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CHAPTER 1: THE MATRIX

You all know the story of the blind men and the elephant, right? It was originally published in a poem by John Godfrey Saxe that was about the silliness of humans disputing the nature of gods and religions.

The blind men, each very famous for wisdom and intelligence, walk up to an elephant, touch a piece, and begin to explain and describe the entire animal. The first touches the elephant’s side and declares that an elephant is just like a wall. The second, happening to grab hold of a tusk, knows that an elephant is just like a spear (okay, dull and curved and too thick but otherwise exactly like a spear…I don’t think this was the smartest of the blind men). From his short experience with the trunk, the third decides that an elephant is just like a snake

I don’t need to go on, do I?

Not to hit you over the head with the animal metaphors, but violence is a big animal and many people who have seen only a part of it are more than willing to sell you their expertise. Does someone who has been in a few bar brawls really know any more about violence than the guy who grabbed the elephant’s ear knows about elephants? Bar brawling experience is real and it is exactly what it is, but it won’t help you or even provide much insight into military operations or rape survival.

A truly devious mind that understands the principles can occasionally generalize from one type of conflict, say flying a combat mission, to very different types of conflict, such as crime prevention, debate or tactical assault. But that skill is both rare and limited. No matter how good you are at generalizing, there is a point where it doesn’t work and you descend into philosophy at the cost of survival.

Many martial arts, martial artists, and even people who fight for real on a regular basis have also only seen a very small part of this very big thing. Often, the best know one aspect very well, but that is only one aspect.

Some of the experts who are willing to sell you their insights have never seen a real elephant. Many people, almost all men in my experience, are willing to talk at length on the subjects of fighting and violence. They will lecture, expound, and debate.

Know this: Watching every martial arts movie ever filmed gives you as much understanding of fighting as a child watching Dumbo learned about elephants. Learning a martial art often teaches you as much as a taxidermist would know about elephants. Watching boxing or the UFC teaches as much as a trip to the zoo or the circus. Really, really studying the best research available gives you an incredible amount of knowledge about violence or about elephants, but there is always one detail missing.

When you are standing next to an elephant, it is huge. It could crush you at will or tear you in half, and there is nothing you could do. The advantage of being blind, of only knowing a part of this beast, is the comfortable illusion of safety.

section 1.1: the tactical matrix—an example

Violence isn’t just a big animal. It is complicated as hell. If you ever really wanted to get a handle on just one piece—interpersonal violence—you would need to understand physics, anatomy and physiology, athletics, criminal law, group dynamics, criminal dynamics, evolutionary psychology, biology and evolutionary biology, endocrinology, strategy, and even moral philosophy. In this great big complex mess, if you want to survive, you need a quick and simple answer. That’s hard.

A matrix is used to describe and analyze a multidimensional event in a multidimensional way. Ask a martial artist, “What’s your favorite attack?” or “What’s your favorite combination?” and they will have an answer. For a few years, mine was a backfist/sidekick combination. Remember that. It will come up in a few paragraphs.

There are many ways to break things up. Consider this as one example. There are four different ways that a fight can arise:

(1) You are completely surprised, hit before you are aware that a conflict has arisen.

(2) You felt something was going on but weren’t sure what.

(3) You knew it was coming and you were ready, a mutual combat.

(4) You ambushed the other guy, initiating action when he was completely surprised.

There are also three different levels of force that you can use. (A) You must not injure the other person, (e.g. getting the car keys from drunken Uncle Bob). (B) It’s okay to injure, but not to kill. (C) Killing is both legally justified and prudent.

This makes a simple 3x4 matrix of twelve options:

Figure 1.1: The Tactical Matrix

	SURPRISED	ALERTED	MUTUAL	ATTACKING
NO INJURY
INJURY
LETHAL

In only one of these twelve possible scenarios is the backfist/ sidekick a really good option. It is workable in perhaps two more, but for seventy-five percent of the options, my “favorite” technique is worthless.

You can plug almost any technique, tactic, or even system into the matrix and see where it applies. Karate’s core strategy is to “do damage”— close in and hit hard. Given that it is difficult (not impossible) to kill with a bare hand, where does Karate fit on the matrix? Where does boxing fit? Sword and shield? Where does a handgun fit? Can you use a handgun when you are completely surprised?

	SURPRISED	ALERTED	MUTUAL	ATTACKING
NO INJURY	Inappropriate due to risk of injury/ requires time and distance	Inappropriate due to risk of injury	Inappropriate due to risk of injury	Inappropriate due to risk of injury
INJURY	Requires some time and distance. Won’t work	Possible, if attacker gives time	Good	Possible, but feint is inefficient if you have surprise
LETHAL	Insufficient force, time, and distance. Unworkable	Insufficient force	Insufficient force	Insufficient force

Using a backfist/sidekick combination in an example of a simple tactical matrix.

