Desert Fox

Playing beyond the illusory structures of reality

“The beautiful moonlight does not really change anything; it only seems to change the world; it is an illusion.”

- Lafcadio Hearn

Game On

Under the thick canopy of stars that pulse over the Libyan Desert, German General Erwin Rommel guided the Afrika Korps division — consisting of 30,000 men and a modest fleet of Panzer tanks — by way of compass and constellations as if they were aimlessly navigating an oceanic expanse with the tide slowly turning against them.

Ordered with a strict mandate to hold a defensive line against the approaching juggernaut of Allied infantry, Rommel was forced to get creative and deviate from the traditional mechanics of a brutal war that spilled blood into its third year.

With zero landmarks, the silver desert that stretches across Libya and Egypt proved to be the main enemy for all that found themselves at the secluded “second front” of the WWII conflict; water, fuel, and ammo had to be trudged in for hundreds of miles over the infinitude of scorched sands, which grew more hostile by the day.

But Rommel held the world by its bone-dry jugular, playing out the high stakes military campaign with a paced grace uncharacteristic of the global war.

In what came to be known as the North Africa Campaign (1941–43), Rommel turned the backdrop of an emotional and brutal conflict, ripe with racism, staggering death tolls and civilian brutality, into a chivalrous chess game of cunning.

Keeping his fingers on the pressure points of the global economy — the Suez Canal — he aspired to cut off Britain from its thriving empirical hubs in the Pacific; a victory for Rommel here would also serve to bathe the fuel-starved German war machine in the rich oils of the Middle East.

Through his perspective and perseverance, the desert sands of North Africa proved to be more fertile than futile for this new game of war that rewarded Rommel’s anachronistic creativity and optic-bending bravado in the face of what should have been a quick burial of his division in the hungry sands of North Africa.

“This is the one moment in ten thousand ages”

- Li Si

By now, we’ve come to realize a thing or two about the subjective nature of existence.

Relativity and quantum mechanics work to undermine the supremacy of objectivity, revealing that reality can be bent in all directions by the organized systems that pull at it.

The observer effect alone is just one subatomic drop in a bucket of evidence that defies the absolute nature of objectivity.

The malleability of time is a sparkling grain in an hourglass of evidence to the same point.

And while we may not yet understand the how, we continuously pick away at the why.

We know, for one, that the systems which best perpetuate themselves through time and space are those that engage their environments with an explorative sense of play; of a tenacity to become more expansive with each iteration and a desire to break from the static norms of existence.

We know, too, that those systems which not only align themselves with the laws of thermodynamics in all the right ways (of riding the wakes of entropy and increasing complexity rather than drowning in them) are able to earn the best existential rewards; those that can delinearize the march of time (of triumph through truism or foresight through failure) can find the ability to deviate quite far from any imposed expectations.

To look outside the box and find more; the universe bows to those who know how to play the game and how to play it by their own rules.

And so while the boxed-in rules of any given industry or social sphere or biological habitat may be relative, the physics are all the same: it’s a game that can be decoded and played.

In this sense, winning isn’t everything; losing plays a critical role, so long as the box is broken.

“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”

- Marcus Aurelius

Game Over

Our consciousness filters nature in such a way as to give us a kind of advantage, and our neurochemistry is tailored to functioning at its best when it’s engaged in cycles of experience — failure and information; reward and repetition.

We’re meant to build an existence through setbacks just as much we are through success, and to play it all out on a series of gains and losses, not inherit or steal it or navigate it without any ambition.

The practice that backs the theory is seen in all forms and systems of nature: organisms that adapt to new predatory forces, pathogens that mutate to survive host defenses, ecosystems that self-correct after catastrophic disruptions.

Every evolutionary leap is a ledger of past failure, written directly into the game code. And nature never seeks a permanent, static equilibrium; instead, it relies on localized destruction to clear the path for more complex, highly organized structures that are willing/able to emerge from the chaos.

“How does the living organism avoid decay? …By eating, drinking, breathing and assimilating. The technical term is metabolism… It feeds on negative entropy.”

