The Art of Comparison 10: Misconceptions
Warfare is one thing.
It is a philosophy of deception.When you are ready, you try to appear incapacitated.
When active, you pretend inactivity.
When you are close to the enemy, you appear distant.
When far away, you pretend you are near
Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Chapter 1, Section 4: Lines 1-6
The first two lines here are perhaps the most misunderstood in The Art of War. My translation, sadly, contributes to the confusion by following other English translations. Most think that these lines mean that competition is requires deception. I thought the same thing before I spent twenty years analyzing and teaching these strategic methods.
The five Chinese characters mean:
[War] [is] [deceive] [philosophy] [also].
The “philosophy” is the Chinese character, tao, that practical strategy describes as “mission” and “goals.” Tao literally means “the way,” as in both a path and a way of life. Today, I would translate these characters as, “Competition is also a deceiving path.” As the old line goes, “The problem isn’t what we don’t know but what we think we know that ain’t so.”
The problem is that appearances are deceiving. We are filled with misconceptions about what we are seeing. We can see actions, but the motivations behind actions are not visible. This is why we listen to discover motivations, but words can also be deceiving. However, people are less likely to deceive about their goals and values than their actions. Clever words can always justify actions. We must compare actions to goals and values to understand what is more likely to be true.
The Hidden Truth
The truth is always partly hidden. As Paul said in the New Testament, “We see through a glass, darkly.” The “glass” is the filter of our own assumptions, our own points of view. We must always be aware that we make all strategic decisions based on limited information. We naturally try to compare what we know more for certain to what appears less certain, but we will always err. We must suspect what is certain and watch for what is uncertain. Sun Tzu explored these limitations in the second line above.
When you are ready, you try to appear incapacitated.
I translated this verse in the second person, “you are,” because, in English, we need a subject to build sentences. But the ancient Chinese is formless. Characters are concepts, not verbs, noun, adverbs, etc. In translating a concept as a verb, we can use “he” or “I” for the “you.” The seven characters on this line says:
[Make][able][and yet][show][no][of][ability].
In the more abstract Chinese, this line could mean:
“When they make themselves ready, they may seem incapacitated.”
Or, “When I make myself capable, I may find I am incapable.”
In other words, what we see and think is not necessarily real. When we are prepared for what is coming, we can still act like we are unprepared because we do not know what is coming. Our apparent incapacity is misleading, not because we are trying to deceive anyone, but because we do not know. We must always compare our readiness with what could happen with the knowledge that we do not know. We keep ourselves adaptable by remaining unsure.
Visible and Invisible Action
When active, you pretend inactivity.
When active, they appear inactive.
When active, I see myself as inactive.
Action means doing. Our mistaken assumption is that all action involves movements that we can see. But one of the most important forms of action is decision making. Decisions are the cause that determine their future actions and our own. Materialism only sees cause and effect working from the past into the present. But for conscious human beings, it works from the future into the now. Our visions of the future determine what we do now. A materialistic view is that a cake exists today because someone decided to make it yesterday. The strategic view is more psychological: a cake is baked today only if someone wants it tomorrow. Cakes do not bake themselves. The most important step that creates them, the decision motivated by goals, is unseen.
We are also surrounded by critical unseen actions. We are always doing, but dew know what we are doing. We can see someone on the phone, but we do not know who they are talking to and what they are saying. The actions that affect us can surprise or disappoint.
Close and Distant
When you are close to the enemy, you appear distant.
I added “to the enemy” to this line to provide some context. The Chinese again is more general:
[Near][and yet][show][it][far].
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