When Standing Your Ground Is Worth It
A lesson in conflict from Neville Chamberlain and the Tank Man.
This essay is part of my ongoing investigation into the principles that shape conflict. Each essay can be read on it’s own, or you can read part one here.
When it comes to conflict, conventional wisdom often suggests that the wisest course is avoidance. "Choose your battles," we're told. "Let it go." "Is this really the hill you want to die on?" These well-intentioned phrases highlight an important truth—not every potential conflict deserves our energy. But this wisdom, valuable as it is, tells only half the story.
The complete truth is more nuanced: while most conflicts are better avoided, some fights are absolutely worth having—regardless of the cost.
The Man Who Stopped Tanks
The image is one not easily forgotten: a lone man, shopping bags in hand, standing immobile before a column of tanks in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. The year was 1989, and the world watched as a solitary anonymous protester confronted the full military might of an authoritarian regime.
Time seems suspended in that moment. The lead tank attempts to maneuver around him. He shifts his position to continue blocking its path. The tank stops. The man climbs onto it, appears to speak with the soldiers inside, then returns to his position of defiance when the engine restarts.
What calculus ran through this anonymous man's mind as he made his stand? The tanks represented overwhelming physical force. The political momentum behind them was unstoppable. The personal risk was extreme. By any rational cost-benefit analysis, this was precisely the type of conflict one should avoid.
But something deeper than self-preservation motivated him. In that moment, Tank Man joined the ranks of history's greatest heroes. In every age, in every country, courageous people have reminded us that some principles cannot be compromised without sacrificing something essential to our humanity. Some stands must be taken, not because victory is assured, but because the alternative—silent complicity—extracts a greater cost than any punishment that might follow resistance.
The distinction here is a crucial one. A couple weeks ago I wrote that not all fights are worth the cost they extract. But this doesn't mean we should avoid all conflict. Rather, it means being so selective and discerning that we engage only in those battles that truly matter—conflicts where the principles at stake outweigh the inevitable costs.
The Selective Defense of Your Immune System
Your body contains perhaps the most sophisticated conflict management system in nature—your immune system. It doesn't respond to every foreign substance it encounters; that would waste precious resources and potentially damage healthy tissue. Instead, it distinguishes between harmless particles and genuine threats, reserving its full defensive response for pathogens that could compromise vital functions.
When such threats are detected, however, the immune response is swift and comprehensive. Resources flood to the site of invasion. Specialized cells mobilize to neutralize the threat. The entire system shifts to a state of heightened alertness. Your immune system doesn't debate whether to respond; it responds because failing to do so threatens your survival.
Our moral and ethical immune systems must function with similar discernment and resolve. Some violations of our core values are like pathogens—if allowed to proliferate unchallenged, they threaten not just our circumstances but our very identity. These situations demand our engagement, not because victory is guaranteed, but because non-response would compromise something fundamental to who we are.
The Fight for Penicillin
In 1928, Alexander Fleming was cleaning his laboratory when he noticed something peculiar in one of his petri dishes. A mold had contaminated his Staphylococcus bacteria culture, creating a bacteria-free zone around itself. Rather than discarding this "ruined" sample as most would have done, Fleming recognized a potentially significant discovery.
What followed was a 15-year battle that would save countless lives. The development of penicillin from this initial observation wasn't a straightforward process. Fleming's initial paper received little attention. When Howard Florey and Ernst Chain later attempted to produce penicillin in quantities sufficient for clinical use, they faced seemingly insurmountable obstacles.
World War II had created critical resource shortages. Research funding was scarce. The technical challenges of production appeared overwhelming. The scientific establishment viewed their work with skepticism. By any reasonable assessment, this was a fight with terrible odds.
Yet they persisted. At one point, Florey and his team were so desperate for precious penicillin that they collected the urine from patients who had received doses, attempting to extract the excreted antibiotic for reuse. They worked with inadequate facilities, minimal support, and under the constant threat of German bombardment during the London Blitz.
But by 1944, their persistence had transformed medicine forever. Penicillin became widely available just in time to save countless Allied soldiers who would previously have died from infected wounds. In the decades that followed, this single drug (and the antibiotics developed after it) saved hundreds of millions of lives worldwide.