- Erwin Shrodinger

Adapt or lose; play the game. But the bigger lesson that tends to get lost in the shifting sands of possibility is that the rules are open to change.

In countless ways and forms, life demonstrates its gamified nature, more malleable for those willing to leave the paths of least resistance and adventure outside the parameters of possibility.

Aside from overlaying a framework of progression and opportunity onto our movement through space and time, gamifying life can carry the potential to open up the bookends of existence in ways that break the molds of expectation and perspective.

Not unlike the way religion turns life from a novel into a story, and not unlike the way perspective can chart a course from tragedy to triumph, an attitude that sees life as an arena for playing out ambition on quests for meaning, and deviating from the structures that be, can pay infinite dividends.

We not only move through our world with the primal instincts of progression and reproduction but we do so with a kind of a creative agency that allows us to pursue our subjective objectives — to play the odds or play the roles, to play with the fires of possibility and breathe life into our chosen crucibles of meaning.

“It appears that mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent inherent in every electron.”

- Freeman Dyson

And so setbacks can be restrung as inevitable respawns for greater inputs of data — prompting a whole different interaction with failures and mistakes, which are to be seen as ineludible necessities built into the architecture of the game.

Rather than being [de]terminative, setbacks aren’t only overcome with each iterated effort and gained experience, they’re the stimuli that’s needed to feed the system to improve.

The resulting approach allows us to remain somewhat detached from the fear of failure or from clinging to any permanent ideals, akin to the countless conceptualizations that flow out of Eastern philosophy and emblematic of the light of faith from their Western counterparts.

Surrendering control over any permanency and gamifying the cycles of risk and reward creates a new formula towards achieving meaning, one that’s more giving to the curious minds that travel outside the realms of possibility.

It’s what motivates students and athletes to reach their peak potentials, what makes mundane obligations become passionate pursuits, and what helped Rommel carve out his masterpiece of a campaign through the Libyan desert.

End Game

The wide open desert initially proved a problem for Rommel — the featureless terrain offered little to no natural cover, making conventional warfare impossible.

And so he skewed the rules of war, turning the setback into an advantage — the physical openness of the desert became an opportunity to manipulate optics and control what the enemy saw.

“Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.”

- Niels Bohr

Faced with a constant supply shortage and with being ridiculously outnumbered, Rommel focused instead on projecting an aura of overwhelming strength.

He created phantom forces out of the dusts of his creative playground; attaching brushwood to his smaller vehicles, he dragged them through the sand to create massive clouds that created an illusion of large Panzer divisions moving swiftly with reckless abandon, an intimidating and unexpected anomaly to British aerial and ground reconnaissance.

He ordered his tanks to fan out, creating a perception of an all-enveloping, immense armored division that terrified the suddenly trapped Allied commanders; believing they were surrounded by a much larger force, the garrison surrendered and yielded thousands of prisoners and vital tactical ground.

To compensate for his very real shortage of armor, Rommel also mounted plywood onto Volkswagens and advanced the decoy fleets toward British positions, tricking Allied commanders into retreating and squandering their own ammunition on the toy army.

In once instance, Rommel executed a masterclass in optical manipulation by placing 88mm anti-aircraft guns (able to blast through tanks at a long range) in carefully concealed positions; he then ordered his lighter, vastly inferior Panzers to lure the advancing British tanks into a trap. As the Brits chased the retreating German tanks, Rommel’s concealed 88s decimated the armored vanguard and frustrated Churchill in one of Britain’s most humiliating and devastating losses.

“Mortal danger is an effective antidote for fixed ideas.”

- Erwin Rommel

His tactics, creative as much as they were theatrical and synonymous with only those that could be found between the covers of Sun Tzu’s Art of War, made him a legend and earned him the moniker ‘The Desert Fox’.

Rommel deviated from the principles of conventional warfare, both by way of his actual strategy and also the character of his approach; he transcended the modern mechanisms of military might and recoded the game through imaginative necessity and a tactical defiance of objective reality.

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