The 33 Strategies of War

by Robert Greene

To communicate in a deep and real way, you must bring people back to their childhood, when they were less defensive and more impressed by sounds, images, actions, a world of preverbal communication. 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. That is precisely the language Hitchcock developed and perfected over the years. With actors he wanted to get the most natural performance out of them, in essence get them not to act. To tell them to relax or be natural would have been absurd; it would only have made them more awkward and defensive than they already were. Instead, just as his father had gotten him to feel terror in a London police station, he got them to feel the emotions of the movie: frustration, isolation, loss of inhibition. (Of course he hadn’t mislaid the handcuffs’ key somewhere on the set of The 39 Steps,

Understand: you may have brilliant ideas, the kind that could revolutionize the world, but unless you can express them effectively, they will have no force, no power to enter people’s minds in a deep and lasting way. You must focus not on yourself or on the need you feel to express what you have to say but on your audience—as intently as a general focuses on the enemy he is strategizing to defeat.

You are not after personal expression, but power and influence. The less people consciously focus on the communicative form you have chosen, the less they realize how far your dangerous ideas are burrowing into their minds.

To the extent that this strikes at their insecurities, your wise words may merely have the effect of entrenching them in the very habits you want to change. Once your language has gone out into the world, your audience will do what they want with it, interpreting it according to their own preconceptions. Often when people appear to listen, nod their heads, and seem persuaded, they are actually just trying to be agreeable—or even just to get rid of you.

Meanwhile he would compliment his listeners, feeding their vanity by praising their ideas in an offhand way. Then, in a series of questions constituting a dialog with a member of his audience, he would slowly tear apart the very ideas he had just praised. He would never directly say anything negative, but through his questions he would make the other person see the incompleteness or falsity of his ideas. This was confusing; he had just professed his own ignorance, and he had sincerely praised his interlocutors. Yet he had somehow raised a lot of doubts about what they had claimed to know.

What you need to pay attention to is not simply the content of your communication but the form—the way you lead people to the conclusions you desire, rather than telling them the message in so many words. If you want people to change a bad habit, for example, much more effective than simply trying to persuade them to stop is to show them—perhaps by mirroring their bad behavior in some way—how annoying that habit feels to other people. If you want to make people with low self-esteem feel better about themselves, praise has a superficial effect; instead you must prod them into accomplishing something tangible, giving them a real experience. That will translate into a much deeper feeling of confidence. If

It is best to seem to conform to these norms, then, by parroting the accepted wisdom, including the proper moral ending. But you can use details here and there to say something else. If you are writing a novel, for instance, you might put your dangerous opinions in the mouth of the villain but express them with such energy and color that they become more interesting than the speeches of the hero. Not everyone will understand your innuendos and layers of meaning, but some certainly will, at least those with the proper discernment; and mixed messages will excite your audience: indirect forms of expression—silence, innuendo, loaded details, deliberate blunders—make people feel as if they were participating, uncovering the meaning on their own. The more that people participate in the communication process, the more deeply they internalize its ideas.

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 real truth, in other words, what happens in fact, not in words or theories. In examining the career of a pope, for instance, Machiavelli would look at the alliances he had built and the wealth and territory he had acquired, not at his character or religious proclamations. Deeds and results do not lie. You must learn to apply the same barometer to your attempts at communication, and to those of other people.

Communication that does not advance its cause or produce a desired result is just self-indulgent talk, reflecting no more than people’s love of their own voice and of playing the role of the moral crusader. The effective truth of what they have written or said is that nothing has been changed. The ability to reach people and alter their opinions is a serious affair, as serious and strategic as war. You must be harsher on yourself and on others: failure to communicate is the fault not of the dull-witted audience but of the unstrategic communicator.

Even as you plan your communications to make them more consciously strategic, you must develop the reverse ability to decode the subtexts, hidden messages, and unconscious signals in what other people say. When people speak in vague generalities, for example, and use a lot of abstract terms like “justice,” “morality,” “liberty,” and so on, without really ever explaining the specifics of what they are talking about, they are almost always hiding something. This is often their own nasty but necessary actions, which they prefer to cover up under a screen of righteous verbiage. When you hear such talk, be suspicious. 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. In general, you must pay attention to the forms in which people express themselves; never take their content at face value.

As the story of Canaris demonstrates, if there is something you want to fight or destroy, it is often best to repress your desire to act out your hostility, revealing your position and letting the other side know your intentions. What you gain in publicity, and perhaps in feeling good about expressing yourself openly, you lose in a curtailment of your power to cause real damage, particularly if the enemy is strong.

HUMAN,

What? Reread

The lotus strategy is widely applicable. When confronted by something difficult or thorny, do not be distracted or discouraged by its formidable outer appearance; think your way into the soft core, the center from which the problem blossoms.

The stakes are high, which is why conspiracies are so often difficult and dangerous. The main weakness in any conspiracy is usually human nature: the higher the number of people who are in on the plot, the higher the odds that someone will reveal it, whether deliberately or accidentally. As Benjamin Franklin said, “Three may keep a secret if two of them are dead.” No matter how confident you may be of your fellow conspirators, you cannot know for certain what is going on in their minds—the doubts they may be having, the people they may be talking to.

