Okay, I admit it, I’m grumbling about work again.
There’s a huge swagger factor of thinking you know an ultimate fighting system … oops, I mean a ‘street tested’ self-defense system. However, I strongly believe there’s a lot more going on under the surface. Something that is, in fact, about all kinds of things other than personal safety. You might want to cross reference this blog with the Walls That Trap Us (1 & 2) and see what sort of connections you come up with.
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Not too long ago the business partner of a very expensive empty-hand combatives instructor contacted me. He wanted me to go into business with them. His contention was — since I only deal with nonlethal situations and they only deal with lethal situations — our two systems would enhance each other nicely.
It took a second to calm down, but I did manage to politely decline. I seriously doubt bright boy had the vaguest idea how insulting that was … or how utterly out of touch with reality he was.
The insult part was summed up by a friend of mine who exclaimed, “Excuse me, but what ******** part of someone coming at you with a knife is supposed to be NOT lethal?!”
This brings us to the ‘out of touch with reality’ part. That is, after 40 years of pissing off violent people, I have more experience with lethal force situations than both he and his business partner combined. But far more important, I also have WAY more experience with all the other levels of violence — including how rare deadly force encounters are. If I were going to try to put a percentage on it, 99 percent of all violence is not only nonlethal, but was never meant to be.*
Let me translate that for you. Ninety-nine percent of the time, you’re going to find yourself in situations where what stud muffins dismissed as ‘you-only-deal-with-nonlethal-situations’ isEXACTLY the information you need to know –especially if you want to keep from stepping on your dick. By that I mean not only staying out of jail, but NOT escalating a situation into that 1 percent because you didn’t know how to behave.
And yeah, I’ve seen it happen. In fact, most of the violence I’ve seen that escalated into lethal force started out in this 99 percent and was horribly mismanaged. That’s why it got so bad. Worse, a large source of the mismanagement is now laying there leaking on the floor. Sure there’s asocial violence that starts out rotten from the start. But to tell you the truth, mostly it’s someone screwing up in the 99 percent and making things a lot worse than it needs to be. As in, it didn’t need to be at all
I’m also going to talk about why the idea of preparing for that 1 percent is not only a fantasy, but an outright lie to get your money. And it isn’t just with the guy whose partner insulted me either, there are a lot of folks out there doing it — especially when it comes to using self-defense items.
I got to thinking about teaching people to prevail in epic life-and-death struggles. Then I began to question the idea. It occurred to me that someone trying to kill you isn’t exactly a daily problem for most civilians. Hell, I’ll be generous: Anybody try and whack you this week? Me neither.
In fact, despite all the hyperbole about being a ‘survivor,’ very few people in civilized countries have had the experience of someone actually trying to kill them. I say this because there are some predictable results when that happens. Results that, well, if they didn’t happen, I hate to tell ya, but …
http://www.nononsenseselfdefense.com/someone_trying_%20to_kill_you.htm
This kind of sums up the problem I have with the idea training for surviving our own little Ragnorak. Ignoring what is overwhelmingly happening and skipping to the ultimate end game just doesn’t strike me as smart — especially if you want to be safe.
The analogy I came up with is: This kind of training claims to be able to teach you to win the Superbowl of Violence. I use this analogy because it’s something Americans will understand.**
It’s a long road to the Superbowl. I’m talking starting in pee-wee football (Pop Warner and AYF). Then moving onto high school football. And then, if you’re REALLY good, moving into the college leagues.
Now right there, we have covered a majority of the football games that are actually played in this country on any given weekend. We’re talking actual numbers here. And we haven’t even gotten to the semi-pro or NFL teams, just good ol’ hometown and sports league games.
When we finally do get into the NFL, there are 36 teams of professional football players who have taken the game to a freaking hybrid of science, art and technology. Even players for Buffalo are amazingly competent in comparison to all the other football that’s being played in high school and sports fields.
Only then — after fighting your way through 34 other professional teams — do you face off in the Superbowl with the other, best of the best.
If someone told you they could cut out all those years of practice and hard work and teach you how to walk on the field and ‘win’ the Superbowl would you believe them? Or would you laugh in their face because you know about Pop Warner, high school, etc, etc.? You’d laugh because you know there’s a whole lot of training, hard work, mindset, knowledge and experience to even get into the majors. That immediate disbelief is what happens when you even have a vague idea about what it takes to get into the league, much less win the Superbowl.
And yet, there are people who are willing to pay a lot of cash to someone who tells them they can teach them to win the Superbowl of Violence.
Forget the Peewee leagues, forget high school and college even. You can skip over that petty nonsense. They’ll teach you to step onto the field and WIN the ultimate game!
This is why I choke on my coffee when I hear someone claim they can teach this. But, man, are they shiny, confident and willing to tell you about it. They’re just itchin’ to tell people how they can teach you, not to just survive lethal violence … oh no …. they’re going to teach you how to win! And you’ll look as cool and confident as they do, too.
