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
