Maslow Thoughts

I use Maslow's pyramid in a lot of my books and classes. Not because it's great science, there are holes in it you can drive a truck through. I use it partially because it has great predictive power, but mostly because it is so common and universally accepted (which is not the same as 'understood') that it's easy to piggy-back useful information on it. In other words, using Maslow, you can take a person who has only ever experienced social conflict and in a few minutes get  them to accept and understand the existence and even the patterns of asocial violence.

We don't work through the levels. Babies are born at the esteem level in all but the most dysfunctional families. Our ancestors took care of the two lower levels long ago. Thus, most people in the industrialized world have no frame of reference for the survival and security levels. So much so that the skills that belong there have become hobbies.
If you have a choice, it's not self-defense, it's fighting.
If you have a choice, it's not wilderness survival, it's primitive camping.
If you have a choice, it's not hunger, it's fasting.

The thought: Is it possible to have a genuine* experience of the level you inhabit without experiencing the lower levels?

Taking care of the *asterisk now. Genuine is a a problematic word. Of course anything you are experiencing you are experiencing. It's by definition genuine, as real as it is. I mean more that there is a gap between what is experienced and what could be experienced. An understanding gap. That it is different than it is perceived. (Note-- when I say the blog is where I go to think out loud, this is what it means. Words are not how I naturally think and the translation process can be ugly.)

People who have never dropped below the belonging level tend to either think that membership in a group is important without thinking why, or think it is unimportant. (This is separate from the instinctive tribal drive, I'm talking about the reasons, rationalizations and cognitive process.)

I was raised in a family of self-sufficient, back to the land, grow/hunt your own food yadda yadda yadda. I value groups because raising enough food to feed a family was a metric fuckton of manual labor. I liked being a bookworm and a dreamer, but I realized that those were self-centered, selfish preferences-- something I could indulge in during free time, but if that was all I was, someone would have to take up the slack of weeding and packing water and feeding stock and milking and chopping wood.

Same with teams. We had CERT because there were things you could do with a team efficiently and with little injury that would have been either suicidal or murderous to do alone. I still occasionally have dreams about a military service that ended 24 years ago. The bonding when you are dealing with deep Maslow problems is intense.

So I value interdependence and cooperation because of experience. It's not a knee-jerk reaction I must  justify after the fact, so I see the downsides as well. Nor can I listen to the song, "I Walk Alone" without laughing a little on the inside.

If you've never experienced the survival level, there are things you can't understand (and another thought, this isn't monolithic. Look at these three examples.) If you've never been truly hungry, you can't really grasp how important food growth and distribution is or the idea that "all philosophy is based on bellies." If you've never had anyone try to kill you, physical defense skills are a fun hobby.  If you've never been drowned or frozen, you'll never really grasp your own mortality, or how small you really are.

If you've never mastered the security level your basic needs are controlled by someone else. You are owned.

If you've never had to break into a group, just passed from (and this is poor kid's fantasy, I have zero experience in this world) country club family to prep school to your dad's fraternity at Yale and on to the political career assigned for you, you've never learned why other people's feeling are important or how to be considerate. You'll know the forms of politeness, because those are tribal status markers...but you'll never understand that courtesy is central to predators living together.

And without all these and putting them into play and getting competent at them, you can simulate self actualization. You can be an artist or devote yourself to causes. But the depth of understanding will be missing. Causes are chosen by the social impact on your friends. You measure your own art by the reaction provoked in others or the price you can charge for it. (Which are valid ways to evaluate art, but not self-actualized ways to evaluate your own art.)

Just a thought, and a thought I have to be careful of. Most of most best friends have depth of experience (which is the polite way to say "profoundly shitty lives"). It becomes easy to conflate 'people I like better' with 'better people,' And that's a dangerous trap.

Edutainment

Snowed in a lot over the winter so getting some good reading in. For the classics, just finished Seneca's "On the Brevity of Life." Seneca may be the only Stoic so far I haven't enjoyed. Misonius Rufus is next.

Also just finished one of the best books in a long time, Tom Wainwright's Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel.

It was a kick. Taking the Freakonomics approach and applying it to the world of cartels. Why violence is rampant in Mexico but has dies down in El Salvador. Why tattoos keep labor costs low. The etiquette for leaving feedback when you buy heroin on the dark web. Franchising, subcontracting and offshoring in the world of illicit drugs.

Specimen

Got to watch an interesting specimen. In retrospect, I’ve seen them before, quite a lot actually. But this one was blatant enough to draw attention. Attention brings analysis. 

Have to unpack the language here, and talk about a couple of categories and some background concepts.

Creepers are low-level sexual predators. The kind that harass and pressure women, but always with deniability. Rarely ever cross the line into something legally actionable, or something that could legally justify physical self-defense. They stand too close, shake hands too long, try to increase the physical intimacy of a relationship (e.g. pressuring a good-bye hug from someone they just met.) It hides in the normal social interaction. Rather, they disguise it in the normal social interaction. Many are willing to apologize, to explain away, or even call in allies to make their targets feel like maybe it is all imaginary, there is no problem… Some are sophisticated enough to cultivate an image of “social awkwardness” that gets other people defending their actions: “Mel’s always like that. It’s not a gender thing he does the same weird stuff around me and the other guys.” Perfect camouflage.