Nothing sows more doubts in conspirators’ minds than last-minute changes. Even given all this insurance, keep in mind that most conspiracies fail and, in their failure, create all kinds of unintended consequences. Even the successful plot to assassinate Julius Caesar led not to the restoration of the Roman Republic, as the conspirators intended, but eventually to the undemocratic regime of the emperor Augustus.

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. An acquaintance is good or bad, nice or mean, his or her intentions noble or nefarious; an event is positive or negative, beneficial or harmful; we are happy or sad. The truth is that nothing in life is ever so simple.

In war as in life, the false surrender depends on the seamless appearance of submission. Dessalines did not just give in, he actively served his former enemies. To make this work, you must do likewise: play up your weakness, your crushed spirit, your desire to be friends—an emotional ploy with great power to distract. You must also be something of an actor. Any sign of ambivalence will ruin the effect.

Remember: 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. Being passive and making others come to you is a brilliant form of aggression.

Most often their behavior is relatively harmless: perhaps they are chronically late, or make flattering comments that hide a sarcastic sting, or offer help but never follow through. These common tactics are best ignored; just let them wash over you as part of the current of modern life, and never take them personally. You have more important battles to fight.

Indeed, you can virtually recognize the harmful variety of passive aggression by the strength of emotions it churns up in you: not superficial annoyance but confusion, paranoia, insecurity, and anger.

To defeat the passive-aggressive warrior, you must first work on yourself. This means being acutely aware of the blame-shifting tactic as it happens. Squash any feelings of guilt it might begin to make you feel. These types can be very ingratiating, using flattery to draw you into their web, preying on your insecurities. It is often your own weakness that sucks you into the passive-aggressive dynamic. Be alert to this.

If it happens to be a partner in a relationship in which you cannot disengage, the only solution is to find a way to make the person feel comfortable in expressing any negative feelings toward you and encouraging it. This may be hard to take initially, but it may defuse his or her need to be underhanded; and open criticisms are easier to deal with than covert sabotage.

You can also try this with the less harmful types—the ones who are chronically late, for instance: giving them a taste of their own medicine may open their eyes to the irritating effects of their behavior. In any event, you must never leave the passive-aggressive time and space in which to operate. Let them take root and they will find all kinds of sly ways to pull you here and there. Your best defense is to be sensitive to any passive-aggressive manifestations in those around you and to keep your mind as free as possible from their insidious influence.

Understand: we are all extremely susceptible to the emotions of those around us. It is often hard for us to perceive how deeply we are affected by the moods that can pass through a group. This is what makes the use of terror so effective and so dangerous: with a few well-timed acts of violence, a handful of assassins can spark all kinds of corrosive thoughts and uncertainties.

Few victories in history are total or bring about lasting peace; few defeats lead to permanent destruction. The ability to effect some kind of change, to attain a limited goal, is what makes terrorism so alluring, particularly to those who are otherwise powerless.

The strategy’s main weakness is the terrorists’ lack of ties to the public or to a real political base. Often isolated, living in hiding, they are prone to lose contact with reality, overestimating their own power and overplaying their hand.

His sessions with his patients, for example, were often cut short before the usual fifty minutes were up; they could last any period of time that he saw fit and were sometimes as brief as ten minutes. This deliberate provocation to the medical establishment caused a great deal of scandal, setting off a chain reaction that shook the psychoanalytic community for years. (These sessions were also quite terrorizing for the patients, who could never be sure when Lacan would end them and so were forced to concentrate and make every moment count—all of which had great therapeutic value, according to Lacan.)

If you have to deal with a terroristic spouse or boss, it is best to fight back in a determined but dispassionate manner—the response such types least expect.

To consider the 9/11 attack a failure because it did not achieve Al Qaeda’s ultimate goal of pushing the United States out of the Middle East or spurring a pan-Islamic revolution is to misread their strategy and to judge them by the standards of conventional warfare. Terrorists quite often have a large goal, but they know that the chances of reaching it in one blow are fairly negligible. They just do what they can to start off their chain reaction.

A counterstrike may hurt them but will not deter them; in fact, it may even embolden them and help them gain recruits. Terrorists are often willing to spend years bringing you down. To hit them with a dramatic counterstrike is only to show your impatience, your need for immediate results, your vulnerability to emotional responses—all signs not of strength but of weakness.

In general, the most effective response to unconventional provocation is the least response: do as little as possible and that cunningly adjusted to the arena. Do no harm. Deny one’s self, do less rather than more. These are uncongenial to Americans who instead desire to deploy great force, quickly, to achieve a swift and final result. What is needed is a shift in the perception of those responsible in Washington: less can be more, others are not like us, and a neat and tidy world is not worth the cost. DRAGONWARS, J. BOWYER BELL, 1999

More valuable than military force here is solid intelligence, infiltration of the enemy ranks (working to find dissidents from within), and slowly and steadily drying up the money and resources on which the terrorist depends.