Environmental Vulnerability
This is not an article about “climate change” except in the sense of hoe our human condition changes. In Sun Tzu's The Art of War, written 2,500 years ago, “fire attacks” are a loophole in the strategic rule that damaging opponents is too costly for long-term success. While Sun Tzu wrote about actual fire, that is, starting a fire to destroy some opponent’s position, the main advantage of these attacks was that they leveraged the power of the environment against others without the risks or costs of direct conflict.
In our modern world, where we compete on the basis of psychology, our environment is still used against opponents. However, the danger is not the natural world, but our social world: the government, the media, the legal system, social networking, and so on. Lawsuits, government investigations, bad publicity, and demands for “canceling” opponents are today's forms of “fire” attacks. In some of my books, I refer to these generally as “fire storms of controversy.” Though the examples we see on the news are those directed at large organizations or well-known individuals, most environmental attacks are directed at unknown individuals and small organizations.
This article looks at how rivals and opponents can use the larger environment against us. This is a first of a series of articles about the concept of “fire attacks” and how we can avoid getting burned by them.
The Larger Environment
Established positions have a degree of natural security from opponents. We hold our positions because they are firmly established in the minds of those who make judgments about us. However, the competitive environment is larger than the world of our supporters. It includes everyone in our larger communities. This larger world is always more powerful than we are, so it represents a potential source of danger that we cannot ignore.
The vast bulk of society is made up of people who have no opinion about us. Their self-interest and our self-interest do not normally overlap. But this larger society also has many institutions within it: the various components of government, the components of the legal system such as courts, lawyers, and police, and the communication media. Today, these communication systems include not only traditional media but the new social network. All of these organizations have their own goals and values that we cannot afford to ignore.
This larger environment can also include potential rivals or opponents. These people may not normally care about us or even know about us. They are often not rivals in the traditional sense. However, when conditions are right, these potential opponents can discover us as targets of opportunity, targets they can use to advance themselves or their cause by leveraging the larger environment as a weapon against us. Their motivations can be individualistic, where they see some opportunity in undermining our positions. However, their motivations can also be clan-based. These opponents seek to advance within their particular clan by finding a target to promote clan values. Clan values are often be nihilistic, seeking to destroy those who are not members of the clan, often out of envy.
All environmental attacks are attacks by proxy. The conditions and forces in the environment do the work. An opponent's role is limited only to sparking the “fire” attack, usually in a hidden way working behind the scenes. Our first concern is with defending our position against our vulnerability to such attacks. Many of our reactions can do more damage than the “firestorm” itself.
Fire Storms and Changing Values
The conditions for fire storms depend on shifts in the social climate to create the needed fuel. These shifts are usually psychological, when, what was once acceptable behavior almost everywhere becomes unacceptable, at least to some small but vocal group. This “unacceptable behavior” is the fuel in the environment that is used to power these attacks. We do not create these environmental conditions. We can be blissfully unaware of them until we become embroiled in a firestorm fueled by them.
The more chaotic society becomes psychologically, the more unpredictable the climate becomes. Stability depends upon a foundation of shared beliefs. The one advantage of traditional ideas is that they have survived the test of time, the test being that they created stable societies. When belief systems erode and too many people are encouraged to follow their own ideas, any new set of values can become the basis for a firestorm.
We must be aware of what types of new “fuel” are being used to feed new firestorms of controversy so that we can avoid creating it so that it can be used against us as some future date. Defending our positions requires constantly monitoring our environment for vulnerabilities. Emerging values may represent a very small section of society, but our media gives a lot more weight and credibility to novel oddities than to a large base of tradition.
Points of Vulnerability
There are five points at which our positions are vulnerable to environmental attacks. If we recognize these five targets, we can better monitor them to avoid opening ourselves to such attacks. Generally, these five points of vulnerability are:
The key people upon which our positions depend,
The immediate resources which we need to maintain our positions.
The systems we use for communication and transportation.
The long-term assets that we have developed in our positions, and
The structural dependencies of our organizations.
We will discuss all these points of vulnerability in more detail in future articles. Environmental attacks or “fire storms” are primarily tests of leadership skills. Defense against these attacks is the single greatest test of our decision-making. One constant rule for defense is that we cannot panic. Overreaction usually causes more damage than the attack itself. Our decisions and reactions in these situations determine whether we maintain support for our position or create openings for our opponents. Many large organizations today are self-destructing in the face of these environmental attacks.
We must know how to defend against five types of environmental attacks. These types of attacks and the appropriate defenses against them will also be the topics of future articles. Different types of environmental attacks follow different courses of events, but these attacks can all be defended. Some of these attacks can even be turned against opponents that instigate them.
Conclusions
People have spent trillions because of what they perceive as an overheating of ouephysical environment. However, the overheating to our social environment is a much greater danger. Historically, we humans have shown great adaptability to environmental change. What brings societies to their knees is usually their lack of attention to the fire storms undermining their own institutions.