Most women who have been in any kind of  office environment recognize the problem and know the type. But also, many excuse or explain away their own instincts.

Violence groupies are all over. If you’ve been in any kind of force instruction role for any length of time, you’ve seen them. These are the guys that follow you around, begging for stories about ugly fights and death and violence. It’s not a healthy fascination, it’s pure fantasy fodder. Some of them even get fuller lips or lick their lips when they ask. Lips are erectile tissue, BTW, and swell when you get excited in certain ways. The lips are your face’s dick.

The specimen this time was both.

Concept: Unconsciously deliberate. People are largely unconscious machines. The words in your head are weak and pale (and very late) reflections of what is going on in your head. There’s a study out there where scientists watching an fMRI could tell what decisions a subject would make as much as six seconds before the subject consciously knew. You can pretty much get over the idea that your conscious mind is the driver.

You see people clearly planning and setting up situations that they will absolutely deny were intentional. We’ve all seen it— the guy who has been married for X years and meets an interesting women and starts dropping her name into conversations with friends, starts making sure she has a place in the social network, slowly gets everyone used to her presence. Starts minimizing the wife. Then one day after a big shared victory, there will be a bottle of wine and things will “just happen…”

So, back to creepers and violence groupies. You can’t accidentally stand too close or ask inappropriate questions. Those are volitional acts. But you can either be (e.g. raised in a culture with different rules on proxemics) or pretend to be oblivious that your choices are inappropriate. Watching the pattern, it may be unconscious, but the actions were one and all, deliberate.

And this is an aside, but we have the idea of justice tied intimately with the idea of conscious intentionality. A planned murder is considered a more heinous act than an unplanned act of rage. As long as the creeper can convince others that there is no conscious intent, the others will believe his acts are unfortunate instead of malicious. If the creeper can convince himself, he acts guilt-free.

So, and I have no answer for this— when an act is clearly deliberate, is there any way to tell if the perp was truly unconscious, pretending to himself it was unconscious or deliberately using the impression as a way to manipulate others (very conscious.) And, way to tell or not, does it matter?

Two of the giveaways. The deliberate ones do target-prep. Long ago, someone introduced himself in a class I was taking as, “That guy.”

“That guy?” The instructor asked.

“Yeah, you know, there’s one in every class, the guy who asks the inappropriate questions and bugs the instructors.”

Oh yeah. Look at that. This specimen has declared his intention to be disruptive. Any of the normal conversational response (the usual is the class snickers and the instructor says, “Thanks for letting me know,” with a little laugh and moves on) gives the specimen implicit permission. He has declared his intention, and has influenced the entire class not to object. This isn’t self-deprecating humor. This is victim grooming.

When someone touts their self-awareness of their bad patterns it isn’t admirable. If they are aware of the bad patterns then any step down that path is a choice. Once you know you’re ‘that guy’ acting like ‘that guy’ is a choice. Your excuses are gone.

The recent specimen had a tactic. At first I thought it was new, but in retrospect I’ve seen it before. He went around after class to apologize to the instructors. Again, the default is to be professional, polite (read ‘social and following the social scripts’) and try to minimize what he was apologizing for. But I wasn’t in a social mood.

Specimen: I just wanted you to know I’m really sorry.

Me: For what?

Specimen: You know (very smarmy voice: Yooou knoooow)

Me: I can think of a lot of things. What do you mean?

Specimen: I know how I can be.

Me: Then you have no excuses.

Specimen: Change is hard for some people.

Me: Not really.

Specimen: I’ve been working on this for years...

Me: Let me cut to the chase. When you say “I’m sorry” what you really mean is, “I fully intend to do the exact same things again and I want your permission.” The answer is no. You don’t get my permission.

Specimen: That’s not the way I thought this conversation would go.

The other giveaway: If this was subconscious, habitual, ‘just the way I am’ fear of consequences wouldn’t change behavior. More telling than the conversation I just described is his reaction afterwards. If a target sets boundaries and the creeper backs off, it may indicate an honest misunderstanding of proper behavior. Maybe. And if it is an explanation, the behavior will change universally (I once explained to a socially awkward friend the rules for shaking hands. He had assumed that the more he liked you, the longer the handshake went on and he creeped people out. Once the rules were explained his behavior improved with everyone, not just me. He is an example of someone who honestly didn’t know.)

But if someone changes behavior only around the people who simply say, “I know your game” then he knows his game as well. Deliberate and conscious.

Agency and Interdependence

I recently read Junger's book, "Tribe." It hit a lot of my buttons-- not well thought out or researched, explanations just asserted even when there were far simpler possible explanations. He had a theme  and a bias and stuck to them... but it got me thinking.

We live in an amazingly interdependent society. How many of you butcher your own food? Make your own clothes? Do both? Raise the cotton or wool to make the clothes? You're reading this on a machine you didn't make. Maybe, if you are really good, you assembled your own PC, but you damn sure didn't make it. Amazingly interdependent... but not really.
Societies have always been interdependent. You can think of the best survivalist societies you know-- the Kalahari Bushmen or the Lippan Apache or whatever and in all of those societies of super-survivalists, the greatest punishment was to be ostracized. Because as good as they are, no one survives for very long alone.

