When I was much younger, I briefly lived in a house with a mold problem. It may not be immediately apparent what this personal anecdote has to do with either politics or warfare, but I assure you that there is a point to this story.
Initially the house seemed great. It was a shared living situation in a really nice looking area, with my two roommates each taking one of the upstairs rooms while I had the spacious half-basement. This may not seem like a big deal, but the bathroom in the half-basement had a jacuzzi tub, so I figured that if I could get some of my attractive dates to come over for some “Netflix and chill,” the jacuzzi tub would be a perfect way to seal the deal in terms of persuading them to take their clothes off. By my grown-up standards, this may not seem like a big deal, but for a young man on a tight budget, this was a great living situation. Unfortunately, shortly after moving in, I woke up with a splitting headache. This was how I found out that my new place had a mold problem. Obviously I was unwilling to give up such a nice living situation easily, so I went to war against the mold.
Mold is a unique kind of vermin to fight because it replicates fast, and that means that targeted destruction doesn’t work. If you find a patch of mold, you can scrub it with bleach, but it’ll just keep coming back. We had to address the root cause of the mold problem by drilling ventilation holes and using dehumidifiers to remove the humidity that allowed the mold to thrive. When fighting mold, the key to victory is not to fight the mold directly, but to change the mold’s environment from something that mold finds life-sustaining to something that it dislikes and cannot flourish in. Killing every last one of the individual mold spores would be too daunting a task: rather you have to change the background environmental conditions and let them do the work for you. In its own unintelligent way, I suppose that is what the mold was trying to do as well - it was trying to create an environment which favored its survival over my own.
The lesson here is fairly obvious: if you want to destroy your enemies (whether in politics or war) don’t waste time targeting them directly: instead, create an environment that makes it impossible for them to thrive. While I ended up losing that particular battle, I was thankful to the mold for teaching me such an important lesson about how to defeat my ideological enemies.
One thing that people often forget is that war and politics are very closely connected. In fact, I would say that politics is nothing more than an indirect form of warfare, in which the hostility which fuels conflict is channeled towards non-violent ends. This is not a repudiation of either politics or warfare: on the contrary, I think that conflict is a vitally important part of the human experience because it allows incompetent leaders to be overthrown and replaced with more effective ones. My point is simply that a lot of people are obsessed with spreading their political ideologies and defeating rival ideologies, but they often forget to look at the natural world for inspiration on how to do that.
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