Divide and conquer

     Divide and conquer. The key to taking control. It works on many levels in many different environments to accomplish many different goals. From something as simple as eating your dinner to something as extreme as taking over a nation; divide and conquer will work for you. Sometimes it is a matter of who is dividing who to decide who will ultimately conquer the situation. Just when it seems that success or failure is inevitable, the tables can turn.

     We divide and conquer life everyday. In order to clothe ourselves in the morning we take one article of clothing and put it on. Then we take the next article and put it on. If we tried to put all of our clothes on at once we would fail miserably. Like the old adage says, “He puts his pants on one leg at a time, just like you.” When you feel overwhelmed with errands, the best thing to do is to accomplish each task one at a time. Go to the bank. When that is settled, go to the post office. After you have mailed your bills, head for the supermarket. Once you are fully stocked with groceries, head home. Again, divide and conquer. Open one bag of groceries and take one item out and put it away. Move to the next item, then the next bag until all of the groceries are put away. It seems so simple, yet it is one of the most powerful strategies in the world.

     The list of uses for the strategy includes sporting events. Keep the opposing players from being able to work together. In football, the defensive line needs to force the offensive line to separate to allow a linebacker to rush in towards the QB. In basketball, players try to isolate players and keep them from being a viable option to receive a pass. That will cut down on the dribbler’s options and make it harder for him to operate. In fact the season itself can be a success with a well-known attitude of “one game at a time.” No need to spend any concentration on a game that can’t be played until after the next game is played. It can be chopped down to drive at a time, one play at a time, or one pitch at a time.

     This strategy is effective when attempting to become the leader of a group. To become the most dominant of the pretty girl clique, it’s best to start with one girl, convince her that you like her, but that the other girls don’t. Tell her secrets and/or lies, then move to the next girl and do the same thing. When they are all busy fighting each other, you move in and take control, restore order and you are the leader.

     A horrifying way that this strategy has been used throughout history is war. Many a king, tsar, or emperor has used it to take over land, and use it for his own purposes. As he leads his army into the territory, he looks to catch his opponents scattered. If he can’t catch them outside of their attack formation, he will attempt to force them into smaller groups. To do this, he may concentrate on a section of ten men and shoot between them and the main group until they get away from the group. Then they are much easier to deal with. Cutting small groups of men from the crowd like carving a turkey, eventually all that is left is a carcass of an army. The winner of the battle is the side that can divide and conquer more effectively. Sometimes a war is won by forming meaningless battles that divide an army over hundreds of miles of land. In any event, divide and conquer.

     We as a people are the victims of such malaise. Since there is no direct bloodshed, we don’t tend to have any sense of urgency about it. In fact most of us don’t realize what is happening. As humans we are divided in many ways. Nationality, race, age, appearance are attributes that we don’t have a whole lot of control over. Citizenship, religion, political beliefs and social station we can alter. These only begin to describe the many ways we are against each other, when it is proven time and time again that working together makes things much easier. Instead we are led to fight with each other over mundane differences that have absolutely no bearing on making life easier for everybody. Issues such as: red state/blue state, liberal/conservative, old/young, smoker/non-smoker, war/peace; Black/White/Hispanic/Asian/Arabic can be divided even further within each race, and even further then. Black: dark skinned/light skinned White: American/European Hispanic: sexy Latin/dirty Mexican Asian: Japanese/Chinese Arabic entrepreneur/suicide bomber. All these little issues divide us into many armies, some of us belonging to multiple armies. The end result is the wool that is pulled over your eyes.

     In today’s day and age, we have the ability to grow large quantities of food in a small area. Yet people who could help us accomplish our main goals with the proper nourishment are starving. There is plenty of space on this world for all of us, yet we are forced to crowd around the source of money leaving vast parcels of land vacant. We have the knowledge to overcome nature in the desert, in the tundra, and even at sea. All those people with jobs in the financial industry are just pushing papers around, they have no use in the actual port of resource. There must be a reason why we are convinced that we shouldn’t work together to make this beautiful place better. Don’t believe the lies when they tell you that the people from a foreign land want to kill you. It’s the leaders of those foreign lands that dislike the leaders of our land. And both leaders send off our citizens to fight the battles for them. Your sons and daughters being slaughtered in the same fashion as some poor man in Iraq, who is led to believe that the U.S. and all it’s citizens are evil. But as long as the masters divide us humans, they will continue to conquer. They will always rule over you until you realize that we are the driving force in this world. Without us, they are nothing. Without them, we remain the same.