The whole “appear strong when you are weak, and weak when you are strong” nonsense is so easy to spot when people and companies apply it. Everyone can tell when someone is fronting and faking confidence, or faking being humble, nobody is fooled.
Other stuff from The Art of War is more useful though.
Terrible take. People think they can tell when someone is bluffing or lying, mostly they cannot. As someone who does a lot of contract negotiations, who has to bluff all the time, and as someone who also does a lot of audits where I have to spot bluffing all the time I see it both ways. Most people are bad at spotting liars and bullshitters, however good news, most people are also absolutely terrible liars and bullshitters so you don’t need to be good, however this gives a false sense of security in your instincts, you are not Sherlock Holmes, you can’t sniff out a lie a mile away and if your opposite number is half way competent the only way to be really know is to do your homework and catch people out in hard data and in evidence. Me included, I’ve been fooled before and doubtless will be fooled again. It’s the nature of the beast. The only way you can reliably find truth is to know more about your opposite number than they do and to test every premise you can. Conversely the more you can control knowledge about your own position and obfuscate the more margin you have to present a position to your benefit. So long as you’re smart enough to understand what your opponent can know and can’t know it’s very easy to distort a picture.
Word. The importance of controlling information is a theme Sun Tzu hammers on again and again. You want to know as much as possible while doing everything in your power to actively deny your enemies any useful information.
Try and stand somewhere where the sun is in their eyes, instead of in your eyes
Not only have I used this, at one point I made a shield with a mirror on it so I could be that fucker and direct light in to people’s eyes if I didn’t have the sun. If you want to intimidate someone, for instance, put the sun in their eyes so they have to squint at you.
The main reason econ and poli sci majors are so obsessed with Sun Tzu and especially Macchiavelli is that the actual good sources on realpolitik are Mao and Lenin and that’s considered too dangerous for them, so they get the safe stuff, the utterly nihilistic and immoral Borghia bootlicker and the “archers are kinda good for killing at a distance” drivel instead of having State and Revolution on their reading list.
All the better.
How does that saying go - never interrupt your enemy when they’re making a mistake?
Plenty of these poli sci majors are going to be opposed to the revolution, if not most of them. I can’t imagine many econ majors are going to make it through liberal ideology ✨but reified with statistics✨ and end up on the right side of history.
Let them study garbage and produce garbage takes and make a mess of everything. Paper tigers etc. etc.
“You’ll do better if you know the capabilities of your army and the enemy’s army before a fight.”
It sounds simple, but look at Fascism. Their ideological framing of the enemy as both everywhere and all powerful, but also week and feeble, makes them incapable of assessing what’s really happening.
Or that bit where it says - If you’re surrounded, with no way out, you must fight? The liberals are begging anyone to save them from having to fight. They’re up against a wall with no where to go except through the enemy, and they’re preying to a senile, evil old man to save them.
It all sounds simple on the page, but then you look at how people actually behave.
The only thing I’d say about that is it seems like it’s working out just fine for the fascists but like you said in your second point that wouldn’t be possible if the libs opposing them didn’t think that actually opposing them was a moral failure.
Hitler lost WW2.
It’s really good though but you have to be able to take the specific cases Sun Tzu is talking about and apply them to conflict more generally. Like the “look for different kinds of dust clouds to figure out what your enemy is doing” bit doesn’t apply much today, but you can look for tell tale signals that offer insight on the actions of your enemies. Are the pigs on foot or in cars? What kinds of weapons are they carrying? Are they in regular uniforms or riot gear. It sounds obvious, but most people have the same understanding of conflict as those ancient noble failsons
Y’all massively overestimate how much the average person understands about conflict and struggle. Sun Tzu has an important place and doesn’t deserve all this scoffing.
It’s also really easy to look at the advice and consider it obvious when you’re sitting at home reading it with plenty of time on your hands. It’s less obvious when you’re in a stressful real world situation.
The stuff that soldiers get taught in basic training also feels really obvious. “Stay physically fit. Be aware of your surroundings. Only point guns at what you want to kill. Follow orders quickly.” None of this should feel surprising to anyone with the most basic knowledge of what a soldier does, but drilling it in until it’s what you do automatically in the moment is important.
Dang, good point, never thought of the armchair stress-free aspect before.
It’s important, because in stressful situations, most do not rise to the occasion, but rather fall back on their training. So drilling in the basics during training plays a very important role. It also applies to competitive sports as well.
Absolutely. As silly as it sounds, the couple of times I ended up in the middle of a firefight, i was able to function because I had a thousand hours in ARMA, combat LARPs, shit like that - Go for cover, direct civilians away from the fighting, shit like that. Didn’t have to think about it, just fell back on what I’d done in sim games thousands of times.
Going for cover is another great one. “Try to hide behind things so you don’t get shot” seems painfully obvious but in real life you can see how often civilians just freeze up instead.
Omg, i’m playing lots of helldivers rn and people absolutely will not use the simplest tactics! “The shield backpack is essential and you should kick anyone who doesn’t bring it” meanwhile i have used the clausewitz level strategy of lying down to avoid enemy fire
