Playing From Versus Playing To...

A long time ago I wrote about Mac tricking me into a weapons tournament. Been thinking about that, as well as a conversation between acquaintances on the efficiency or superiority of jo versus katana.

I stayed out of the conversation, but it was quickly apparent that I didn’t see the problem the way the people arguing did. It ties back to that tournament. In the tournament (and it wasn’t any big thing, just a small round robin among friends), I stuck with a shinai the whole time. I’m used to katana or boken. The shinai itself is something I never practice with. It is too straight, too long and too light. The other competitors were very skilled and everyone had their pick of weapons- sticks, spears, staffs, shinai, daggers, sword and shield.

The choice of weapon wasn’t the reason I made it through undefeated, though I over-heard one of the other contenders comment that “the katana is a superior weapon.” It isn’t really-- I’d rather use a spear any time I have range, or a pair of short swords if I don’t-- and I wasn’t using a katana anyway.

The thing the others players were doing (speculation alert) and the genesis of the argument about katana and jo, is that everyone was trying to figure out what they could do with what they had. They were playing from their resources, trying to maximize their skill base to win.

The stickfighters were fighting with their sticks with all they had, for instance.

I was looking at what my opponent had. How do you defeat a pair of sticks? Sword and shield? Spear? Another shinai.? Strategizing to the opponent instead of from myself.

The katana/jo thing. You don’t use a stick against a sword the way you use a stick against a stick.

There are people who will tell you that blade and stick are interchangeable, but they haven’t thought about it much. Both are longer than they are wide, but they do damage in very different ways and do their most serious damage to different tissues. Orientation (is it edge on?) isn’t a problem with a club. Things that bleed off power from blunt strikes will still leave you bleeding badly if you try them on blades.

One of the conversants in the great debate, impressed with the might of steel, offered to stand with his katana against anyone who would face him with a jo. He explained that steel was inherently superior to wood, stronger, more dangerous.

But it’s not, really. Wood and steel are strong in different ways. For that matter different types of wood are different. Part of the problem is how to use one against the other. The bigger problem is how to use a staff against a swordsman or a sword against a jodoka.

Jo against jo might be a matter of skill.

Jo against sword? In the first second you will see if he is afraid or not. If he is not afraid, he will come to you. You shorten your grip and the jo has nearly a foot of extra reach and you beat at his hands until he can no longer hold his weapon, circling and angling as he tries to close.

If you see the glimmer of fear, you close, pressing the center of the jo into the blade, hoping it bites, making sure it does because that will buy you the instant to get into the dead space behind his hands, where you can use elbows, the staff and your hands to punish or strip away his weapon…

Sword against jo? The only thing you have to fear is the thrust, and that only at specific range. If the point of the jo strays outside of the triangle, launch an attack pressing the blade, hips and feet all closing. He cannot retreat as fast as you advance. If he angles press on.

If the point never strays, circle (blade high) until you catch his feet slightly impeded, then circle your sword down, gliding his tip to the side as you step in. Use the sword as a pressing blade and do not forget the hilt, your elbows, knees and head.

Breakthrough

I like PDX, as much as it is possible to like an airport. Free wifi and they have the last Coffee People in the state. Which is sad, 'cause Coffee People do some great stuff.

On the way to Colorado to hammer out the basic course for Conflict Communications, get the website off its knees and get this thing rolling. We want to keep things quiet (a little) until the test run. A lot of that is my insecurity. My honest assessment of what we have created is that we have found the skeleton, something that explains the sources of almost all conflict and identifies opportunities and gives skills to handle it. That seems too big, too effective and I want some test runs to see if this really is as huge and important and dead simple as I think it is.

If it is...

It's hard to stay on the basics with this. We started with cop conflict, because good guys and bad guys are what we know. Then realized that it also explained almost every damn instance of line staff and administration hating each other. Then realized that it would give more effective tools for anger management than anything currently taught to prisoners. Then realized it also worked on raising children...

It's like a really good tracking class. The world opens up and is full of useful information that was invisible until you were taught to see.

It's just like the old riddle, "What do you get if you introduce an ADHD former bad guy to a mildly Asperger's former jail guard?"*

Breakthrough. That's what you get.

*Not a real riddle. Artistic license. No need to google for the answer.

Permission

Thanks for the kind words about the seminar, everybody. Be careful, though... what you say in public may find its way into promos.

Read Jim's comment re "Permission" on the last post. Everything he said was right on, but it still needs to go further.

We are, all of us, masses of potential. No matter how unathletic or weak or uncoordinated we feel, we can still do amazing things with our bodies. We can run and climb and dance and if you don't feel like that, you can touch your thumb to each of your fingers, or at least wiggle your eyebrows.

No matter how dumb we feel, or tired, we can still learn new things. Every day. The difference between the guys who spent three years on the mission in Iraq and my first three months was that I worked at the language. No smarter, no gift-- I just spent a little time each night writing out the letters, the time that so many others spent watching TV.

Along with this mass of potential, we are also little bundles of rules. Stuff we have been fed since childhood. Some of it is good. You need to put curbs on temper tantrums because things that are cute at thirty pounds are deadly at 200. But some of it is outdated. Some of it was always wrong. Some of these rules not only limit what we do, but even what we think and what we can see.

