The 33 Strategies of War

by Robert Greene

Bait them with subtle challenges that get under their skin, triggering an overreaction, an embarrassing mistake. The victory you are after is to isolate them. Make them hang themselves through their own self-destructive tendencies, leaving you blameless and clean.

Very important note

first, your rivals harbor the seeds of their own self-destruction, and second, a rival who is made to feel defensive and inferior, however subtly, will tend to act defensive and inferior, to his or her detriment.

Key points

Key

mask is like the scar tissue covering a wound: touch it the wrong way and it hurts. Your victims’ responses start to go out of control:

When you sense you have colleagues who may prove dangerous—or are actually already plotting something—you must try first to gather intelligence on them. Look at their everyday behavior, their past actions, their mistakes, for signs of their flaws.

Begin by doing something to prick the underlying wound, creating doubt, insecurity, and anxiety. It might be an offhand comment or something that your victims sense as a challenge to their position within the court.

they feel attacked but are not sure why or how. The result is a vague, troubling sensation. A feel...

You then follow up with secondary actions that feed their doubts. Here it is often best to work covertly,

Tactic 3

having piled up enough self-doubt to trigger a reaction, you stand back and let the target self-destruct.

To win without your victim’s knowing how it happened or just what you have done is the height of unconventional warfare.

Your goal is to get these rivals to put their ambition and selfishness on display. The way to do this is to pique their latent but powerful insecurities—make them worry that people do not like them, that their position is unstable, that their path to the top is not clear.

THE COMPLETE UPMANSHIP, STEPHEN POTTER,

If you seem too ambitious, you stir up resentment in other people; overt power grabs and sharp rises to the top are dangerous, creating envy, distrust, and suspicion.

The key to making it work is to have a clear sense of your objective, the empire you want to forge, and then to identify the small, outlying areas of the empire that you will first gobble up. Each bite must have a logic in an overall strategy but must be small enough that no one senses your larger intentions.

Tactic instead of convincing everyone they need to be a wolf why not teach each style how to use their own skills?

The truth is that most people are conservative by nature. Desperate to keep what they have, they dread the unforeseen consequences and situations that conflict inevitably brings.

They hate confrontation and try to avoid it. (That is why so many people resort to passive aggression to get what they want.)

The strategy works as follows: Suppose there is something you want or need for your security and power. Take it without discussion or warning and you give your enemies a choice, either to fight or to accept the loss and leave you alone.

Only nibble at what you want and you never spark enough anger, fear, or mistrust to make people overcome their natural reluctance to fight. Let enough time pass between bites and you will also play to the shortness of people’s attention spans.

Also, You enter unoccupied aspace in the same way. maybe a politics lesso s part of the 5 rules of politics could be a philospher's guide to politics - a warrior's guide - a charismatics vuide - they should al have a commo center but based on their strengths and attitudes they can take a different aproach take small but purposeful bites know when to block ad know whe to hit back

The key to the fait accompli strategy is to act fast and without discussion.

Tactic

It is part of people’s conservatism to prefer endless discussion to action.

Symptom

Caught up in the emotions of our dreams and the vastness of our desires, we find it very difficult to focus on the small, tedious steps usually necessary to attain them. We tend to think in terms of giant leaps toward our goals. But in the social world as in nature, anything of size and stability grows slowly.

It forces us to think in terms of a process, a sequence of connected steps and actions, no matter how small, which has immeasurable psychological benefits as well. Too often the magnitude of our desires overwhelms us; taking that small first step makes them seem realizable. There is nothing more therapeutic than action.

Key point

when you take a bite, even a small one, make a show of acting out of self-defense. It also helps to appear as the underdog.

exploiting people’s short attention spans—while proclaiming to one and all that you are a person of peace. In fact, it would be the height of wisdom to make your bite a little larger upon occasion and then giving back some of what you have taken.

your only counterstrategy is to prevent any further progress or faits accomplis. A quick and forceful response will usually be enough to discourage the nibblers, who often resort to this strategy out of weakness and cannot afford many battles. If they are tougher and more ambitious, like Frederick the Great, that forceful response becomes more crucial still.

At all cost, avoid language that is static, preachy, and overly personal.

If you cant know your audience then.ylu must know what you want them to feel and then get them.to feel it.

