34. Inflict injury on oneself to win the enemy’s trust
This phrase means to win the enemy’s trust by injuring oneself. This stratagem is a great way to deceive your enemy in order to win the enemy’s confidence through sympathy or revenge against ex allies. One would injure him or herself as a way to trick the enemy that they are no longer affiliated with their ex allies. This is a powerful way to earn your enemy’s trust in order to spy and create an internal struggle from within.
Injuring oneself by saying that you were inflicted by your ex allies has been done from ancient times to even now. By doing so, the enemy will relax and one would be able to gain the enemy’s trust to stay with them. By staying near the enemy, one can plot against them from within. That is what it means to “inflict injury on oneself to win the enemy’s trust“.
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This was the ruse used by Huang Gai of Wu against Cao Cao in the Battle of the Red Cliff. A difficult stratagem to pull off…but the rewards are great.
Avatar: “if you do not enter the tiger’s den, can you acquire it’s cubs”?
Dear Yours Truly,
Problem is you need a volunteer on your side to go to the tiger’s den. It’s rare to find a person willing to injure themselves in the hope of gaining a rival’s trust so as to achieve one’s goals.
one problem I see is that these days the information travels so fast and the world is so small that to pretend something in the business world is very very difficult … people talk …
Biz- yea, it gets harder to verify what is true or false as there are multiple information traveling at the speed of light!