So yes, when we talk about permission in self-defense it is permission to break the rules against hurting. Permission to let go of our normal, civilized, peaceful self-image. Permission to decide that this shit isn't working and maybe the boss will freak and IAU will get involved and go for the higher level of force... (and this is huge, because a lot of the really bad decisions are a way of protecting the rules themselves. Think about that.)

But it is soooo much bigger than that. What could you be? What could you do right now? Why not? Wouldn't it be fun to laugh and run like a kid? Why don't you? Wouldn't it be useful to learn new things like a child? Do it.

"I can't, the brain doesn't grow dendrites as fast as an adult." Maybe, but try it and see how much faster they DO grow. What are you protecting, what are the rules that say that adults can't laugh and play like children? Because it is the same set of rules that sometimes keep a women from defending herself or make an officer freeze when he needs to fight for his life.

I hate going off on these rants. They start sounding not only touchy-feely, but like every self-help guru out there.

Here's the deal:

• Get off your ass and do stuff
• Challenge your own assumptions
• Have fun

You've spent your whole life trying to be a good person. You're also a perfectly good animal.

Go play.

Seminar Last Saturday

Serendipity, and good friends. Finding out the seminar was sold-out and possibly over-booked was like a splash of cold water. Turning people away violated all my Irish hospitality genes, yet doing serious brawling, even at the low level necessary when you don’t know everyone’s background can get really dangerous when crowded…

Kris came through. Like a hero. One of his students manages a club. Phone calls were made. E-mails sent. And Saturday morning we got busy in a nightclub with two bars and chicken wire separating the sections. It felt more than appropriate.

If you were there, you know if you liked it or not. The feedback at the end was good. The lawyer said I didn’t mess up anything. The karate instructor with 30+ years of teaching said he was stealing some drills. Bobbe said I wasn’t nearly the asshole he was expecting (paraphrased, very paraphrased)… I was happy and tired and my voice was shot.

But… but… and this is a very good bad thing-- there was so much more to cover. K had wanted me to at least mention the little weapon awareness drills that I do at home. We talked only briefly about some of the Principles*. Discussed the legalities of self-defense but ran out of time before the nuances, like factors and circumstances or even levels of threat and force. Mentioned Permission briefly but didn’t touch on Awareness or Initiative as training paradigms. Never got to power generation at all, much less the short range power I love (and we even had the taped-up telephone books).

The only thing that came up about groundfighting was tossing a brick to those who wound up there anyway. Realized that to really do justice to avoidance/evasion/de-escalation would take a day all by itself.

It’s all good. The stuff we missed seems important, but the stuff we covered was important as well. There wasn’t a lot of dead time. Even the water breaks were times to watch videos or listen to lectures (seven stages, legalities, types of attacks, stuff like that).

It was organic as well. I knew where I had to start and had a few things that were on a checklist, but for the rest, without knowing it, the class supplied the clues. Timing in a real fight came up because a few were unconsciously working sparring and not assault. Not only is the difference important, but sparring timing in a drill is actually a form of compliance, and it allows things to work that don’t. Range and negative space came up because of the people who were attacking arms without attacking structure. The talk on stacking damage doesn’t come up very often, but it did here. That’s a sign that there were some pretty skilled practitioners.

There’s more. So much more to play with and learn. Core fighting. Power chains. Negative space. Agreements. There is always more.

But, highest compliment of all, the students got permission to (safely) play with environmental fighting. Water bottles aren’t just impact weapons, they can penetrate as well. Some chairs are too heavy to lift and use as weapons but can be angled into a threat. The bungee cord blocking off the bar back isn’t quite long enough to strangle someone on the ground. That was all stuff that they showed me, thinks that the attendees discovered by playing.

It was a very good day.

*Principles in the sense of my big list of what makes other things work.

Sold Out

Just a quick note- the Seattle seminar February 20th is at capacity. Kris says we can't fit anymore people into the space.

Wow.

In the Dry East Rain

A domestic house cat can bite entirely through your thumbnail. I tell you this in case you are curious. No need to go out and experiment for yourself.

A long drive from one end of the state to another. Lots of not being asleep. There is a place in Pasco, Washington where the remains of irradiated humans are evaluated. Seeking knowledge in a warehouse with an autopsy room, I am struck once again by the huge gap between an expert's knowledge and the public's ill-informed fears.

Also struck by how much human remains, parted and tagged and vacuum-sealed and frozen, look like pork chops.

The science fiction fans out here (for I am at Radcon) are very different from PDX. They are younger, more enthusiastic, and gloriously, openly armed. If I had known it was a weapon-friendly event I would certainly have brought some toys, probably Unimpeded and a tomahawk. Or maybe the Criswell.

Good talks with good friends, as always. Some disturbing panels, where it becomes almost surreal how differently I see the world. In a panel on evil, Sarah Palin comes up as an example. I am thinking of mutilated babies; predation and murder and torture. Others think of political opinions with which they disagree. Once again, and I still struggle with articulating this: I am amazed at the human ability to confuse the worst they have experienced with the worst that could happen; the ability to decide that the perceived enemy is somehow the enemy of all that is good. So petty, and so sad.

Watched a demo of armor and weapons and was antsy with frustration-- "Now!" There would be an opportunity and instead of taking it, the person would then prepare to take it, giving the opponent plenty of time to defend. Only once did I see a participant exploit this. Not once did I see one just bypass it and strike.

It was clear how much of the local martial arts training has been influenced by movie choreography. It was also clear how different training to spar or fight was from training to kill. I wonder if I would have been impressed twenty years ago. Probably.