This story illustrates a crucial truth about worthwhile conflict: the battles most worth fighting often appear impossible at the outset. Had Fleming, Florey, and Chain evaluated their chances of success solely on initial conditions, they might have abandoned their efforts. The obstacles were enormous, the probability of success minimal, the personal cost significant.
Yet they recognized something that transcended conventional cost-benefit analysis: when the potential benefit extends far beyond personal gain—when it touches fundamental human well-being—the normal calculus of conflict changes completely. Some fights are worth having precisely because their impact reaches beyond ourselves, affecting countless others whose faces we may never see.
Recognizing the Battles That Matter
How do we distinguish between conflicts that deserve our full commitment and those better left unfought? After studying patterns across history, relationships, and personal development, I've identified several key indicators of battles worth fighting:
1. Non-Negotiable Values Are at Stake
When conflicts involve values central to your identity or fundamental principles you live by, engagement often becomes necessary. These aren't preferences or opinions, but core convictions that define who you are. When these are threatened, the cost of non-response typically exceeds the cost of engagement.
2. Strategic Investments in Future Victory
Some conflicts are worth fighting not for immediate gain but for long-term strategic advantage. Like chess players sacrificing a piece to establish a winning position several moves ahead, these conflicts require enduring short-term costs for far greater long-term benefits.
3. Fighting For, Not Against
The healthiest necessary conflicts focus on protecting or advancing something valuable rather than destroying something despised. The parent who confronts a child's destructive behavior does so not against the child but for their future well-being. This distinction transforms conflict from purely destructive to potentially creative.
4. Moral Imperatives Beyond Self-Interest
When injustice infects communities or systems, conflict often becomes not merely justified but morally necessary. These fights transcend personal interest—they're about creating environments where dignity and fairness prevail. History's moral arc has been bent toward justice by those willing to engage in necessary conflict, from abolitionists to suffragettes to protesters like Tank Man.
5. Inner Battlegrounds That Shape Our Character
Perhaps the most essential conflicts are those we wage within ourselves—battles against our own limitations, fears, and weaknesses. These internal struggles are uniquely challenging because they offer no external opponent to defeat, only the daily commitment to overcome our deeper resistance to growth and change.
If you find yourself drawn to understanding the moments where principle meets pragmatism—where some battles reveal themselves as absolutely necessary while others are best left unfought—you can join me here. Together we'll explore historical turning points, philosophical insights, and practical wisdom for navigating conflict with courage and discernment.
The True Cost of Avoidance
On September 30, 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich waving a signed agreement. "Peace for our time," he declared to cheering crowds, having secured Hitler's promise that Germany's territorial ambitions would end with the annexation of the Sudetenland. Just eleven months later, Nazi tanks rolled into Poland, and the world descended into the most devastating conflict in human history.
This moment—perhaps history's most infamous example of failed appeasement—illustrates the critical distinction between wisely avoiding unnecessary conflicts and catastrophically evading necessary ones. Chamberlain wasn't wrong to seek peace; he was wrong in believing peace could be purchased by surrendering to aggression rather than confronting it.
What makes this moment so instructive is that appeasement wasn't actually conflict avoidance—it was conflict postponement under increasingly disadvantageous terms. Each concession strengthened the aggressor while weakening those who would eventually have to stand against him. By 1939, when the fight finally came, Britain faced a far more powerful enemy than the one they might have deterred years earlier.
This pattern repeats across every scale of human experience. The employee who silently endures workplace harassment finds the behavior escalating rather than resolving. The parent who avoids addressing a child's problematic behavior watches small issues grow into life-altering challenges. The individual who ignores their own unhealthy patterns faces greater difficulties when those patterns eventually demand attention.
Some conflicts, when avoided, don't simply disappear—they metastasize, returning with compound interest on the pain we sought to avoid.
The Courage to Choose Right Battles
The threads connecting all worthy conflicts—whether defending values, investing strategically, fighting for relationships, standing against injustice, or battling internal resistance—is a particular form of courage. This isn't the courage of bravado or aggression but the quiet resolve to endure discomfort, risk, and potential loss in service of what matters most.