What's missing now is not the interdependence, it's the awareness.  One side is easy to see-- the iconoclast rebel who declares himself free while typing on a keyboard (that some corporation produced) and sucking down corn chips and Mt. Dew (ditto) in his mom's basement (do I need to say ditto again?)

It's physically impossible to tweet "I'm off the grid."

Junger wrote about the other side. All of us, on some level, want to feel the interdependence. We want to feel the connection. Corny as it sounds, we want to serve.

A few of us have been trying to figure out why it seems that individual power--agency-- is so systematically denigrated in modern society.

I think there is an assumption that agency is a contrary force or contrary attitude to interdependence. It’s not. In what I consider a natural society— tribal hunter gatherers— increasing one's own agency was important for the good of the tribe. You wanted to be the bravest warrior or the most cunning hunter or the wisest healer. Change that, not ‘or’.  Ideally ‘and’. So it was all about increasing agency or personal power, but for the good of the tribe. 

You can look at the collectivist movements (socialism, communism, fascism) as attempts to force a tribal level of interdependence from the top down.  It takes massive control because the tribes are artificial and we have enough radical ideas and different points of view that people can find their own tribes and can easily switch tribes. In order for it to work, people would need a monolithic set of values. Hence force. And failure. But those movements appeal mightily to the people looking for that sense of connection.

As wisdom (one type of power) increases, so does a recognition of interdependence as a fact. Individualists recognize that agency is not a contradiction to cooperative society. It is required if we want society to continue to improve.

At the same time, we aren't insects. We will never all have the same values or the same priorities. Nor should we. Wisdom is to let people disagree.  Even more than focussing on increasing our own agency for the good of the tribe, we focus on increasing the agency of others. Accepting other people’s differences _and_ their power.  

Our society tries to draw a distinction between the passive and the active-- and to include passivity in the definition of "good" (but that's a post for another day). That has resulted in the infantilaztion of adults. Screw that. Be strong. Let others be strong. Cherish their strength and your own.

A New Tool

Finished a new book about a month ago, "Processing Under Pressure" by Matthew J. Sharps (link at the bottom). It had been sitting on my shelf for a long while, and I honestly don't remember if I bought a copy or if it was a gift. If it was a gift, and it was from you, thanks.

Either way, it probably wound up on my shelf because the publisher used the same stock photo for the title that my publisher did for a book I wrote, "Force Decisions." Funny, right? And also a cautionary tale about using stock photos, probably. But it was a good book. A good read and probably the best layman's introduction I've found for some of the neuroscience behind decision making and fear.

There were a lot of crossovers between Sharps book and other stuff I like, and that's always gratifying. He presented academic theories that were very close corollaries of Gordon Graham's "discretionary time." And ConCom's Monkey and Lizard. Good stuff.

There was also a tool in the book. "Feature Intensive Analysis." He didn't describe the actual process, it was more of a, 'people have a tendency to gestalt, but when you have time you will make fewer mistakes if you analyze the features of the problem.' So I let the concept sit and played with it for a bit.

Underlying background concept. Labeling, or "ist-ing" is one of the reliable signs that your monkey brain is in control. We call people names to put them in a tribe we don't have to listen to. If I call you an asshole, or any descriptor that puts you in a group, whether your political, religious or national affiliations or... it puts you outside my tribe, Which means (to my monkey brain) I don't have to listen to you. It protects me 100% from the possibility that your arguments might have merit. We all do this.

Sharps used the term gestalt as a related concept. A gestalt, traditionally, is when you see the totality of a concept. A car is thousands of little parts and each car is different, but the gestalt of "car" exists in our head as a unified thing. Professor Sharps pointed out, that just as labeling is a tool to prevent you from analysis, so is a gestalt. Whether you use the ConCom word of labeling or Sharps' interpretation of gestalt, it is a way to not think. And people are lazy. We have a definite tendency to avoid the laziness of hard thinking.

Shading into politics, one of the things that has been annoying me is the "all good or all bad" soundbite nature of most of the things I see discussed asserted. I realized these are gestalts. If I call you a "fascist" (or asshole, most people don't distinguish) I don't have to think, I'm done.

So I decided to take a stab at my own feature intensive analysis of my gestalts in politics. On one axis (sorry, talking about fascists here, forgive the pun) a list of my political labels-- communist, democrat (party), fascist, libertarian, republican (party), socialist...*
On the other axis, traits that I consider important. The features. I tried to be careful with the source of the features. For instance, I didn't use the modern academic definition of fascism but Mussolini's definition. I used Marx directly for the features of communism. For the stuff that wasn't in the literature, I used personal observation when available. If I didn't have literature or personal observation, I gave that feature a null value. If literature contradicted, I gave a null value. If observation and literature contradicted, I went with observation. For instance if a group insisted that they were for personal freedom and peace, but called for everyone who disagreed with them to be executed and planted bombed (I've just read both 'Prairie Fire' and 'Underground') they got marks for "being okay with using violence to silence their opposition."

