/lit/ - Literature

I’ve been reading Sun Tzu and I just finished the actual text. I can certainly see the value of his strategies in war, but what’s applicable to the average person could be condensed into maybe two pages. It wasn’t bad, but it confirmed exactly what I suspected- the Sophomaniacs who praise it are just trying to pretend they’re intellectuals. There’s not one complicated idea in the entire text and honestly, the introduction essay in my copy by Samuel B. Griffith was more interesting than the actual Art of War. It’s also got some pretty brutal ideas that would appeal to the sort of people who have no sense of ethics such as cutting off your own army’s escape routes to manipulate them psychologically into fighting harder because it’s life or death now. Personally, I’m not sure how I feel about Sun Tzu because he promoted the destruction of ethical Chinese warfare in favour of all out war, but at the same time his most important guideline was to cause as little damage as possible and win without fighting whenever it was an option.