A Hitchcock film was not just seen, it was experienced, and it stayed in the mind long after the viewing.

As Hitchcock discovered, to teach people a lesson, to really alter their behavior, you must alter their experience, aim at their emotions, inject unforgettable images into their minds, shake them up. Unless you are supremely eloquent, it is hard to accomplish this through words and direct expression.

There are simply too many people talking at us, trying to persuade us of this or that. Words become part of this noise, and we either tune them out or become even more resistant.

It requires speaking a kind of language composed of actions, all strategically designed to effect people’s moods and emotions, what they can least control.

If you want to communicate an important idea, you must not preach; instead make your readers or listeners connect the dots and come to the conclusion on their own. Make them internalize the thought you are trying to communicate; make it seem to emerge from their own minds. Such indirect communication has the power to penetrate deep behind people’s defenses.

One of Machiavelli’s most revolutionary ideas was to apply this standard to politics: what matters is not what people say or intend but the results of their actions, whether power is increased or decreased. This is what Machiavelli called the “effective truth”—the

Politics

Meanwhile people who use cutesy, colloquial language, brimming with clichés and slang, may be trying to distract you from the thinness of their ideas, trying to win you over not by the soundness of their arguments but by making you feel chummy and warm toward them.

And people who use pretentious, flowery language, crammed with clever metaphors, are often more interested in the sound of their own voices than in reaching the audience with a genuine thought.

Instead of trying to conquer this group from the outside, you burrow your way into it. As an insider you can gather valuable information about how it functions and particularly about its members’ hypocrisies and weaknesses—knowledge you can use to wage insidious intraorganizational warfare. From the inside you can divide and conquer.

In attacking any group, the lotus strategist thinks first of opening an inner front. Confederates on the inside will provide valuable intelligence on the enemy’s vulnerabilities. They will silently and subtly sabotage him. They will spread internal dissension and division. The strategy can weaken the enemy to the point where you can finish him off with a penetrating blow; it can also bring down the enemy in and of itself.

A variation on the lotus strategy is to befriend your enemies, worming your way into their hearts and minds. As your targets’ friend, you will naturally learn their needs and insecurities, the soft interior they try so hard to hide. Their guard will come down with a friend.

keep in mind that most conspiracies fail and, in their failure, create all kinds of unintended consequences.

Your only real safeguard against conspiracies and saboteurs is to keep your troops satisfied, engaged in their work, and united by their cause. They will tend to police themselves and turn in any grumblers who are trying to foment trouble from within. It is only in unhealthy and decaying bodies that cancerous cells can take root.

To follow the passive-aggressive strategy, you must seem to go along with people, offering no resistance. But actually you dominate the situation. You are noncommittal, even a little helpless, but that only means that everything revolves around you. Some people may sense what you are up to and get angry. Don’t worry—just make sure you have disguised your aggression enough that you can deny it exists.

Gandhi and his associates repeatedly deplored the inability of their people to give organized, effective, violent resistance against injustice and tyranny. His own experience was corroborated

STRATEGIES OF PSYCHOTHERAPY, JAY HALEY, 1963

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Metternich may have been history’s most effective public practitioner of passive aggression. Other diplomats sometimes thought him cautious, even weak, but in the end, as if by magic, he always got what he wanted. The key to his success was his ability to hide his aggression to the point where it was invisible.

changing shape like Proteus himself. Remember: people are willful and perverse. Opposing them directly or trying to change their ideas will often have the contrary effect. A passive, compliant front, on the other hand, gives them nothing to fight against or resist. Going along with their energy gives you the power to divert it in the direction you want,

Their inability to get what you are doing in focus gives you room to work behind the scenes, checking their progress, isolating them from other people, luring them into dangerous moves that make them dependent on your support.

We humans have a particular limitation to our reasoning powers that causes us endless problems: when we are thinking about someone or about something that has happened to us, we generally opt for the simplest, most easily digestible interpretation.

Dessalines’s use of passive aggression has deep roots in military strategy, in what can be called the “false surrender.”

it is never wise to seem too eager for power, wealth, or fame. Your ambition may carry you to the top, but you will not be liked and will find your unpopularity a problem. Better to disguise your maneuvers for power: you do not want it but have found it forced upon you.

Tactic