Long talking in the rain in a usually dry country. Warm for this place, this time.

Bouncing for the first time in years, checking ID at a private party. No issues, which I am told is the exception here.

Experimenting, last night, with consciously unconsciously firing muscles. Hard to describe and very much not a word thing. I decide I want my back muscles to jump, but when it happens my conscious mind is completely surprised. The same principle as firing a gun without anticipation, so that the report comes as a surprise. How do I think of this stuff? And , damn, it works. Conscious decision with unconscious execution. Can I apply it in a fight? How many times have I already?

All good.

Stuff 'n' Things

The Seattle seminar is a 'go'. Here's the information. Should be fun.

Also check this out. KJ and I are toying with starting a VPPG in the Portland area.

Upcoming seminars in Kansas City and Austin.

I'll post some more if the damn phone quits ringing.

Ronin

It makes my teeth ache when martial artists try to be “modern samurai” or “American samurai.” Samurai is a really specific thing, a specific class of warrior. In order to be a samurai, one must be born into the buke, the warrior caste. Not possible in modern America unless, I suppose, you descended from one of the recognized buke families of Japan.

The second element is that you were a bushi, a professional warrior. Making war, peace-keeping, policing, guarding—the bushi did them all, so for modern shorthand, you would have to be under a ‘profession of arms’ or what Van Canna calls a “Force Professional.”

And the third element is that you must be in sworn service to a lord.

Born into the right family, doing the job and working for someone else…

Obviously, I wasn’t born into any ancient Japanese families, neither bushi nor heimin nor the other caste (which I can’t remember right now…)

I was talking to K, being introspective. Both relishing the freedom and wrestling with the uncertainty. “I always knew who and what I was. I had my tribe and my status and duties within the tribe. I’m not a part any more.”

“You’re ronin,” she said.

I winced at the word, thinking of some long ago wannabe martial artists.

But, as usual, she hit a piece of the truth. For the first time in my adult life I am not in service. From a sworn officer in my old agency to a representative of a program in Iraq I’ve always been in service to a cause. In sworn service, which is something else. I always took the duties seriously, internalized them. Became, to the best of my abilities, the perfect retainer/representative/operator for the agency that I worked for.

And now…

I don’t miss it, the world is wide open in a way that it hasn’t been for twenty-three years. Yet I do feel something. Not quite an emptiness. A drift. A change in my identity. Things are new. Things are different.

A world to wander. Like a wave.

Common Ground

One of the tricks to dealing with schizophrenics is to work from the common ground. You can't hear the voices or see the images that they might see. Simultaneously, they can't NOT see or hear them. If it was a choice, it wouldn't be a mental illness. You can waste endless energy and just infuriate people by arguing about what is real and what isn't.

So you work from the common ground: "You probably know I can't see the blue people, but I can see that you're bleeding. Can I help you with that?"

It works, more often than not. Not just here, either.

Talking to a friend recently about cultural sensitivity instruction. Many do it backwards, to my mind. They try to give you a list of all the ways that all of the world's different cultures differ from yours. Sometimes without even knowing what your culture is.

It backfires, sometimes. There is nothing quite as annoying as someone who watched a television special on a part of the world and feels a need to tell a native what that native believes and why. The whole time, the speaker feels 'sensitive.'

Work from the common ground. Respect is actually pretty universal. So is truth. I've never insulted anyone by saying, "I know absolutely nothing about your country. How do I say, 'Hello'?" There is no disrespectful way to ask for instruction, as long as you are sincere, and follow it up with actually listening and learning.

Cultural differences, mental health, even politics and religion. All easier to understand starting from the common ground.

Rich Environment

I'm going to get all mystical for a second. Feel free to tune out.

When you really really want something, the universe seems to come together to make it happen. It's not mystical convergences- more likely once you know what you want, it is easier to see opportunities.

Simultaneously, when what you want will entail a big change, it seems that life throws beautiful distractions in your way. You seem to get more offers from more really cool places.

Both of these things happen, and they contradict and, of course, both are merely perception.

In the end, life is about choices and I will decide which of these things are opportunities and which are distractions:

I have been asked separately, by two men I highly respect, to collaborate on books. Opportunity or distraction?

A provisional job offer in the place I love best in all the world. Opportunity or distraction?

There may be a job in a mountainous place on another continent, a reputedly dangerous place that I've never been. Opportunity or distraction?

Asked to put together a class for writers, a web-based seminar on violence. Opportunity or distraction?

Did a test run of a new program and the instructor who invited me pointed out that it was a critical skill completely missing from Criminal Justice education. There is a possibility that his employer would like the program developed. Opportunity or distraction?

The seminars are going ahead in Seattle, Missouri and Texas. People in Canada, the UK and on the east coast have asked about the possibility. KJ is sure that he can keep me busy. Opportunity or distraction?

The LEO program on Conflict Communication with Marc is taking shape. It will be spectacular. Opportunity or distraction?

All are simply choices. Whatever I choose will be the opportunities. Many of these I can do at the same time, but some will force me to give up others. Everything seems too rich and full of possibility right now. At least I will definitely be busy.

Group Dynamics

A recent project got me thinking about group dynamics. In college, the Group Dynamics course offered by the College of Liberal arts (don’t remember if it was under the Psychology or the Sociology Department) was largely worthless—unreliable observations tied together with dubious theory presented in a way that was not useful.

