Approach People Like You’re Grand Admiral Thrawn
Grand Admiral Thrawn.
He’s not real. But maybe you can’t handle someone like that.
Imagine studying everything about a person in order to understand them.
Okay, that sounds logical.
Well what about studying their culture and not just the frilly nilly aspects, like food.
Study their art, study their language.
Get down and dirty into the deep innards of their ancestral world view.
But, it seems flawed.
What if you reject your ancestral culture?
I’m South Asian, with family from Hyderabad in India.
Yet, I’ve grown up in Canada.
Born in Canada and haven’t really lived anywhere else for the past twenty-six years.
How can someone expect to understand people like that by looking at their ancestors?
Well, maybe there are several things that aren’t so easily forgone (if they actually are forgone).
Undoing generations of social conditioning in one generation seems kind of tough
And that’s where Thrawn excels.
He’s an alien working for the seemingly indomitable Galactic Empire of the Star Wars universe. The New Republic has no idea that there’s someone this good left after both Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine have gone under.
Who is he?
And how is he so good?
How can a man who simply understands cultures of enemies he hasn’t even met face-to-face be able to strategically undermine them?
And with such artistic blunt force?
Is culture that powerful? Is history that useful?
Again we are talking about a fictional character but let’s look at the idea of ‘Thrawn’.
He’s kind of like Sun Tzu, the great Chinese military strategist. And in one phrase, Thrawn can be summed up: Know your enemy.
That doesn’t mean treating the person as an actual enemy per se but just KNOWING the people you’re engaging with.
All facets of their worldview.
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