save us, skepticism—the doubt that assails the search for truth—cozies up with soft words and bears gifts to transform our fear of conflict into a superficial strength. Some see this as compassionate tolerance and others a kind of civility—a way toward greater equality through the mantra “Different strokes for different folks” or “Live and let live.” But it is hardly that. Its true self is masked, and underneath is one of man’s oldest foes that holds contempt for the good, cynicism toward the joy of wonder, and a thick suspicion and distrust for truth itself. Its name is nihilism.
If nihilism were a person, he would be a supervillain living in a hollowed-out volcano with an army of ninjas waiting to die in his name. Nihilism may seem foreign, but it’s quite domestic—all spoiled children, whether children or adults, are nihilists at some point, for it’s the malady symptomatic of selfishness and its dearth of gratitude. The nihilistic ideal does not just lead to ethical befuddlement; it leads to moral confusion because it advocates for willful ignorance in the prioritization of values, the principles or standards of our behavior. Not only do we not know what to do ethically, but we don’t know why we do not know.
Some values are more important than other values. When we deny that, we’re not on top of Mount Righteous waving the banner of tolerance; we’re hunting down and culling truth with torches and pitchforks.
Nihilism makes us bystanders, ones who willingly sacrifice the sacred to the senseless and art to the artificial. Choosing to stand for nothing allows the promotion of anything. In fact, when the zeitgeist equates all values, it provides the perfect cover to join in because, hell, everybody’s doing it. But this groupthink bears an unintended consequence: it normalizes the sick and twisted. Faced with a zombie apocalypse, rather than fight, we stand shoulder to shoulder with the risen dead as zombie activists, waving signs and yelling, “Zombie rights now!”—just before we’re surrounded and devoured.
From behind this veil of equivocation, folks can aspire to a world in which no value is greater because all of them are lesser. Conflict can then only occur when we choose to take a stand. But choose to stand for nothing and you protect you and yours. There are plenty who believe this to be a good, righteous, enlightened view of the world.
They’re wrong. It’s a joke—a sick and killing one.
The aim of morals, ethics, and especially virtue—the pinnacle of our moral and ethical endeavors—is not to avoid the fight but ensure that it’s worth fighting. Denying the causes of conflict does not alleviate but stoke, especially when faced with intolerable values like those that threaten, harm, torture, and murder innocents in the name of culture or creed. Distorting reality through groupthink and manipulating language and popular culture to claim the mantle of the right and the good is to deceive fundamentally on the matter of rightness and goodness. Consensus is never a worthwhile end if it means consensual suicide. Only the ignorant and dishonest are assured there is nothing worth risking themselves for. But this reasoning is as twisty as a Gordian knot. Fidelity to truth is not about unraveling these knots but, like Alexander, cutting them.
Intervention is often underrated in the aftermath of horror, usually by the bystanders who did nothing. It is hard to imagine, however, that these same folks would have discouraged passengers from coming to their own loved one’s aid. Would they have asked them politely to stop? Encouraged them to look out for themselves? Do you think Kevin Sutherland appreciated in those last moments the fact that no one dared intercede? After all, these folks only did what normal people think they should normally do: stay out of it.
Hardly.
Our absolute needs become our fiercest desires when we find them in short supply. Just ask anyone saved from drowning. No one is more grateful for a life saved than the saved life.
But try telling that to those who are convinced there is no magnetic north on the moral compass, like the writer at the Washington Post who softened the blow of her own nihilism with cooing solidarity: “It makes a lot of us uncomfortable to think we would have cowered instead of confronting Sutherland’s killer.”1 Of course it’s uncomfortable. It should be. We are all perfectly capable of intervening. We make a conscious choice not to.
Everyone has the mental, spiritual, and physical fortitude to intervene on behalf of another who needs protection. Who would be unwilling to shield their child, sibling, or spouse under brutal attack? Those who love them can throw themselves on their bodies to shield them from violence. Anyone mobile is capable of doing this, from Grandma to Junior, and people of all kinds have. No one has to be made of steel to intervene, because doing violence to the aggressor is not the point. Protecting the victim is.
If we do not acknowledge this difference, then we stand to applaud the claptrap and confide in the con that says we are powerless. This is irrational fear, the worst kind, and it seduces into that cult of victimhood—a cult of death—where we expect to be a victim at some point, and our only defense is the condemning hope that sheer numbers safeguard us from being next.
If you’re unwilling to risk your life to protect a complete stranger, congratulations, you’re a member of the club called human. There are plenty of folks—good folks, mind you—who will never bring themselves to intervene. But do not confuse that raw fact of our humanity with the moral, ethical, or virtuous, should, ought, and must.
However, if you are willing to risk yourself to protect others, that makes you above and beyond—superhuman, in fact—and we have a name for those people: heroes. And just so we’re clear, those willing to risk their lives to protect the lives of others, and physically engage attackers to rout them, kill them, or subdue them, well, we call those rare folks by another name: warriors.
The best that martial training can do is not simply provide the necessary mental and physical skills to respond to conflict, but calibrate ourselves justly to know we ought to respond. That’s another of those ancient martial secrets. In fact, you will find these secrets have one thing in common: they all concern, touch, and overlap the realm of ethics.
Placing ethics first, ahead of physical, tactical concerns, isn’t simply more difficult because it requires more training, more study, and skill. It’s more life threatening because it forces us to risk our lives for ourselves and others and thereby requires greater fortitude of will for the courage to act. Any book can splash photos of techniques across its pages. I admit, this book aspires to something more: to articulate why it is harder, tougher, requires more competence, more strength of character, and more faith in oneself, to be ethical before we are tactical.
The best definition of ethics I ever heard did not come from some inscrutable ancient philosopher or religious exponent or secular concern, although each of these has contributed in some capacity to its historical meaning. It actually came from a US Marine Corps captain, a mentor of mine, who stated that ethics is nothing more than our “moral values in action.”
Damn.
The simple and sublime from someone trained to shoot and blow things up. From a man trained to fight.
We ought to protect others. We ought to shield them and defend them if we must, so as to escape threats and violence. And we ought to want to.
Soldiers and police officers are protectors by duty. But so are moms and dads and schoolteachers. So is the pizza guy, the investment banker, and old lady Smith down the street. So are the ten passengers on a metro train when a predator sets upon an innocent.
We can ask ourselves that question again. We can ask it and attempt to answer with examples from the martial way’s significant history, or the hallmarks of its traditions, or the extensive beliefs that the antiquity of its thought communicates to us today in its myriad cultural forms. Or we can accede
