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Оглавлениеsection 2.1: assumptions and epistemology
Before we start explaining strategy or tactics, we need to address assumptions. Assumptions are those things you believe to be true without really considering them. They provide the background for much of how you see the parts of the world that you have never experienced. For instance, you can assume that people elsewhere in the world are very similar to the people you know, or you can assume that they are very different. Either point of view will color all of your interactions with and perceptions of those people. Like many things, your assumptions affect you far more than they affect the world.
The world is a big place and full of many things. We could not function if we had to deal with each event in our life as a new and separate thing. We will start the car tomorrow the way that we started it yesterday. When we buy a new car, it will start and operate very much like the old one. Assumptions, in a large part of our daily life, are necessary and usually harmless.
We get into trouble when we base our assumptions on either irrelevant comparison or bad sources. No amount of driving a car will prepare you for riding a bicycle for the first time. No matter how hard you convince yourself that they are both vehicles, both just machines, the skills are different. Cars and bicycles are irrelevant comparisons. A bad source would be taking driving lessons from someone who has never driven a car. Worse would be learning to drive a car from a bicyclist who THINKS it’s the same as driving a car.
There is a second condition that must be met before your bad assumptions can harm you. The subject must matter. You can believe anything you want about the best way to approach extraterrestrials or how you would broker world peace and since it will never be tested, you can believe anything you want with no consequences. Martial arts and self-defense are tricky, because for most practitioners whether they work or not will never really matter. It will never be tested. They can learn and believe and teach any foolishness they want. It will only be a source for interesting conversation.
Then, occasionally it will matter very much to an isolated individual. The stakes are high.
It is very difficult to analyze your own assumptions. In your own mind, they are only “the things you believe,” the “true” things. As I wrote above, they are the things you never really considered…because you’ve never really doubted them.
Epistemology is the study of how people and societies decide what is true. What is your personal epistemology? What sources do you consider unimpeachable? If it’s on the eleven o’clock news, does that make it true? If all your friends are saying something, does that make it true? If it’s in Science Digest or Scientific American, do you believe it? If your pastor said it, is it gospel? (sorry, pun) Do you trust your personal experience?
Personal experience would seem to be a no-brainer but very, very few people will trust their own experience against the word of either many people or a single “expert.”
One of my co-workers is amazing. He’s a hell of a nice guy and hell itself in a fight—huge, strong, and not completely sane. We were taking a course in a personal protection system and the instructor was describing a “Straightblast” technique where you applied chained punches to the face with aggressive forward movement. The instructor was very good, a very charismatic young man who had been training for years but didn’t have a lot of experience in our environment.
The instructor explained how under a Straightblast the threat will retreat. My friend said, “But what if he doesn’t? What if he steps in?”
I thought, “Brother, the last guy who moved in on you and STABBED you, you lifted him up in the air and slammed him down so hard you broke his spine! Why the hell are you listening to this guy when you have more experience than him and everyone he knows combined?”
But my friend, this truly awesome survival fighter, had completely set aside his own experience…because this instructor was an “expert.”
Even when you develop a belief based on personal experience, you are influenced in subtle ways. Rarely, if ever, is personal experience the sole basis of a belief. As an example, most people believe that the sun will rise tomorrow. If you questioned them, a good percentage of them will say that this belief is based on personal experience. It seems reasonable to believe that if the sun has risen every day of your life, it will continue to do so forever.
However, since the same people have awakened every morning to observe this have also awakened, isn’t it equally reasonable to believe that since you have woken up every day of your life you will continue to do so forever? Yet, very few people think that they are immortal. My wife says, “We’re immortal, so far.”
The best advice in this book will serve to enrich your life more than it will contribute to your survival. This is one of those bits. Examine your own epistemology. Look at your beliefs, and the source of those beliefs. Some of your beliefs came from early training or bad sources. Some of your sources were chosen because you knew they supported your preexisting point of view. Look very deeply at those sources that you accept without question.
