In 1951 General Douglas MacArthur, at the end of a career of great brilliance, overstepped his limits when, during the Korean War, he almost unilaterally brought the United Nations into a war on the Chinese mainland. MacArthur had built his military edifice on the concept of avoiding direct attack. During the Second World War, he'd bypassed and isolated huge concentrations of Japanese forces. In Korea, he conceived and executed the brilliant surprise invasion at In Chon, deep behind enemy lines. And yet at age seventy he abandoned good generalship in favor of what General Omar Bradley was to call “the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy.” As historian Bevan Alexander puts it in his book How Great Generals Win, “One of the remarkable facts about great generals throughout history is that—except in cases where they possessed overwhelming power—practically all their successful moves have been made against the enemy's flank or rear, either actual or psychological.” Poor generals favor the “glorious” do-or-die head-on attack. Alexander lauds MacArthur’s track records during the bulk of his career, but cannot except the military mess at the career's end.

The best generals, then, are the least self-destructive ones. The general who cannot retreat, when retreat is necessary, fails as miserably as the general who cannot attack when the moment is ripe. Many of the finest military minds in history have distinguished themselves in retreats, keeping their armies intact for battle on better terms later on. In relations between lovers, or any close interpersonal bond, the most successful are those people who have the mental and emotional flexibility to give and take, to adopt new perspectives on people and feelings, to admit the possibility of error, to re-group and to re-strategize. The successful speculator in stocks or commodities has the discipline and personal vision to retreat in an orderly fashion, to take small losses in order to fight again for large gains (indeed this is a “happy few”). In business, failure to adjust to change is quickly fatal. Wishes, hopes, shoulds, oughts, and concepts of life being “fair” only accelerate the misery. If the profession you have chosen as a career fades into nothing, all the energy, determination and guts in the world won't make you a success in it. You must unsentimentally break the pattern of reverberation and face the hard reality that the rules have changed. You must retreat to rise and fight again.

In Homer's Iliad, two Greek generals, Agamemnon and Achilles, feud with each other to such an extent that they put their expedition to Troy in great jeopardy. The enraged Achilles nearly returns to Greece with his troops, then broods and sulks, calling on the gods to bring disaster to the Greek armies, just to prove how much the Greeks need him. The Trojans do, in fact, nearly push the Greeks into the sea. Achilles in his rightness surges with adrenaline; fortunately for the Greeks his rage will soon turn to the enemy. Achilles knows no middle way, only the way of pride. He will not survive his own warrior lust.

A common theme in Greek drama and myth is the hero who bursts with heroic energy and yet is infected with hubris, a self-damaging pride. The hero is blinded by both the energy and the pride and turns his back on aidos, a civilized restraint, concern for public opinion and order, rational and reflective action. This type of hero burns bridges behind him. A fatal hardening of character (atasthalie), is the result.

Our Henry The One and Only, who is not up on Greek literature, fails to see the parallel between himself and Achilles. He doesn't know that he's carrying a sword, that he burns with lust for blood, in need, more than ever, of a well-defined enemy he can attack. As the result of a lifetime of sweeping his escapist heroic urges under the rug, Henry has reached a point where he, like Achilles, is out of control, not truly responsible for his actions. We've adopted a term from the Malay language: running amok. A man who seemed perfectly normal would all of a sudden snap, take up a sword called a kris, run amok and chop up everything and everybody in sight. As Henry runs amok, of course, real physical blood is not spilled. But damage is done, because Henry can no longer prevent himself from reaching out and grabbing that one glorious moment where he defines his entire environment, where he is right and everyone else is wrong, ignorant, or in some other fashion less valuable than he.

Pick and choose; Henry could easily be doing the opposite: sabotaging his family life because of a distorted view of the demands of his career. “Don't they appreciate,” he asks himself, “that I'm doing all this for them?” The need for glorious sacrifice is the same, even if the effect and excuse are reversed. In the “glory” scenario the actor fights to lose, romantically, heroically. Follow the glory route and you do not need to be patient, nor do you need to make hard choices. You can act out your script without all the decision-making that causes so much stress. Maybe fate will be kind to you.

Fate is a seductive concept. It is a strong model for self-damage, and at the same time it colors all the other models. Fate is a surrender of our most precious asset: freedom. Fate substitutes an objective thing you can touch for a life that is subjective, nebulous, uncertain and ambiguous. Fate upsets doubt, which many humans find themselves unable to handle. “My career is in shambles because of economic forces beyond my control.” “My love life doesn't work because I am destined to run into only dysfunctional partners.” Humans come into the world with immense talents, with unlimited imagination. Fate gives them a chance to bypass the stress of human genius, to hold onto solid rock. Feel-good fate is heroin: a soporific drug that many people cannot resist.

Exercise: Strategic Retreat and Personal Resource Management

For this exercise, look back onto your life onto the personal wars you have fought. (Remember, you'll use the military analogy to learn, not to let loose blood-lust or any deep-seated need to be violent. War for us is a laboratory). Write an account of the following four situations based on your experience in life until the present.

• Paint a personal picture of a victory you've achieved and of which you are particularly proud, even if it seems small.

• Write an account of a situation where everything went wrong, a defeat, and where you especially blame yourself for having made things worse. Sketch out how you would handle the situation today.

• Think: have there been situations where things haven't gone your way, but you managed to use your integrity and intelligence to make the best of things? Paint a picture of this “strategic retreat” for yourself and be proud of what you were able to do.

• Finally, here is one of the most difficult situations. Have there been times in your life where everything went sideways, neither up nor down? How have you handled life situations in which the times weren't right to advance or retreat, where you had to be content to wait? How could you improve your handling of this type of situation in the future?