Random Thoughts: Don Tzu and the Art of War (Only Winning, No Losing) | World News –

A few years ago, a video of an Indian man hitting a young man and taunting him went viral: “May maybanayega tu (Are you going to make memes)?” The answer to this existential question is yes, because everyone is making memes now, from the White House, which has been serenading us with over-the-top edits of the Mortal Kombat leitmotif and quotes from famous Hollywood films, to the Iranians, who have somehow upped their meme game to the point that much of the world is cheering these memes on from across Iranian social media, showing that Americans are used to losing at their own game.

A meme is a concept first introduced by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene (1976), to describe a unit of cultural transmission similar to a gene, and the meme has since become a lingua franca on the Internet.

The one meme that has taken the Internet by storm, even bypassing China’s Great Firewall, is Don Tzu — an amalgam of Donald Trump and Sun Tzu — filled with Trumpian aphorisms about “winning,” which include gems like “Break the enemy’s siege by breaking his siege” or “If you don’t know what you’re doing, neither will your enemy know what you’re doing” or “You can’t lose if you don’t have a goal.”But let’s start from the beginning. During his first presidential bid, Donald Trump told his fans that they would “win so much” that they would “get tired of winning.” The world is approaching fatigue. Today we are witnessing this victory, in a way that the greatest strategic philosophers of the past could not have imagined: Chanakya, Machiavelli, and obviously Sun Tzu.Chanakya, the ruthless Indian advisor who engineered the rise of the Mauryan Empire; Machiavelli, who wrote a Renaissance playbook on how to rule; Sun Tzu, who wrote the discipline chart in The Art of War, were great in their own way, but none of them were able to hold a candle to Donald Trump, or use the title that had been cast on his shelf: Don Tzu.

Jeffrey Epstein once wrote to Noam Chomsky that Trump has written three books, making him one of the few people on the planet who has written more books than he has read. Since Don doesn’t need to read books, he has already absorbed all of their teachings. Sun Tzu wrote that all wars are based on deception, but Don Tzu improved on that by removing the details of said deception. Clearly, what critics call Logorhoia—his tendency to interject stream-of-consciousness ideas—is the highest form of deception. Sun Tzu said: “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you have no need to fear the outcome of a hundred battles.” Don Tzu does not know yourself, so how can the enemy know him?Sun Tzu argued that the ultimate distinction consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting, and Don Tzu does this by acting and speaking in such an incoherent manner that the enemy has no idea what he is doing. Even he doesn’t do that.On the other hand, Machiavelli said that it was safer to be “feared than loved”, while Don Tzu believed it was not too much to ask for both, having reshaped first the Republican Party and then the New World Order around those who fear and love him and those who do not.

Rules-based international order? There’s only one rule: Love Don with all your love. Chanakya believes that strength must be amassed patiently. There was an apocryphal story about how he saw a young mother scolding her son for eating from the center of the plate where the food was hot and devised the technique of attacking the enemy on the border where he was weakest before building toward the center. Don knows this well, which is why he builds large walls on the border and picks up dissidents directly from the capital.Chanakya believed that the enemy of the enemy was a friend, but Don Tzu believed that friend or enemy was merely a state of being, depending on who had a better deal at hand. To borrow an old phrase, it is dangerous to be an enemy, but more dangerous to be a friend.All of this explains the reason behind America’s great victory in Iran. Was the strike effective? Has the fog of war lifted? Were the goals achieved? Who cares?

In Don Tzu’s framework, such behavior is reserved for lesser mortals.

In return, he declares victory, then declares a ceasefire, then declares his victory. Sun Tzu, Machiavelli and Chanqia wanted to shape the battlefield, but Don Tzu realizes that reality is herd instinct caused by lack of interest, so everything he does is a complete and complete victory.Sun Tzu postulated that knowledge precedes victory. Machiavelli assumed that control supported it. Chanakya assumed that the systems were securing him.Don Tzu assumes none of this; Maybe he doesn’t understand all of it, because it doesn’t matter. Because he understands the true nature of perceived reality and all of creation better than any of the ancient strategists, which is that nothing matters, nothing is real.In The Matrix, when Neo goes to meet the Oracle in his first semester, he meets another young man, a would-be young man who explains to him the true nature of the universe.

After showing Neo that he can bend a spoon, he tells him to realize the truth: it’s not the spoon that bends, it’s yourself. Don Tzu recognized that true nature but still wanted someone to come with spoons: preferably a lot of golden spoons.

Edmund Hillary once said that one cannot conquer a mountain; At best one can hope to overcome oneself. Don Tzu went a step further and realized that one cannot even conquer oneself, so why bother? As for winning, if you really believe in your mind that you are winning, and every neuron is telling you that you are winning, is there any way you can lose at all? But the world may be a little tired of winning, but that is the world’s problem, not Don Tzu’s.