Change Agent Part 5: A Position of Weakness Can Be a Strength
“If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito.” Dalai Lama
- The ruling force automatically has more to lose than the weaker force.
- Position of weakness as a form of power
One of the most counterintuitive lessons of insurgency strategy is how a position of weakness can be a form of power.
People and organizations with a significant amount of resources and power have to spend their time and effort defending those resources and power. The difficulty of defending those resources and power goes up with the more resources and power a person or organization has.
I first learned this lesson when advocating for in-person mental health screenings after deployments for the Montana National Guard. I was conducting a public campaign to get Montana’s governor at that time to order the Montana National Guard to make screening mandatory for servicemembers returning from combat.
At the time, I was a really green junior associate at a medium-sized law firm. My bar passage results had only come in four months earlier, so I didn’t have any professional expertise that would have considered the Governor of Montana with a full-legal team at his disposal.
The closest thing I had to political expertise was helping out with someone else’s student council campaign when I was in high school. If there were odds makers, the odds makers would have given me a snowball’s chances of watching Fourth of July fireworks.
The three things that I had going for me were:
- An important issue
- A personal relentless focus on this issue, and
- A willingness to engage in a protracted public fight to win.
This was the only fight that mattered to me at that time. I still needed to do my work, pay my bills, etc.; but all of my free-time could go to sending emails, writing op-eds, making phone calls, etc.
The Governor who I was pestering had to deal with all of state government, getting the Legislature to approve the state’s operating budget, and dealing with a wide variety of other issues.
Each minute that the Governor and his team spent dealing with me was a minute they didn’t have to deal with every other issue in the state.
While every other power metric would have been skewed towards the Governor, the metric of who was willing to give up more time to fight about whether the National Guard should receive in-person mental health screenings was fully in my favor.
This is a small-scale version of the lessons that countries and empires fighting insurgencies have learned the hard way for thousands of years. The group that values the fight more almost always wins.