I may not have used the FI Analysis the way Sharps intended, since I was back-engineering from a vague description of effects. But I liked it. I found it useful. It did confirm some of my gestalts, some of my impressions of how closely related some of the political labels were. But if it had been just confirming what I already believed, I'd be pretty skeptical. Like everyone else, there's a part of me that likes pre-existing beliefs validated. That's not what happened. I found a few quite unexpected similarities and differences.

And before anyone asks, no. I am not going to share the specific analysis here. 1) I didn't do it for you, I was testing a test for (to an extent) objectively testing my own instincts and, 2) There are few things more likely to put you, as a reader, in your monkey brain than to show you that your favorite affiliation is actually 80% similar to your most hated.


*Not right/left or liberal/conservative, I consider those to be a different taxonomy. I could do an FI analysis those traits, but it would be an apples-to-oranges comparison with the affiliations listed.

Cognitive Dissonance and Denial

Anna blogs over at God's Bastard. And we have some good conversations. There's a whole side to self-defense that doesn't lend itself to soundbites and simple solutions. What are the options in a violent relationship when the victim is economically dependent on the abuser? What about when the entire social support network is shared between the abuser and victim?

And there are other subjects that dance on the edge of deep buttons: How often is domestic violence a one-way street? What about cultures that have wildly different ideas about consent?

One came up recently. One of the common reactions to an accusation of abuse is denial and normalization. A child accuses an uncle of molestation or rape and suddenly mom and dad, the fierce protectors start saying, "Oh, I'm sure that couldn't have happened. Uncle Fester would never do anything like that. Little Kelly must be exaggerating again."

On top of the act of violence, the victim has to deal with the betrayal of a social network that pulls away. Protectors who deny, essentially calling the victim a liar, add to the damage.

I get why professionals doubt. We have due process and "innocent until proven guilty" for very good reasons. But Anna asked why so many victims in families are left out in the cold. Denied.

My take? People are stupid and talk a lot of shit. But only in the abstract. They are loud-mouthed in their machismo and silent in their cowardice. So the person who has watched innumerable news reports about child molesters and always said, "If anyone did that to my kid, I'd kill 'em." Well, that person now has to put up or shut up. Faced with the actual prospect of doing what they said they would do and the sure and certain knowledge that they'd go to prison for actually doing it, they become silent cowards.

But they can't bear to think of themselves that way. They can't be cowards. The event must not have happened. Because if it did happen, they definitely would kill that somabitch.  And they aren't killing, and they refuse to recognize their cowardice. To prevent cognitive dissonance, they are left with denial.

It comes up too, in personal self-defense. A lot of critical decisions, actually. Draw your lines. Know your go buttons. But think of them all in terms of the consequences as well. Promising to avenge your daughter may satisfy your indignation, but promising to go to prison for her is the reality. Is it worth it? If not, keep your mouth shut.

Have a plan. Know where your lines are. Know what you will do when they are crossed. Know the price you may have to pay (on every level: social, legal, emotional, medical...) And keep your mouth shut. If you hit the line and can't find the guts to execute your plan, at least you won't be outed as the liar and coward you are. And if you do hit the line and execute the plan, well, words are discoverable and can come up in court. They can also give a heads-up to the target. Either way, silence serves you better.

And last point-- If you have been outed as a liar and coward (like all the people who said they'd leave the country if the election went a certain way) don't deny it. Resolve the dissonance. You might learn something.

More Writing Whining

Hopefully, this will be the last of the introspection posts for a while. But I committed to writing close to the bone:
Another reason the new book hit me so hard was that the process (my life process for the last several years) has violated my own epistemology. My society has a common belief about where knowledge comes from. There are nuances, of course, and people have varying loyalties to their own thought processes, including their epistemologies, but the general belief seems to be:

We have a large pool of all known things, called Science. There are special people, called scientists, who add to that pool. They study the known Science, and ask themselves questions, and design experiments to answer those questions*. As those questions are answered, the body of science grows, and as it grows, the pool of known things becomes greater.

I know that's absolutely not how it works. The asterisk marks the place where laymen completely misunderstand the scientific method. * In real science, the scientists hypothesize answers to the questions and design experiments to prove those answers wrong, to test the limits of those answers. Science doesn't prove, ever, it disproves. It is not a fact finder but a bullshit detector.

And most of the big gains in science have worked exactly the opposite. Almost never does big growth come from building on past knowledge. The big growth comes serendipitously, from noticing something that science can't yet account for and figuring it out. Darwin noticed that there were no rabbits in perfect rabbit country in South America. Every school kid learns about the accidental discovery of penicillin. Einstein had to think outside the box to work out relativity, and maybe that was made easier because experimental science did it's job and disproved the widely-accepted idea of aether.

I was raised in a society that takes the mythologized idea of science as its primary epistemology. Unless I am careful, that's my default. That idea has a powerful but subconscious sub effect. The model is Darwinian. Whether or not you believe in evolution, on some level you believe in Darwinian selection. It is nearly impossible for a thinking person not to believe so obvious a concept.
Short and simple: In any given population, whether a species or a body of beliefs or a design or an advertising campaign, there exists a range of differences. The differences that are more successful propagate faster than the ones that are less successful, and each succeeding generation is more like the successful generation before it.

