<!-- bryant-content-generator:start --> # This is therefore a strategic manual disguised as... > This is therefore a strategic manual disguised as an indictment, and the disguise is thin on purpose. Once the reader can price behavior, three things become possible that the buzzword literature has spent forty years making impossible. The first is **prediction**: the reader learns to watch the price rather than the promises, to notice when their own value in a coalition has fallen, when a partner's exit options have widened, when a rival has found allies, when they themselves have become isolated enough to be affordable, and to act before the animal does rather than after. The second is **positioning**: since the only serious defenses any social mammal has ever had are to raise the cost of harming it, to reduce its exposure, and to stand where retaliation is credible and isolation is impossible, the reader stops trying to be understood and starts trying to be expensive. The third is **blame with precision**, and this is the one that heals, because every story the reader was given about the people who hurt them, that they were sick, wounded, insecure, that they did not mean it, that hurt people hurt people, quietly moved the wound out of the reader's hands and into a diagnosis where no one could be held. The book returns it. He did it because it was cheap. She did it because you were alone. They expelled you because your rank had dropped and the coalition needed a demonstration. {{You were not destroyed by a mystery. You were destroyed by an animal that priced you correctly and found you affordable.}} A person who can finally say that sentence has been given back the one thing the therapeutic vocabulary took: a defendant. **Source:** [[books/Chimping Out|Chimping Out]] ## Share on Social Media ``` “This is therefore a strategic manual disguised as an indictment, and the disguise is thin on purpose. Once the reader can price behavior, three things become possible that the buzzword literature has spent forty years making impossible. The first is prediction: the reader learns to watch the price rather than the promises, to notice when their own value in a coalition has fallen, when a partner's exit options have widened, when a rival has found allies, when they themselves have become isolated enough to be affordable, and to act before the animal does rather than after. The second is positioning: since the only serious defenses any social mammal has ever had are to raise the cost of harming it, to reduce its exposure, and to stand where retaliation is credible and isolation is impossible, the reader stops trying to be understood and starts trying to be expensive. The third is blame with precision, and this is the one that heals, because every story the reader was given about the people who hurt them, that they were sick, wounded, insecure, that they did not mean it, that hurt people hurt people, quietly moved the wound out of the reader's hands and into a diagnosis where no one could be held. The book returns it. He did it because it was cheap. She did it because you were alone. They expelled you because your rank had dropped and the coalition needed a demonstration. You were not destroyed by a mystery. You were destroyed by an animal that priced you correctly and found you affordable. A person who can finally say that sentence has been given back the one thing the therapeutic vocabulary took: a defendant.” — Bryant McGill https://bryantmcgill.com/passages/passages-therefore-strategic-manual-vocabulary-took-defendant ``` <!-- bryant-content-generator:end -->