Consider chess. The board is indispensable if you are to make out the paths of the pieces within the game's laws and rules - their positions at the starting point and what moves they can and can’t make. You draw on the varied capacities of the queen and the knight, you recognize the limits of the pawn, and you take account of your opponent's moves.
Some moves are forbidden by the laws of the game, and some we abstain from by choice, in view of how the match is going. If your opponent succeeds, through his arrangements, in narrowing the space of your choices, defeat is coming; there is no arguing about it.
On the board of the political map, similar conduct obtains between adversaries, and it is legitimate. What is strange is to impose it on yourself: to enter the arena of politics having ruled out the knight's leaps because they run against "nationalist" fundamentals, having curtailed the queen's capacities because they run against "patriotic" fundamentals, and having confined the rook within its own walls on the pretext of religious rulings.
At that point there is no hope of winning. Your choices are limited and predictable. The most you can hope for is a defensive plan of obstruction. The paradox is that you did this to yourself, without your opponent expending any effort worth mentioning. That is the point at which many are deceived.
While you promote your obstructive moves to your public as epic victories against arrogance, the truth is that the opponent you exhausted yourself is playing you with minimal effort, using you as a training ground. His real skills he devotes to other challenges, ones that yield something: to development, and to the making of a future. So, your public cheers you, then closes its eyes and opens them to find that your nearest neighbors have improved their citizens' lives, and that your adversaries have made giant leaps through technological revolutions - from communications to artificial intelligence - and through military and medical breakthroughs.
That progress has been reflected in their citizens' welfare and in their appetite for life. Meanwhile your own public, having cheered your propaganda, realizes it is living a straitened life, and grows more resentful of life, and of you.
You gave your adversary your very soul. He drew it out of you and fed on it. Perhaps he choked for a moment and needed an extra sip of water. Nothing more.
Reality is clear to anyone who opens his eyes. All your claimed victories were not real: an internal struggle between your pawns and your rooks, between your own black squares and your white. You have turned yourself into a cautionary tale, the kind nations tell their children to teach them what should be avoided in life.
In the end, you ruin the thing you claim to protect. You may wear it as you please, and by the power of authority you may compel those under your hand to praise it and sing its beauty. But everyone can see it is coming apart. If you carry on in the same way, the damage will grow too great to mend. Then you will have no one to blame but yourself. It was torn apart at the hands of those who claimed to be preserving it, maintaining it, protecting it, and making it strong.