As you do this, it will allow you to see many things that you have thought of as true as merely opinions, and give you great freedom in exploring and understanding both your world and other people’s.
Because of the nature of this book, I want you to apply this concept first to violence. Violence, for most of us, is unknown territory. Though martial artists have studied “fighting,” and everyone has been raised in a culture where stylized violence is everywhere, very little of what we know is based on experience, and very much is based on word of mouth. It is, for many people, entirely assumption. If the source of information is good, the martial artist may be able to defend him or herself with the skills. If the source is bad, the skills taught can actually decrease survivability.
I want to be very clear here. What you have trained in and been taught is “word of mouth.” Until you do it yourself, for real, you can’t evaluate it with accuracy. Experience in the dojo is experience in the dojo. Experience in the ring is experience in the ring. Experience on the street is experience on the street. There is some overlap in skills; some lessons transfer. But a black belt in Judo will teach you as much about sudden assault as being mugged will teach you about Judo. And my experience will always be your word of mouth.
You have certain assumptions about what conflict is like. If you are interested in self-defense, you will choose a martial art based on its similarity to your assumptions. As you read books or listen to TV analysis of crimes and war, you will subtly pick your sources to mirror your views. In some cases, if the student isn’t careful or becomes enamored of the system or instructor, he will ignore real experience if it doesn’t match his assumption.
John has studied two martial arts and has been in several “encounters.” He considers one of his martial arts unrealistic and worthless, largely because he fights “so much harder” sparring in his new grappling system. Yet, studying his old, “worthless” style, he was surprised and responded with (of all things) a kick to the chin. The threat was taken down in under a second with no harm to John. After studying his new style for some time, he chose to interfere in a conflict between a biker and someone who owed the biker money. John got stomped pretty bad. He feels it would have been much worse if he had stuck with his original martial art.
Despite his own experience of a perfect fight (one move, complete takeout) and a bad one, John likes his new art because the sparring feels more like he imagines a fight should feel. It matches his assumptions and, like many people, his assumptions override reality.
If you study a formal martial art, there is another set of assumptions that you must deal with: the assumptions of your style. The first major assumption is a belief in what a “fight” is and looks like. The second is what defines a “win.” For the old style of Jujutsu that I study, the assumed opponent was an armed and armored warrior, the assumed environment was a battlefield full of armed people, the assumed situation was that your weapon had been dropped or broken suddenly, and the assumed goal was to get an opponent’s weapon, probably by killing him. This list of assumptions drives almost everything in the style. It forces a close, brutal, quick, and aggressive concept based entirely on gross motor skills.
Most styles and instructors are remarkably well adapted to getting the win in the right kind of fight, and crippled when the fight doesn’t match their expectation or when the conditions of a win change.
Every style is for something, a collection of tactics and tools to deal with what the founder was afraid of. A style based on the founder’s fear of losing a non-contact tournament will look different, even if it is just as well-adapted for that idea of a fight as my Jujutsu is for its time and place.
Understand thoroughly what your style is for. Violence is a very broad category of human interaction. Many, many instructors attempt to apply something designed for a very narrow aspect of violence, such as unarmed dueling, and extrapolate it to other incompatible areas, such as ambush survival. My Jujutsu, for instance, is wonderfully adapted to close-range medieval battlefield emergencies. From there it is a fairly easy stretch to predatory assault survival, but difficult to adapt to either sparring or the pain-compliance/restraint level of police Defensive Tactics (DTs).
Each instructor also has assumptions based on his or her experience, training, and (too often) television and popular culture.
At a seminar, I met a martial arts instructor of great skill in his specialty—under the right circumstances, he could dodge and send people sailing with very little effort. It bothered me, because the operative concept was “under the right circumstances.” If someone rushed him from at least two long paces away and flinched past their own point of balance, his techniques would work. Otherwise, not so well. They didn’t work, generally, on the other instructors there, and he had brought his own student so that he could demonstrate successfully.
