Chapter 2
From Maneuever Democracy: Voting, Discussion, and Conveyance for Impact
Released Nov 30, 2025
Part 1
A similar principle is known in the form of maneuver discussion.
It is both a strategy and tactical methodology incorporating speaking and moving. There's also the grander speaking and maneuvering. Essentially, one of the biggest reasons people fail to create change in the time they want to see is because they can do one thing way better that I'm about to say. The way old people went about convincing, or democracy, is something called a discussion of attrition. A discussion of attrition is when you converse with the person on every issue. It's when you use all your intellectual capacity to win or persuade one point with the other person. You move on to the next, and repeat. This is a discussion of attrition, and it often fails, or gets results not as quickly as it can.
The alternative is called a discussion of maneuver. The key idea is to engage with the person on points of extreme interest, the deciding points. The second key idea is to move from one point to the next. You identify 3 main points in the discussion that are crucial to persuading them. In the discussion, you make one good point only on that first big one. Then you immediately move to the next; you don't keep pressing it. You make another good point before they know where you are. They'll make a point, but you're moving again. You make a final large point, and this time you see they're even considering what you're saying. When that happens, you make your final, large point about the whole issue, summing up only the most crucial aspects to win and only once this decisive point has been reached through maneuver.
There are two aspects here: speaking and moving as well as speaking and maneuvering. Speaking and maneuvering is the bigger one. Let's say you decide on 3 big points before the discussion to focus on, and only focus on those. That's a maneuver. During the discussion, when you are moving from one of those three big points to the next, that's a maneuver.
But within making a big point, you may have sub-points. You may have 2 sub-points, which are themselves distilled down to the two most crucial and absolutely most necessary topics in the discussion to control and guide. When you move from sub-point to sub-point, that is a move. So you make one of these sub-points, then you quickly move to the next. Once you have made all your sub-points, you've made your big point, which you may, if necessary, sum up briefly in another speak and move. Then you're back to maneuver. You've now got to maneuver to your second big, crucial point. So you sum up the sub-point well and good in an act of maneuver, then you maneuver to your next big point and speak about it. You get to the sub-points. You speak about one, then move. You speak, then move.
This is called maneuver discussion.