The 33 Strategies of War (37 page)

The first step in the process is to get over the idea that people are impenetrable mysteries and that only some trick will let you peek into their souls. If they seem mysterious, it is because almost all of us learn to disguise our true feelings and intentions from an early age. If we went around showing just how we felt and telling people what we planned to do, we would make ourselves vulnerable to malice, and if we always spoke our minds, we would offend a lot of people unnecessarily. So as we grow up, concealing much of what we are thinking becomes second nature.

This deliberate opacity makes the intelligence game difficult but not impossible. For even as people consciously struggle to conceal what is going on in their minds, they unconsciously want to reveal themselves. Hiding how we feel in social situations is exhausting; being able to show ourselves is a relief. We secretly want people to know us, even including our dark side. Even while we consciously struggle to control this hidden yearning, unconsciously we are always sending out signals that reveal a part of what is going on inside--slips of the tongue, tones of voice, styles of dress, nervous twitches, sudden irrational actions, a look in the eye that contradicts our words, the things we say after a drink.

Anger as spy.
--Anger empties out the soul and brings even its dregs to light. That is why, if we know no other way of discovering the truth of the matter, we must know how to put our acquaintances, our adherents and opponents, into a rage, so as to learn all that is really being thought and undertaken against us.

H
UMAN
, A
LL
T
OO
H
UMAN
, F
RIEDRICH
N
IETZSCHE
, 1886

Understand: day in and day out, people emit signals that reveal their intentions and deepest desires. If we do not pick them up, it is because we are not paying attention. The reason for this is simple: we are usually locked up in our own worlds, listening to our internal monologues, obsessed with ourselves and with satisfying our own egos. Like William Macnaghten, we tend to see other people merely as reflections of ourselves. To the extent that you can drop your self-interest and see people for who they are, divorced from your desires, you will become more sensitive to their signals.

The ability to read people was a critical survival skill for Japanese samurai and was particularly emphasized by the Shinkage school of swordsmanship. One of the school's earliest masters was the seventeenth-century samurai Yagyu Munenori. One spring afternoon in his later years, Munenori was taking a peaceful walk through his gardens, admiring the cherry blossoms. He was accompanied by a page/protector, who walked behind him, sword raised, as was the custom. Suddenly Munenori stopped in his tracks. He had a feeling of danger. Looking around, he saw nothing to warrant this feeling, but even so he was so troubled that he returned to his house and sat with his back against a post to prevent a surprise attack.

Then David fled from Nai'oth in Ramah, and came and said before Jonathan, "What have I done? What is my guilt? And what is my sin before your father, that he seeks my life?" And he said to him, "Far from it! You shall not die. Behold, my father does nothing either great or small without disclosing it to me; and why should my father hide this from me? It is not so." But David replied, "Your father knows well that I have found favor in your eyes; and he thinks, 'Let not Jonathan know this, lest he be grieved.' But truly, as the Lord lives and as your soul lives, there is but a step between me and death." Then said Jonathan to David, "Whatever you say, I will do for you." David said to Jonathan, "Behold, tomorrow is the new moon, and I should not fail to sit at table with the king; but let me go, that I may hide myself in the field till the third day at evening. If your father misses me at all, then say, 'David earnestly asked leave of me to run to Bethlehem his city; for there is a yearly sacrifice there for all the family.' If he says, 'Good!' it will be well with your servant; but if he is angry, then know that evil is determined by him."...And Jonathan said to David, "Come, let us go out into the field." So they both went out into the field.... So David hid himself in the field; and when the new moon came, the king sat down to eat food. The king sat upon his seat, as at other times, upon the seat by the wall; Jonathan sat opposite, and Abner sat by Saul's side, but David's place was empty. Yet Saul did not say anything that day; for he thought, "Something has befallen him; he is not clean, surely he is not clean." But on the second day, the morrow after the new moon, David's place was empty. And Saul said to Jonathan his son, "Why has not the son of Jesse come to the meal, either yesterday or today?" Jonathan answered Saul, "David earnestly asked leave of me to go to Bethlehem; he said, 'Let me go; for our family holds a sacrifice in the city, and my brother has commanded me to be there. So now, if I have found favor in your eyes, let me get away, and see my brothers.' For this reason he has not come to the king's table." Then Saul's anger was kindled against Jonathan, and he said to him, "You son of a perverse, rebellious woman, do I not know that you have chosen the son of Jesse to your own shame, and to the shame of your mother's nakedness? For as long as the son of Jesse lives upon the earth, neither you nor your kingdom shall be established. Therefore send and fetch him to me, for he shall surely die." Then Jonathan answered Saul his father, "Why should he be put to death? What has he done?" But Saul cast his spear at him to smite him; so Jonathan knew that his father was determined to put David to death. And Jonathan rose from the table in fierce anger and ate no food the second day of the month, for he was grieved for David, because his father had disgraced him.

1 S
AMUEL
20:1-11, 24-34

After Munenori had sat there for a while, his page asked him what was the matter. The samurai confessed that while looking at the cherry blossoms he had had an intimation of imminent danger, of an enemy on the attack. What troubled him now was that the danger had apparently been imaginary--he must have hallucinated it. A samurai depended on his keen instincts to anticipate attack. If Munenori had lost that power, his life as a warrior was over.

Suddenly the page threw himself to the ground and confessed: as Munenori walked in the garden, the thought had come to the page that if he were to strike at his master while the samurai was lost in admiration of the cherry blossoms, not even this gifted swordsman could have parried his attack. Munenori had not lost his skill at all; quite the contrary--his incomparable sensitivity to other people's emotions and thoughts had allowed him to pick up sensations from someone behind his back, rather as a horse senses the energy of its rider or a dog the movements of its owner. An animal has that sensitivity because it pays complete attention. Similarly, the Shinkage school taught warriors to empty their minds, centering themselves in the moment as animals did and keeping themselves from getting derailed by any particular thought. This would allow the Shinkage warrior to read in his opponent's elbow or hand the slight tension that signaled an attack; he could look through his opponent's eyes and sense the coming blow or notice the nervous shuffle of the feet that indicated fear or confusion. A master like Munenori could virtually read someone's thoughts when the other person wasn't even visible.

