Comparing: Scarcity and Crowds

The Art of War 6:5.12-14

This article continues our project explaining each line of Sun Tzu’s work. The English and Chinese are from my award-winning translation, The Art of War and The Ancient Chinese Revealed. Start here for the book’s opening lines.

These lines are the last ones of the fifth Section of Chapter 6 of The Art of War. The topic is still the balance between weakness and strength, which Sun Tzu describes in these lines as “scarcity” and “crowd.” These terms can apply to people, money, time, or any other resource.

All competition is a comparison between alternatives. Another common strategic mistake is following the crowd instead of looking for the openings in scarcity. By definition, crowded ground offers many, many alternatives, of which we can only be one. By definition, scarcity offers only a few choices. While crowds naturally draw more people, standing out in crowds is difficult. In improving our positions in people’s minds, we do not find opportunities being compared to many others most of whom are unknown to us. The opposite is true: we want to be compared to as few as possible where we can know our rivals and how we compare.

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Like strength, crowds draw our attention. We naturally think of crowds as where the opportunities must be. The opposite is true. Our opportunities exist in scarcity. Everyone feels a stronger need for what is hard to get than for what is plentiful. In everyday competition, this scarcity is the unmet needs of others.

Position

Since my translation of The Art of War was written, as is customary, in terms of facing enemies on a military battlefield, we will leave out the English sentence translation here and focus only on the original Chinese characters. In the quotations below, we summarize each Chinese character as a single English word shown in < > brackets.

<Without> <place> <no> <prepare>

Strategic positions exist in the human mind. They exist in two basic components, their <place> and their <form>. The<place> is the category of comparisons in which a position is ranked. In our minds, we have different ladders for ranking positions in various categories. The <form> is the various strengths and weaknesses of a specific position, usually falling into the five key elements: mission, climate, ground, command, and methods.

Getting a place in the minds of others is the first step. Without it, we cannot <prepare> the strengths that we need to compete with others. Without a place, we have nothing to strengthen, nothing to prepare. Our place gives us a foundation to build upon.

<Then> <without> <place> <no> <scarce>

However, without a place, without a category to fit into, we also cannot have any weaknesses. Strength and weakness are relative terms arising only from comparison. within a category Without a place, we cannot be compared. We are empty everywhere, but, that emptiness itself becomes our strength.

This is the strength of the empty self described earlier in this chapter. This weakness allows us to develop a fresh positions in a new competitive area. How does this place arise from the nothingness of emptiness? We are given a place when we are born into a family. As newborns, we are the ultimate “empty self” where our extreme weakness and need become the basis of our creating a place for ourselves. Only with our growth do we earn all our future places in life.

Scarcity

It starts with scarcity, the initial problem for everyone. We may not have a position but space still exists. Since locations in space are all different, each offers its own unique resources that are the basis for the five elements that can give a position strength.

<Scarce> <is>

This scarcity exists outside of ourselves. It exists whether we see it or not. Everyone feels the lack of something. Often we feel we lack our “true” place in the world. No matter how rich or successful we become, we may still feel this lack. It can be described as the divine-shaped hole in our hearts. It is, indeed, a gift of the divine, motivating our search for more out of life. Today, our problem is seldom our need for more and more things. More and more often, we need more purpose and meaning in our lives.

We are all looking for ways to be more valuable to those around us. This starts with those in our family, but it reaches out to the people we work with and in our communities.

<Prepare> <men> <is> <also>

Because scarcity exists, our ability to develop strengths also exists. Strength is a response to need. The fact that anything survives proves that strength usually solves the problem of unmet needs. Scarcity or emptiness is the primordial need. Fullness, crowds, and strengths are all reactions to scarcity. These crowds come out of people’s joining together in preparing their strengths. These strengths may arise initially out of fear, our desire to defend ourselves, but they also arise out of our need and desire for more.

Our creation of fullness demands trust in our ability to fill what is empty. We may initially just do this for ourselves, but from our growing trust in what we can do well, we seek to extend our abilities to create fullness and strength for others.

Crowds

From our responses to emptiness, its opposite arises. Some <places> become <crowds>, that is, full. The question becomes how we react to this fullness.

<Crowd> <is>

While our unavoidable reaction to emptiness is to seek to fill the void, our reaction to fullness is often to join the crowd. This is a strategic mistake. A crowded area is where we are compared to too many others by too many judges. Strategically, we must seek separation from the crowd. We must seek our own form of specialization and develop unique <places> and <forms>, unique aspects to our positions.

<Make> <men> <prepare> <self> <is> <also>

This sharpens us each as individual <selves>. We can each work to prepare ourselves as individuals, with our own positions and own unique strengths based on the five elements. When we leave the crowd, we can establish ourselves as different, offering what the crowd does not. Competition is a comparison. The more unique we are, the less we will appeal to a crowd, but the more we will appeal to scarcity, which is where the biggest needs lie.