I don’t think this was conscious. I met the instructor and talked with him. I genuinely liked and respected him. I believe that in his own mind, his techniques did work on the other instructors. If they didn’t, he attributed it to our vast skill. I don’t think for a second that he realized that he had taught his student to flinch in a certain way so that the techniques would work.
The two long paces bothered me more, because he espoused that attacks happen exclusively at that range, and they don’t. He set me at that distance and asked how I would attack. I smiled, walked up, put an arm around his shoulders, and fired a knee into his thigh. He laughed and said, “I’d never let you get that close.” He just had. Without a beat, he turned back to the lesson.
He had superb skill and he (or his instructors) had rewritten the map of the world so that the techniques would work. Since the techniques required two paces, attacks must come at two paces, right? Otherwise, the techniques would have been designed differently. Right?
Imagine studying something for a decade or more that you will never actually use. You have worked to perfect it, but without a touchstone to reality, how do you know what perfection looks like?
He told me about a serious assault he had been subjected to—it was bloody and messy, an ambush at close quarters with lumber and boots. It didn’t happen at two paces, or from the front. The two he could see were closer than he believes he would ever let anyone get, and he didn’t see the third.
I assume that sometime after this incident he found his martial art, fell in love with it, and found great comfort and a feeling of safety in its practice. Does he ever think about that attack within the context of what he teaches? How do illusions become so powerful that they seem more real and affect beliefs more than an event as horrific as the one he experienced?
The assumptions of his style and his respect for them were able to outweigh a brutal and critical personal experience. That is powerful and very, very dangerous.
section 2.2: the power of assumption
Some of our assumptions are so closely held that we will cling to them, even in the face of overwhelming evidence. Many, many people discount their own experience as an “aberration,” preferring to trust in “common sense” or tradition or the word of an “expert.”
I’ve caught myself doing this.
I’ve had five real encounters with knife-wielding threats…sort of.
The first was downward stab at my shoulder from a teenage girl that I blocked and armlocked easily. So that doesn’t count, right? It was too easy, not the scary and desperate situation I’ve trained for— and it was “only a girl” and only a pair of scissors.
The second was a straight-up assassination attempt. A somewhat unbalanced relative tried with all her might and speed to put a steak knife in my kidney from behind. I’m only alive because I saw a reflection and my body acted immediately and explosively. Was it a “real knife defense” if I am aware that I’m only alive because of luck?
The third was in a casino in Reno. I was ordering a bum who had been stealing credits from other customers to leave, and he pulled a knife. I stayed calm, hands up, and continued moving towards him, keeping my voice calm. I knew that my legs were slightly longer than his weapon range and I was fully prepared to kick as soon as the critical distance was reached—it wasn’t going to be a friendly sparring kick, either. I was going for a forty-yard punt. With each step forward that I took, he took one backwards until he was out of the casino. It never went to combat. Does it count?
The fourth was searching a fresh arrestee in booking. He was a little drunk, his cuffs were off, and he had his hands on the counter facing away from me for the pat search. At the base of his spine there was a roughly cylindrical object under his shirt. I thought “knife!” at first, but when I asked him what it was, he said, “Let me show you!” and he spun, reaching under the shirt exactly the same way I’d practiced to draw my weapon from under my jacket. He never got it out. Knife or gun, I didn’t know and didn’t care. I hit him as hard and fast as I’ve ever hit a human being, driving his head into the wall, the counter, and sweeping his legs out from under him. His head hit three hard surfaces—wall, counter, and floor—in about a second. If he never got a chance to draw, was it really weapons defense? If I thought it was a knife and it was only a cigarette lighter, does it count?