The model is a perfect example of circular logic: Whatever the next generation looks like determines what the environment was selecting for. This is only a problem if you're self-centered. If you get miffed because what you value is not what was selected for. An excellent engineering design can be trumped by a superior ad campaign. The economic environment in which ideas compete to survive is ruled by pocketbooks, which in turn are ruled by emotions. An excellent business model that serves many consumers well can be regulated out of existence by government agencies who want to flex power (ours is a mercantilist, not a capitalist, system.)
Circular logic, in this case, doesn't make it wrong. We directly experience selection in every aspect of our lives.

Because of the Darwinian sub-aspect to our epistemology, we have a subconscious default that our current practices are the best available. Every society and most individuals have had a reflexive view that their ideals of right and wrong are universals, but this is something different. Republics are assumed to be better than aristocracies because they evolved from and therefor must have been superior to, those aristocracies. Our teaching methods evolved from older methods, and therefor must have been superior to those older methods. QED.

Except, not. Because of the circularity of the Darwinian logic, that statement will always be logically valid. But it is begging the question: superior with regards to the challenge of what environment? Artificial selection is always faster than natural selection. I have no idea how many tens of thousands of years for natural selection it took to drift wolves from coyotes. But it took a fraction of that time to create chihuahuas from wolves. Are chihuahuas better than wolves? Not stronger, not smarter, but they are absolutely more successful. By Darwin's rules, the chihuahua is superior to the wolf. Because man hunted one and bred the other? Man is just as much a part of the environment as climate.

Most instructors, including me, have extensive experience with the public school system and with martial arts training. Another cognitive bias enters here. When you have devoted a significant chunk of time and effort to something, you have to start telling yourself it's because it's the best. You see it in martial artists all the time, and in people who have taken a profession they disagree with and debaters who are assigned a side they disagree with but in the course of forming arguments convince themselves of their position.

Is our public education system effective? In terms of access, yes. In no other way that I see. Any service provided by the government will always be a lowest-common-denominator solution. It will be run by bureaucrats for the sake of it's own bureaucracy. Paperwork will always be more important than people. Compliance with standards will always trump mission. In the school system, private schools who have to compete (for students and money) will consistently produce better achievers than a system that has no competition and whose clients are compelled to attend. Despite the fact that the US spends more money on public education per student than any other country, our public schools are regularly out-performed by private schools, charter schools and even home schoolers who are essentially amateurs at education. Basically, anyone who cares about the students, or simply wants to be better than other teachers, outperforms the lowest common denominator. Big surprise.

Upshot? Our current educational system is a Darwinian survivor, but not by competing for making a smarter or more critical or more self-reliant kid. Exactly the opposite.

And martial arts training. The rote training, kata, forms, all of that, get a lot of flack from martial sports and combatives. When things are predictable, you can script them. When unpredictable, attempting to script is worse than useless. I've looked at some martial arts training classes and thought, "This is exactly how I would train my enemy to fight."

And maybe that's what happened. If the Japanese had conquered the Americas in WWII and the occupying army ordered you to teach them American catch wrestling... how would you teach an enemy occupying army you hated? Especially working through shitty translators?

Though I can intellectually see the flaws, these are the models I was raised with.

And thus my hesitations on writing a book about teaching. I want to have a bunch of scientific papers to back my my observations that it works better. (One of my first readers is a professional educator, and he showed me the research was out there-- Thanks, Quint.) I want it to build off of the traditions of training in my culture. I want it to be a visible evolution. In short, like a little whiny special snowflake, I want to do something really really cool but with absolutely no exposure to any ego risk. And that's too bad for me.

In lots of ways, this teaching method is a devolution, turning back the clock.
Is teaching about the student? the material? you? your career? If the answer is anything but the student, this book isn't for you.
Are you willing to let your students be better than you, and become better faster?
Can you handle the fact that this is about chaos, and changing the questions as much as finding the answers? Do you get that that means your students can change the rules on you whenever it suits their needs? And that means they will beat you. If you need things controlled and measurable, you aren't teaching survival, but obedience.
The smallest, weakest student you have ever had is a natural predator. She may not be able to fight you, but she can kill you. Easily. Do you have the courage to teach those tools and show that mindset to a super-predator?
If someone you loved was going into harms way in the immediate future, how would you give them the best chance possible?

Thresholds and Knife Defense

A while ago I got drafted to teach a weapons defense workshop. It's not something I teach often. I've written about the format here (it has changed in the intervening years).

