The 50th Law - 50 Cent [48]
He decided he was the politician best suited for this cause. His first step was to present a moderate front to the public in the 1860 campaign and after his election to the presidency. He gave the impression that his main goal was to maintain the Union and to gradually phase slavery out of existence through a policy of containment. When war became inevitable in 1861, he decided to lay a clever trap for the South, baiting them into an attack on Fort Sumter that would force him to declare war. This made it seem that the North was the victim of aggression. All of these maneuvers were designed to keep his support in the North relatively unified—to oppose him was to oppose his efforts to defeat the South and maintain the Union, the slavery issue slipping into the background. This unified front on his side made it almost impossible for the enemy to play political games.
As the tide of the war turned in favor of the North, he gradually shifted to more radical positions (stated in the Emancipation Proclamation and his Gettysburg Address), knowing he had more leeway to reveal his real goals and act on them. Leading the North to victory in the war, he had even more room to continue his campaign. In sum, to defeat slavery Lincoln was prepared to publicly manipulate opinion by concealing his intentions, and to practice outright deceit in his political maneuverings. This required great fearlessness and patience on his part, as almost everyone misread his intentions and criticized him as an opportunist. (Some still do.)
In facing an unjust situation, you have two options. You can loudly proclaim your intentions to defeat the people behind it, making yourself look good and noble in the process. But in the end, this tends to polarize the public (you create one hardened enemy for every sympathizer won over to the cause), and it makes your intentions obvious. If the enemy is crafty, this makes it almost impossible to defeat them. Or, if it is results you are after, you must learn instead to play the fox, letting go of your moral purity. You resist the pull to get emotional, and you craft strategic maneuvers designed to win public support. You shift your position to suit the circumstance, baiting the enemy into actions that will win you sympathy. You conceal your intentions. Think of it as war—short of unnecessary violence, you are called to do whatever it takes to defeat the enemy. There is no nobility in losing if an injustice is allowed to prevail.
STATIC SITUATIONS
In any venture, people quickly create rules and conventions that must be followed. This is often necessary to instill some discipline and order. But most often these rules and conventions are arbitrary—they are based on something that was successful in the past but might have little relevance to the present. They are often instruments for those in power to maintain their grip and keep the group unified. If this goes on long enough, they become stultifying and crowd out any new ways for doing things. In such a situation, what is called for is the total destruction of these dead conventions, creating space for something new. In other words you must be the complete lion, as bad as can be.
This was how several important black jazz musicians—such as Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, and Dizzy Gillespie—responded to the musical conventions that had hardened in the early 1940s. From its more freewheeling earlier days, jazz had become co-opted by white performers and audiences. The sound that became popular—big band, swing—was more controlled and regimented. To make any money in the business you had to play by the rules and perform these popular genres. But even those black musicians who followed the conventions were still paid considerably less than their white counterparts. The only way around this oppressive situation was to destroy it with a completely new sound, in this case with something that later became known as bebop. This new genre went against all the current conventions. The music was wild and improvisatory.