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|---|---|
| Do not thwart the enemy retreating home. | |
| If you surround the enemy, leave an outlet. | |
| Do not press an enemy that is cornered. | |
| These are the principles of warfare. | |
| Organized war, rhetoric, politeness. | |
| These are the tools of the civilized man. | |
| So it behooves us to ask the question, what is organized warfare? | |
| What is war exactly? | |
| It is not mere violence. | |
| Violence is the domain of the barbarian, is to assuage the ego, to demonstrate personal greatness at the expense of the civilization. | |
| Barbarians engage in violence. | |
| Civilized men engage in warfare. | |
| Warfare is the coercion of others using violence. | |
| Again, let's go back to Sun Tzi. | |
| The highest form of achievement in battle is to win the war without having to wage a battle in the first place. | |
| This is why you leave your enemy an outlet. | |
| You don't seek to destroy the enemy. | |
| You don't seek to assuage your petty ego concerns by proving that you are the biggest one around. | |
| You go out there with a goal and you accomplish that goal using violence as part of the tool set. | |
| This is why you leave them an out. | |
| You leave them a place that they can rout to. | |
| An easier way to understand this, you know, we could go into a huge big thing about routing the enemy, etc. | |
| An easier way to understand this is the use of landmines. | |
| Now, most people, when they think of landmines, they think of, you know, buried landmines surprising the infantry, etc. | |
| That is not the primary use of landmines. | |
| They certainly have a role in establishing a defensive position, but the primary use of landmines in warfare is to funnel the enemy into a particular place. | |
| What you are trying to do in any battle is control the enemy. | |
| Control them and make them march to your tomb. | |
| So what you do is you put, you put a field of landmines here, and you put a field of landmines over there, and so the enemy, you offer them one vulnerable location where they don't have to worry about the landmines, and the enemy will be funneled into that location, which is exactly where you know they're going to go, so that's where you put up your machine guns. | |
| You always want to leave your opponent an out. | |
| A slaughter? | |
| A barbarian slaughter is going to be needlessly costly on both sides, and ultimately it will be a pyrrhic victory. | |
| You'll win, but at what price? | |
| No, no. | |
| The civilized man uses organized warfare to achieve his aims, preferably without wasting a single bullet. | |
| The exact same thing applies to rhetoric. | |
| Now let's say you're arguing with somebody and you're trying to convince them. | |
| Now when we argue with feminists and socialists and other such mentally ill, damaged personalities, we're not trying to convince them of anything. | |
| There's no point in trying to convince them. | |
| They don't work on a logical level. | |
| With those people, all you can do is ridicule them. | |
| You can redefine that. | |
| You can look at their positive positions are incoherent. | |
| You can look really closely, define their position, and show a thousand ways it loops back on itself and cancels itself out, that it's nothing but a big divide by zero error. | |
| They will continue to repeat this exact same argument. | |
| But let's forget the sociopaths and the narcissists and the broken people. | |
| And what about when you're arguing with somebody that actually is intelligent but has an incorrect belief? | |
| How do you sway their opinion? | |
| If you use the same tactic that you use to ridicule the feminists, if you take their position and you completely define their position and make them look like a fool for holding that position, you're not giving them an egress of retreat. | |
| There's no way for them to salvage their ego. | |
| Now, perhaps this person is incredibly noble and they will accept your argument despite the blow to their ego. | |
| But for the vast majority of people, it is such an insult. | |
| You are calling them such a moron for believing in what they believe that they're going to double down on the belief. | |
| Put simply, one of the best rhetorical devices you can use to convince a person is say, you know what, I agree with you, but even if you don't agree with them, there's some sort of common ground you can establish with that person. | |
| And if you start that out, you start out saying, listen, we have this common ground. | |
| You're not a complete idiot. | |
| You're just mistaken about this one thing. | |
| And you leave them that outlet. | |
| And then you present your argument, you have your debate with them, and you leave it hanging. | |
| You don't press the attack. | |
| You let them retreat. | |
| That person will then go back to their home. | |
| They will think about it. | |
| They will process the new information you provided them. | |
| And they're able to process it because it's not directly attacking their ego. | |
| Because you said that I agree with you, but. | |
| And so they process it, and then a month later, two months later, three months later, you will hear your argument coming out of their mouth. | |
