Agent Provocateur

What an agent provocateur does is, go behind the scenes, and incite someone or some group of people to rash or illegal behaviour.

Of course though, today, we know that the word is also a branded lingerie product that stresses marketing through images.

We all live in a much more sophisticated world today than ever before.  But wealthy and well-funded and sophisticated though it may be however, even the branded ‘Agent Provocateur’ company cannot spread itself so wide as to sponsor frivolous events in, say, Outer Mongolia. Or Western Mongolia, let’s be more specific, where the Republic of Kalmykia is located. (Between Russia and China). This kind of thing is reserved only for sovereign states to be able to afford.



Amir Ban, a chess engine programmer, with a Kalmyk.
Propaganda with a sinister purpose

I’m engaged in a fairly large commercial negotiation right now, and I am in a virtually unrelenting state of fear and panic. On the one hand it is very exciting, but on the other hand unnerving because I simply can’t trust that things are as airtight shut in terms of confidentiality as I would prefer them to be.

And so to skirt around things, let’s talk about Chess. Chess is most certainly, a frivolous pastime. It has little or nothing to do with strategy, since all the rules are pre-set, and the game itself produces nothing material. One can neither benefit from it by applying ideas from it about strategy to the real world, and nor can one eat the products of the game’s endeavour for there aren’t any to speak of.

Decadence, of course, is nothing if not to do with the sophisticated frivolous.



The Dolmabahce Palace

But of course I jest. Strategy is learned from many pursuits. And those of us who fancy that we understand strategy deeply, usually take the long view, and draw an often rather distant perspective on our ultimate objectives before we step into spotlights at all.



I’m not too sure that the word I’m really looking for is not ‘labyrinthine,’ rather than ‘Byzantine,’ to describe how I personally approach the art of making money.  Perhaps it is a bit of both. And yet it is the style I personally recommend, for at least in the dark and shadowy labyrinths of Byzantium, one may scratch the guilding off the walls and profit even there from alone, if from nothing else. And this means, one ought to always walk where there is money, and not where there isn’t any. Sometimes what appears like power or money is really only the phantoms flitting across the shadows of the labyrinth.

 

Next post, propaganda that is not sinister.