YMMV / The Art of War (Sun Tzu)

• Common Knowledge:
  • Ask a random person about it and they will tell you it's a massive military guide collecting all sorts of genius insights on how to fight and win wars. What it really is is a 101: War for Dummies short guide, that discourages military conflict and fighting battles for most of its length.
  • Thanks to the 80s yuppie circles, it is also associated with strategies applicable to cutthroat business practices. Not only is this a massive stretch, but those few general rules that do apply outside of warfare are so generic and surface-level, they rely on the most basic common sense.
  • If all of this wasn't enough, it's easily one of the most misquoted books in human history, with the majority of lines people associate with it either being taken out of context or from different books entirely.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The book was originally written for Helyu, the ruler of the Kingdom of Wu. About fifty or so years after Sun Tzu's death, Wu was completely destroyed and absorbed by the Kingdom of Yue. Additional points when you consider that Helyu's son and successor Fu Chai did many things that Sun Tzu (and The Art Of War) would have frowned upon.
• Mainstream Obscurity: Art of War is widely known to the mainstream audience even though only a relatively small amount of people have read it.
• Memetic Badass: The book (with its annotations usually making it semi-biographical) has made Sun Tzu into a worldwide byword for military brilliance.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • — Sun Tzu, The Art of War ^Explanation Similarly to Confucius' Dialectics, it has become commonplace to intentionally write random, often nonsensical quotes, and misattribute them to The Art of War.
  • "If you're losing, consider not doing that." ^Explanation A joke about how a noticeably loud part of the fanbase of this book consider it to be deep, philosophical, and relevant in everyday life (and think much more highly of themselves for having read it), while in actuality, those types of people tend to be very shallow.
• Older Than They Think: While The Art of War has only become popular in the West during last 200-300 years, it's still worth noting that General Sun lived in the sixth century BC (500-400 BC) and was a contemporary of Darius I of Persia, Confucius, and Pythagoras.
• Once Original, Now Common: This work is frequently advertised as the book about war, but by modern standards, most of its lessons amount to having common sense and not being a bonehead. This is a case of Values Dissonance, as modern common sense was not as common back then (heck, it may not be even today); more than a few modern readers have joked about how much of Sun Tzu's advice amounts to "Don't die." War is, in general, extremely complicated, difficult, risky, and chaotic, and many leaders — who decide whether or not to engage in a war, and/or how a state prepares itself for the possibility of warfare — would not necessarily have any real clue about how to conduct warfare. The Art of War serves more as a concise, very well-written beginner's guide for warfare in general, and even well-trained and experienced generals can sometimes forget a basic tenet of warfare (due to the sheer complexity and chaos of a given situation in a war), which makes it good literature to know. In addition, back in Sun Zi's day, superstition was rampant, along with the belief that the supernatural can influence wars.
• Values Dissonance:
  • Sun Tzu's advocating of treating prisoners kindly so that they join your side would appear odd to Western readers. This is because Europe has a long history of parole, ransom and prisoner exchange (at least, for people that "matter"), but standard procedure in pre-modern China was to massacre everyone involved to prevent any chance of them being a thorn in the victors' side.
  • Today, some of the tactics Sun Tzu advocates would be considered war crimes, including examples like pretending to set up truce talks to lure enemies into a trap and attacking the enemy without declaring war. While the whole point of the book is to be a Combat Pragmatist, those tactics are an example of how what is or isn't pragmatic has changed over the millennia. The central assumption behind pretty much the entire work is that the reader will remain in a superior position because of his adherence to these tenets, and it overtly assumes that the reader is seeking total annihilation of the opposition, either via assimilation after victory, or plain old genocide (which is its own can of worms entirely). In modern war, almost no one can nor is expected to maintain military and political dominance one hundred percent of the time, and doing things like staging false peace talks and attacking the enemy without declaring war runs a very high risk of angering your opposition and even alienating potential allies, which might cause severe problems for your side if they decide that you are untrustworthy — at best leading to a prolonged war, at worst leading to your total annihilation.
  • It's also a reflection of how Technology Marches On. Whereas setting up peace talks between two factions in a single nation's civil war might have been completely unknown by virtually anyone else (and certainly not the population in general, which allows one to use it as a chance to massacre the leaders invited), in the modern era trying this trick would result in everyone knowing immediately, which would bring down very serious consequences.

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