Sayings do nothing
I don’t understand how quotes or sayings work. There’s a huge misrepresentation of the idea I feel, mainly because the system has been popularized in books and television. Let me explain.
In every movie, the main character (or main villain) has some kind of code they live by. The code is codified (obviously) in a phrase of some kind. Now in the good movies, this phrase is original. In others (even some of the good ones) this is a famous quote from someone long dead. Because dead people are quite a lot wiser than living ones. For instance, the movie Battleship. A bad one, I know. But the main guy keeps trying to plug in Sun Tzu into his strategy “Fight the enemy where they aren’t”. He uses this quote after hitting an enemy ship by targeting an empty space where he anticipates they will appear next. That’s a load of bullshit though and the Japanese captain on his ship tells him as much. After a bit of mild research, turns out the quote was heavily edited too. A better translation reads “Attack where your enemies are not prepared; go to where they do not expect.” which makes way more sense as a military strategy than some cryptic phrase. Stupid Americans. But that wasn’t what I was getting at.
What movies and TV shows tell us is that characters on screen internalise these messages of wisdom and then, at the opportune moment, they have a realisation that these messages are the key to whatever predicament they’re in. Not so in my reality.
I was playing badminton the other day with a novice partner. I told him a couple of time how to properly place the shuttle in places where no one was on guard or would be difficult to reach for the opposition. That’s a basic tenet of any game and after several tries at this, I remembered this shitty quote “Fight the enemy where they aren’t”, a mis-translated and crappy interpretation of an actually wise saying. It struck me then that we actually see situations playing out in life and then we attribute them to things we have heard or read. It isn’t often that we shape situations out of our readings.
So this archetypal hero business of getting inspiration from a quote is bullshit. It may be more subtle than that, I’m willing to concede. Because the hero internalised the saying, he or she acted in a way that was consistent with it and then later attributed the action to the quote. That is a deeper, psychological explanation of this. Or, we just see things and we want to label them. The more things we see and the more mature we get, the more sophisticated and worldly our labels on things. Hence instead of shouting “PLACE THE GODDAMN SHUTTLE WHERE THE GUY ISN’T COVERING THE COURT”, you feel wiser (and waaaay more superior) saying “Fight the enemy where the aren’t. Haven’t you ever read The Art of War by Sun Tzu?”.
