A few years ago, a video went viral in which an Indian man was beating up a young man and taunting him: “Will you make memes?”. The answer to that existential question is yes, because everyone is making memes now, from the White House, which is presenting us with super-edits of Mortal Kombat leitmotifs and cuts from popular Hollywood movies, to the Iranians, who have somehow turned up their meme game so much that many of the world is applauding the meme game from various Iranian social media handles, which shows that Americans are not used to losing at their own games. Meme was a concept first introduced by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976), describing a unit of cultural transmission analogous to the gene, and has since become the lingua franca of the Internet.
And one meme that has taken the internet by storm, even breaking the Great Firewall of China, is Don Tzu – a portrait of Donald Trump and Sun Tzu – filled with Trumpian fetishes on ‘winning’, including “Breaking the enemy’s blockade by blocking his action” or “If you don’t know what you’re doing, your enemy doesn’t know either” or “If you don’t have a goal you lose. Can’t.”But let’s start from the beginning. During his first presidential campaign, Donald Trump told his audience that he was ‘going to win so much’ that he would ‘get tired of winning’. And the world is close to exhaustion. Today we are witness to said victory, in a way that the greatest strategic philosophers of yore: Chanakya, Machiavelli and, of course, Sun Tzu could never have imagined.Chanakya, the ruthless Indian advisor who heralded the rise of the Maurya Empire; Machiavelli, who wrote a Renaissance playbook on how to rule; and Sun Tzu, who wrote the blueprint for discipline in The Art of War, were all great in their own ways, but none of them will ever hold a candle to Donald Trump, or, to use the title put on his shelf: Don Tzu.Jeffrey Epstein once wrote to Noam Chomsky that Trump had written three books, making him one of the few people on the planet who has written more books than he has read. Because Don doesn’t need to read books, he has already absorbed all of their teachings. Sun Tzu wrote that all war is based on deception, but Don Tzu has refined the deception by removing the nuances of it. What critics call logoria – his tendency to break down thoughts into stream of consciousness – is clearly the highest form of deception. Sun Tzu said: “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the outcome of a hundred battles.” Don Tzu If he does not know himself, how can the enemy know him?Sun Tzu argued that the highest excellence was to break the enemy’s resistance without fighting, and Don Tzu did this by behaving and talking in such a way that the enemy had no idea what he was doing. Even he doesn’t.Machiavelli, on the other hand, argued that ‘it is safer to be feared than loved’, while Don Tzu believes it is not too much to ask for both, first the Republican Party and then reshaping the new world order around those who fear and love them and those who do not. Rules-based international order? There is only one rule: Love Don with all your love. Chanakya believed that accumulation of power should be done with patience. There was an apocryphal story of how he saw a young mother scolding her son for eating food in the middle of the plate, where the food was hotter, and he devised a technique to attack the enemy at the borders before moving towards the center, where he is weak. Don knows this very well, which is why he builds big walls on the borders and picks opponents from the capital itself.Chanakya believed that the enemy of an enemy is a friend, but Don Tzu believes that friend or enemy is only a state, depending on who has the better deal in hand. To borrow an old phrase, it is dangerous to be his enemy, but it is even more dangerous to be his friend.All this shows why America is achieving so many victories in Iran. Was the strike effective? Has the fog of war cleared? What objectives were achieved? Who cares.
In the Don Tzu framework, such behavior is for lesser mortals. On the other hand, he declares victory, then declares an armistice, then announces that he has won. Sun Tzu, Machiavelli and Chanakya wanted to shape the battlefield, but Don Tzu understands that the reality is herd instinct caused by lack of attention, so all he does is achieve total and complete victory.Sun Tzu believed that wisdom precedes victory. Machiavelli believed that control perpetuates this. Chanakya believed that systems make it safe.Don Tzu believes none of this; He probably doesn’t even understand all this, because it doesn’t matter. Because he understands perceived reality and the true nature of all creation better than any ancient strategist, which means that nothing matters, nothing is real.In The Matrix, when Neo visits the Oracle in the first term, he meets another young man, a prospect who explains to him the true nature of the universe. After showing Neo that he can bend a spoon, he tells him to realize the truth: it is not the spoon that bends, but you yourself. Don Tzu has realized the true nature, but still wants someone to bring spoons: preferably lots of golden spoons.
Edmund Hillary once said that one cannot conquer a mountain; The most one can hope for is victory over oneself. Don Tzu went a step further and realized that one cannot conquer oneself, so why bother? As far as winning, if you truly believe in your mind that you are winning, and every neuron firing tells you that you are winning, is there any way to not lose? But the world may be tired of winning, but that is the world’s problem, not Don Tzu’s.
