One of my favorite Stargate SG-1 quotes is (no surprise) a Daniel quote.  It goes something along the lines of “The only way to defeat it, is to deny it battle.”

The quote specifically refers to dangerous information contained in the brain of a human child.  The information is everything ever known by a particular alien villain.  The information is very strategic, valuable, and incredibly tempting.  Thing is…a lot of that information is also a copy of the opportunistic, predatory, ruthless, sadistic personality of the alien that the information comes from.  The personality is a Gould…an alien life form that craves ever increasing power…and must pursue that power even into the teeth of self-destruction.  It cannot tolerate existence in a state of powerlessness.

To access the information, is also to access that personality…which WANTS to be engaged.  It wants the child to try to use the information he possesses…so that it can worm its way into the child’s decision making process, and turn him into a tool of the Gould personality.

A very advanced being named Oma taught the child how to meditate, focus, and remain disengaged from the enemy.  She taught him the truth that the alien personality gained too much from competition and battle…that it thrived so on conflict that engaging it would only make it stronger and more determined to engage and escalate.

The only effective way to fight the alien personality was literally to ignore it.  To deny it the battle it craved…to not give it experience of tactics and arguments, to not let it gather the knowledge and experience that it would need to win in the end. 

This goes against all of the experiences of my life…and runs counter to all of the visceral lessons I have encountered so far with regards to this sort of thing...not to mention the small matter of my neural hard-wiring to which suspense, waiting, and passivity are anathema.

Nevertheless, it is a good lesson, and the right one for the right time.