The Enemy Gets a Vote
Do you have any idea of what that vote would be?
There’s an old expression that if you know yourself but not your opponent, you will only win half of your battles, ditto if you know your enemy but not yourself. However, if you know yourself and your enemy, you will win all of your battles.
Sure, it’s not literally true in literally every case. It is however metaphorically true.
One of the things I’ve pointed out with the recent shooting, and in previous discussions of altercations, is the degree to which some people cannot actually put themselves in the head of their opponent, or understand the limitations of physics, logistics, and situational awareness and reaction time in anything more complex than a tabletop boardgame (and even some wargamers, oddly… and I make the distinction in part because many boardgames of the euro variety go out of their way to avoid all but the most passive-aggressive conflict).
They cannot even put themselves into the position of the other side and project their own feelings and thoughts into what they would do with the options. God forbid you ask them to take someone with a foreign - literally or figuratively - mindset seriously insofar as what they say or believe, rather than treating them as a replaceable and re-educatable cog. Haidt had a massive realization that many self-described leftists cannot model the attitudes of the right or guess what they’d actually say because they so predominantly emphasize two of the labeled moral axes that they cannot barely imagine the others. The opposite did not hold true. Self-described conservatives could pull a trick similar to “how do you write women so well?” in “As Good as it Gets,” and answer as a liberal with a much higher degree of accuracy.
In the Sun Tzu case, “understanding yourself” is about understanding your strengths, weaknesses, mindset, the triggers you can be played on, and in the army sense what resources you have, where units are stationed, how fast they can move and where they can appear, adn their capabilities. Ditto understanding your enemy.
It’s very difficult to understand your enemy if you cannot imagine how they would feel or respond to your own moves and actions. If you cannot even project yourself into those situations and how you would react wihtout an awareness of your own biases and baggage. If they’re just a cardboard cutout “evil guy from 1930’s Germany,” with no motives but a psychopathic joy of killing (that the “ICE observers” obviously don’t internalize given how they confront supposed sociopathic thugs with guns). If you do not understand their priorities, their resources, strengths, weaknesses, vices, and yes, virtues.
There is no such thing as a competent army or opponent without at least some virtues, no matter how outweighed…, and even an incompetent one can numbers on their side. Quantity has a quality all its’ own, and all that. And the left, even a lot of moderates who just consume too much mainstream news, have a cartoonish attitude toward anything labeled “right wing”, not helped by portrayals of anything resembling right wing ideology in the media. The immensely popular “Law and Order: SVU” is but one example, if you look at how they poison the well by using cartoonishly evil white men any time anything remotely antifeminist or pro-western is uttered, made easier because in that long running fantasy/parallel world series, the women and women are almost never at fault at all1. They dress it up as portraying both sides, but argument straying into worldview vice personal actions gets progressively more detached from reality as it departs from progressive orthodoxy, or is treated as having no basis in reality.
Anyone who insists that the officer in the Good shooting should not have shot is either a liar or cannot place themselves in the place of the officer. I know it’s a trope in a lot of Anime, as characters spend a minute thinking through the series of available moves, countermoves, and counter-counter-moves, and you wouldn’t do that in real time, but no serious person going into a confrontation with armed people should do so without understanding the likely trigger points to avoid, and being prepared to accept the consequences of said civil disobedience or worse. Or understanding people and verbal conflict well enough to spot them in real time, even if it’s harder and dicier.
This blindness is not restricted to one side of the aisle. “Liberals” may not model “conservatives” very well overall, and it’s easy to laugh at the weirdly morphed freaks one sees in antifa lineups, but whoever organizes the cells, distributes the supplies and pamphlets, is either much more aware of how the other side actually thinks in realtime, or has been well trained on the tactics of “Rules for Radicals” and similar resources that distill proven and working tactics and strategies. Someone has spent a lot of time putting the data together, setting up the funding and communication and logistics, as well as establishing ground rules such that the mainstream press can credibly claim “antifa doesn’t exist” unless they want to paint antifa as the only hope of salvation.
They definitely work hard to drive independent cameras and reporters out of anywhere they are acting - anyone who can’t be trusted to clip out provocations. It’s why many antifa clips feature a mob of people closely following people to drive them out, properly speaking assault, while not quite committing battery or aggravated assault. One of the ironies here is that is that many on the moderate left who buy these narratives and the media feed are just as ignorant of their own side’s actual beliefs and underlying worldview and behavior. Those who have seen the pamphlets as Good reportedly have have less excuse.
But in the end, there’s the quote you hear after Good is shot - shocked the police have real bullets. Someone trained up via propaganda and mainstream media coverage, unaware at best that ICE agents have been assaulted with cars, and that if their life is in danger, they are allowed to use deadly force. The fact that any path at all could even possibly lead to a lethal response, and that the agents, whether by default or policy due to the last year or two of protests, would be prepared to use lethal force, never crossed their minds.
Such ignorance will result in more dead bodies, though I think fewer are now truly that ignorant, no matter how hard they’re pushing the boundaries.
You have to know how the other side thinks, and what they have to bring to the table, in any conflict, verbal or otherwise.
If they are, they were pushed into it by a man, almost always white. The one exception I recall was a ripoff of the university rape claims and the mattress girl, where they found out she was lying, and even then they lamented that women would be hurt because people might not unquestioningly believe an accusation.
Thank you! As Lewis pointed out in the Screwtape Letters, you can't really get a very evil man without some virtues to build from. Modern fiction has convinced a lot of people that the evil must be totally devoid of any goodness.