Working with your enemy

So my favorite epic novel is "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" and I've been rereading it over this summer break. The thing about this book is that it's so deeply packed with strategies and tactics that I've been able to take away something new every single time I've read this book.

For those who don't know, Romance of the Three Kingdoms is a Chinese epic about the fall of the Han dynasty and all the conflict that happen after. China was eventually split into three kingdoms (hence the name of the book), and the three kingdoms fought against each other for power and tried to reunify China, setting up a new dynasty. It's a great book and I definitely would recommend it to anyone looking for a good read.

As I've already said, there's so many different takeaways you could take from this book as each chapter is jammed packed with multiple events that could easily be deeply analyzed. So in this blog, I'm gonna write about one of the takeaways I've gotten so far upon me rereading this book.

My takeaway from the book

In the beginning of the book, Liu Bei, one of the main characters of the book, was fighting against the Yellow Turban rebellion. His force was many times stronger than that of the rebels, and he managed to surround the rebels in a small city. Now here's where you might expect Liu Bei to go on a siege, completely surrounding the city and taking out the rebels, but instead Liu Bei told his men to leave one exit open. This made it so that the majority of the rebels decided not to fight as they see a much easier way out by running away. Then, Liu Bei easily captured the city, and managed to capture a lot of the rebels that ran away anyways.

The thing about this fight was that had Liu Bei completely surrounded the city, it would probably be a much more tedious task as the rebels would have no choice but to fight. He would likely still win, but it would take much longer and his army will likely take more casualties than necessary. Instead, by letting the rebels escape, he managed to do pretty much the exact same thing but easier.

This is kind of counter intuitive in a way. Intuitively, you would want inflict maximum damage on your enemy, but doing so will make them fight back harder. So you choose to "save" your enemy which somehow also saves you from further trouble.

This sort of event is then paralleled later on in the book when a minister, Wang Yun, managed to kill the dictator Dong Zhou. A big portion of Dong Zhou's men were in a different city when it happened and they asked to surrender to Wang Yun. But instead of letting them surrender, Wang Yun told them that he intends to go kill them as they once served a dictator. This enrages Dong Zhou's followers and they went all out on Wang Yun's army completely taking them down and killing Wang Yun in the process. You could argue that this is a result of poor planning by Wang Yun, as his army didn't defend really well, but I would argue that the whole fight didn't have to happen in the first place. A lot of Dong Zhou's supporters weren't truly supportive of his cruel behavior to begin with but had no choice as they would be killed if they had spoken up. Wang Yun should've just let them surrendered and go on to deal with other problems instead. Instead, he managed to unite his enemies by telling them that he intends to take them all down, giving them no choice but to fight him.

Working with your enemy

I feel like this sort of counter intuitive thing where the best thing to do is to help your opponent out happens way more than we realize. In economics, oligopolies are much better off cooperating and letting their competitors live rather than trying to kill one another hurting everyone in the process. In game theory, the classic prisoner's dilemma shows that even though both parties defecting is the equilibrium solution, cooperation would be efficient and mutually beneficial for both parties. Even in the cold war, a somewhat recent historical event, the US and the Soviet nuking each other would be the most damaging move for both sides if they were solely focused on completely taking each other out, yet they choose not to do it because of the horrendous consequences that will follow and instead later concluded on cooperating with each other to end the war.

These examples are just a few that I could think of off the top of my head when writing this blog. There are probably a lot more examples you could think of with the same underlying idea: sometimes you should stop fixating on taking out your enemy; maybe working with them (even if they're weaker than you) might be a better solution.

There are two cases that I can think of that would nullify this argument. For one, if you're competitor is significantly weaker than you and you are confident that it is much easier and more beneficial for you to just take them out. For example, a monopoly does not have the incentive to go around cooperating with every single competitor they have since they most likely can easily out compete them with little cost. The second case is that if for whatever reason you're confident that your opponent will not work with you and intends to bring you down. Then, that's the case of a prisoner's dilemma where you already know the other party is going to defect and there's no point in cooperating. Other than these two fairly obvious cases, cooperation is key.

Conclusion

It's pretty counter intuitive to work with your enemy, but a lot of times it is the best option available. That's kind of deep I think.

Go read Romance of the Three Kingdoms if you've never read it before. There are many many more lessons and takeaways you can get from reading the book. There's also more examples of people helping out their enemies for various reasons if you want more examples.

I might do more reading takeaways. I might not. We'll see. That's it for this blog.