This, despite the fact you’ve never bothered getting the experience and chops for dealing with even low-level violence. I’m talking the knowledge, understanding, skills, confidence and emotional control that you have to have to function when violence is a regular part of life. I don’t care if you’re the winner, the loser or just a bystander, there are all kinds of things to learn about violence and conflict in the 99 percent. Things that if you don’t know, the situation can get real bad, real quick. Things the guy claiming to be able to get you a Superbowl ring isn’t going to teach you.
Let’s start with a basic skill about functioning in places where violence is common. That’s knowing when to shut up. Or failing that, how not to dig yourself into a hole. This is one of those things a whole lot of people don’t seem to understand the need for, much less master. In pee-wee level violence, opening your mouth at the wrong time can get you slapped or hit. Duh! You shouldn’t have said that!
And the bigger the problem, the worse the results for violating this rule. Important safety tip, when you’re looking down the barrel of a gun, it is NOT the time to say, “What are you going to do shoot us?” See, knowing when to keep your mouth shut IS a survival skill. One that has a far better track record than any combatives system.
I tell you this because I recently heard one combatives guru proudly state that he doesn’t bother to teach de-escalation. Uh why? Well, because everyone knows it already.
Okay is it just me or does anybody else notice that, if this was true, there’d be a lot less violence? Like in the 99 percent of social violence department –especially when dealing with behavior-correcting violence. Like oh say, someone telling you to shut up or they’ll punch you?
For something that ‘everybody knows,’ I can’t tell you how many time’s I’ve seen people provoke a physical assault, not because they opened their mouths, but because of what came blasting out:
http://www.nononsenseselfdefense.com/get_attacked.htm
But apparently when you’re stepping into the Superbowl of Violence, that isn’t important because you have no choice about being there.
Yeah, well if you hadn’t said that about his mother, it wouldn’t have provoked him into trying to kill you now would it?
Maybe AFTER you’ve provoked him, you don’t have much choice, but if you’d spent some time in the bush leagues, you would have known better.You’d have known not to say that unless you wanted him to come after you. More than that, you’d also have known there are places where saying that means you’re about to attack. That’s because you don’t say that and NOT expect to be attacked. So he figures — since you know the rules — if you say it, it means you’re initiating an attack on him. And he’s going to come at you with everything he has.
You’d know about these standards if you’d spent any time in the college leagues of violence. But see, you don’t need to know that kind of stuff because stud muffins there is going to teach you how, come that February day, to step onto the field and win the ultimate battle. Win using his ultimate fighting system. You can rely on victory because his system is:
a) scientifically designed
b) an ancient warrior art
c) what some elite military force used
d) street tested
e) UFC proven
f) some of the above
g) all of the above.
This isn’t just advertising. You’re going to hear all kinds of people proclaiming on the Internet and in ads how awesomely effective and how great this ultimate training is.
Here’s where decades of experience with violence makes me say, “Hold on a second.” Who are these guys pissing off so they had a chance to test it out? It’s not always true, but, generally speaking, you have to work at getting people mad enough to try and kill you. And if they did use this training, why aren’t they spending time and money on their legal defense rather than posting on the Internet?
I mean, hell, last time I checked, the cops really want to talk to you after you’ve killed someone — even if it was in self defense. That legal aftermath can take a loooooong time. Oh yeah, and did I mention all the family members and friends of the deceased who might want to talk to you about what you did?
Hi, welcome to life in the NFL of violence.There’s all kinds of things that are involved beyond just the physical act.
The bottom line is when you hear someone claiming that this ultimate, reality-based, elite, commando fighting system is all you will need, you’re dealing with someone who has a rich fantasy life. More than that, somewhere in the picture, there’s someone who is getting rich pandering to this fantasy life about violence.
But I want to point out how little this training has to do with actual violence. In fact, by gearing up for Ragnorak, you have a great strategy for keeping yourself out of even the pee-wee leagues of violence.
Number 1 is the whole “I’m too big and bad to mess with anything that isn’t life or death.”
The second one is, because now that you’re such a big bad stud, you don’t have anything to prove by going into situations where violence is possible. Good strategy that, BTW. No matter what your reason for not going where violence is routine, not being there works real well. But this is a specialized version, one that works with the third point.
The third thing is sort of proving a negative, but when you’ve seen it, you’ll know it. That is, these new ‘studs’ are very careful who they wag their now enlarged pee-pees at. Oh, they’ll talk tough and wave their weenies at people from the safety of the Internet, in the training hall and around non-fighters. But when a heavy hitter cruises through where they are, they aren’t there anymore. I’m talking about an almost magical ability to disappear.
