Doc Searls Weblog

One response to “Monday, 23 June 2025”

1. 

   Don Duval

   July 15, 2025 at 2:04 pm

   Being in NYC, as an American, I noticed a shift that made me move into a space of realizing our entire citizenry was losing — at something. But I didn’t know what. There was massive construction going on in Williamsburg NY during the lockdowns still. An entire population of people from Isreal moved in before the war as buildings were build every empty lot available and police precinct lines were shifted to exclude the area — even building one building over an disturbed train exit on the G line — which only city hall has to this day.

   I noticed something was off though. In order to really break down what was happening, I had to take account of an ontological taxonomy and I started mapping people according to it using a “dating” card game that essentially mapped their mental health, defined as the ability to solve problems with the mind, for self, family and society. Self is one’s ethics, rituals, and needs. Family is health, education and wealth systems. Society is 16 points of critical infrastructure and 24 points of war. Anyone thinking about other ego driven things definitely are running into a brick wall.

   Anyways, when I mapped different groups, I saw the phrase “time is money” morph into something else before my very eyes — the length of history of groups inbound relates to owned and newly acquired real estate in my city. While the news about NY discusses binary oppositions, through a ‘for or against’ posture, the actual indication American citizens are losing, IMO, is those from non-American education systems with intact family structures were buying up NYC and having their way with contracts for construction.

   The original binary oppositions most still believe in don’t exist here anymore. The ‘loss’ is mutual from a “Tragedy of the Commons” perspective for all hyper-Americans because our history and militaristic leanings are limited due to the length of our shared binary split historical lenses as Americans.

   There is a book, however, that breaks down what is causing the loss and inability to see how we as Americans are losing. Sharing this is really to help others become more selfless as the only stop-loss to what we have witnessed on our landmass is IMO a fundamental shift towards swarm / collective intelligence free of agenda. Utopian? Maybe? Grandiose? Delusional? Impossible? Given my particular avatar and position, I don’t expect anything besides all green lights to demonstrate who made America great in the first place.

   Here’s an exerpt written by Harro von Senger:

   A question never posed in Europe, but frequently raised in China The difference in perception of cunning between Europeans and Chinese can be clearly seen in quotations from Machiavelli’s most famous work The Prince and one of China’s best-known folk tales Journey to the West. Machiavelli (1469–1527), whose name springs instinctively to the lips of Western managers whenever they hear the word “cunning,” uses the words “cunning” or “trick” several times in his work The Prince, but never actually names a specific technique.

   He only describes individual crafty behaviors, recounting cunning anecdotes.
   For instance, he writes that Cesare Borgia “resorted to cunning” (The Prince, Chapter 7). But then he simply describes what happened:
   “He knew so well how to conceal his mind that … the Orsini were reconciled, so that their simplicity brought them into his power at Sinigaglia,” where he had them murdered (see Strategem 2, pp. 275–6).

   A passage like this, where the author speaks explicitly of “cunning,” is the highest level of awareness of cunning to be found in Western literary or scientific works for close on three millennia, since ancient Hellas. Machiavelli does not name the trick that Cesare Borgia uses.

   But anyone familiar with the catalog of the 36 stratagems can immediately identify Borgia’s trick. He used stratagem 10, “Hiding the dagger behind a smile.” Had the victims of Cesare Borgia’s trick been familiar with the catalog of the 36 stratagems, they might have been more alert to Borgia’s lethal charm offensive and might not have been so naively taken in by his cunning.

   The awareness of cunning in the book Journey to the West, from the time of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), appears one level higher than in Machiavelli, and is representative of the accuracy with which the Chinese recognize cunning. At one point, the Monkey King fights a monster. Vanquished, the latter flees the battle arena.
   The Monkey King and his companion, the pig monk, stay hard on his heels. The monster is at its wits’ end. The following is an original quotation from the novel Journey to the West:

   The monster resorted to the stratagem The cicada casts off its skin of gleaming gold. It rolled on the ground and reassumed its original tiger form … The monster saw its pursuers hurrying ever closer. It struck a hole in its chest fur and tore off the fur. Then it cast the skin over a large rock and changed into a violent gust of wind … When the monster later gave a report to his master, the King of the Yellow Wind, it was keen to point out: “Just as they were chasing me and tried to attack me, I used the stratagem The cicada casts off its skin of gleaming gold” … The Monkey King and pig monk had seen the tiger fall and flop down outstretched onto a rock. The Monkey King raised his iron bar up into the air and brought it down with all his might, but it simply bounced back up off the hard stone … Likewise the pig monk hit out with his rake, but its prongs also rebounded. It was only then that they realized that it was just a tiger’s fur that they had struck … Greatly startled, the Monkey King cried out: “No, no! We have fallen for its stratagem!”—“What stratagem?” asked the pig monk.—“It goes, The cicada casts off its skin of gleaming gold. The monster left the tiger’s skin covering this rock and made a leisurely escape.”

   This is not just the portrayal of a cunning incident. Over and above that, the writer, the victim of the trick, and its perpetrator all identify the trick technique used, which corresponds to the stratagem wording that is listed as number 21 in the catalog of the 36 stratagems. Nowhere in the whole of Western literature, including modern management literature, is such a high degree of specialized knowledge of cunning documented. Since Europe first came into being, a European has never asked the question “What stratagem?” either in a novel or in real life. This is a question that Europeans cannot ask, because they do not have the terminology for the various trick techniques.
   Something that is missing from language will also be missing from thought. Because of the lack of suitable terminology for cunning, a European is unable to think about tricks rationally and communicate competently about them. As far as Europeans are concerned, every trick is a new one. No wonder that the Prussian King Frederick the Great (1712–1786) said, “The number of stratagems is never-ending” (Larousse, p. 1132).”

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