I think that the world has a very strange conception on what it thinks strength is. The reason why I think that it has this strange idea, is because people are selfish to the point where what is immediately in front of them is often the most impressive.
The way we usually think about strength, mostly has to do with what is immediately displayed in front of us. The most obvious display of strength is raw power; that is: Who can exert the most force? Who can punch, swing a sword, pull things, lift things, et cetera, the hardest, the fastest? The strength of one person is not very much though. In antiquity horsepower was greater than manpower. From the industrial revolution onwards, we found a way to replace the horses with machines with many many times more power than one horse. We are currently in the process of replacing human brainpower with machine brainpower as well. When you talk about the strength of a person thought, while we may be impressed that someone can lift a heavy thing, or powerfully swing a club, we can all concede that it takes a very different kind of strength to stand up under hardship, under injustice, under cruelty, and under the meanness of other people.
Who are the strongest people in the world? Is it someone like Magnus Magnussen who can lift Atlas Stones? Or is it a mother who is awake at 3am because their child has the flu? Is it that kid in high school who is being bullied because they are the smallest, or not the accepted race of their immediate cohort, or who is late at passing through puberty? Is it a refugee who has fled chaos and is now waiting just to settle somewhere which might resemble normality and where they might be able to call home? Is it someone who must deal with an illness for which there will be no cure, or pain which will never be relieved? Is it someone who works at a mind-numbing spirit-sucking job who turns up every day, just to keep the lights on and pay their landlord who demands an even greater share of their meagre income? Who actually is the strongest person in the world when framed like that?
The kosmos is populated with people who are all each the centre of their own observable universe; which makes for a world with some pretty horrid side-effects on occasion. We all pretend to be the heroes on the good side; not realising that we are all the villains on the other. A kosmos populated by selfish people, means that they all think of themselves as the most important; which is hardly an objective starting point to determine who is on the good side or the bad side. Actually if you really want to reduce it down to atoms and elements, there is no-one on the good side.
Perhaps related to that point, is that every bad thing which happens in the world either happens through environmental accident, or human stupidity which leads to negligence or accident, or deliberate cruelty. If every bad thing happens due to accident, stupidity, and cruelty, and there are so many of us knaves in the world, then it follows that by the law of large numbers where we repeat the experiment lots and lots of times, that lots of bad things are going to happen and in a variety of interesting ways.
I have my doubts that things can be reduced to a binary fight or flight response when badness or the nastiness of other people comes. Already there is an implied mismatch in power dynamics which says that one person is very much aware that they can lord it over the other and acts accordingly. We can basically assume that a flight response is either not an option or is not imagined by the person on the receiving end. Either the person on the receiving end backs down or shuts down, or fights back in some way. I suspect that Perseverance is related to some kind of fight response.
Given all of this, then there are a number of responses that people can prepare. Either you can complain, which in many cases is perfectly justified; or you can develop coping strategies, which may or may not be effective at mitigating the badness; or you can choose to persevere and keeping on carrying on.
Perseverance is not a virtue which is easily attained. Like all the the virtues such as patience or kindness, it is one which requires the moral work of discipline to achieve. Perseverance is best described as standing calmly and bravely against the circumstance and then working through the badness of unpleasantness which accompanies it. Perseverance is standing fast in the storm and then walking slowly into it. Perseverance is either gained deliberately because of circumstance, or accidentally because the circumstance is relentless and demands it; where quitting is not an option. Standing calmly and bravely when everything is screaming at you to stop, when other people might be screaming at you to stop by exacting injustice, meanness and cruelty, I think requires a greater display of strength of character, than merely swinging a club.
Perseverance is one of those moral qualities which is masqueraded by the rich and powerful especially and then used as a sheath over the top of weaponised cruelty. "If I am successful and worked hard, then why can't you?" The automatic connection with particularly financial success or lack thereof, is equated with the amount of work that someone supposedly does. Poverty especially is seen as a demonstration of some kind of moral failure. What this does is completely negate the circumstance, as well as the set of starting privileges which the various actors had to begin with. Quite often someone who has achieved a level of quiet calm has been forced to develop Perseverance; whereas the "successful' person from atop their gilded tower has not. Perhaps it is because of the job that I do but experience leads me to believe that richer people when faced with hardship (often of their own making) are more likely to respond with rage and nastiness, than poorer people who have had to practice Perseverance as a standard survival and coping mechanism.
As a moral practice to be displayed and worked outwards, perseverance may involve continuing to love and care for someone despite and in spite of their badness. That person may have very well wronged you. Perseverance as a practice, is always going to be expensive as with every moral work worth doing. This would suggest that Perseverance which I suppose could be though as some kind of positive adaptation after the fact, still requires an active choice to be able to do.
It seems to me that people who have learned to Persevere despite circumstance and hardship, are generally happier with life. This is likely because having learned and practiced how to keep on keeping on, gain a degree of inner confidence that they are capable of continuing; as well as the secondary moral product that the person at the centre of their own observable universe is both worth fighting for as well as not someone who they should be fighting against. Applied outwards it also says that the someone else for whom you choose to Persevere with is also worth fighting for as well.
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