The Art of War by Sun Tzu, Chapter Three, Planning Offensives

[kimberlysteele]

Unless you are one of the lucky few, you have probably had to deal with a neighbor you didn’t get along with.  I am not untouched by the bad neighbor experience.  Sun Tzu gives us some help in learning how to battle a bad neighbor on both the large and the small scale in this chapter that may be of some use to those (like myself) currently embroiled in dealings with less-than-savory neighbor situations.  

 

Sun Tzu the Good Neighbor

 

Right out of the gate, Sun Tzu says “preserving the enemy’s state-capital is best, destroying their state capital is second best.”  

 

Sun Tzu wants everyone to get along.  Though he doesn’t rule it out, he reminds us that it is vastly preferable not to obliterate our neighbor’s ability to thrive.  Let’s say there is a family living in an average suburban house in an average suburban neighborhood called the Average Family.  One day, a family of hoarders moves in next door.  The hoarders are extremely well off (this is often the case with hoarders) and over the span of a few years, they cram their home with junk. Mr. and Mrs. Average could go ballistic on the hoarders, shunning them, shaming them, and generally abusing them, or they could go the high road and treat them as they would want to be treated: with kindness and compassion.   Hoarding, after all, is a mental disorder and though those who hoard should not be enabled, bullying them serves little to no purpose except one’s own ego-gratification.   If push truly comes to shove, for instance if the hoarders share common walls (and rats, roaches, and ants) with the average family’s duplex, the second option of attempting to destroy their capital comes into play.  To destroy their capital, we could take any array of options from having them fined by the town, the association, or both, or we could employ natural magic against them in the form of hot foot powder.  Sun Tzu’s preferred approach is to sweeten the relationship instead immediately going for the jugular.  

 

There Goes the Neighborhood

 

Let’s say the hoarders move out… yay!  The For Sale sign goes up and in a few months, there is a new neighbor moving in next door to the Average Family.  Problem solved, right?  Wrong!  The family next door is now a bunch of drug dealers.  Great.

 

Sun Tzu says that the highest realization of warfare is to attack the enemy’s plans, but how do you attack the enemy’s plans when they’re dealing drugs?  Magic and prayer would be a good place to turn in this case, because the only way you are going to get in their way is with the help of the gods.  One would think that doing magic to destroy them would be the order of the day, but actually you should take the opposite approach.  Doing magic to strengthen your own morale and praying for your own ability to transcend your law-breaking neighbor is the best strategy for undermining their deleterious effects upon you and your surroundings.  Fortifying your own “vibe” with the power of beings that are much, much smarter than you will get in the way of your drug dealing neighbor far better than any hexes or curses you can throw at them.  Trust me on this one, as I have an uncanny natural talent for hexing and cursing that I wisely no longer use.  You can also ask others to pray for your well being… give those nosy Christians something to do, but make sure you specify they are not to pray for your conversion to Christianity unless that’s what you want!

 

The next level of the realization of warfare is to attack the enemy’s alliances.  “Alliances” in our case applies to the drug dealer’s clients, suppliers, and the municipality in which they are doing illegal business.  If your neighbors are drug dealers, you will have to consider reporting them to the authorities.  You will want to talk to your neighbors, who might also know what they are doing.  You might consider hiring an investigator or looking into their criminal records.  The City Council might be able to act on your behalf depending on the situation.  

 

The next level of the realization of warfare is to attack their army.  When you call the police on your bad neighbor’s loud party or leave a terse message on their voicemail, this is what you are doing.  You aren’t attacking the head of the enemy: you are doing nothing to drive away the forces that keep the demand for drugs in full swing.  You are merely throwing grenades at foot soldiers.  

 

The lowest level of the realization of warfare is to attack their fortified cities.  Now we are looking at the tactics of Antifa and BLM, the lowest of the low.  You decide to torment your neighbor by marching around his house with a bunch of your own posse and a bullhorn.  You purposefully draw the police to your protest so they may hear you whine about the injustice and unfairness they are allowing.  

 

Sun Tzu always argues for subjugating the enemy without fighting whenever possible.  As frustrating as “leave it to the gods” and “do self-encouraging magic” sounds, it really is the best and most effective strategy.  

A Tale of Two Neighbors' Resources

Sun Tzu goes on to talk about resources and how they pertain to warfare.  If you have ten times the drug dealer neighbor’s resources, you might be able to buy the house they are in and evict them.  You could certainly afford to move if you don’t mind moving.  At the very least, if you are not able to be kind and friendly to them, you can have a wall or fence erected between the two of you.

 

If you have five times their resources, you can consider getting legal on them.  You might not be able to stop them from doing business, but you might be quietly able to make it difficult for them to proceed by reporting them to their internet service provider or slowing the flow of customers in and out of their door.  