The last should have been ugly. A freak on PCP was placed in an isolation cell in Reception. With his fingers, he pulled six concrete screws out of the wall to get access to the stainless steel mirror. He then broke the steel mirror in half so that he would have one shank in each hand. On-duty staff sprayed him with five large canisters of pepper spray and he didn’t even shut his eyes. So they called us, CERT (Corrections Emergency Response Team). We handled it without a problem. Does it count as knife defense if I was dealing with it as part of a specially trained and equipped eight-man team?
These are all real encounters. Any of them could have ended my life. But because they don’t fit my assumptions, because they don’t look like the picture I have in my head of a “knife fight,” I sometimes downplay the lessons I learned, and this is a danger. Lessons from life are gifts and they should not be ignored.
One of the reasons that it is hard to find an experienced instructor for real violence is that it is hard to survive enough encounters to learn what worked and what didn’t. As odd and weak as I sometimes see these experiences, how many “experts” in bladed weapon defense have had five or more encounters? Five is a very large number in this field…but would you train for a kickboxing tournament under a coach who had only five matches? Especially if he freely admitted that of those five he cheated on two, got lucky on one, had one opponent back out, and won the first against an opponent below his weight class? Hell no…but in this field, five is a lot of experience.
Sometimes, it’s not only discounting real experience but taking experience from bad sources and labeling it “truth” that can mentally cripple you.
One of my students was concerned that she couldn’t hurt a large man. I told her to imagine a two-hundred-pound man holding a small cat. Could the man kill the cat? Sure.
“Now imagine I throw a bucket of water on them. What happens?”
“The cat goes berserk and starts scratching the guy up.”
“Does the guy let go?”
“Probably.”
“So the cat wins?”
“I guess. Sure.”
“So you’re telling me that an eight pound cat can hurt a big man and you can’t?”
“The cat has claws and teeth.”
“And you don’t?”
She thought for a minute. “But I’ve wrestled with my boyfriends before and I couldn’t do anything.” Aha.
She had taken a situation where she had no desire to cause injury, no fear, probably wanted to strengthen and deepen the relationship, and she had chosen that incident to base her assumptions about combat. Those assumptions nearly made her give up on training.
There are fads in the law enforcement community and we love experts. When the UFC started and the Gracies were winning everything, “Tactical Groundfighting Courses” started springing up all over the country. They were barely-altered aspects of Gracie Jujitsu or wrestling. Many of the classes I saw showed a fundamental ignorance of the job. Sport grappling immobilizes opponents on their backs; LEOs immobilize face down, for handcuffing. Sport grappling takes up space with tight body contact; in law enforcement, at that range the threat can kill us with weapons from our own belts.
The goals of the two are not the same. In many ways it was as if LEOs were attempting to improve their ability to fly fighter jets by taking lessons from the best submariners in the world.
One last story: It is said that when a baby elephant is first trained, a rope or chain is tied around its ankle and it will struggle and pull and fight against the chain. When it learns that it cannot break the chain, the chain can be replaced with a bit of twine and the elephant will never try to break it. The elephant assumes it can’t, and so a full-grown elephant can be held by a piece of string.
Many of your assumptions came from childhood. You are no longer a child.
Many came from earlier in your training—you have grown and changed since then.
Many came from unreliable sources. You can make up your own mind.
Do not let yourself be crippled by something that only exists in your mind.
section 2.3: common sources of knowledge about violence
We are, all of us, both teachers and students. As teachers, we give our students information. As students, we learn from our teachers. The teachers give us knowledge. This knowledge came from somewhere, from one of four sources:
• Experience
• Reason
• Tradition
• Entertainment and Recreation
I like experience. It helps to winnow the BS from the truth. It allows you to pass on a little of the mindset, a few of the tricks, some of the obstacles that they will face. It leads to a perspective that is unique. But realistically, how many instructors have enough hands-on experience in real violence to pass anything along? Very few. The instructors who have experienced enough violence to be able to generalize are even more rare.
Additionally, violence is extremely idiosyncratic. I honestly don’t know if my experience will match yours. I don’t know if our bodies and minds will react in the same way to the cascade of stress hormones. I can’t honestly tell you how much of my survival is based on judgment or skill or luck.
