Know Yourself...and Your Enemy

It's not as simple as you think.

When I started The Shepard Scale, the goal was to help educate people who love freedom on how to be effective activists. Whether we like it or not, the left has always been better at the long game than we were, and patriots have always seemed to have this strange objection to reading the literature that trained the left. Quite frankly, when it comes to political activism and operations, the left has been eating our lunch for a long, long time.

That’s not a popular thing to say, especially when it’s said by someone who used to be one of those loud-and-proud activist types. Believe me when I tell you that the Patriot movement is mostly ineffective, overrun with federal agents, and often regionally led by some pretty awful people.

The average person calling himself a patriot will quote Sun Tzu’s book The Art of War like it’s their personal Bible, but somehow miss the parts in it about how you must know yourself, and know your enemy. For the average patriot, “knowing your enemy” means knowing the names of the prominent leftist legislators, following Twitter or TikTok accounts for “intel” (I am using the term as they do, loosely and incorrectly), and yelling at the TV when someone comes on that they don’t agree with. And don’t forget about those annual rallies that everyone seems to think actually accomplish something.

This is not how you operate effectively.

Know thyself.

The concept of knowing yourself is simple, but it’s not easy. It requires some deep dives into your soul. There is the person we are to strangers and the public, the person we are to the ones we love and can ‘be ourselves’ around, and then there’s the person we really are. We can claim that we are the same no matter where we are or who we are with, but in reality, most people aren’t. That’s why we sometimes refer to people as “real.” We instinctively understand that to truly be authentic is a special and rare thing.

In order to really know yourself, you have to be able to answer questions like:

• Who am I? This sounds stupid on its face, but it’s not. It requires understanding your own fears, traumas that still affect you, and being honest about what your character is, what needs to change, and what you’re willing to do to become the person that you know you’re supposed to be.

• Why am I here? How did you get to be here in this moment? What is the purpose of your existence? If you believe in an afterlife, for instance, you may look at things differently than someone who believes this is all there is. If you believe in creation or intelligent design, you may see your role on the earth differently than if you believe you’re the random product of millions of years of evolution.

• What do I believe? Where did my beliefs come from? Can you explain it to someone? Saying you believe in the Constitution is great and all, but if all you know and can explain is a few snippets from the Bill of Rights and Article 1, Section 8, then you don’t believe in the Constitution. You believe in a few snippets from the Bill of Rights and Article 1, Section 8. Are you parroting what you were taught? Is it merely an emotional connection?

• What am I truly willing to give up in order to live according to what I say I believe? This is what it all comes down to, right? This is where the rubber meets the road. People say they’ll die for freedom and all, but what about living in prison for the next 20 years? What about you and your family becoming homeless because you refused to go along with something at work and lost your job, or got arrested and can’t provide for them anymore? What about becoming persona non grata in your own family because they all disagree with you? What about watching your spouse leave and take your kids with them because they think you’re evil or racist or whatever the term du jour is now?

Answering questions like this merely scratches the surface of what you need to know about yourself. You can’t withstand the things that can come, if you do not train your mind for it. And if you don’t even know or are willing to admit where your weaknesses are, you can’t do anything about them. If you are not certain and well-educated on your beliefs, you will not stand for them, because you won’t know where your personal line is—or if it’s in the right place.

Know Thine Enemy

To actually do this, you have to first know who your enemy is. You need to know what they believe, why they believe it, and what they’re willing to do for it. In other words, you need to be able to answer the questions above for your enemy as well as yourself.

How do you do that? Just like you need to do some mental work to understand yourself, you need to do a whole lot of studying to understand your enemies.

When a person goes in for therapy, the counselor might initially ask, “What brought you here today,” or “What made you decide to seek therapy,” but that’s really just the turning of the doorknob. In order to truly be effective, they need to know a lot more than what brought that person there at the moment. They need to understand why the person is who they are; what influences and people have shaped them. What they believe and how they came to believe it. What experiences they’ve had, and how they dealt with them. They need to get into their client’s head.

The same is true in the world of activism and ‘fighting for freedom.’ It’s not enough to say, “My enemies want population control,” “They want to ruin the nuclear family,” or even “They hate freedom.” These are not even scratching the surface, and depending on who you’re talking about, you could be dead wrong.

In order to really understand them, you need to know:

• What groups make up the collective “enemy” you’re considering? You might have a hundred different groups banding together on one overarching issue, even though they disagree strongly on many others. You’ll need to choose one group to start with, and I highly advise that you choose one that is local to you.

• What exactly do they want, both on an immediate level and strategically or long-term?

• Why do they want it?

• What they believe about it

• How they came to believe it

• Who are their major players in your area?

• Who is influencing them

• Where is their money coming from?

• What they will do if they get what they want

• What they’re willing to do in order to get it

• Whether they are capable of doing what they’re mentally willing to do

That means studying. It means reading what they read, listening to the music they listen to, and paying attention to the things they see as important. It means talking to them. Watching them. Seeing how they perceive threats and why they think you are one.

When considering how they operate and what they’re doing or willing to do, you have to also think about why they are willing to do it, and what motivates them. It all goes back to validation. We all choose vehicles with which we seek to matter. For some, it’s faith and a relationship with God. For others, it’s family, physical or academic achievement, or personal character. Still others, it’s sex, money, power, control.

Find the thing that someone uses to dictate and measure their worth, and you find the way to predict, thwart, and influence their behavior—because if you can leverage how they measure their worth as a human being, you own them.

The flip side is also true, however: If you don’t even know how you measure your own worth, you’re wide open to someone coming along and figuring out how to use that against you.

Kit Perez is a counterintelligence and deception analyst, the author of The Mindset of Resistance, and the co-author of Basics of Resistance: The Practical Freedomista.