Playing the Players
Friday, September 25th, 2009
We all know these people, those slick, smooth manipulators who seem to get away with murder, do as little as humanly possible and end up living the life of Riley. For a number of reasons our society is set up in such a way that it is very difficult for them to lose. It is as if life was a huge Game and they were the master players. What is the average person to do when confronted with such practiced charlatans?
The task of beating the Players at their own Game seems at first impossibly daunting. They know the rules inside out, have risen to positions of great power and authority, and are far more experienced than we are. How can someone like you or I hope to prevail in a showdown against them?
What we need is a way to unseat them from their self-appointed thrones by playing our weaker position to greatest strength. We need to undermine them and create leverage to force them out of their complacency. The Players base their strategy on having the upper hand at all times. This allows them the luxury to rake in profits without investing much effort in their work. This smug sense of unimpeachable success is a symbol of their strength, but it is also their greatest weakness.
Meanwhile, they become dependent upon this advantageous position; and when the trump is removed from their hand, they really have no idea of how to cope with the situation they find themselves in. They will usually resort to what they know; bluff and bluster, which only serve to worsen their predicament, as they amplify the downward spiral in which they find themselves. The outsider, on the other hand, has no such advantage. Therefore, we must rely upon intelligence and stealth, to create our good fortune.
The good news for us is that most Players have only one strategy, and once it has failed they are left paddleless up the proverbial creak. The Players never imagine that they might be played, and therein lies our advantage. The reasons for this are twofold:
First, the average Player views the rest of us as fools, incapable of thinking tactically. Second, they see themselves as gifted with a shrewdness which the rest of us simply do not have.
On the surface, we seduce the Player, lulling them into a false sense of security while we go about their undoing. To do this, we must first develop ways of identifying them. Next, we must learn to understand their nuances, so that we may differentiate between various types of Players and thereby better attune our movements to theirs. Next, we observe their movements to discern the underlying pattern hidden beneath. Players are always ‘on their game’. That is to say, they never let up in pursuing their hidden agenda.
Believing themselves to be infallible prevents them from learning from their mistakes. Add to this their lack of interest in anything that does not immediately benefit them, causes them to lack depth. This then severely restricts their ability to be innovative when problems do arise.
The fact that a Player cannot engage in a situation in which the odds are not stacked overwhelmingly in his favour makes him a coward at heart, further limiting what he can and will do in his own defence. Small wonder, given all of this, that the Players created The Game: without it, they would have little going for them indeed.