I was discussing this with one of my students, explaining that unlike almost anything else, the more experience of violence you have the less sure you are that things will work out. Jordan put it in perspective: “Sounds like a case of the more you know, the more you realize you don’t know.”
Experience, in my opinion, could not give rise to a new martial art. Given the idiosyncratic nature and the improbability of surviving enough high-end encounters, it would be hard to come up with guiding principles or even a core of reliable techniques. I am painfully aware that things that worked in one instant have failed utterly in others.
Decapitating goats and the limits of reason. When I was very young I read a book called The Far Arena by Richard Sapir. The premise of the book was that a Roman gladiator had been frozen in arctic ice and miraculously brought back to life in modern times. One section stuck with me for many years. The gladiator was ruminating on decapitation. He explained that it was rare, that in all his time in the arena he had only seen it done once, by an enormous Germanic barbarian. He explained in great detail about the different layers of tissue, the toughness of the muscle, and how things that cut muscle tend to be poor at cutting bone and vise versa. It made perfect sense. I filed it away in the back of my head and believed, without challenging it, that beheading someone or something would be a very difficult task indeed.
Years later I was asked to help a friend butcher some goats. The first step, of course, was killing the animal. We wanted to minimize pain and panic. Cutting throats can work. A gunshot to the brainstem can work (but the other goats tend to get scared and are harder to control). I’d been practicing with sword for years. Both the owner of the goats and my wife write fiction of the sort where details on beheading might be useful. I volunteered to lop the goats’ heads off.
Mary held a rope and the goat pulled against it, stretching its neck nicely. I used the sword my wife had given me for our first anniversary, a single-edged hand-and-a-half forged by Cord. The Far Arena firmly in mind, I prepared for a power stroke. All of my skill and all of my power…The sword went through the neck like it wasn’t there. In all the animals we butchered that day, I only felt any resistance once—we didn’t use the rope and I did a backhand horizontal stroke. That goat died instantly with its spine severed but the blade didn’t go all the way through the front of the neck. Later, there is a stage in the butchering process where you normally use a saw to cut the spine in half lengthwise. Mary started the job but the dead animal was floppy and hard to work with, so I volunteered to finish it with the sword. Without a stroke of any kind, just letting the weight of the blade fall off my shoulder, the steel went through about 18 inches of bone.
Hope that wasn’t too gruesome for you. Here’s my point; just because something makes perfect sense doesn’t mean it is true.
Reason is weak. Most people don’t recognize the sheer chaos of survival fighting or the effects that the stress hormones dumped into your bloodstream will have. Seeing a need for training in this area, instructors have a tendency to look at an area they are familiar with and extrapolate it to violence. Many take competition experience or other people’s research and try to figure out what “should” work.
Things that should work don’t all the time. I’ve been completely unfazed by a crowbar slamming into the back of my head and been left dizzy and puking for three days from a light slap…also to the back of the head. I couldn’t have reasoned that out.
Reason has given rise to a number of martial arts styles, or perhaps fantasy masquerading as reason. There are two ways reason can be applied to any particular aspect of the matrix, such as self-defense. Most people and organizations plan from a “Resources Forward” model. Basically, they look at what they have and figure out what they can do with it. The equivalent in martial arts would be to say, “We’re really good at kicking and can punch a little, how do we use that in an ambush?”
“Goals Backwards” looks at the problem and then creates the resources. “What do I need to do, and what do I need to get to accomplish that?” There’s no real martial arts equivalent of this thought process. The self-defense equivalent is to ask, “What does a real attack look like, and what do I need to have a chance?” Look at what you need, not what you have. Then you gather what you need instead of trying to stretch resources where they were never meant to go.
In theory, there is no difference between theory and reality.
In reality, there is.
Reason, by itself, is only theory.