 

If you have double their resources, Sun Tzu suggest dividing your forces.  You could acquire a pied-a-terre in another state so that you can take vacations during their annoying busy seasons.  You might buy a nearby house and rent out the original residence to someone who doesn’t mind being next door to a drug dealer until the drug dealer leaves.  You might send the kids to go live with their grandmother for a few weeks at a time.

 

If you are equal in strength, you can engage your enemy.  You have every right to be there, after all, and they are breaking laws.   Can doesn’t mean “should”.  My thoughts are that you shouldn’t expect too much from the police these days, at least not in the US.  

 

Finally, you can avoid your enemy if you are outmatched by them.  This is what I have done in the case of my own bad neighbors when they were doing illegal things in their space.  The Average Family might put up a large address plaque on their house to deter addicts and other dealers from mistakenly flocking to their door instead of the dealer's place.  They would do well to plant trees and bushes on the border between the two houses, which will add a magical protective effect as well as a visual shield.  Periodically sprinkling salt laced with hot pepper at the edge of their property will also keep their customers and colleagues from wandering in the direction of your house.  Putting up a decorative mandala-like symbol somewhere near the door such as a hex sign confounds the negative energies of addiction that swirl around your bad neighbor and their clientele.  The ultimate avoidance of the enemy, of course, is moving.

 

Sun Tzu says not to entangle the army if you don’t have to.  Right now, if the Average Family decides to move its troops, they might end up getting soaked.  We are in a massively inflated property bubble.  If the Average Family sells high, they’ll only end up buying high somewhere else and in a few years, will end up under water in their mortgage or rent.  So pick your battles carefully.

 

Sun Tzu also talks about generals who do not understand the army’s affairs yet tries to direct them like its own civil administration.  The Average Family might think that they are owed law and order in their neighborhood because they are law-abiding citizens.  They are naive.  When you are dealing with a bad neighbor, are you looking at the general symptoms of decline in your geographical area and the larger landscape of your country?  We are in a Long Descent where even the “good” neighborhoods are infested by crime.  Many people can no longer make an honest living even if they want to.  Drug dealing, prostitution, and homelessness is going to touch the Average Family because that is modern life.  Not-In-My-Backyard or NIMBYism is harder to sustain with each passing year.

 

Know your enemy.  Their goal is simple: Continue staying afloat by selling drugs.  In the case of hoarders, it is to accumulate lots of stuff until they die, whereupon they will quickly realize they can’t take it with them.  They aren't your friends, but they also aren't Josef Stalin.

 

More importantly, know yourself.  Know your own weaknesses and don’t sink to the level of hating your neighbor.  They may be parasites, but aren’t we all?  Takes one to know one.

 

 

 

Comments

[emmanuelg]

This is a good summary of the possible levels of engagement!
I have a neighbor like this, uphill from me who keeps dumping dirt over our shared property line to expand his somewhat flat yard. Unfortunately, he is burying our back yard doing it, and has been gradually dumping on us more and more since about 2012.
I am not sure we have any other option than legal at this point.
It is difficult to assess the best level of warfare realization-- Our neighbor is extremely secretive. After more than 15 years, I still have no idea how he supports himself, nor do any of his neighbors.

To further complicate matters; We may be forced to remove the barrier plants between us and them to lessen the risk of our house burning in forest fire season; My wife (and her whole family) are full of hatred for these people and can't seem to get unstuck from that, so there's a bit of the Raspberry Jam Principle at work here.

Sounds like I would do well to get his background investigated so I know what resources I am up against;

I suspect that they are involved in generating some sort of glamour that inhibits people from acting against them;

Then to find a way to break the hatred cycle....

Thanks for the practical food for thought!

[kimberlysteele]

What an @$$hole. Currently, I have a bad neighbor situation where the neighbors at my business location are engaged in an illegal business (I can actually prove it). To add insult to injury, they are fond of stamping out their cigarette butts in my garden area. My other business neighbors know about their shady stuff and hate them and our landlord viciously. All it does is perpetuate the cycle of bad karma via blowback.

[kimberlysteele]

Can you afford an iron fence? I'm thinking fire proof with the advantage of also being a barrier that his malefic energy will have a hard time crossing. It would also make his illegal dumping a painful exercise. You might bury some iron nails facing his direction if you can manage to do it without wishing harm upon him. Personally, I don't pray for my nasty neighbor, but since she is in the business of exploiting other humans, I regularly pray for the well-being of the people she exploits.

[methylethyl]

Ugh. We just figure the dicey neighbors come with the low price tag, and deal with it. Had at least 2 meth-lab fires in our 1-square-mile neighborhood in the 2 yrs we've lived here, in addition to the dealers who walk down our (rural, dirt-road, 7 miles to the nearest gas station) street a couple times a day with their little school backpacks and giant purses (yep, just a casual stroll downtown, with my big purse, going... shopping?). They meet up, we assume, with the random cars that park by the cow pasture on the road leading into our neighborhood. I like watching the cows as much as anyone, but... it's a 400-acre paddock and they're rarely visible. The cars are there all the time.