The course with the exact same title presented by the Forestry Department was outstanding- but they expected to graduate men and women who would be leading groups ranging from US Forest Service offices to fire crews.

We were taught (and I have seen again and again over the years) that there are two basic types of groups: Goal-Oriented and Longevity-Oriented.

Goal-Oriented teams exist to accomplish a mission. Your status with the team is based entirely on your contribution to getting the job done. Hard work, intelligence and creativity are valued and rewarded. There is no need for office parties or company picnics*. It is not a social club and when the mission is accomplished, the members drift off. This last is hard for some people to understand- in bad times, a good team can be tighter than family and then, when the bad times are over, go on to separate lives.

Longevity-Oriented groups exist to perpetuate the group. Status is based on rank and service to the group. Hard work and intelligence may be rewarded, but only so long as they don’t make others feel stupid. Creativity almost always threatens the status quo, and is almost always discouraged in a Longevity-Oriented group. Social ritual, whether hazing and initiations** or policy and protocol are the lifeblood of the LO group.

A pure group type is very rare. Even an extreme GO team, unless they are assembled for a single mission, will have to deal with training, logistics and the day-to-day issues of work between missions. Even the most bureaucratic LO team still (I hope) has some kind of job to do, some mission. They will also occasionally have crises that will require at minimum a few mission-oriented thinkers.

Larger organizations will have mixed departments. A GO tactical team will often work for an agency that is primarily run by LO administrations. The GO elements have a job to do, perhaps the primary job of the agency. The LO elements arrange for funding and coordination with other agencies and all of the little social details that are so critical to success and survival in both the government and corporate wilds. Both the GO and LO elements tend to think they are carrying the whole agency.

Something taxpayers should pay attention to: when they identify a problem and through ballot or protest demand a fix, they are expecting a GO response. They want the problem fixed. Due to the vagaries of funding, bureaucracy and labor law the solution will be constructed and run on LO principles. A Longevity-Orientated group is not benefited by accomplishing the mission and ceasing to exist. They are benefited by being able to show incremental progress.

Lastly, there are GO and LO individuals, though LO should actually be changed to Relationship-Oriented when talking about individuals. Generally, they will be happier in the group that matches their personalities. Yet the groups need a mix. LO groups need Goal-Oriented staff to deal with the basic job and to respond to any emergencies that arise. Goal Oriented groups get a lot of benefit from having a few Relationship-Oriented people. No matter how into the mission, a good team still has egos and feeling. I was always careful to have a couple of ROs on my Tactical Team and I never regretted it.

It’s that diversity thing.

*No need, but sometimes they hold good ones. Particularly barbecues in my experience.

**Interesting point- an initiation in an LO group serves the dual purposes of reminding the new member that they are very low status and giving them a shared experience, usually embarrassing and/or painful for common ground to talk. A GO group often has a test. In emergency response groups, the tests can be exhausting, dangerous and difficult. In more cerebral GO teams, such as tech innovation, the tests can be demanding. The purpose is to weed out those who might fail before they jeopardize the mission. It is not embarrassing, making recruits shy rarely improves mission success. It is also expected that bonding and shared stories will arise from action, not from the test.

At the DMV

Four hours at the DMV yesterday. Sigh. Got some good people-watching in, though.

One couple came in with three kids, one a babe in arms and two young boys. Black hair, dark eyes, olive skin… this station serves a relatively heavily Hispanic neighborhood but the vibe wasn’t quite right.

I glanced at the woman’s shoes and there it was—an Arabic family. I eavesdropped shamelessly. I wasn’t sure about the accent at first, a couple of hundred words in Iraqi Arabic hardly qualifies me as a linguist, but I caught part of a slang term, “shaku maku” and I was pretty sure.

The man was dressed in beige 5.11 pants, the unofficial uniform of the contractors working over there. I was wearing a pair myself…

Translating is a difficult, dangerous job in that part of the world. There are many factions (it isn’t just two sides, not by a long shot) who would delight in identifying and killing a high-value target. Like a translator or a translator’s child. Or threatening the children to force the translator to bomb his employers.

It’s a hard job and dangerous and done by brave men and women. Thing is, it becomes even more dangerous when the employers leave. Memories are long, sometimes, and people become more violent as it becomes safer to be violent. There is a special visa available for some of these men and women. The bureaucracy is huge and tedious and frustrating, but some make it through…

This was one of those families, come to a safer place where they had more possibilities beyond what was decreed by gender or sect or tribe or family connections. They looked happy- a few hours in the DMV must seem swift and simple compared to trying to push even simple things through certain middle-eastern bureaucracies…

I wanted to say thanks. Though I didn’t know him, men like him had been instrumental to the good that we did over there. I owe a lot to many maturjim… but a stranger guessing so much of a dangerous history would have scared him, and rightly so. So he and his family get my best wishes from a distance.

Active Listening

There are good skills that people don't use. AADs, for instance. Sometimes they don't understand the skill itself. Sometimes they don't understand the utility. There are some things that work really well in practice that seem like fluff in a classroom.

One of these is "active listening." It's a very common training- I would hazard that most cops and counselors and business people and teachers have had specific training in the concept. Listen. Focus. Don't start formulating your answers while the other person is talking. Mirror body language. Open-ended questions. Feedback.

It can seem like a lot of buzzwords. It can seem artificial and tricky, too... but that's because of an inherent trap. If you are thinking about the technique, you aren't listening.