This courage emerges from clarity about what truly matters to us. When we have identified the principles, relationships, and goals that define our core, the decision to fight becomes not just easier but necessary. Knowing what we stand for makes it clear which conflicts deserve our full commitment and which are better left unfought.
The trick is not avoiding all conflict but developing the discernment to recognize which fights deserve the full measure of our commitment, courage, and capacity. Some fights are not merely worth it; they're essential to becoming who we're meant to be and creating the world we wish to inhabit.
Finding Your Balance Point
The truth that Tank Man reminded us of—that some principles are worth defending regardless of the odds—stands in perfect counterpoint to the WOPR computer's realization in WarGames that "the only winning move is not to play." Both insights are true, but they apply to different categories of conflict.
WOPR recognized that nuclear war offered no path to meaningful victory, only varying degrees of mutual destruction. Tank Man understood that some values cannot be compromised without sacrificing something essential to our humanity. Both insights required breaking free from conventional thinking—the computer had to transcend its programming, and the man had to transcend his instinct for self-preservation.
Together, they offer us a more complete philosophy of conflict: the wisdom to avoid battles that offer no path to meaningful victory, coupled with the courage to engage fully in those fights that genuinely matter. Like your immune system, which ignores most foreign particles while mobilizing decisive responses against genuine threats, the wise person develops excellent discrimination about which conflicts deserve engagement.
Some fights are absolutely worth having. Wisdom lies in knowing which ones they are.
I recognize the genuine struggle in these decisions. How do we know when we're standing on principle like Tank Man, and when we're simply being stubborn? How do we distinguish between our ego's desire to be right and our soul's need to defend what matters? These aren't just theoretical questions, but practical dilemmas we face regularly. In my next post we'll explore specific frameworks for making these difficult judgments with greater clarity and confidence.
Every Tank Man standing before history's tanks faces the same fundamental question: Is this principle worth the cost of my stand? Over the next six months I’m going to explore this territory between necessary courage and wise restraint—the razor's edge where our most important decisions live. Subscribe for insights drawn from historical inflection points, philosophical wisdom, and hard-earned experience navigating conflict's complex terrain. In a world that either avoids all conflict or rushes headlong into unnecessary battles, we're charting a more nuanced path together—one that honors both peace and principle, restraint and resolve.
References and Further Reading
Quotes and References
The Tank Man incident occurred on June 5, 1989, in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. While the identity of the protester remains unknown, the scene was captured by several photographers, most famously by Jeff Widener of the Associated Press. Time Magazine later named it one of the "100 Most Influential Images of All Time."
The immune system analogy draws from the field of immunology, particularly the concept of "immune tolerance" first recognized by Peter Medawar and Frank Macfarlane Burnet, who shared the 1960 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of acquired immunological tolerance.
The details of Alexander Fleming's penicillin discovery come primarily from Gwyn Macfarlane's Alexander Fleming: The Man and the Myth, which I picked up at a local library sale. For those interested in the full development story including Florey and Chain's contributions, I recommend Eric Lax's The Mold in Dr. Florey's Coat, which details their desperate measures during wartime research.
Neville Chamberlain's "Peace for our time" declaration was made on September 30, 1938, upon his return from the Munich Conference. The phrase echoes Lord Disraeli's "I have returned from Germany with peace for our time" statement from the 1878 Congress of Berlin.
The concept of moral principles as non-negotiable elements of our identity draws from Charles Taylor's work on moral frameworks in Sources of the Self, which explores how our moral intuitions form the background against which we make our most significant life decisions.
Additional Perspectives
Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion offers fascinating insights into the moral foundations that drive our sense of which principles are worth defending. I read this on a flight to Phoenix last month and found myself underlining something on nearly every page.
For those interested in the psychological dimensions of conflict avoidance versus engagement, Susan David's Emotional Agility provides valuable frameworks for distinguishing between emotionally-driven reactions and value-aligned responses. Her concept of "emotional agility" closely relates to what I describe as our moral immune system.
Hannah Arendt's essay "Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship," published in the collection Responsibility and Judgment, offers a thoughtful philosophical examination of why certain moral stands become necessary, even when they appear futile.
For a historical exploration of moral courage in extreme circumstances, Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin documents countless examples of individuals who made extraordinary stands when silence would have been safer but morally catastrophic.