	SURPRISED	ALERTED	MUTUAL	ATTACKING
NO INJURY	Inappropriate due to risk of fatality/no time to draw	Inappropriate due to risk of fatality	Inappropriate due to risk of fatality	Inappropriate due to risk of fatality
INJURY	Risk of fatality/ no time to draw	Risk of fatality	Risk of fatality	Risk of fatality
LETHAL	Possible, if you can overcome surprise and draw weapon	Effective	Effective	Effective

Using a firearm as an example.

Looking at it like that, however, is a fundamental flaw in thinking. To work from technique to situation is backwards. The parameters, in this case “level of surprise” and “acceptable damage,” dictate the matrix. Each box in the matrix represents a type of situation. To go through life being very skilled at one or two aspects of the matrix, and hoping the violence you run into will happen to match your boxes, is dangerous and yet very common.

Here’s a rule for life: You don’t get to pick what kinds of bad things will happen to you. You may prepare all your life to take on a cannibalistic knife-wielding sociopath. You may get stuck with a soccer riot. Or a road rage incident with a semi. Or a pickup full of baseball bat swinging drunks. Or nothing at all. You don’t get to choose.

The purpose of the tactical matrix is to introduce regular people to the idea that violence is complex. For martial artists, it is important to understand that preparing for one thing is not preparing for all things. For citizens watching the news, trying to figure out if what an officer did was the right thing, it’s important to understand that not everything can be solved with a wristlock or a few kind words. Violence is complex.

The tactical matrix here is NOT an answer or a guide. It is an example. It’s not even an example of types of fights. It is a first step in demonstrating complexity. The matrix can be extended infinitely. Multiple bad guys? Three ways that can break down—my side outnumbers you, your side outnumbers me or we’re even. The matrix now has 36 boxes. Weapons? I have a weapon, you have a weapon, we both do or neither of us do. Four options and the matrix jumps to 144 boxes.

Got it? Good, ‘cause now we’re going to get complicated.

section 1.2: the strategic matrix: what martial arts tries to be

A New York Times article dated June 7, 2005 describes a video of an officer in a traffic stop taking fire from the driver and his partner running away. The officer who ran away chose the perfect option for self-defense. It was not the best option for his partner. It was not what he was trained and expected to do. He was trained and expected to engage the threat.

Officers on patrol avoid hand-to-hand encounters. Fights are dangerous. Even when you win, there is a possibility of injury, exposure to blood-borne pathogens such as HIV and hepatitis, or a lawsuit. Within that context, there are two distinctive hand-to-hand skills that an officer needs. In the ugly, surprise situation, taking damage and unprepared, the officer needs brutal close-quarters survival skills. Putting handcuffs on an unruly drunk who doesn’t want to go to jail but doesn’t really want to hurt you requires different skills, different techniques, and a different mindset.

Sometimes there are more. A SWAT sniper needs a crystal clear thought process and the ability to deal with hours of boredom and discomfort. The point man on an entry team doesn’t need or use the same techniques or mindset as the sniper, isn’t interested in semi-compliant handcuffing and damn well better not be surprised if he works for me. He is the “surprisor.”

In just one profession, four different skill sets for dealing with physical conflict. Not one of them is like dueling, sparring, or waging a war.

Martial arts try to do more than that. Some studios promise self-defense skills and tournament trophies, discipline and self-discovery, fitness and confidence, and even spiritual growth and enlightenment.

How well do these goals really mesh?

Cardiovascular fitness is extremely important for health and longevity and should be the cornerstone of any fitness regimen, yet fighting for your life is profoundly anaerobic. Whether you had a good breakfast will have a greater effect on your endurance thirty seconds into the fight (and thirty seconds is a long time in an ambush) than your ability to run a marathon.

Spiritual growth, the measure of many modern martial arts, is a difficult concept to pin down. I once asked my sensei in Jujutsu if there was a spiritual discipline associated with Sosuishitsu-ryu. Dave said, “Oh. Sure. The dead guy doesn’t get to go to church. Don’t try to read too much into this, Rory. It’s not a way of life. It’s a collection of skills a samurai might need if he wanted to go home to his family.”

Martial arts and martial artists often try to do it all. They teach self-defense and sparring and streetfighting and fitness and personal development, as if they were the same thing. They aren’t even related.

