In the world there are three strategies that lead to ruin,
and the world has all three of them.
This must apply to the present situation.
I, your subject, have heard:
“One who attacks the orderly by means of chaos is doomed to be ruined,
One who attacks the correct by means of the deviant is doomed to be ruined,
and, One who attacks the compliant by means of the obstinate is doomed to be ruined.”
Context
Han Feizi is in the Warring States era, where kingdoms schemed, infiltrated, bribed, deceived, and annihilated each other. Survival was statistical and not philosophical. A single misaligned move costs the entire state.
Orderly vs. Chaos:
“Orderly” refers to systems with high coherence and internal unity (a disciplined army, a stable administration, a coordinated faction).
“Chaos” is ad-hoc, emotional, impulsive, unstructured assault.
To attack order with chaos is like attacking a shield wall with a mob.
Correct vs. Deviant:
“Correct” means alignment with norms, expectations, and legitimacy.
“Deviant” is any approach that breaks protocol, social logic, or institutional rules.
To attack legitimacy with deviance is to trigger every defense instinct in a system.
Compliant vs. Obstinate:
“Compliant” refers to those who bend, accommodate, and absorb force.
“Obstinate” is rigidity, ego, and stubborn escalation.
To attack the flexible with rigidity is to break yourself on what does not resist.
Do not fight on the opponent’s strongest terrain. Strength amplifies itself through alignment; weakness collapses under mismatch.
Mismatched force applications generate guaranteed failure.
You must counter structure with structure, legitimacy with legitimacy, flexibility with adaptation.
The First Ruin (Attacking Order with Chaos)
In the court of the Warring States, chaos often appeared seductive.
A cunning minister might think: “If I destabilize my rival, I will rise.”
But the moment chaos is unleashed, it does not remain selective.
It spreads like fire, consuming the arsonist along with the intended target.
Han Feizi had seen this pattern repeatedly. A bureaucrat who disrupts protocol eventually finds the same disruptions used against him. A general who encourages indiscipline for short-term advantage finds his troops disobeying him in the next battle.
You cannot weaponize unpredictability without becoming a victim of it.
A parasite that kills its host too quickly ends its own lineage. Chaos devours the very hand that wields it.
This truth echoes through history:
- The French Revolution devoured its revolutionaries.
- McCarthyism consumed its own architects.
- Social media witch hunts often reverse onto initial attackers.
Chaos, once unleashed, refuses to remain loyal.
The Second Ruin (Attacking the Correct with the Deviant)
“Correctness” here does not mean morality. Han Feizi refers to structures that work: stable laws, efficient routines, predictable systems.
To attack such structures using “deviance”: favoritism, trickery, personal whim, is to fight architecture with graffiti. The building outlasts the vandal.
Consider the Qin Empire’s rise. It did not win because its kings were morally superior. It won because its systems were precise, standardized, brutally consistent. Its rivals tried to match Qin through clever schemes and temporary alliances, but schemes are fragile; systems are immortal.
Structure outlives improvisation.
Markets punish deviations from fundamentals.
Buffett repeats: “Do not bet against the underlying structure.”
The Third Ruin (Attacking Compliance with Obstinacy)
Compliance here means alignment with the governing pattern. Obstinacy means ego refusing to adapt.
This is the downfall of proud generals, stubborn ministers, and centuries later, rigid CEOs.
Han Feizi had watched rulers confronted with inevitable reforms cling to old ways out of pride.
Their kingdoms did not fell because the reforms were wrong but because the rulers insisted on resisting the tide.
This is the story of the Chu kingdom, of the Mughal Empire resisting administrative modernization, of Kodak ignoring digital photography, of Nokia dismissing smartphones.
Nature again offers a mirror.
Species that cannot adapt to new climates perish.
Evolution does not honor the proud, it honors the responsive.
Obstinacy looks powerful but is the weakest stance possible. It is a tree refusing to bend in a storm. It breaks.
The Battlefield of History
King Li of Zhou (9th century BCE)
As a monarch paranoid, ambitious, and blind to structure, Li believed he could control dissent through brutal suppression, outlawing criticism, executing anyone who whispered discontent.
He attacked order (the stable rhythms of Zhou society) using chaos: terror, spies, arbitrary punishments.
But a system built on ritual, hierarchy, and moral legitimacy cannot be subdued with panic. The more violently he squeezed, the more violently the social order reacted.
Revolt became the People’s Uprising of 841 BCE, the first recorded civil rebellion in Chinese history.
Li fled the capital.
He died in exile.
He had done precisely what Han Feizi forbade:
Attacked the orderly with chaos, and was devoured by the very forces he unleashed.