Tradition. Often we don’t respect the environment that spawned the old combat arts. There is, in my opinion, a persistent myth that we live in the most dangerous and lethal era in human history. Surely our weapons and delivery systems are more powerful, but our perception of the value of life has far outstripped our destructive abilities. For generations raised like I was on the myth of the destructive, wanton Killer Man, this will be a hard sell.
For 2002, the Bureau of Justice statistics put the murder rate at six per 100,000, the lowest rate seen in at least thirty years. Overall violent crime was 25.9 incidents per 1,000. This has shown a steady drop since 1996 (as far back as I was willing to go with some slow-loading tables on their Web site).
I don’t know whether those numbers seem low or high to you.
In early 1945, the Battle of Iwo Jima lasted 35 days and resulted in 26,000 dead, combining both sides. The combatants used artillery, bombs, naval guns, and the most sophisticated personal weapons available at the time: rifles, machineguns, flamethrowers, and grenades.
In 1600, the Battle of Sekigahara resulted in about 40,000 dead in six hours. The battle was fought with horses and the most sophisticated personal weapons of the day: swords, spears, bows, and muskets.
It is estimated that the total civilian and military deaths of World War II would be around 50 million people. This was a war where the major industrial nations of the earth fought a war of attrition to the bitter end, a war where nuclear weapons were developed and used.
It is also estimated that using bow and spear and sword, the Mongols conquered Northern China between 1210 and 1240 at the cost of 40 million lives…but they also conquered Russia and the Middle East, another 10 million (perhaps a million in the sack of Baghdad alone) and another five million conquering Southern China from 1250-1280.
Do we really believe that the serial killer is a modern phenomenon? Modern serial killers don’t approach the body counts of Elizabeth Bathory who may have killed and bathed in the blood of 600 young women or Gilles de Rais who was eventually executed for the torture, rape, and murder of 200 (more or less) young boys.
What is different today? A countess could not hide behind her nobility and it is difficult and rare to say that peasants don’t “count.” We have a computer network that helps us know if a murder is part of a larger pattern. We have a media that reports what happens. At the turn of the last century, if someone were killed in your town, no one outside of your county and the relatives would even know—unless it made excellent news, like the Lindbergh baby or the Lizzy Borden ax murders.
We also have the police. The idea was a new concept in the 18th century. The U.S. Marshals Service was founded in 1789. Scotland Yard was founded in 1829. Think about the implications: If you were killed, unless your friends or family sought vengeance, there would be no investigation, no search for justice. You would be forgotten. The killer would move on. Many of these killers lived and worked in bands, sometimes gangs, but sometimes agents of authority. The press gangs beat and kidnapped citizens to “recruit” for the British Navy. The soldiers of the Hundred Years War, the Thirty Years War, and much of the Napoleonic era roamed the countryside supplying themselves, which means robbing, raping, and killing for anything that they wanted or needed. The largely unarmed citizenry had no recourse to any higher authority.
This is the environment and the context in which the older martial arts arose. It was an answer to a primal understanding of violence, something we often miss without the experience to understand and evaluate it.
Anything that is taught becomes tradition. Even a tradition of questioning traditions. Students have a right to know which of their lessons are based on experience and which on reason. Do you even know if the techniques you learn and teach have actually been used? If a martial arts style goes through several generations of teachers with out combat experience, will the guesses of the many teachers come to wash away the hard-won experience of the few? Will the rhinoceros become the unicorn?
Entertainment and recreation. Too many people, students of martial arts, concerned citizens, self-defense “experts,” and rookie officers learned most of what they think they know from television, movies, or sports events. The purpose of all of these venues is to entertain, not to educate. What they show has been modified to look more interesting. The long, complicated fight scenes of a Hong Kong Kung Fu flick are just as unrealistic as the wire work and flying. In a lethal fight, one party has the advantage or gets it as early as possible and presses it to the quick, brutal end. It’s fast. There is very little drama.
