Willpower

uttered it. The first record of it occurs in Stanley’s dispatch to the New York Herald, written well after the meeting. It’s not in the diaries of either man. Stanley tore out the crucial page of his diary, cutting off his account of the encounter just as they were about to greet each other. Stanley, chronically insecure about his workhouse roots, apparently invented the line afterward to make himself sound dignified. He’d always admired the stiff-upper-lip credo of British gentleman explorers, and he sometimes tried to mimic their sanqfroid by affecting a dispassionate air toward his adventures. But he lacked their flair—and their discretion. While they omitted or downplayed the violent encounters and disciplinary tactics on their African expeditions, Stanley vastly exaggerated those aspects, partly to sound tougher, partly to sell newspapers and books.
    As a result, Stanley ended up with a reputation as the harshest and most violent explorer of his age, when in fact he was unusually humane toward Africans, even by comparison with the gentle Livingstone, as Jeal demonstrates. For his time, Stanley was remarkably free of racial prejudice. He spoke Swahili fluently and established lifelong bonds with his African companions. He severely disciplined white officers who mistreated blacks under their command, and he continually restrained his men from violence and other crimes against local villagers. While he did sometimes get in fights when negotiations and gifts failed, the image of Stanley shooting his way across Africa was a myth. The secret to his success lay not in the battles he described so vividly but in two principles that Stanley summarized after his last expedition:
    I have learnt by actual stress of imminent danger, in the first place, that self-control is more indispensable than gunpowder, and, in the second place, that persistent self-control under the provocation of African travel is impossible without real, heartfelt sympathy for the natives with whom one has to deal.
    As Stanley realized, self-control is not selfish. Willpower enables us to get along with others and override impulses that are based on personal short-term interests. It’s the same lesson that Navy SEAL commandos learn during a modern version of Stanley’s ordeals: the famous Hell Week test of continual running, swimming, crawling, and shivering that they must endure on less than five hours’ sleep. At least three-quarters of the men in each SEAL class typically fail to complete training, and the survivors aren’t necessarily the ones with the most muscles, according to Eric Greitens, a SEAL officer. In recalling the fellow survivors of his Hell Week, he points out their one common quality: “They had the ability to step outside of their own pain, put aside their own fear, and ask: How can I help the guy next to me? They had more than the ‘fist’ of courage and physical strength. They also had a heart large enough to think about others.”
    Throughout history, the most common way to redirect people away from selfish behavior has been through religious teachings and commandments, and these remain an effective strategy for self-control, as demonstrated by research that we’ll discuss later. But what if, like Stanley, you’re not a believer? After losing his faith in God and religion at an early age (a loss he attributed to the slaughter he witnessed in the American Civil War), he faced a question that vexed other Victorians: How can people remain moral without the traditional restraints of religion? Many prominent nonbelievers, like Stanley, responded by paying lip service in public to religion while also looking for secular ways to inculcate a sense of “duty.” During the awful trek through the Ituri jungle, he exhorted the men by quoting one of his favorite couplets, from Tennyson’s “Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington”:
    Not once or twice in our fair island-story,
The path of duty was the way to glory.
    Stanley’s men didn’t always appreciate his efforts—the Tennyson lines got very old for some of them—but his approach embodied a correct principle of self-control: Focus on lofty thoughts. The effects of this strategy were recently tested by a team of researchers headed by Kentaro Fujita, of New York University, and his thesis adviser, Yaacov Trope. They used a series of methods to move people’s mental processes to either high or low levels. High levels were defined by abstraction and long-term