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Since no creature can survive without the ability to see or sense what is going on around it, you must make it hard for your enemies to know what is going on around them, including what you are doing. Disturb their focus and you weaken their strategic powers. People’s perceptions are filtered through their emotions; they tend to interpret the world according to what they want to see. Feed their expectations, manufacture a reality to match their desires, and they will fool themselves. The best deceptions are based on ambiguity, mixing fact and fiction so that the one cannot be disentangled from the other. Control people’s perceptions of reality and you control them.
“In war-time, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies”—Churchill
It is always useful to know what the enemy wants you to believe.
In a competitive world, deception is a vital weapon that can give you a constant advantage. You can use it to distract your opponents, send them on goose chases, waste valuable time and resources in defending attacks that never come.
To mirror reality you must understand its nature. Above all, reality is subjective: we filter events through our emotions and preconceptions, seeing what we want to see. Your false mirror must conform to people’s desires and expectations, lulling them to sleep.
“What we wish, we readily believe, and what we ourselves think, we imagine others think also.”—Julius Caesar
Why not deliberately distort the signs the enemy was looking at? Why not mislead by playing with appearances?
We are social creatures, and our happiness, even our survival, depends on our ability to understand what other people are intending and thinking. But because we cannot get inside their heads, we are forced to read the signs in their outward behavior. In the social realm, we learn from an early age to use deception—we tell others what they want to hear, concealing our real thoughts, hedging with the truth, misleading to make a better impression. Many of these deceptions are entirely unconscious. You need the power to cloak your maneuvers, to keep people off balance by controlling the perceptions they have of you and the signs you give out.
The following are the six main forms of military deception, each with its own advantage. (1) The false front. This is the oldest form of military deception. (2) The decoy attack. This is another ruse dating back to ancient times, and it remains perhaps the military’s most common deceptive ploy. (3) Camouflage. The ability to blend into the environment is one of the most terrifying forms of military deception. (4) The hypnotic pattern. Human beings naturally tend to think in terms of patterns. They like to see events conforming to their expectations by fitting into a pattern or scheme, for schemes, whatever their actual content, comfort us by suggesting that the chaos of life is predictable. (5) Planted information. People are much more likely to believe something they see with their own eyes than something they are told. (6) Shadows within shadows. Deceptive maneuvers are like shadows deliberately cast: the enemy responds to them as if they were solid and real, which in and of itself is a mistake. Casting shadows within shadows makes it impossible for your enemies to distinguish between fact and fiction.
In the battles of daily life, making people think they are better than you are—smarter, stronger, more competent—is often wise. It gives you breathing space to lay your plans, to manipulate. In a variation on this strategy, the front of virtue, honesty, and uprightness is often the perfect cover in a political world. The decoy attack is also a critical strategy in daily life, where you must retain the power to hide your intentions. To keep people from defending the points you want to attack, you must follow the military model and make real gestures toward a goal that does not interest you. You must seem to be investing time and energy to attack that point, as opposed to simply trying to signal the intention with words. The camouflage strategy can be applied to daily life in two ways. First, it is always good to be able to blend into the social landscape, to avoid calling attention to yourself unless you choose to do so. When you talk and act like everyone else, mimicking their belief systems, when you blend into the crowd, you make it impossible for people to read anything particular in your behavior. That gives you great room to move and plot without being noticed. Second, if you are preparing an attack of some fort and begin by blending into the environment, showing no sign of activity, your attack will seem to come out of nowhere, doubling its power.