Your Greatest Teacher Will Always Be Your Enemy — Here’s Why

Ignore the strengths of your enemy at your peril

Photo by GR Stocks on Unsplash

“If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained, you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” ― Sun Tzu

Imagine a boxer, this boxer absolutely hates the person he is going to fight and has no respect for him or his talents whatsoever. Considering this, what are the odds of him actually winning the fight?

Slim is the answer. For a boxer to win a fight, he has absolutely no choice but to pay his opponent absolute respect, specifically in regard to his talents as a boxer.

He may hate everything about this person, find everything that he stands for completely and entirely lamentable. But if he wants to win the fight, he has to respect his talents.

Not just that, but he needs to be willing to learn from him. That means he needs to study how he fights, and if he sees that there is something he is doing better, he needs to be willing to copy him.

It can be extremely difficult to do, but it is a must, and there are no limits. For example, take Adolf Hitler. The monster of all monsters. Hitler’s skills as an orator are arguably better than any bar Winston Churchill, which is of course why Hitler was able to rally the German people to his cause.

In fact, his skills as a public speaker were so top-notch that if he were not such an evil person, his name would be the main subject of many public speaking courses.

Yet, how many people want to learn public speaking skills from the Adolf Hitler playbook?

Not many would be the answer, and yet all present-day public speakers will have done so; they just don’t realise it. This is because Adolf Hitler’s skills as a public speaker have been studied and analysed a bazillion times over so that we could learn how he was able to manipulate the German people into backing him.

That is the power of learning from your enemy. It not only helps you beat them, it helps you to stop them ever returning, and would you believe it, it is not just Hitler’s public speaking skills we have learned from in the fight to stop anyone like him ever gaining power, it is his army, the Wehrmacht.

The common perception of the Wehrmacht from World War II is that of an efficient robotic machine in which the soldiers are mindless sheep who comply with every command as if it were decreed by God himself.

However, this is inaccurate. The Wehrmacht are arguably man for man the most effective fighting unit in the history of mankind, and the reason they were so effective is that they were the absolute opposite of a robotic, mindless machine.

Yep, the Wehrmacht understood the need for the commanders on the battlefield to have the freedom to come up with their own plans, and long before Mike Tyson coined the famous phrase, everyone has a plan until they are punched in the face, the Wehrmacht taught that no plan was much use beyond the first move.

That means rather than mindlessly following orders, Wehrmacht commanders were given control on the battlefield, and were given freedom over how to achieve their orders.

For example, if a battalion were ordered to take a village, it would be left to the battalion commander to come up with a plan for how to take that village, and this was extremely effective and made the Wehrmacht extremely effective, especially considering that Allied armies of the time did not have this freedom.

They do today though, because we learnt.

There is another tactic we learnt from our enemy. The Wehrmacht commander would not just be given free rein over how to take the village, he would be told the reason why the village needed to be taken — for example, perhaps to block the enemy’s advance.

This was phenomenally effective, mainly because if the commander discovered a means to block the enemy’s advance other than by taking the village, for example, perhaps by blowing up a bridge, he had the power to apportion troops to blow up that bridge, greatly benefiting the war effort.

He also had the power to question his commanders, and his soldiers had the power to question him. This is because, rather than soldiers of the Wehrmacht being expected to remain silent and compliant, they were actually, to an extent, allowed to question the plans and commands of their superiors.

That means the Wehrmacht practised critical thinking.

The craziest thing of all is that at the time, all of this combined means that soldiers of the Wehrmacht were arguably the most freethinking in regards to battle strategy of their day, and the Allied armies, in comparison, were quite a distance away, which is why of course they struggled so much — at least in the beginning.

But we learnt, and have learnt ever more since, and that is our superpower. The ability to learn and adapt accordingly.

The Anglosphere especially is strong on this. After all, the Romans conquered us, and yet we revere them and are smart to; they taught us a lot, and still teach us a lot.

As such, next time you find yourself on your ass at the hands of a foe, remember, if you want to beat them, you’re going to have to learn from them. To put it more bluntly, if you get punched in the face, it may pay to learn why your defence failed so you can make certain not to get punched in the face again.

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