It's useful, very useful and I'd go so far as to say that it is THE hallmark skill in talking someone down in crisis, but it's also very useful for keeping your wife happy. There is no downside to getting good at this.

Most people don't, however. They go through the motions (eye contact and feedback and...) but you can tell from the results that they aren't really listening.

Because of ego. Because saying is so much more important than hearing. Because expressing is so much more important than understanding. Because 'I' am so much more important than 'you.'

That last is not just a statement about me, it's pretty universal. Someone close to you gets hurt, you feel sympathy. You get hurt you feel pain*. This self-centeredness isn't wrong or unnatural, but that doesn't make it effective, either. And effectiveness depends on you. If your goal is to feel good about yourself or get attention, then active listening is a waste of time. If you goal is to help people or change behavior or defuse a crisis, then it is no longer about you... and you have to listen.

The people I've seen teach active listening usually lose the audience, especially the tough-guy problem-solving audience, because they present it wrong. "Why listen? To help some stranger solve his problems? Half the time he is the problem..."

Here's the deal, plain and simple: active listening is intelligence gathering. You want the other guy talking because everything he says and the way he says it tells you stuff about him. Stuff you can use. Likes and dislikes and enthusiasms and blind spots and lies.

And every time you talk, you give away the same kinds of information. Active listening (and keeping your own mouth shut) is a supreme tactical skill.

*Yes, someone will bring out the old saw that they would give their lives to protect their children. How few will give up careers to spend time with them? It's easy to say something that will never be tested.

Obvious Epiphany

Another super-obvious training epiphany.

One of the key concepts in survival fighting is to always fight to the goal. You do not do the same things to escape that you do to neutralize a threat. You do not defend yourself the same way that you defend someone else. Sometimes drawing attention is a more achievable goal than prevailing in the moment… and other times you don’t want attention. Goals (and parameters) dictate strategy, which dictate tactics, which dictate technique.

So one of the basic training items is to change the goal. Groundfighting? Person A wins by submission, but person B wins if he gets to his feet. Fighting out of a corner can be practiced primarily to get skill at fighting in restricted space or the goal can be changed to get time and space to run.

The minor epiphany is that in self-defense training, the goal change only applies to one person. Noticed this the other day practicing response- bad guy (BG) attacks, good guy (GG) takes him out as normal. When GG was supposed to fight to the door, the student playing the BG subtly changed attacks to prevent escape.

You see things in training that profoundly affect real life.

BGs, in real life, are going to do what they are going to do. They have their own goals, strategies and tactics. The victim’s defensive strategies are both unknown and largely the BG doesn’t care. His tactics have been honed and he is used to the victim being too frozen to respond at all.

So it becomes an interplay of known and unknown strategies. That’s just a cool insight, another way to look at conflict.

For training, however, it becomes critical to ensure that the uke, the student playing the BG, is performing his role as a BG, with his agenda, as if completely unaware of what tori (GG) intends. That keeps some of the training artifacts from creeping in.

A Little Something From Mac

This will mostly speak to the LEOs, but in his ongoing series of different things people train for Mac wrote:

"This shows the heart of defensive tactics – not wrist locks and pig piles, but control. Control; first and foremost, of yourself, no matter how you feel about it – control of your slamming heartbeat, dry mouth, deadened ears, trembling hands that cause the front sight of your gun to disappear and the face of the man who may be about to die become huge, distorted into gargoyle-like ugliness. Control of your tactics, your partners, the perp, the environment; control of the outcome. This is very unlike, and infinately harder than the simplicity and single focus of combat (kill) and self-defense (escape). In defensive tactics, you have to exist outside yourself, be a witness to the action, in order to stay objective. You have to control your mind, body and spirit as if all three were tools, and still remain focused, and committed to, the mission, the outcome. Can this kind of objectivity be trained, be learned?"

Good stuff.

Drills, Free Play and Scenarios

David T asked about scenario training. I want to expand on the answer here.

First a caveat- this isn't encyclopedic. There are lots of ways to train: from the kihon-kata-kumite paradigm; basics versus fundamentals; technique-based or principles-based. Levels of resistance. Different types of randori. Attributes training. What I'm writing about here are things that can be build-ups to scenario training.

For me, a scenario involves roleplaying a specific scene- actors, props- trying to make things as real as possible. Somewhere in the middle there is practice for problem solving and free play.

One way to envision the difference is to start with a problem. For an example, you are pinned up against a wall. The threat has his left forearm across your chest, gripping your left collar in his left hand. He has a knife in his right hand against your throat.

For Drill training the instructor tells you exactly what to do and you practice it. Ideally it is a short, scripted and damned efficient set of motions that solve the problem. Even here there are elements of scenario training. One of the biggest, something that is always critical but more obvious in a scenario and often lost in other levels is to fight to the goal.

What the instructor drills will be heavily influenced by his or her own trainings and beliefs. Ergo, if the goal is to escape, the response practiced may be very different than if the goal is to neutralize the threat. It will get even messier if the instructor confuses strategic goals (escape or neutralize) with tactical goals (control the weapon).

Anyway, drills are set and scripted. They can be invaluable for instilling quick responses to specific situations. Properly evaluated, they can give quick and accurate insights on efficiency at all levels (are the goals realistic? Do the body mechanics actually work? Are the motions enhancing or inhibiting each other?*) It's especially important to practice drills at variable levels of resistance or with strangers. Often students have been subtly programmed to help things along that simply don't work on other people.