Very, very different things get lumped under the general heading of “violence.” Two boxers in a contest of strategy, strength, skill, and will. A drunken husband beating his wife. Two highschoolers punching it out in the parking lot. A mental health professional trying to hold down a schizophrenic so that a sedative can be administered. An officer walking into a robbery in progress finds himself in a shoot-out. Soldiers entering a building in hostile territory. A rapist pushing in the partially open door of an apartment. An entry team preparing to serve a search warrant on a drug house with armed suspects. A Victorian era duel with small swords.

Matrix of Martial Arts and Violence: Differences of Type

Because they involve people in conflict and people get hurt, we lump them together as violence, but they aren’t the same and the skills and mindset from one situation don’t carry over automatically to the other.

Self-defense is clearly my focus in this book. What is it? It is recovery from stupidity or bad luck, from finding yourself in a position you would have given almost anything to prevent. It is difficult to train for because of the surprise element and because you may be injured before you are aware of the conflict. The critical element is to overcome the shock and surprise so that you can act, to “beat the freeze.” Self-defense is about recovery. The ideal is to prevent the situation. The optimal mindset is often a conditioned response that requires no thought (for the first half-second of the attack) or a focused rage.

The duel is out of fashion in our day and age. It was (and occasionally is) a glorified Monkey Dance (See Section 3.1) forced by society. It was a contest to see who could better uphold the standards of the day, thus it was fought over insults and unacceptable behavior and not more material injury. It was possibly more about show than survival. There was a “right” way to win. This still happens in rare incidents of “dojo arashi” when martial artists go to other martial arts schools to challenge the instructors. The early UFC bouts also tried to take on this element in the “style versus style” but they were very different.

Can we use the skills, mindset, and strategies of the duel in a self-defense situation?

Sport is a contest between two people; different than the duel because it is something the practitioners seek and not something they feel they must do to preserve their place in society. It is admirable, to me, because the real goal is to test yourself. For most, it’s not about domination but about what they have, what they can do, what they’ve learned. Mixed martial arts (MMA) is part of a long evolution of taking this concept as far as it can go safely.

Is the righteous rage, which has gotten so many people through an attempted rape, an efficient emotional response for a high school wrestling match?

By combat, I specifically mean war. Combat is a very different experience for generals than for soldiers. Generals can look at percentage killed, take risks, sacrifice, and maneuver men. For the generals, there are acceptable losses and you can continue to fight if you suffer twenty percent killed. For the soldier, it is binary: You are alive or you are dead. Generals win wars. Teams win wars. I remember my drill sergeant yelling, “You are not an individual! You are a part of this team!” In order for the generals to win, the soldiers must be predictable. The general has to be certain that if he orders them to march or attack or hold position, they will. Thus, obedience is critical and it is enforced by a culture that will do what is expected because they don’t want to let the rest of the team down.

Given that the most common lead up to an attack on a woman is to show a weapon and order her to obey, is being trained to obey, whether in the military or one of the militaristic dojos, a good training method for self-defense?

Assault isn’t just for criminals. Elite military teams, hostage rescue, SWAT, and entry teams use this mindset as much as criminals do. They don’t want to be tested or find out what their limitations are, they want to get the job done and go home. The mindset is implacable and predatory. They use surprise, superior numbers, and superior weapons—every cheat they can, and they practice. On the rare, rare occasions when my team made a fast entry and someone actually fought, the only emotion that I registered was that I was offended that they resisted, and we rolled right over the threat(s) like a force of nature.

If you can truly flip the switch from surprised, overwhelmed, and terrified to the assault mindset, I can’t teach you much. This is the opposite of the “frozen” response often triggered by a sudden assault, and we train hard to trigger that freeze in others.

Spiritual growth is very difficult to define. If it is a depth of understanding of the human condition, you will grow more by living and serving and talking to people than you will ever learn in a class of any kind. If it is understanding of yourself, you will learn the most by challenging your fears and dislikes, and few people stick with a class that they fear and dislike. If it is a happy feeling that all is right with the world and there is a plan and everything is wonderful and good…you can get it from heroin cheaper and faster. If it is something great and magical that will open up your psychic powers, keep playing video games. There is a danger here that I don’t properly address in the simple matrix and is beyond the scope of this book: people want to believe in magic and secrets and there are other people who will satisfy those beliefs for money or power. This can result in abuse and trauma, the very opposite of self-defense.

Fitness is objectively the most important effect of martial arts training. The physical skills and self-defense aspects of training will never save as many people from violence as the conditioning will save from early heart attacks. If you study Judo, Jujutsu, or Aikido, you will probably never use the skills to throw an attacker, but I can almost guarantee that you will and have used the breakfalls to prevent injury. Properly trained, many martial arts give balanced development of muscle, strength and aerobic training, increases in flexibility and agility, and all at a relatively low risk of injury. It may not be as efficient as a good circuit program in these areas, but it can be more fun and you will stick with the exercise program that you enjoy.

