Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.
[…]
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.
—Sun-Tzu (ancient chinese 5GW Theorist)
The Second Style of 5GW after the Puppet Master (ref Pslog, D5GW) in my long neglected series, is the Socio-Political Entrepreneurship Style of 5GW.
The S-P-E 5GWers (or whatever we should call them) don’t wait for the future to arrive, they actively seek out to create and shape the future they desire.
The S-P-E 5GWer acts out in the open (not in secret), but their true aims or expected/hoped-for consequences are closely held (secret) and/or at longer timespans then most folks consider or notice (there’s the secrecy), or the effects are so broad/horizontal that the ramifications are overlooked by most.
The S-P-E 5GW will be non-kinetic in war sense - or rather the kinetics will be widely dispersed.
The S-P-E will with a creative impulse (perhaps even an ultimate expression of love).
The S-P-E 5GW actor is a Super Empowered Individual or group of SEIs (where SEI = individuals super-empowered by their access to technology and connectivity allowing them to act and interact globally) who use entrepreneurial principles to initiate, organize, create, and possibly manage change in a target actor (state, institution, network) or the target actor’s environment to further the non-trivial socio-political goals of the 5GW actor. The S-P-E 5GW actor will employ and manipulate a variety of actors across a variety of domains to create changes that will have effects even after the 5GW actor is no longer actively participating in the changes.
The SEI choosing the path of S-P-E 5GW may include (but not be limited to):
- Super-empowered money actors (think Gates, Buffet, Soros)
- Super-empowered media access actors (think Gore, Michael Moore, Kos)
- Super-empowered idea/meme generating actors
When you read of the founders of the Muslim Brotherhood Project…think S-P-E 5GW.
When you read of the founders of American Cold War Strategy…think S-P-E 5GW.
When you read of Gap-Shrinking, Sys Admins, and creating capabilities through a DoEE…think S-P-E 5GW.
When you read of TDAXP’s MISC ideas…think budding S-P-E 5GW.
Next up: The Strategic Citizen 5GW Style
Love this post, and looking forward to your post on the strategic citizen. I do worry, though, that clearer delineations of types will need to be made. But this is good archetyping, in a loose and somewhat metaphorical kind of way, to grease the mental gears.
I made a mistake. I will be doing Memetic Engineering 5GW next, then Strategic Citizen 5GW.