The fourth thing is if they can’t teleport from the location, when the dude is in arm’s reach, you don’t hear a peep out of them … until after the guy is gone. Then you can’t get them to shut up about what they would have done if…
In case you missed the implications of those last four points, the people who seem to go for this ultimate killer, commando, kung fu training are pretty much the ones least likely to find themselves in such a situation. But boy howdy — surrounded by nice, nonviolent people — will they swagger around convinced of what bad asses they are.
I wonder if they have any idea how unimpressed the people they are surrounded by are about their killer training. Realistically, that kind of stuff makes nice people uncomfortable. Basically because violence plays no part in their lives, not even the pee wee league stuff. In fact, violence is viewed by most people as a sign of ignorance and immaturity.
Some years ago, Peyton Quinn and I were sitting on his deck and doing fatal damage to a bottle of champagne. He observed in passing that many people in the self-defense world and martial arts are socially truncated.
Now I would have used the terms ‘stunted’ or ‘hung up’ to describe their behaviors. I especially mean the idea of obsessing on having been bullied by five guys in school and not standing up like a man and beating the hell out of them. Ummmm, dude … there were five of them? You MIGHT have had a chance if you were an actual NFL league player. But five to one sucks, pretty much no matter who you are. And yet that’s what they’re hung up on, the idea of what they should have done. They fixate on that rather than the fact they got out of the situation AND high school without major physical damage.
Obsessing over something that happened in past is not self-defense. Unfortunately a lot of people are getting into self-defense to deal with these emotional issues. This influences what is being taught. And what’s being taught as self-defense is seriously flawed because it isn’t focused on solving actual danger, but dealing with these personal fixations and fantasies.
Fear Management vs. Danger Management
I don’t know about anyone else, but I haven’t been in junior high school for a long, long time. But better than that, I’ve developed some other life skills since then. Even when I worked in professions where violence was common, I used those new social skills to keep things from turning physical. Oddly enough, by spending all those years in pee-wee, high school, college and eventually in the NFL of violence, I learned there are all kinds of rules, social skills and standards about violence. I also learned there are all kinds of restrictions, complications and consequences of doing it.And I learned why de-escalation and compromise really are better strategies and worthwhile skills.
Oh here’s another bit of news. If you don’t have these skills, you’re going to get into a lot of pee-wee and high school conflicts. Conflicts that, even if they do turn physical, are light years away from the end-of- the- world situations these guys want to teach you how to handle. Is it just me or does anyone else not like the idea of teaching someone — who’s socially incompetent with even verbal confrontation — to unleash their ultimate combat training if they feel threatened?
This is why it’s so disturbing when so-called experts on violence give a ‘hand wave’ (yeah, we teach that, too, now here’s how you break an arm) to de-escalation, avoidance, awareness, legal considerations and manners.But when someone brags about not bothering to teach that stuff because theirs *sniff* is only for the MOST deadly of times *growl!* … man, that’s just wrong. And wrong in about eight different ways at once.
Let’s just pick one. Excuse me, but even for people who do commonly use extreme levels of violence, there’s all kinds of nonlethal action going on. Yeah, surprise, surprise, they too spend a lot of time in that 99 percent of social violence — even if it is reaching out and smacking someone on the head to tell them to shut up.
This may come as a shock to you, but the people who are actually using violence know there are all kinds of rules and complex social behaviors they need to follow. Damned straight there’s rules; they’ll get their asses beat if they break ’em, and they know it. If they really screw up, they’ll be killed. These are the standards by which they live their lives. And for the record, they’ll enforce those rules on those in their lives too.
But when you’ve been trained and are ready for that 1 percent, that’s the stuff you don’t have to worry about knowing. Yeah … sure…
It may sound cool that you can pay someone a lot of money and learn how to just step onto the field and win the Superbowl. But no matter how much you tell yourself you could if you needed to, you’re a lot safer not testing it out. Violence is a complex subject and many issues influence it beyond just the physical. That’s why the idea of skipping all those years of practice and experience in the minor leagues is such a crock. You don’t just pull up in a limo, step out and win the Superbowl single-handed. The guy who’s offering to teach you this is selling a fantasy. A fantasy that you’d best never test. Not even in the minor leagues because you don’t know how to conduct yourself.
That’s because nobody ever bothered to train you because they told you “don’t worry about all that namby pamby shit of de-escalation and how not to provoke an attack. REAL men already know that!” Now that they’ve cleared that up, they can focus on taking your money for showing you what to do when you’ve found yourself in a battle for your life.
Except not knowing how to keep from pissing people off is far more likely to get you mixed up in something in the 99 percent range. So before we worry about those uber 1 percent scenarios, how about focusing on the realities and dynamics of what you’re going to be facing? Especially when it comes to learning how not to step on your dick and get INTO conflict in the first place?
So now you can begin to see why I have problems with the idea of training to win the Superbowl of Violence when violence isn’t your profession or your lifestyle. You’re lacking the skills to exist in truly dangerous situations and you also lack the skills to function in normal society. By fixating on violence, you don’t have change or develop people skills.
Or is that too real and too dangerous?