🎯 Claim
When people dodge candor to duck awkward confrontation, they do not erase the fight; they push it sideways. They still score the outcome like a zero-sum game: someone wins cover, someone eats the cost, and trust rots in the gaps.
📑 Grounding
In game theory, you call a game zero-sum when one side’s gain marks another’s loss on the same score. Source: Britannica, zero-sum game. Mao Zedong called politics war without bloodshed (and called war politics with bloodshed); commentators often quote him to frame political struggle as conflict. Source: Wikiquote, Mao Zedong.
