
Pilecki’s life was a paradox of heroism — one who entered hell so that the world might know the truth of it. His name does not ring as loudly as the Caesars or Churchills of history, but in the quiet register of moral greatness, he stands among the immortals.
Courage Doesn’t Need Praise
We’ve become accustomed to a culture that mistakes bravado for courage.
The insult hurled on social media, the belligerent speech from a secure podium, the entrepreneur proclaiming “disruption” while insulated by venture capital — these are not instances of courage but of theater. Real courage carries the cost of vulnerability, and therefore cannot be faked.
If we are to recover the meaning of the word, we must disentangle it from applause. Courage is not guaranteed success, nor even survival. It is simply the decision to face what terrifies us because it must be faced.
“Who lives in fear will never be a free man.”
— Horace, 19 B.C.
Without courage, liberty is a slogan, justice a mirage, and leadership a costume worn by cowards. With it, even briefly, even imperfectly, we remember that human beings are capable of something more than calculation — that there exists a virtue beyond expedience.
Courage, then, is not the absence of fear but its conquest, not the guarantee of safety but the embrace of risk.
It is the solitary moment in which a person chooses duty over comfort, truth over silence, conscience over complicity.
And if civilization is to endure, it is less dependent on our cleverness than on our courage — for without that, every other virtue is merely an alibi.
There’s so much to learn,
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As heard on Futility Closet Episode 27, September 22, 2014