| Sometimes they won't even remember that it's your argument, other times they will. | |
| And then they'll treat you like their best friend because your enemy, you didn't destroy them. | |
| Again, this is in Machiavelli. | |
| Don't destroy your enemy. | |
| Your enemy can become your best friend if you leave them a means of escape. | |
| If you let them survive, they wind up being grateful. | |
| Whether we're talking about warfare or talking about rhetorical argument, it's when you destroy somebody that they become resentful. | |
| Even if they admit that you're right, chances are they're going to be vengeful towards you. | |
| And this is where we get to politeness. | |
| See, again, the barbarian. | |
| He goes to war to feel like a big man and just kill a bunch of people. | |
| The barbarian gets into screaming matches just because he wants to be the one to win the argument rather than convince anybody of a particular belief. | |
| And the barbarian doesn't know what politeness is. | |
| He knows how to dominate and he knows how to kowtow, but he doesn't know how to be polite. | |
| Politeness is the tool of the civilized man for other civilized men. | |
| When you are encountering somebody in public and there's a conflict of interest, this is where politeness comes up. | |
| Probably the easiest one to imagine here is if you're trying to pick up a girl at the bar, if you're approaching a woman. | |
| Now women like being approached, but they want to be approached by a particular guy. | |
| And you might not be the guy that they want approaching them. | |
| And so civility, politeness, would be the woman letting you down gently. | |
| In other words, she's allowing you a means of escape from the whole thing. | |
| that she is allowing you to pretend that you were just gently flirting, you weren't really interested, that your feelings aren't hurt, that you didn't lose status by being shot down. | |
| And it's this preservation of the ego, this means of escape, that allows us to be in a civil society together. | |
| Alternatively, if... | |
| And this is becoming increasingly prevalent throughout... | |
| Manosphere talks about it a lot. | |
| Alternatively, if she shuts you down and then ridicules you and laughs at you, you feel like an idiot. | |
| And you've just had your ego damaged. | |
| And at that point, there's no longer language. | |
| There's only violence. | |
| You're back to the brute barbarian. | |
| And same thing goes for the guy. | |
| The guy approaching the woman needs to let her have an out, rather than press his attack constantly. | |
| If she's not interested, a decent guy will politely back off, politely allow her to reject him without being overwhelming. | |
| And see, that way, we maintain the ego. | |
| We maintain our status within society without having to revert to violence. | |
| I saw a terrible example of this during the Calgary Stampede, where a drunk guy was getting kicked out of the bar because his girlfriend was complaining about him. | |
| I didn't know the whole backstory. | |
| But there are these two wannabe alpha males at the bar telling him, no, you can't come back in here, buddy. | |
| You're creeping her out. | |
| You're doing XYZ. | |
| And they were just destroying this guy's ego. | |
| And so you got this guy, and he is raging right now because his woman is inside the bar with a bunch of strange men. | |
| This goes right back to the hind brain. | |
| This goes back to Paleolithic times. | |
| And on top of that, they are calling him every word in the book and challenging him, essentially challenging him to stand up to them. | |
| And on top of that, he is hammered out of his skull. | |
| He's dressed up in a cowboy costume, so he probably feels a little bit ridiculous, especially now that he's being emasculated in front of strangers. | |
| And I could just see in this guy's face the struggle between the higher brain saying, this fight isn't worth it, and the lower brain saying, murder these sons of bitches. | |
| That's how you get knife fights happening. | |
| A real bouncer does not destroy the ego of the person being bounced. | |
| He does not destroy the enemy. | |
| He allows them to retreat with dignity. | |
| He says to them, listen, you've both had a lot. | |
| She's going to be okay in here. | |
| You know, you should probably go home and give her a call the next day, and you guys can sort it out then when you're both sober. | |
| Suddenly ego assuaged. | |
| No need for violence. | |
| Except we are in a civilization fast losing that civility. | |
| And we're all reverting back to the grunts of group barbarians. | |
| The reason I bring all of this up is because politeness is so poorly understood nowadays. | |
| It's become the kowtowing. | |
| People mistake standing up for something as being impolite. | |
| They mistake assertiveness as being impolite. | |
| When real politeness only happens during a conflict, it's like virtue. | |
| You can only have virtue by resisting a seductive temptation. | |
| You don't have virtue by being an asthmate. | |
| Same thing with politeness. | |
| If there's no conflict, there's no politeness. | |
| But when there is conflict, politeness is how the civilized man deals with it. |