Go — the Art of Power Over Circumstances

It is pointless to look for a way out in a hopeless situation — it is not there.

However, history knows many examples when, in force majeure circumstances, a strategist changed the circumstances themselves and already in them, instead of avoiding losses, received new great opportunities.

60 years of the XI century AD the Song empire was on the verge of collapse and civil war, the price of rice had increased tenfold in 20 years, the treasury was empty. The chronicles speak of famine, the murder and sale of children, leaving their families as collateral.

Carrying out the reform of the first minister Wang An-shih (王安石), the mobilized masses of peasants and soldiers erected 11 thousand irrigation facilities within 6 years. The introduction of Vietnamese early ripening varieties of rice, which yielded 30 centners per hectare, instead of 10, made it possible to obtain two crops per year. The rent from the second crop was prohibited by decree. This is just a small part of what has been done.

After the deployment of reforms (since 1069), instead of a civil war, a new population growth begins — by 1110, the population of China had grown from 58 to 110 million people.

Sengoku Jidai, (戦国時代) “Era of the Warring States” (second half of the 15th — early 17th centuries) — the period of Japanese unrest. Control of the central government over the periphery was lost. The furious internecine war of the daimyo princes tore the country apart. Oda Nobunaga (織田 信長), Toyotomi Hideyoshi (豊臣 秀吉), Tokugawa Ieyasu (徳川 家康) united Japan in a difficult struggle. All three took Go seriously, seeing the game as excellent training for a strategist.

Having put an end to wars, the country received two and a half centuries of peace and development. The rapid growth of the urban population, crafts and trade began. During the Tokugawa era, the city of Edo (today’s Tokyo) became a city of over a million people. Mass art, design, woodcuts, various theaters and spectacles arose.

In 1949, post-war Japan, defeated, with a ruined economy, began its Nation Revival Program. First of all, the revival of traditional culture and art began, a new school curriculum was introduced. Against this background, the reindustrialization of Japan was carried out. Everyone gave his strength to the common cause — the worker, the politician, and the businessman. In the 60s, the Land of the Rising Sun began to capture the markets of Europe, Asia and America. At a modest price, the products were of fantastically high quality. Japan received an impetus for development, the inertia of which has not faded even today.

In all three of the cases described, the strategists created opportunities — circumstances that allowed new developments to kick-start. The current economic model has come to an end, markets are collapsing, the global system is in unstable equilibrium.

Covid is only a catalyst for these processes. A crisis is a fork in the road, either decay or rebirth. The world is waiting for new strategists and politicians. They will really need the qualities that Go brings up.

The game of Go is an excellent tool for educating a strategist. Its essence is not tactics at all (the art of masterfully using circumstances), the essence of Go is the art of creating the necessary circumstances.

For Go, it is a common situation when, playing against a handicap, a player changes circumstances move by move throughout the game, and when a qualitative leap finally occurs, his stones get new opportunities, and the opponent’s stones have already exhausted them. Hopeless circumstances were turned into necessary ones for one of the players, while the other only struggled with rapidly changing circumstances.

If chess is a model of battle, then Go is a model of preparation for the future, when any battles become suicidal for the opponent. This is the organization of circumstances not only for oneself, but also for a partner and throughout the entire game board.

Go is not a model of war, but of power. Here we are not talking about crushing the opponent, but about creating hegemony, which can be done quite peacefully.

War is a form of existence of chaos, power is a form of existence of order, a condition for the existence of society. Harmony, which turns chaotic parts into a whole, is often born in the cycle of conflicts, therefore, in life and in Go, one cannot do without conflicts. Conflict is only a tool, not a meaning.

Go allows you to develop in the student, first of all, proactivity, since the reaction according to the “stimulus-response” module in Go leads to defeat. Already at the very beginning, you need to learn the discipline of emotions. Go is the education of the will, the discipline of the spirit.

Another important quality is the ability to synergy, to conjugate, to merge multidirectional forces and processes into a single vector. To be a Gardener who nurtures – society and industry can no longer be organized by a technocratic engineer, they are not mechanisms, they are complex organisms that require love.

Go develops a special type of intelligence, where the analysis is holistic, not dissecting, the main methods for assessing a position are qualitative, where the parameters are mostly relative and can only be assessed through comparison, logical chains can break on the second or third move, and where the reason lies not in the past , but in the future. Quantity is constantly compared with quality, which is logically unacceptable.

All this is very much like life, where you have to make decisions in conditions of uncertainty.

In the European tradition, the world was known and changed through mathematics and logic, through concepts and algorithms, “believing harmony with algebra”, using knowledge about the elements of our World in a linear flow of processes. In the East, there were no developed exact sciences, the mastery of controlling non-linearities, qualitative leaps, was dominant. It was not a science, but a practice brought to the level of an art. If the computer builds models based on mathematics, then the game of Go itself was a model of complex adaptive systems that today’s science is only beginning to learn.

The military leader, minister, emperor of antiquity, while playing Go, consciously sought to develop skills to launch processes, feel current processes and manage them. Among the modern Russian management and business communities, an interest in Go spontaneously arose, the game is becoming a kind of elite fashion.

Of course, this will be beneficial, however, in order to achieve significant results, it is required to consciously develop a system of training and education, interpreting Go not only as a sport, but as a means of developing specific skills of a strategist used in life.