The last post (just below this one) back in November I talked a bit about thresholds.
The threshold über-basics. These are levels of experience, completely separate from training. There are likely many more levels I've never experienced. Just as training is no substitute for experience, experience alone is no substitute for training-- it's entirely possible to be an unconsciously competent but shitty driver.  The levels:
 No experience. You can't even know what you don't know. You can have a lot of information and tools. You can be an excellent instructor of those tools.
1 Encounter. Mentioned in previous post. Tend to be focused on a single answer and teaching tends to be more for personal therapy than the benefit of the students.
Conscious incompetence. Somewhere, and following Ken Murray's lead on this it's around 3-5 real force incidents, the shock becomes less overwhelming and you start trying to apply your skills. Side effect, you realize how little your really know.
Conscious competence. You still have to think, but you're starting to get good at it.
Unconscious competence. You deal with the problem without consciously thinking about it. Tend to make poor teachers, because they don't consciously recall what they do, and a lot of technical nuance has become complete mental gestalts.
Split mind. I've only heard one other person talk about this, but you let your body/hindbrain deal with the primary problem unconsciously and divert your conscious mind to something useful. In my case, it was almost always composing the report.

This might seem exotic applied to self-defense, but it mirrors most people's experience learning to drive (manual transmission, at least) pretty well.

After the weapon defense seminar in Manhattan, a friend asked why I don't teach it more often, and I pulled out the line that it would be stupid to train under a judo coach that only had five matches.

That's only part of what's going on. My reluctance stems exactly from the threshold model. The techniques themselves are clean. Designed around the attacks that happen. Efficient. Gross motor. I know the key points and failure points. Are they answers? In Knife defense? You gotta be kidding. But they are better than zero percent chances, which is the best I can offer when it comes to knife defense.

If I'd never had anyone try to stab me or only one person, I'd probably be eager to teach this stuff. Unconscious incompetence and confidence often go together. But on knife stuff I am solidly at conscious incompetence. Emphasis on the conscious. I'm completely aware and very focused on how much I don't know. How many of those five encounters depended on luck and maybe instinct...and knowing that luck can't be taught.

If I'd had a few more people try (and was lucky enough to be intact) I'd have the confidence to share.

Hmmm. Two posts in a row working out my cognitive biases. Pattern?

Why Doesn't Rory Write?

I think the last stretch has been the longest time without a post since the blog started. There are nonexistent, rational and irrational reasons for my dry spells. Going to walk them out a bit.

Nonexistent reasons include writer's block and lack of time. I don't get writer's block. There are times, probably most of the time, when I don't feel like writing. Some of the reasons for the feelings will come in the rational and irrational lists below. But just because I don't feel like it doesn't mean I can't do it. Writing is like any other job-- you show up, you do the work. And honestly, I think my uninspired writing is technically better and far more readable than when I'm in the zone. In the zone I'm writing to myself and use all kinds of shorthand and personal language that doesn't translate to anyone else.
And time. I don't always have hours to write, but I always have minutes. And if I ever start using the time excuse, I just have to monitor the minutes and hours I spend doing unproductive things, but that would be embarrassing.

Rational reasons.
Writing on other stuff. Time writing here is not time spent writing for Conflict Manager Magazine or working on the next book. And the next book (On Principles-based instruction) took a ridiculous amount of effort in the rewrite.

Too personal/too public. A lot of the most interesting things I am observing now are people. Instructors, students, classes. And, frankly, I sometimes see some weird and disturbing shit I'd like to think about out loud on the blog... but I don't want to deal with the e-mails of "Dude, were you talking about me?" Most people talk others down to build themselves up. Even if that's not my intention, I refuse to follow the pattern. It was okay when I was doing the blog as an anonymous jail guard, now that it's part of my living, it would violate my ethics.
I do have a backlog of good ideas, but it might take a year or two for time to create anonymity.

On the line between rational and irrational.
Swiss cheese brain. It might be the concussions, or age, or simply volume, but I'm worried about repeating myself, turning into the old guy in the corner telling the same stories over and over again.

Relevance. I've influenced enough people who are coming into their own as instructors and writers that there is a very visible next generation. I also don't want to be the old guy struggling to stay relevant when his first-hand perspective is a decade out of date.

Irrational.
These are the deep ones. The things actually affecting my performance are all known cognitive biases. But they still work.

Imposter syndrome. Everyone I know who is really good at what they do has a voice in the back of his or her head telling them that they suck. The book that kicked my ass over the last year is about how to teach, which is something I've only been doing full time for eight years. Who the fuck am I to write on that subject? One of the first readers (those are the people kind enough to critique the first draft) gave me a list of educational reference books to back up my points, but my reaction was, "how would I dare to write if I wasn't already familiar with the literature..."

Blockheads. One of the recognized cognitive biases is the human tendency to assign more weight to bad outcomes than good ones. I taught roughly 900 people last year, and I remember the three who just couldn't get it. Occasionally, you'll see it in a comment here, where someone writes, "What about..." And I want to reply, "You mean the thing I addressed directly in the very first paragraph?"

Tribalism.The election season hit me hard. Not the politics itself. On social media I watched friends, people who I consider thoughtful, advocate violence as an acceptable response to words. Declare that people who disagreed with their own opinions should be exterminated. Characterize their sides acts of violence as "free expression" and the other side's violent words as "vicious oppression." I saw the Orwellian doublethink hard and it was coming from the bottom up, not the top down.

