“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”
—Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Ok, read the above quote. Replace ‘war’ with ‘conflict’, subdue with ‘calm’ and ‘enemy’ with ‘challenger’, all synonyms.
The supreme art of conflict is to calm the challenger without fighting.
Simply put, it’s about retreat.
In the spiritual community, a ‘retreat’ is when you spend $3000 to go to rural California for a week, live in a hot tent and do group meditation therapy or DMT with a bunch of rich strangers. But what does the word ‘retreat’ really mean?
In the West, we have a hard time acknowledging the potential transformative value of retreat. We view it as weakness. We’d rather burn alive than withdraw from battle. We have world record numbers of sports riots, corporate downfalls and failed foreign interventions to support this thesis.
In the second half of the 20th century, Sun Tzu, ancient writer of The Art of War, became popular among politicians, business titans and other ‘masters of the universe’, as well as regular people looking for a new way to meditate conflict. Lots of Eastern writings became more popular, in fact, after the world watched a decentralized army of Southeast Asian peasants and farmers win a war against the supposed most powerful nation on Earth. Despite his writings being cornerstones of Eastern tactical strategy since the 5th century BC, it took a long time for the West to recognize his value. This is no coincidence.
Sun Tzu’s attitude towards retreat is significantly more nuanced than our hard-lined Western ideological fighting stance. When you’re the biggest kid on the playground (see: the West until the middle of the 20th century) it’s easy to kick ass. But when other big kids emerge, you’re better off learning from them than turning your back to them, lest they trounce you with their superior tactics and steal your pizza money.
The full Sun Tzu passage is this:
“Therefore the skillful leader subdues the enemy’s troops without any fighting; he captures their cities without laying siege to them; he overthrows their kingdom without lengthy operations in the field.”
On the other side of this, and beyond any historical or military context, we run into immense personal problems when we try to live our lives through some sort of ‘only the strongest will survive’ ethos. We all know at least someone who’s too much of a hard-ass to maintain jobs, relationships or friendships for long enough to experience their true value or joy.
In business or professional life, stoking conflicts exclusively in order to ‘win’ tends to backfire in creating new enemies and new conflicts. It’s as if each branch you chop off through over-aggressive means spawns 3 more branches in its place. People who do this end up with way more enemies than friends.
In relationships, trying to win a conflict through sheer force of will leads to screaming matches, miscommunications and saying things you can’t take back. The sheer loudness of a bad fight drowns out any opportunity for reconciliation. People who do this end up alone, or paired with shallow mates who never challenge them or encourage them to grow.
In social life, a disagreement between two friends over politics, religion, or lifestyle choices can escalate into confusion, misjudging, and even the termination of a relationship. People who do this also end up alone, or, once again, paired with other shallow people who never challenge them or encourage them to grow.
And in your inner life, attempting to “conquer yourself” through work, achievement, wellness or self improvement can alienate you from your true self and cause you to become someone else, an actor instead of a real person. People who do this get sucked into delusional or obsessive behavior, like those who start exercising out of self-care but then become addicted to unhealthy degrees of thinness or muscularity. This attitude leads to a lot of unhappiness and self-hatred.
Retreat doesn’t make us weak if it’s balanced with self-respect. Like anything done out of balance, using retreat as your only tool for living will not do much for you. But retreating at key moments, both for yourself and for others, can lead to profound respect, growth and satisfaction.
Meditation is a form of retreat. Meditating for 8 hours a day is escapism. But meditating for 20 minutes or an hour a day helps settle the equilibrium between activity and non-activity. It lets your brain recalibrate.
Acquiescing in conflict is a form of retreat. It doesn’t mean coddling someone while fighting and saying, “You’re right,” if you don’t mean it. But it can mean stepping back and saying, “Listen, we are clearly not on the same page, and arguing isn’t going to fix that while we’re worked up. Let’s take a breather.” That’s a strength, not a weakness.
Self control is mitigating a conflict before it escalates into irrational nonsense. That’s a strong trait. Weakness is letting yourself indulge in the escalation until you can’t control yourself any longer.
Lastly, pushing yourself just for the sake of being faster, better and stronger represents a loss of self-control. If you become so obsessed with improving yourself that you lose sight of what improvement actually means, you end up confused and unhappy. That doesn’t sound like improvement.
The ultimate lesson of Sun Tzu is that there’s value in both sides: confrontation and retreat. And this applies to all facets of life. To fight or argue is not inherently a bad thing. To sacrifice yourself or a relationship you care about to the fires of fury and self-criticism is definitely a bad thing.
We should remember to mediate unnecessary conflicts before they start. And if a conflict is necessary, we should set our ego aside and fight with the awareness that we want to get to a better place. This strategy allows us to engage constructively in conflict and confrontation without getting carried away. And it also reminds us of the great value that can come from not letting the ego interfere with personal or professional matters.
A follow-up to this post with some journaling prompts and exercises is available here.