Divide and Conquer

Your impact is weakened as you are divided and conquered.

“…the art of using troops is this: When ten to the enemy’s one, surround him; When five times his strength, attack him; If double his strength, divide him…” Sun Tzu, the brilliant military strategist and author of “The Art of War”, born around 500 BC.

Divide and conquer has been an effective military strategy for over 2,500 years. The Assyrians. Julius Caesar. Rome defeating Macedonia in the Battle of Pydna. The British Empire.

Divide and conquer has also been used in legal theory and the social sciences. It’s used by economists, political scientists, and historians. Instinctually it’s used on playgrounds and in middle schools, on school boards and company boards.

You’d recognize it in a minute if it were happening to someone else. It’s not hard. Plant the seeds of discontent. Sow distrust. Insinuate that there are insurmountable differences between people who have far more in common than they have differences. Pick up on petty grievances and magnify them out of proportion. And always use the powerful weapon of fear - the fear that if ‘those people’ get ahead, you or ‘your people’ will suffer - a totally effective strategy for keeping any group down - set them fighting among themselves.

Sun Tzu was wrong about one thing. You don’t need to be even double in strength to divide and conquer, you can be less, even far less, if you just find the right fracture points, stuff in some dynamite, and blow everything to bits. Social media has magnified the ability of even the smallest minority to fracture the majority.

Divide and conquer has been on my mind recently. I’ve read countless articles predicting that women’s rights will be set back by decades by the pandemic. Women make up 50.8% of the U.S. population and 49.6% of the global population. In other words, half the population within one percentage point, statistically of equal power. Yesterday I read an article which described health care and education as ‘women’s issues’, with the implication that women do not have the strength in numbers to create significant change. I just about imploded. Yes, I’m sure the statistics come from polls about ‘what people care about’, but through what convoluted thought process are those not human issues? Last time I checked, males also require health care and education.

We’d have to do an anthropological dig to uncover all the reasons why only women have been conditioned to prioritize health care and education, and why men have supposedly not. From that we could create a social marketing plan to make the issues which sustain and improve humanity of equal importance to all genders. However, the implosion point for me was the idea that if something is a ‘women’s issue’, it is in the minority and has little hope of being addressed.

The efforts to divide women and to diminish their corresponding financial, political, and legal power has been effective for 5,000 years. Perhaps it’s where Sun Tzu got the idea in the first place. Ongoing and currently accelerating with the peeling off of ‘suburban women’, and ‘white women’, and take your pick among the endless dividing lines of geography, race, religion, education, political party, city vs. suburbs vs. rural, north vs. south, socio-economic status, gender identification, maternal status, Bears fan vs. Green Bay Packers fan, and every other dividing point. It’s ridiculous that I even have to point this out, but men are just as diverse a group as women, yet somehow they remain primarily one category, men. When was the last time you read about how political parties need to cater to suburban men? College educated men? Black men? Even then it’s just ‘suburban’, ‘college educated’, and ‘Black’. We only add the gender when it’s not men, especially White men, all the better to divide and conquer.

I, for one, am tired of being put in confining categories, I do not know of one interesting person who fits neatly into one box. People continually surprise me with the range of their interests. Each of us is a sublime symphony of different ideas, beliefs, talents, and passions.

What I do hate is watching the talent, brains, and creativity limited because divide and conquer is ruthlessly and continually wielded by those in power, limiting the potential of the entire human race and holding back even those who wield the power, not that they care.

You are being held back by divide and conquer.

Categories and patterns are how humans make sense of our complex world. We identify ourselves in recognizable categories. They are necessary or our brains will overload. I am a daughter, a mother, a friend, an activist, a gardener, a traveler, a reader, a quilter. From those categories I may seek out others with similar issues - a book club, the camaraderie of the fabric store, fellow travelers. I also see how some of my self-defined categories are diminished by others, part of the divide and conquer strategy. My pet peeve is the elevation of golf. How is golf more challenging and rewarding than quilting? I suspect it is because golf players are 77% male, whereas only 1% of quilters are male. The 23% of women golfers has only come from 500 years of fighting for the right to play, with attitudes persisting today.

Think about how many boxes you fit into.

I know you are an interesting person.

Now look at all the ways you are being told you fit into ‘us vs. them’ boxes. The only way to fight back against divide and conquer is to consciously identify and question those boxes. Be aware. Know what is being done to you. And take an axe to the boxes designed to divide and conquer.