That was what I wanted to write about most and there's really no way to talk about it. Once tribalism is triggered, people are out of their neocortex anyway. The people who are staying rational don't need to hear logical breakdowns, they have their own. The ones who most need to hear it are incapable, and convinced that their opinions are already based in logic and "truth." (Pro tip, if you ever catch yourself screaming that you're being rational, you aren't being rational.)

It sucked bad enough that I wanted to fall back to my own immediate tribe, and not even all the members of that.

Tribalism is true, but it's under irrational. Because that bullshit has nothing to do with what I write about here. Different parts of my life. But it made a damn good excuse to write and delete.

Back to One

There's something I've written about, thresholds, and it's not quite right. Experience with violence rewires you. The person who has survived a violent encounter is not the same person as they were before the violent encounter. Five encounters later, there's another definite change. Then another and another and another. Six discrete stages is as far as I know.

It tracks for other things and it generally tracks for other people. One of the issues with writing from personal experience is that you can't really know whether something you notice is idiosyncratic to you. One stupid example-- I tend to remember high-stress incidents in mirror image. I'd go over a force report and everything in there was exactly what happened, except everything I wrote that I did with my right side, e.g. "I then knelt on the side of XXXXX's head with my right knee to immobilize him against the ground." I'd actually done with my left knee.

How idiosyncratic is that? Without the combination of force incidents + report writing + report review I wouldn't even know. Same with the idea of experience thresholds rewiring your brain. Internal change is usually imperceptible unless you have a mechanism to bring it out. Or a combination of alertness and luck.

That's a digression.

Kathy Jackson over at The Cornered Cat is one of my "Honorable enemies." She's a good friend who has no hesitation in telling me when she thinks I'm wrong.

One of my threshold observations was that people who has prevailed in a single violent encounter were consistently the worst teachers. These were the ones that felt there was only one right answer, whether it was rage or fitness or speed or power or... the one thing that had worked was the only thing that could work. And, because all thinking humans know that's not true, these instructors had a constant cognitive dissonance they needed to resolve. As a result, the students they attracted were not students at all, but just pawns in their self-therapy.

Kathy pointed out two instructors who were superb, but each had one violent encounter. Which made me dig a little deeper.  She was right. But those two instructors had not prevailed by any stretch of the imagination. They had survived on luck or the intervention of others.

One of the other things that rewires your brain is to be absolutely sure that you will die in the next few minutes while being absolutely sure that there is nothing you can do to change the equation. Situations of complete helplessness exist, and I think almost everything we do as societies and individuals is geared, at least in part, to deny this truth.

These two instructors had hit that rock-bottom of helplessness and were allowed to live. And it has driven them to become the best they can be. They have the constant bullshit filter of their own experience and a drive to push their limits. They're extraordinary instructors.

Recently, Kathy pointed out another pattern. The experienced, effective, skilled operator who has that feeling of total helplessness late in their career.

(remind me to write later about how much fear and cognitive dissonance there is at the heart of this)

Simple truth is that no matter how alert, fit, skilled, experienced, equipped... name any combination you want... there is something out there that can crush you like a bug on a windshield. The incidents are rare, so most will never face them. And if you do face them and die, which is common, you don't have to work out the emotional issues afterwards. But when you hit complete helplessness and live, that can really mess you up.

We train to be harder to kill. That's cool. It's cool right until we become invested in the identity. When we start to believe that we can handle anything. Confidence is fine, but when it is not paired with humility and the sure and certain knowledge that the world is bigger than you and can bring you down, it creates a vulnerability.

So the tough guy (and I want to write swaggering, but not always) who has convinced himself he is the best of the best gets rolled. Nothing he had was enough. Maybe he wakes up in the hospital fully aware that the only reason he's not in the morgue is pure dumb luck, or the whim of violent strangers.

The pattern? Generally he goes out on one more mission to prove he can still "get back on the horse" and then he transfers from operations into teaching. He fantasizes extensively about what might have worked in that one encounter and when he thinks he has something that might have worked, he insists it would have worked. And he teaches that, obsessively. Not the hundreds of other things that did work in real life before the one incident. The fantasy that makes him feel less vulnerable.

Like the instructor with only one encounter, it's not really teaching. It's self-guided therapy. And the students are just pawns in that therapy.

Constant Forward Pressure

There are things about fighting that are very difficult to learn without fighting. There are things about an assault that are difficult, maybe impossible, to learn without being on both ends of an assault. Martial arts training is largely about trying to preserve and pass on skills without the side-effects of using the skills. You want to learn to punch without the arthritis from old fractures in the delicate bones of your hand. To learn how to survive an attack without the accumulated concussions and microconcussions that are a natural result of knowing what "surviving an attack" even means.

When we sanitize fighting and try to make it safe we lose a lot of information. In hierarchical systems, if information is lost to one generation of instructors, the system tends to resist the information when it is rediscovered.

Some of those little bits of wisdom are so obvious it feels weird to talk or write about them. This is one.

Hitting changes stuff. Not just 'hitting a body feels different than hitting a heavy bag or punching air.' Every time you hit or are hit for real, something changes. Something in the structure of the person receiving the hit is disrupted. If you get hit hard enough in the face to twist you neck, it will change your shoulder alignment and the distribution of balance between your feet. If you take a heavy rising body blow it can break your connection with the ground.

