Patterns of Conflict
| The works of |
| Works of John Boyd |
|---|
OODA WIKI Edition
Quantico Transcription
So, what, in the nature of what people think is what they want, comes their goals; so what does a goal mean? Look at human nature. As human beings, what do we want? First of all, we want to survive. Otherwise, jump out the goddamn window. Now some people do that, but as a corporate body we normally don’t do that. And you tend to want to survive on your own terms. You don’t want to have to survive where you’re getting beat up by somebody else, and have to do what he wants to do, you want to have some freedom of your own, some dignity in your own survival. Which suggests you want to improve your own capacity for independent action.
Okay. But remember we live in a world in which we have limited resources. So if you improve your capacity for independent action, by taking resources from somebody else, he may not like that too much, and vice versa. So what happened, we tend to diminish his capacity for independent action, or deny him the opportunity to survive on his own terms, or if it gets particularly hard, make it impossible for him to survive at all. In other words, it’s a natural human condition, it’s just the way it is.
Like in the Marine Corps, there’s only so many promotion slots, like say ten for some, and if fifty guys compete, somebody’s going to lose out. So I’m not talking about survival just in terms of physical, but moral-mental, more subtle aspects too.
And the implication is clear: life is conflict, survival, and conquest, what is soft, moderate—operates as an automaton, squeeze them and it’s all going to come unglued, and won’t be able to adapt. Got different mindsets. American industry’s proven that’s exactly what they had relative to the Japanese. They’re kicking us in the balls every goddamn day without a doubt, you should see it. We say, “goddamn, we know we’re better,” so we can hang on to the same old view, get hammered one more time. We had our [unintelligible] in Vietnam but they don’t believe it yet. Okay? So what I want to do now, is I want to show you some impressions that came out of my, well before I do that, I want to make one more comment, excuse me.