Leitmotif I
A Double Quote: Re-conceptualizing Walls
“Lot of engineers don’t realize this is possible. They think there’s like a wall. They’re basically operating according to these invisible walls and we’re in the the process of explaining those walls don’t exist. And I think it’s going to be pretty amazing.”
-Elon Musk, entrepreneur
“This space that you look at, this room that you look at, is nothing but your interpretation of it. Now, you can stretch the boundaries of your interpretation, but not in an unlimited fashion, after all, it must be bound by physics, as it contains buildings and alleys. The question is: how do you interpret the alley? Do you interpret the alley as a place, like every architect and every town planner does, to walk through, or do you interpret the alley as a place forbidden to walk through? This depends only on interpretation. We interpreted the alley as a place forbidden to walk through, and the door as a place forbidden to pass through, and the window as a place forbidden to look through, because a weapon awaits us in the alley, and a booby trap awaits us behind the doors. This is because the enemy interprets space in a traditional, classical manner, and I do not want to obey this interpretation and fall into his traps. Not only do I not want to fall into his traps, I want to surprise him! This is the essence of war. I need to win. I need to emerge from an unexpected place. And this is what we tried to do…This is why that we opted for the methodology of walking through walls….Like a worm that eats its way forward, emerging at points and then disappearing. We were thus moving from the interior of homes to their exterior in a surprising manner and in places we were not expected, arriving from behind and hitting the enemy that awaited us behind a corner…I said to my troops, ‘Friends! This is not a matter of your choice! There is no other way of moving! If until now you were used to move along roads and sidewalks, forget it! From now on we all walk through walls!’”
-Aviv Kochavi, Paratroop Brigade Commander, IDF
While the idolization of Elon Musk is getting out of hand, it cannot be denied that the man is an innovator. In an article that references the great Richard Feynman, Musk’s simplistic ground-up approach is credited for his ability to spot unexpected solution, even if implementing them requires vastly more complex engineering. Musk explained this clarity of mind using the wall as an analogy for a mental block. Where he is able to rethink the wall, he sees opportunities which he can then disclose to others.
Opposite this, Kochavi describes walls literally, but discusses rethinking them, redefining them in a way that leads to conducting maneuver in a different manner.
Whereas Musk’s approach is geared towards identifying where a wall is not truly a wall but instead a doorway, Kochavi’s approach is to literally turn walls into doorways. Both are enabled by redefining, in a way, what a wall actually is.
* One last note is that while the theoretical approach to arrive at the idea of ‘moving through walls’ is interesting, one wonders whether, for all its pontification, the idea was really more inspired (at the very least subconsciously) by practice, by these officers’ study of history — take sources like Chuikov’s writing about Stalingrad or the histories of the Battle of Manila, for example.
-LM