Fitness will never hurt you in a self-defense situation. Even aerobic conditioning, which rarely activates in a fight, will help to dissipate the stress hormones that will affect your mind and body. When comparing fitness with self-defense, the problems come from the other direction. Self-defense is largely about dealing with surprise and fear and pain, none of which is useful in developing fitness.

One example from the other dimension of the matrix to hammer home the point: Look at the optimum mindset for each of the examples of conflict.

The implacable predatory mindset of the assault is powerful. It is cold-blooded, calculating, and utterly controlled. It is also inhuman, reducing the target of the assault from human to either a resource (in the criminal mind) or a threat (in the mind of an entry team).

This mindset, in my experience, horrifies the people seeking spiritual growth. It is a natural mindset and beautiful in its place, but it is scary to someone who is seeking light and love and harmony. People who imagine the harmony of nature are often willfully blind to the savagery between wolf and rabbit. The assault mindset can revel in that savagery.

The assault mindset in a sporting competition is completely unacceptable. From the assault mindset, if you are scheduled to fight a world champion heavyweight boxer on Thursday, you shoot him on Tuesday. It is not just beyond cheating—cheating has no meaning in the mind of a predator—there are only odds, tactics, and meat. This comparison is doubly true for the duel.

Some elite elements in combat develop the predator mindset. It requires trust and respect to get an entire team into that mindset. Far more teams fake it by hard training under a good leader than actually have the mindset. True predators are unpredictable and that makes the chain of command uncomfortable. They will get the job done but will ignore any parameter or rule of engagement set by command that does not seem important to them. Because of this, they are idolized in times of serious conflict and marginalized, ignored, or pushed aside when combat is rare.

Fitness training is about your self. There is no prey and therefore nothing for the predator mindset to focus on. A predator without prey is a fat, lazy cat that likes to play and eat and sleep.

The predator mindset is a choice. No one is in that mind at all times—it has too many blind spots to function in normal society. Self-defense is never a choice. The attacker is in the predator mindset, not the victim. The victim will have to deal with shock and total surprise, the predator won’t. The essence of self-defense is breaking out of the frozen mindset you have been shocked into. If you can access the predator mindset a few seconds into the attack, you can turn the attack into something else. That’s powerful, but takes great experience.

This matrix could be extended almost infinitely in either dimension. Fight choreography for films, stuntwork, performing arts, and restraining mental patients without injuring them could all be added across the top. Timing differences, best class of techniques, ideal opponent, and reliance on technology could all have a space.

Despite the wide variety of skills and complete incompatibility of the mindsets or strategy, martial artists are often convinced that they are training for all of these things simultaneously. In strictly regimented classes where things are done by rote and without question, you can see the military roots of a soldier’s art…but that obedient mindset can set students up for failure if they are victimized by an authority figure or overwhelmed by an attacker who uses verbal commands with his assault. Some instructors extol the virtues of the predatory mindset, the “eyes of a tiger,” without teaching how to get there from a moment of surprise, pain, and fear (for self-defense) or dealing with the logical consequences for sport—a true predator cheats in profound ways. Not the little ways, like illegal nerve gouges in the grapple, but big ways like getting a bunch of friends and weapons and finishing the fight in the locker room before the match starts.

This extends well beyond martial arts and into the world of conflict and the perception of conflict in general. In the world of movies, boots and fists and guns are used interchangeably. In real life, the skills, needs, and legal justification for striking and shooting are very different.

Police solutions to military problems are doomed to fail just as military solutions to police problems will never be allowed in a free society.

You will bring your experience and training (your touch of the elephant) to bear whenever you read about a military operation or see a story about a police shooting on the news.

Remember this—that the fair play and good sportsmanship you learned as a child were predicated on two fairly matched people who wanted to be there, not some drugged-up freak with a knife and an officer answering a call.

That on TV and in your martial arts classes, they make it look easy to take away a knife—an officer knows that if someone is within seven yards he can be stabbed more than once before he can even draw his weapon.

That in the movies, the sniper can coolly make head shot after head shot at five hundred yards, protecting his team. In real life, snipers have tried in vain to identify a target through smoke and muzzle flash as civilians get slaughtered.

That in books, the radios always seem to work, cell phones never go off when you are trying to get into a position, the good guy always carries enough ammo, and no one ever just bleeds out and dies from a “flesh wound.”

That when the newspaper decries the brutality of the officer who used force on a fifteen-year-old, mentally-ill “child,” all the officer saw was a 280 pound person in an altered mental state coming at him, swinging a club.