Comparing: Mental Maps

Art of War 4:5.1-3

This section is at the end of Chapter 4 on Positions. It brings us back to a simple fact: positions are a map, not the territory. What is real? We are, as people. Positions are a simplification of our complexities. People are not only too complex for us to understand others, but we are too complex to understand ourselves. This is especially true since we can hide our innermost goals and values not only from others, but from ourselves.

This last section of the chapter on positions allows us to examine the key differences between the maps that we must use for strategy and a reality that is too complex for our limited understanding.

Positions versus People

(In the quotations from The Art of War and the Ancient Chinese Revealed below, we summarize each Chinese character as a single English word shown in < > brackets. The Chinese is followed by a sentence from my English translation.)

<Victory> <is> <of> <battle> <people> <also,>
Winning a battle is always a matter of people.

Our success doesn’t depend on the simplifications of positions. It depends on the depths within all of us. When we are compared and when we compare others, we use positions to facilitate the process, but what we seek to compare is real people.

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