I don't feel like I can let the kids bike around the neighborhood (like I did when I was their age), which is a bummer.

I've been mulling over the right course/s of action here. Can I do anything to improve the situation? A few things seem obvious: The house next door is vacant, and the house across the street is on the market... so I should pray for *good* neighbors to move in. Also seems like a no-brainer to ask God's blessing on the whole neighborhood. We need it! The place got walloped by the last hurricane, and in two years, we've lost three OK, non-drug-dealing neighbors *on our street* to house fires (dogs+heaters, electrical problem, food left on stove... nobody hurt but they had to move out).

But I do wonder if more concrete action is called for. One recalls the Oakland Buddha story, and various ghetto churches doing "prayer-walks" around their neighborhoods to call down God's grace and deter crime. Maybe I need to make the time and effort to get out there and walk the neighborhood and work some prayer beads...

A subject for meditation ;)

[methylethyl]

...and definitely, we need more trees along the fence-lines! One thing the hurricane did was take out 95% of the trees (mostly pine)! We've planted a few, but we could definitely step up our efforts in that direction. Our remaining next-door neighbors are decent people, but very *loud*. The trees between us are a welcome buffer!

[kimberlysteele]

A prayer walk sounds like a great idea! Or if you're not shy, you could do a banishing ritual right out in the open. I'm still a bit too inhibited to come out of that broom closet. What is the Oakland Buddha story? I could be imagining things, but I swear my few blocks have become less dramatic since I started doing the Sphere of Protection every day. We do have our share of unstable people though. We have a guy who most likely has Tourettes. He yells at the top of his lungs and often runs like a charging bull. As far as drug activity, there's a local park a few miles away that is drug dealer city. The parking lot is always full of them blaring loud music and sitting in their cars, which are running with the windows closed. It could use a prayer walk.

[methylethyl]

Oh, Oakland Buddha is a delightful story. Type it into any search engine and you'll come up with any number of synopses. But my all-time favorite is this podcast, which interviews Mr. Stevenson, the guy who installed the Buddha:

https://thisiscriminal.com/episode-15-hes-neutral/

TL:DR: Some dude in a sketchy neighborhood in Oakland was tired of people dumping trash on the little median by his house. So he (not a religious man of any stripe) went and purchased a totally ordinary concrete garden-center Buddha, and installed it on the median. Over time, not only did trash stop being dumped there, but the local Viet Kieu immigrant community adopted the Buddha and started maintaining it, showing up to pray there every morning, leaving offerings. Now the Buddha has a whole shrine built around him, including other statues, regular daily visitors, nobody dumps trash there, and crime in the neighborhood has dropped significantly. And it's enough of a tourist attraction that it's marked on Google maps.

A strict materialist could easily surmise that the increased foot traffic by regular law-abiding people discouraged the crime. I am, of course, not a strict materialist ;)

[mollari]

That is a really beautiful story.

[kimberlysteele]

I so agree! It's very inspiring.

[methylethyl]

PS, after some thought, it seems like one reasonable course of action (out of several) regarding the druggies-- dealers and customers all-- is to pray for their healing, and that their needs be met.

[kimberlysteele]

That seems like the best approach I can imagine.

[mollari]

When I read the Art of War, I found it quite amusing how much effort Sun Tzu put into going over how to avoid war. Fighting is not something the wise will do any more than necessary, so the first step is always to figure out how to avoid fighting. This is a lesson which I think a lot of people have never grasped.

[kimberlysteele]

Thank you. That's how I interpret it. It doesn't seem too far off from the philosophy of many martial arts, which is only to fight when absolutely necessary.

[mollari]

Which makes a lot of sense, given how significant of an impact Sun Tzu had on many martial arts!

Bob the Human

[(Anonymous)]

Oy!

My neighbor has a piece of property more than twenty times larger than ours. He also has a an attitude about women who speak up for themselves. He uses chemicals like Rounup and Oxbow to manage weeds, blackberries and poison oak. When my husband and I talk with him across the fence because of some boundary management issue, he addresses his remarks to my husband, even when he’s responding to something I’ve said.

Yeah, he triggers me.


A few years back I had developed such a strong animus against him I started referring to him as “Bob the d**k”

I had a spiritual teacher who suggested to me I was amping up the antagonism and she suggested I stop calling in what I hated about him, thus he is forever now known as “ Bob the Human.”

It works. I’m more able to speak to him without a charge and to hear his humanity behind his choices. I’m more able to feel compassion for him, although I could be more deeply compassionate!

I’m afraid I laughed at him behind his back when he planted 60 of his acres into CBD hemp, investing at least $200,000 in irrigation, plants, fertilizer, and labor, but lost the whole crop to mold because that year the fall rains and cooler weather came early.

Perhaps I had a kind of victory by blessing him more than cursing him.

Annette