Somewhere in the middle between drilling and scenario is free play- put the student in the same situation and it is the student's responsibility to figure a way out of it. This is interesting because a lot of factors come into play here. This is where the student gets the first taste, often, of applying principles instead of techniques. This is where they learn to adapt things to fit their own size, strength and temperament.

One of the big glitches comes up here as well: you see the students eyes dart as they try to remember what they are "supposed" to do. The best thing, IMO, an instructor to do is 1) to give the student permission to be sloppy and 2) put a very short time limit so that the student doesn't have time to remember. Or even think.

It's easy to train a student to do something faster than thought. It's much harder and infinitely more valuable to teach a student to improvise faster than conscious thought. And that is really what surviving in a dangerous encounter is all about.

If you ever, as an instructor, catch yourself telling a student they did something incorrectly that worked, give your ego a double-check.

Freeplay can be expanded a lot. Sometimes subtle differences in the situation require more reliance on principles and lest on rote technique. Giving permission to deal with the situation at a different point in time, early, can give the student a chance to deal with force dynamics rather than static position- another critical skill that both makes things harder (more complicated) and much, much easier (the more variables you can exploit the more you can accomplish with less effort.)

Then the scenario. Good scenario training requires props and roleplayers. Further, the roleplayers must know how people (both real threats and real bystanders) act under stress. They have to give realistic feeds and precursors to the student and respond realistically to what the student does.

• If the roleplayers don't act like real threats, the student gains little valuable from scenario training. They don't learn how to spot a potential threat or do a threat assessment or scale force.
• If the facilitator is constantly trying to 'trick' the student by not having the bad guys act realistically or setting up ambushes from people deliberately scripted to appear 'safe' it can create either a learned helplessness** in the student or a student who over-reacts to everything. It decreases the student's potential for survival.
• If the roleplayers don't respond realistically, if they stay on their script despite what the student does, the student misses polishing other skills, like defusing and avoidance. It goes back quickly to learned helplessness.

Like a lot of things, bad scenario training can be more damaging than no scenario training at all. Good scenario training allows a student to develop as not just a fighter, but a tactician, a strategist, a diagnostician of violence, an observer... It also forces the student to practice in tandem with laws on force and realities of legal violence.

Scenario- You're watching a pool game in a bar. Several people including the players are walking between you and the table, so they get quite close. Some are talking among themselves. A group of three men and a woman were giving you flack about looking at the woman earlier in the evening. The bouncer quieted the situation down.

So you have obstacles (pool table, bar stools) weapons and potential weapons (cue sticks, pool balls, beer steins and potentially concealed knives and guns), distractions (extraneous people, music, lights) witnesses and legal and ethical issues. The instructor has already given one of the people involved (who has a motive, it does no good to try to get the student to expect to be blindsided, the goal is to raise student awareness so successful ambushes become less likely) a practice knife with instructions to try to get the student pinned against the wall as in the drill.

The student gets to practice seeing things coming. Winnowing important information from a mass of detail. Identifying attack pre-cursors.

The instructor will go over it later:

Instructor: Why did you stay on the wall?

Student: Because you told me... oh. That was stupid.

Instructor: When did you know it was going to go bad?

Student: When those three people were arguing earlier.

Instructor: So why did you stay?

.... On and on. Were you fighting to win or fighting to leave? Was the one who attacked working solo or with the other two? How many people in the scenario were armed? Why did you (or not)*** use an improvised weapon?

The student has an opportunity to handle it strategically e.g. by leaving; socially e.g. by talking threats down or calling on allies; tactically with or without force e.g. by accessing a superior position and weapon; fighting the initial energy; spiking the pre-assault;....

And maybe that's one of the reasons that scenario training is hard. Maybe most instructors aren't ready to coach a multi-leveled reality.

*Sometimes footwork and handwork complement each other; sometimes they detract. That's why it is hard, but not impossible, to hit hard while retreating- the feet are subtracting power from the arms. Sometimes people are trained to evade with the body while trying to shock with the hands- you have to be careful that the hands aren't slowing the evasion and the evasion isn't weakening the strike...

** You can train a student, a child or even a lab rat to be helpless. By putting them not in no-win scenarios, but in scenarios where winning and losing are arbitrary, decided by an outside factor, you create a personality type that becomes progressively fatalistic and quits trying.

***Another thing- a lot of stuff that the student will do isn't right or wrong. Bad debriefers try to tell the student what he did wrong. Good debriefers get the student to examine his own reasoning and especially his or her subconscious reactions.

Purity of Intent

Going down to the core, trying to winnow what is from attribution. Then trying to put it into words.

How artificial, exactly, are social conventions? The monkey dance and all the posturing and ritual of day-to-day interactions between humans seem amazingly contrived, sometimes pointless. Often silly. That doesn't mean they are unnatural.

They feel unnatural to me, but that is because of a baseline established long ago. I know when I feel most me. In a situation that will require extreme physicality and allows no mistakes; where the body and mind have to be simultaneously utterly free and utterly disciplined is the best of me. Those times bring out the best not of who I am but of what I am.

Nowhere in there do I find the faintest echo of social concerns. No angst. No fear of looking silly. “What would so-and-so think of me know?” would be a suicidal distraction and has no place in that mindset.

There are emotions at that level. But they are very few, less nuanced, and they feel more pure than the many, many things our social brains consider emotional.