The power taught by the Shinkage school--the same power possessed by Prince Metternich--was the ability to let go of one's ego, to submerge oneself temporarily in the other person's mind. You will be amazed at how much you can pick up about people if you can shut off your incessant interior monologue, empty your thoughts, and anchor yourself in the moment. The details you now see give you unfiltered information from which you can put together an accurate picture of people's weaknesses and desires. Be particularly attentive to their eyes: it takes a lot of effort to hide the eyes' message about a person's state of mind.

According to the baseball pitcher Bob Lemon, the great player Ted Williams "was the only hitter who you felt saw through you." In the struggle between pitcher and batter, the pitcher has the advantage of knowing what pitch he will throw. The hitter can only guess at that, which is why even the best of them usually connect only one out of every three or four times. Somehow Williams changed those odds.

Williams's method wasn't magic, or even intuition; it was simple enough. He made baseball pitchers his study, watching their patterns over the course of a game, a season, a career. He would ask the pitchers on his own team endless questions about their process, trying to get a feel for how they thought. At the plate he would empty his mind of everything but the pitcher, noticing the slightest hitch in his windup or change in his grip--anything that would signal his intentions. The end result seemed uncanny: at bat, Williams was able to think himself into the pitcher's mind and anticipate the pitch that was coming. Sometimes he would even see himself as another person--a pitcher trying to outwit the great hitter Ted Williams. As Williams demonstrates, the ability to mimic and get inside your enemies' thought patterns depends on collecting as much information on them as you can, analyzing their past behavior for its habitual patterns, and being alert to the signs they give off in the present.

It is of course critical that people be unaware you are watching them so closely. A friendly front, like Prince Metternich's to Napoleon, will help disguise what you're doing. Do not ask too many questions; the trick is to get people to relax and open up without prodding, shadowing them so quietly that they never guess what you're really up to.

Information is useless unless you know how to interpret it, how to use it to tell appearance from reality. You must learn how to recognize a range of psychological types. Be alert, for instance, to the phenomenon of the masked opposite: when someone strikingly manifests a particular personality trait, that trait may well be a cover-up. The oily character who is ingratiatingly effusive with flattery may be hiding hostility and ill will; the aggressive bully may be hiding insecurity; the moralizer may be making a show of purity to hide nefarious desires. Whether they're throwing dust in your eyes or their own--they may be trying to convince themselves that they're not what they're afraid they are--the opposite trait lurks below the surface.

In general, it is easier to observe people in action, particularly in moments of crisis. Those are the times when they either reveal their weakness or struggle so hard to disguise it that you can see through the mask. You can actively probe them by doing things that seem harmless but get a response--maybe say something bold or provocative, then see how they react. Making people emotional, pushing their buttons, will touch some deep part of their nature. Either they will let slip some truth about themselves or they will put on a mask that you, in the laboratory situation you have created, will be able to peer behind.

A critical part of understanding people is gauging their powers of resistance. Without that knowledge you will either over-or underestimate them, depending on your own levels of fear and confidence. You need to know how much fight people have in them. Someone hiding his cowardice and lack of resolve can be made to surrender with a single violent push; someone desperate who has little to lose will fight to the bitter end. The Mongols used to begin their campaigns with a battle whose only purpose was to test their opponent's strength and resolve. They would never deal with an enemy until they had gauged his morale. This set-up battle also had the benefit of revealing something of his strategy and thought.

The quality of the information you gather on your enemies is more important than the quantity. A single but crucial nugget can be the key to their destruction. When the Carthaginian general Hannibal saw that the Roman general he was facing was arrogant and hot-tempered, he would deliberately play weak, luring the man into a rash attack. Once Churchill saw that Hitler had a paranoid streak, becoming irrational at the merest hint of vulnerability, the British prime minister knew how to unhinge the German fuhrer: by feigning to attack some marginal area like the Balkans, he could make him see threats on all sides and spread out his defenses, a critical military mistake.

In 1988, Lee Atwater was a political strategist on the team of the senior George Bush, who was then in the race to become that year's Republican presidential nominee. Discovering that Bush's main rival, Senator Robert Dole, had a terrible temper that his aides had to struggle to control, Atwater devised endless stratagems to push Dole's buttons. Not only did an upset Dole look unpresidential to the American public, but an emotional and angry man rarely thinks straight. A disturbed mind is one you can control and unbalance at will.

There are, of course, limits to how much intelligence gathering you can achieve by firsthand observation. A network of spies will extend your vision, particularly as you learn to interpret the information they bring you. An informal network is the best--a group of allies recruited over time to be your eyes and ears. Try to make friends with people at or near the source of information on your rival; one well-placed friend will yield far more than will a handful of paid spies. In Napoleon's time his intelligence network was second to none, but his best information came from friends whom he had carefully positioned in diplomatic circles around Europe.

Always look for internal spies, people in the enemy camp who are dissatisfied and have an ax to grind. Turn them to your purposes and they will give you better information than any infiltrator you sneak in from outside. Hire people the enemy has fired--they will tell you how the enemy thinks. President Bill Clinton got his best intelligence on the Republicans from his adviser Dick Morris, who had worked for them for years and knew their weaknesses, both personal and organizational. A warning: never rely on one spy, one source of information, no matter how good. You risk being played or getting slanted, one-sided information.