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.
The author gouging Luke while praticing no-hands elbow control.
Courtesy Kamila Z. Miller
section 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