There is joy: it is a pure, soul-singing state of elation at the beauty of the world, or the connection felt with all things, or the grace of survival. Beyond words. My mother once told me that a religious fanatic is what happens when a person only feels this once.

There is fear: Not “False Evidence Appearing Real” but the supercharged, battery-taste-in-the-mouth animal awareness of impending and inevitable death. Can’t even really write around this without changing it into ‘fear of’ or tacking some philosophy on it. It’s not even fear of death, because death is too abstract a concept for this mind. It is just a feeling, another soul-singing but at a different pitch.

Maybe there is lust. There is a deep level, but since lust centers around another human I don’t think I’ve ever felt it without some social attributions impinging.

That’s all, perhaps. Anger doesn’t make the list. Personalize a fear and decide to do something about it and you have anger, a purely social thing. The simple (in theory) and very effective (in practice) trick of learning “don’t take it personally” wouldn’t work so well if anger was pure.

Not love. When joy is felt it is often misinterpreted as “universal love”… and romantic love is one of the few social emotions that approaches that pleasure and intensity, so the attribution is sort of understandable… but love, whether romantic or social or agape or patriotism are profoundly social and profoundly constructed. The notion of romantic love was invented and even today hasn’t spread to all cultures.

Not anxiety, obviously. Nor despair. Certainly not indignation or jealousy.

Assuming I’ve written this non-word concept well enough to be understood: Are there other pure emotions?

More on War and the Hunt

Telling comments on the last post. I apologize for bringing you all into a conversation in the middle.

Here’s the deal: certain forms of violence hit humans, particularly men, at a very deep level. When Robert E. Lee says, “It is well that war is so terrible or we would grow to love it too much,” or a French survivor of the German occupation after WWII says that it was horrible and she never wants anything like that to happen again BUT she has never felt really alive since…

We need to look at that. Not pretend it doesn’t happen. Not arbitrarily decide that since it sounds icky to us, anyone who says that kind of thing must be crazy or deluded or wrong. It’s an important data point. If peace is important to you, you will never do anything about it by ignoring the aspects of violence that you want to disbelieve.

If humans are important to you, you do a great disservice to yourself by ignoring or denigrating things that don’t fit your worldview. No matter who you are, your experience with the world is very limited. Approaching disagreements with curiosity almost always works better than doing so defensively.

Do I love war? No idea. The time I spent in a war zone was pretty mild. I dislike the idea of war, but seen both good and bad results from it. I won’t pretend to have an opinion without a lot more input.

Now that that is out of the way-

Monkeys don’t hunt elephants. That’s important. Personally, I don’t see a lot that I like in chimp social dynamics, either. Those two thoughts are related.

It hasn’t been an exhaustive study for me, but almost everything negative in human society can be found in chimps- betrayal, punishing the different, bullies, even ritual murder. The chimp idea of altruism and self-sacrifice is to spend a few hours picking lice or share a bit of food. Monkeys don’t hunt elephants.

Humans do hunt elephants. With primitive stone tools we hunted a lot of big animals, some to extinction in North America. Canoes of men armed with stone tipped spears would go after whale in the Pacific Northwest, challenging some of the biggest animals alive in some of the cruelest conditions.

These are the things I see in humans that I don’t see in chimps and (don’t always see in humans, for that matter). But when I do see them, I see humans at their best.

Teamwork in dangerous conditions for the common good. Self-sacrifice up to and including death for people you are not even related to. The ability to set ego aside and follow someone else’s plan. Innovation towards a common goal. Team planning. Respect based on merit. Reward based on need (not all humans do this, but many do and did- children eat first from a hunt; potlatch; “Sergeants eat last.”)

There are other things too- the hunt and war drove technology, and tool use made human life what it is today. It is a straight line from the first obsidian or flint hide-scraper to the laptop I’m typing on now.

Hunting may have driven the development of language. Gathering doesn’t take a lot of words and farming only a little more and neither require speed and precision of information.

These are all very human things. These things we do better than chimps. These are things that got us to the moon and one day, hopefully, will take us to the stars.

Not many people hunt anymore and those that do have a huge technological advantage. It no longer requires the teamwork and careful planning of hunting a mastodon with spears. Few hunters are at risk except from each other.

Hunting is still important. You can talk all you want about the circle of life and man’s place in nature and ecology and Gaia but until and unless you have killed your own food (and wild food if you consider yourself a back-to-nature type) you’re just blowing smoke out your ass. It’s all platitudes. Hunting is still important for that, but it’s not like it used to be, far less a community necessity. It no longer drives technology.

People doing dangerous jobs in dangerous environments are the ones who still need and most often show these things that I consider hallmark human virtues.

I think this is part of the attraction of war- it’s certainly not the smells or the deafening noise or the terror. It’s not the snuffing out of irreplaceable individuals or the possibility of being snuffed out yourself. It is a place, one of the few places left, where the unique human traits of the hunt, the ones that have driven everything extraordinary that humans ever did, are valued over the monkey traits of maintaining the status quo and catering to feelings.

The best of humans comes out, but also the worst of monkey society: fear leading to acting out; violence used in ego or status defense instead of survival or to accomplish a mission; turf wars over information or credit that cost lives; ‘othering’- cultivating a racism or classism to make it easier for the monkey to kill*…

(Simultaneously, this is all bullshit to an extent. The people I hang out with are professionals, the ones who have made a conscious, experienced decision to deal with bad things. I don't spend time with the others, if I can avoid it. Hence there is a lot of sampling bias here. Were there professionals making what I cavalierly describe as human-level decisions in the Rwanda genocides?

