“A goodly portion of the reasons that ‘protest’ and ‘resistance’ are nearly always either useless or counter-productive in our time can be understood in terms of tactical and situational intelligence. As a child, I was not a very good chess player, so I played ‘defensively’. In other words, I was ‘trying to keep a problem from happening’.

As a seasoned amateur, I realized that in order to have any chance of winning… I had to assertively »control terrain on the board and »attack. Though I was not skillful enough to win, I began to understand how my defensive strategy was doomed to failure in nearly every case… unless my opponent made at least one and usually a number of significant errors (that I could detect as such).

One of the problems with protest and resistance are that we start out in a role that violates our goal: the role of defender/victim. Another is a defensive mindset. One cannot succeed by ‘playing defensively’ against any opponent that intends to win, especially if they are adept at controlling terrain. In our time, terrain is essentially the minds, lives and relationships of people… as well as the remains of our once thriving ecologies.

When we protest or resist, what actually happens (generally speaking) is that we cede precious assets and terrain (in terms of feeding assets and tactical intelligence about us) to the forces we oppose, who are active, aggressive, wealthy, and can purchase the skills and support they do not already control. This makes it relatively simple for them to turn the outcomes of our defensive or resistive activities into boons that further empower them to succeed (and profit from this process).

For this reason it is imperative that we form highly skilled, tactically proficient ‘teams’ if we intend to actually address problems in our society, and that we (meaning: these teams) »take terrain from the forces currently holding it… efficiently, creatively, effectively… and decisively. It is nearly impossible to win an engagement defensively.

And if there is no actual ‘we’, by which I mean a group that is unified, intelligent, skillful and can table empowering assets quickly, then the conflict is already lost. A ‘we’ of passively complaining victims is little more than a prize waiting to be taken by more aggressive and committed forces.”

— an intelligence agent