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Preface War is thus an act of force to compel our ­enemy to do our ­will.1 This book involves a long trek out of the dark pit of Plato’s Cave.2 My group is escaping this cave, and while gazing up and away, a light appears even as we strug­gle up a cluttered trail in a cold, dark, and damp environment. As faint as the light may be, it has the light of knowledge and truth, as it ­ were. My group and I aim to reach the light and bask in its warmth. Our ­ little group pursues fact, reason, truth, and knowledge, but face the climb up a steep and obstacle-­strewn path, ever so foreboding, dark, and narrow to reach this light of truth and knowledge. All of us are apprehensive. I lead this journey I guide two travelers: one is an Über-­thinker3 and one is a 1. Carl von Clausewitz, On War (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1976), 75. 2. Plato, Five ­Great Dialogues, p. 398. Plato’s Cave is an allegory. It comes from the famous Greek thinker, Socrates, and his discourse with his student, Glaucon, in our words, about man, man’s propensity to accept data inputs from his senses as true but that he knows to be untrue. He lives in a dark cave where a puppet master shows him false truths through pup- pet actions displayed as shadows on a wall in the dark cave. Socrates contrasts the corpo- real world of everyday living with the intellectual world of thinking and knowledge. The person who does drink in knowledge and truth must go back to the cave and try to help the ­ others think about truth and light. They know that the ­ people who have never left the com- fort of the cave and the “truths” therein ­will renounce his good intentions and attack him for disturbing their equilibrium, their comfortable ac­cep­tance of false truths, in the dark gloom of the cave. See Plato, Republic, Book VII. 3. Über-­thinker: Literally, a ­great or superior thinker. This kind of thinker is trained and educated to triumph in ­ mental combat over any foe, in any domain, at any level of conflict, day or night. This thinker is older and more experienced than a thought pilgrim.