Qin vs. Zhao
Zhao had one advantage: disciplined generals and a coherent command structure. Qin, under Lü Buwei and later Li Si, understood Han Feizi’s axiom: you do not strike order with chaos.
So Qin did the opposite, they struck order with greater order.
They used:
- Centralized command
- Standardized military units
- Cold administrative precision
- A law code that turned soldiers into interchangeable components
Meanwhile Zhao’s famed commander Lian Po was removed and replaced by Zhao Kuo, a chaotic internal decision based on palace intrigue, not strategy.
And, Changping became a graveyard of 450,000 Zhao soldiers.
Zhao’s political chaos tried to confront Qin’s political order. Zhao attacked the “orderly” with its own internal “chaos,” and collapsed.
Caesar vs. the Senate
In Roman politics, legitimacy (“the correct”) was everything. The Senate believed they could curb Caesar through underhanded maneuvers, procedural sabotage, and backroom deviance. They assumed political trickery would halt a man whose popularity dwarfed theirs.
But Han Feizi’s law applies: You cannot attack the legitimate with the deviant.
Every time the Senate acted through deviance:
- Withholding his triumph
- Undermining his consulship
- Attempting legal traps …it strengthened Caesar’s narrative as the legitimate champion of the Roman people.
By violating norms, the Senate proved Caesar’s point. They attacked legitimacy with deviance, and legitimized Caesar even more.
The Senate fell not because Caesar was too strong, but because they attacked the wrong terrain.
The US–Japan Trade Conflict (1980s)
Japan Inc. in the 80s was flexible, adaptive, and hyper-responsive (“compliant” in Han Feizi’s terms). American companies were rigid, union-heavy, bureaucratic, and slow (“obstinate”).
When Detroit tried to fight Japanese adaptability with obstinacy, the result was catastrophic.
Japan absorbed shocks, pivoted faster, iterated quicker.
The US automakers clung to old designs, old workflows, old assumptions.
Han Feizi again: To strike the compliant with obstinacy is to break yourself.
The compliant yields, adapts, and flows around the rigid until the rigid shatters. Detroit paid the price in blood and bankruptcy.
Through the Lens of Game Theory
Each mismatch corresponds to a different failure mode.
Chaos vs. Order → Entropy Failure
A chaotic agent confronting an ordered system suffers infinite predictability disadvantage.
The ordered system converges toward equilibrium.
The chaotic actor diverges from it.
Entropy always loses to structure.
Deviance vs. Correctness → Norm Enforcement Trap
Societies, groups, and institutions are self-protecting rule engines.
A deviant actor attacking a legitimate structure generates coalition formation against themselves.
This is a status-quo preserving Nash equilibrium:
Actors coordinate against the violator because coordination is cheaper than tolerating deviance.
Obstinate vs. Compliant → Rigidity Death Spiral
Flexibility is evolutionarily superior.
A compliant agent can change strategy mid-conflict.
A rigid one cannot.
In iterated games, adaptability produces higher payoff over time.
Rigidity is a non-optimal strategy unless you hold overwhelming advantage, which most enemies don't.
Psychological Levers
These three mismatches exploit hardwired instincts:
Order triggers submission.
Humans instinctively respect coherence: disciplined movements, unified fronts, consistent narratives.
Legitimacy triggers conformity.
When something feels “correct” or “in line with norms,” people default to trusting it.
Flexibility triggers frustration.
Humans are built to escalate against resistance, but fold when the opponent refuses rigidity. Flexibility disarms aggression.
These instincts mean an attacker misaligned with these terrains fights not only the opponent, but human psychology itself.
Insight
Any force trying to topple a structure must first become more ordered, more aligned, and more coherent than that structure. To overpower any system, first surpass its internal coherence.
Never fight a system by using tools weaker than the system’s own structure. Either align with the structure or replace it, but do not attack it with weakness.
A rebellious officer who challenges a disciplined military chain-of-command with improvisation is crushed.
A startup founder who attacks a stable market with raw disruption, ignoring regulatory architecture, is bankrupted by lawsuits.
A reformer who tries to bend a compliant bureaucracy through stubborn defiance is quietly erased by procedural suffocation.
If you do not understand the structural nature of the system you challenge, you will die inside it.
Systems do not fall to force, they fall to forces tuned to their internal frequency. Revolutions succeed only when they mimic the deeper order beneath the old regime.
Whenever a force is applied in a way that contradicts the structural nature of the target, the attacker collapses under their own effort. The pattern Repeats:
Reformers who misunderstand bureaucratic order are swallowed by paperwork.
Rebels who misunderstand disciplined armies are slaughtered by formation.
Innovators who misunderstand market regulations drown in litigation.
Employees who try to fight corporate structure with stubbornness get quietly eliminated.
Every system has a dominant logic, those who align with it rise and those who misread it die.