Even if you don't spend time with people who are reacting like monkeys, even the best have chosen, or been born into, a side through social forces.)

* That’s another parallel, the high-end, most professional and effective soldiers and officers that I know work hard to understand the enemy culture and have profound respect for what they face, just as humans long ago often worshipped (that word is somewhat of an anachronism, maybe ‘reverenced’?) the animals that they hunted. Othering propaganda is necessary to get the monkey emotions involved.

The Sacred Hunt

Mac made me think this time, with one of his essays. Here's what he made me think:

The best of being human came out in the hunt. Hunting big, dangerous animals some humans taught themselves what comes so naturally to dogs: team work, loyalty, leading and following, self-sacrifice for the good of the pack.

It was also a place where some of the monkey stuff was revealed as untrue- your value as a hunter and a man depended on your heart and skill, not on your ancestors or connections or politics. And it was the place where some of the better primate stuff, the things that made us human, allowed us to dominate the world: tool use and communication and planning.

The hunt was violent and it appeals to certain people. The social bullshit of the normal monkey world is bullshit... and in violence or the hunt, it falls away. In that moment, everything is real and so much outside of that moment feels artificial. So, I think, violence is natural and important to those who are striving towards our learned, recent better nature... and terrifying and unnatural for those who live for the social monkey games.

The monkeys have always needed someone to protect them, but they think (and they may be right) that evolution is going to a purely human/monkey social world where all conflicts are handled by a Monkey Dance in boardrooms or negotiations. I think if it ever does we will lose the best of being human- the loyalty and self-sacrifice and stuff we learned in the hunt.

The thing about coming to love war is that if you value those virtues, war is where you will see them. It may be terrible-- what I saw of it over there was pretty mild, but the violence I have been exposed to had it's terrible aspects-- but it also brings out the absolute best in men. And it brings out the worst in monkeys.

Never and Always- Thinking

Training and application are context specific. That’s not really news, or at least it shouldn’t be. Sometimes common sense is context-specific as well. We tend to forget that.

A friend, months ago, made the statement that “…never and at no time and in no way have the major hip throws been used in combat. You will never find anyone in a combat zone who will voluntarily turn his back on the enemy. They are purely sport techniques.”

He’s a smart man and not one to throw around words like ‘always’ and ‘never.’ He couldn’t find a record of someone having done a full-entry hip throw in combat and, combined with the common sense that it would be a bad idea, he felt comfortable making the pronouncement.

I wanted to argue- because the word ‘never’ pushes my buttons. I thought about it for some time and couldn’t recall a specific example. I’ve used a lot of sweeps and leverage take-downs at work, but can’t recall a true hip throw. I know a few guys who have used the wrestling version of o-goshi, but without seeing the specific incidents, I don’t know whether they turned their backs entirely or not.

Reviewed the older kata that I knew and half-entry hip throws are common, but not the full entry. I didn’t have anything to argue with. Maybe it was a never and I just need to quit whining when my panties are in a twist.

Then last night I was brawling with my son. And I hip threw him, full entry. But I never turned my back on him.

The thing is, we forget stuff- people don’t kill the way they spar. In any kind of close quarters battle, emphasis on the battle, I’ll do anything I can to get behind you. So will most people who have trained in a place where blindsiding is encouraged. It’s way easier to beat people up (or kill, or subdue) from behind.

My son has been training with me. He snaked past and got to my back. He wanted the facemask leading to the choke, I think, but he executed it a little too sloppy, so I threw him.

There are two, maybe four important thoughts here:

1) Gifts, one of the universal principles: The threat, by action or position, gives you the body you will be acting on. He supplies the openings, he supplies his own vulnerabilities. If you go in with a scripted plan it will only work if the threat, by pure chance, offers you the right position and momentum. One of the most important skills is the ability to see, recognize and exploit the gifts.

2) Bad guys don’t attack in the same way and for the same reasons you might be preparing for. There was a class long ago (I won’t name the style, but within the style they were very good competitors) where the contestants would deliberately turn their backs on their opponents because striking the back didn’t count and might even get the other guy disqualified. Maybe your training flaws don’t seem so extreme—but neither an enraged housewife in a domestic or an ex-con uses a knife anything like an arnisador does. Training for flowing cuts with full mobility is just as irrelevant to the problem at hand as training to turn your back.

3) Some of the things that don’t make sense start to make sense when dealing with assaults. Common sense informed by dojo training or armchair visualization is context specific. Your conclusions (and hence your training methodologies) may be a complete mismatch for how a bad guy attacks.

4) Some of the hardest parts of training and competition are handed to you in real life—there is a serious art and science to making the 180 degree spin to a full hip throw in a judo tournament, but the bad guy may start in that position, close in, tight and from behind.

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The guest entry I wrote for Kris Wilder's Striking Post Blog is now up.

I lost contact with Jason Pittman a few years ago. He's a good friend and a good fighter. When we met, he was in charge of security at a very active trauma center. He was getting more fights in the Emergency Room than I was in a jail. He wandered off to pursue his dream of competing in Mixed Martial Arts and I went to Iraq and we kind of lost contact.

Jason’s back, and coaching at 503 West Coast Jiu Jitsu, a new facility. The space looks great, the crew (instructors and students both) have a great energy.

I’m really happy for you, JP!