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But it is a law of war that by allowing the larger force to come to you, at full strength and unified, you increase the odds against you; a large and powerful army on the move will gain an irresistible momentum if left unchecked. You will find yourself quickly overwhelmed. The wisest course is to take a risk, meet the enemy before it comes to you, and try to blunt its momentum by forcing or enticing it to divide. And the best way to make an enemy divide is to occupy the center.
You must realize that these ties are generally not rational but emotional. By appealing to people’s emotions, you can make your targets see the past in a new light, as something tyrannical, boring, ugly, immoral.
Hannibal was vastly outnumbered at Cannae, but by making the Romans feel vulnerable and isolated, he made them overreact and retreat in confusion: easy pickings.
People today are more dispersed and society is less cohesive than ever before, but that only increases our need to belong to a group, to have a strong network of allies—to
The divide-and-conquer strategy has never been more effective than it is today: cut people off from their group—make them feel alienated, alone, and unprotected—and you weaken them enormously. That moment of weakness gives you great power to maneuver them into a corner, whether to seduce or to induce panic and retreat.
As Mao understood, in political environments people depend on their connections even more than on their talents.
Had he attacked Lin directly, he would have gotten bogged down in an ugly fight. Dividing the minister from his power base, and in the process making him appear to be on the decline, was much more effective.
Divide and rule is a powerful strategy for governing any group. It is based on a key principle: within any organization people naturally form smaller groups based on mutual self-interest—the primitive desire to find strength in numbers.
The temptation to maintain a favorite is understandable but dangerous. Better to rotate your stars, occasionally making each one fall. Bring in people with different viewpoints and encourage them to fight it out.
If you are to lead, you must occupy the center. Everything must flow through you. If information is to be withheld, you are the one to do it. That is divide and rule: if the different parts of the operation lack access to all the information, they will have to come to you to get it.
Whether you are beset by many small problems or by one giant problem, make Musashi the model for your mental process. If you let the complexity of the situation confuse you and either hesitate or lash out without thought, you will lose mental control, which will only add momentum to the negative force coming at you. Always divide up the issue at hand, first placing yourself in a central position, then proceeding down the line, killing off your problems one by one. It is often wise to begin with the smallest problem while keeping the most dangerous one at bay. Solving that one will help you
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Finally, in a divided world, power will come from keeping your own group united and cohesive, and your own mind clear and focused on your goals.
When you attack people directly, you stiffen their resistance and make your task that much harder.
Learn from the great master himself: attacking from the front is rarely wise. The soldiers facing you will be tightly packed in, a concentration of force that will amplify their power to resist you. Go for their flank, their vulnerable side. This principle is applicable to conflicts or encounters of any scale.
Individuals often show their flank, signal their vulnerability, by its opposite, the front they show most visibly to the world. This front can be an aggressive personality, a way of dealing with people by pushing them around.
Avoid a frontal attack on a long-established position; instead, seek to turn it by flank movement, so that a more penetrable side is exposed to the thrust of truth.
More and more clearly has the lesson emerged that a direct approach to one’s mental object, or physical objective, along the “line of natural expectation” for the opponent, tends to produce negative results.
But unless they kill the foes they beat this way, they are merely creating long-term enemies who harbor deep resentment and will eventually make trouble. Enough such enemies and life becomes dangerous. Caesar found another way to do battle, taking the fight out of his enemies through strategic and cunning generosity.
Life is full of hostility—some of it overt, some clever and under-handed. Conflict is inevitable; you will never have total peace. Instead of imagining you can avoid these clashes of will, accept them and know that the way you deal with them will decide your success in life.
What good is it to win little battles, to succeed in pushing people around here and there, if in the long run you create silent enemies who will sabotage you later? At all cost you must gain control of the impulse to fight your opponents directly.
Taking the fight out of people through strategic acts of kindness, generosity, and charm will clear your path, helping you to save energy for the fights you cannot avoid.
Let us see if by moderation we can win all hearts and secure a lasting victory, since by cruelty others have been unable to escape from hatred and maintain their victory for any length of time…. This is a new way of conquering, to strengthen one’s position by kindness and generosity.
In all such cases, the direct assault of new ideas provokes a stubborn resistance, thus intensifying the difficulty of producing a change of outlook.
it is proverbial that the surest way of gaining a superior’s acceptance of a new idea is to weaken resistance before attempting to overcome it; and the effect is best attained by drawing the other party out of his defences.
You must ask yourself this question: what is the point of being direct and frontal if it only increases people’s resistance, and makes them more certain of their own ideas? Directness and honesty may give you a feeling of relief, but they also stir up antagonism. As tactics they are ineffective.
Think of people’s ego and vanity as a kind of front. When they are attacking you and you don’t know why, it is often because you have inadvertently threatened their ego, their sense of importance in the world.
Cortés used this strategy often to deal with dissenters and troublemakers. At first he would seem to go along with their ideas, would even encourage them to take things further. In essence, he would get his enemies to expose themselves on a weak salient, where their selfish or unpopular ideas could be revealed. Now he had a target to hit.
When people present their ideas and arguments, they often censor themselves, trying to appear more conciliatory and flexible than is actually the case. If you attack them directly from the front, you end up not getting very far, because there isn’t much there to aim at. Instead try to make them go further with their ideas, giving you a bigger target. Do this by standing back, seeming to go along, and baiting them into moving rashly ahead.
When someone or something encircles us—narrowing our options, besieging us from all sides—we lose control of our emotions and make the kinds of mistakes that render the situation more hopeless.
There are many ways to envelop your opponents, but perhaps the simplest is to put whatever strength or advantage you naturally have to maximum use in a strategy of enclosure.