Every incoming impact affects you, and every impact you deliver affects the threat.

In order to hit well you need power, targeting, timing, and empty space to move through.
Power is usually based on structure and a connection with the ground OR whip action and speed.
Targets must be in range and available. If you can't reach it you can't hurt it.
I'll skip timing. Timing in fighting is a complicated art form, in assault (either doing or receiving) timing is dead simple.
Empty space is something an infighter must manage.

Every solid impact affects at least one of those things. It can disrupt structure and connection with the ground and interrupt the looseness required for whip power. Changing structure changes range and the body's orientation to available targets. Attacks change your perception of time and thus alter your timing.

The essence of defense is to disrupt the other person's offense-- by denying targets or disrupting, power, targeting, timing or range. "The best defense is a good offense" is a literal truth when you are working with impact.

On the receiving end it is a double-whammy and almost impossible to understand or get skilled at without experience. Incoming attacks at power mess you up physically, as described, but also mentally. Fast hard attacks disrupt your OODA loop and tend to overwhelm people into a passive, child-like mode. The determination to keep control of your own mind and to adapt to the physical disruption-- there are exercises which can show you pieces of it (Infighting randori is the best I know, followed closely by full blown scenarios...) but the real thing can't be replicated safely.

I first heard "constant forward pressure" as a wing chun strategy. This is my understanding of it today: Every attack disrupts. Each contact does damage; disrupts the threat's targeting, timing and distancing; and sets up the next shot. (I tend to fight by touch instead of sight, so indexing and pivoting the attacking limb off the point of impact are big for me.)

Constant forward pressure lets your offense handle your defense. It sounds like an armchair strategy, but it is an obvious natural truth when you are hitting and getting hit hard.

Overlay

Working on a model. A lot of things have puzzled me for the last several years, especially things that look, to me, like people fighting against their own self-interest; people blind to the disconnect between their own peaceful words and violent actions; people arguing and even rioting against their own civil rights (WTF, people?); demands to add power to already failed initiatives and institutions...

The people that see the problems I see tend to have certain things in common. And the people who don't see the disconnects also tend to have things in common. I think the disconnects fall on a common fault line, though. So let's see if I can dig this out here.

There is a natural world. In that natural world, things follow the laws of physics and the laws of biology. If you want a rock on top of a hill, energy must be expended to get it there. Most things you eat comes from the destruction of another living creature. Want a burger? A sweet, docile, brown-eyed cow must be killed, chopped up into it's constituent parts and some of those parts ground into piles of once-living flesh. Want a beer to grow with that? Barley must be chopped and carefully rotted.

There is an economics to the laws of biology/ecology. It's not exactly a zero-sum game, but energy must be exerted to get benefits. You must expend the energy to move to shelter. To get food. To not be killed by creatures that want you for food.

This reality underlies everything. Bellies need to be fed, in order to feed bellies, something must be destroyed and some person must initiate that destruction. Meat doesn't come from grocery stores, it comes from ranchers and slaughterhouses.

That reality is stark, and people are very uncomfortable with it. Extremely darwinian. There will be winners and losers and extinctions.

Nobody likes extinctions and they dislike people losing (in an abstract way) and hate being losers themselves, and so they set up or empower someone else to set up a system that overlays and attempts to control the natural world. You can't control the natural world, but you can influence the effects.

But by creating this second ecosystem that overlays the natural one, you create a second way to play the game. If I can't feed my family, I can invoke the rules and someone else will feed them. If I'm not a good enough businessman to prosper, I can apply for grants or get a bailout or donate to a congressman who might write rules that hamper my competitor.

Technology has out paced population. We don't live in a scarcity economy and almost no one has any direct connection to something as primal as procuring food. We have machines powerful enough that it takes a remarkably small number of people to deal with the real world-- to butcher the animals and move the heavy rocks and build the roads and...

So for most people, the artificial overlay of rules (written and unwritten; intended and unintended...) have always been more powerful than the real world. And the people who manipulate the artificial world (politicians and bankers, for instance) have always been more powerful than the ones who work in the real world (industrialists, for instance*). Thus, the artificial world feels more real, and in day-to-day life, has more impact than the real world of hunger, cold and injury.

That's background. Here's the deal.
No matter how detailed, intense, powerful or all-controlling the artificial world becomes, the natural world never goes away. And every so often, in a natural disaster or a spree shooting, the natural world intrudes. For people who see the artificial world as the real world, the answer is obvious: We need more rules. In modern society, the response to fear has become micromanagement. Which works so well in the business world, right? Sigh.

But hurricanes and spree-shooters don't follow human rules, that's what makes them what they are. They follow physics or the laws of biology. Society's rules are just magical incantations and they only work on believers.

Universally (so far, I'm sure there are exceptions) the people that see the problems I see have lived close to the edge. They have been hungry with no one there to help, they have had people try to hurt or kill them and been profoundly alone. Which means they come overwhelmingly from the poor and rural demographics. Conversely, the ones who believe you can create a written answer to a physical problem have spent their lives in a rich, privileged and artificial world.

Both the worlds exist. Both affect our future. We need to recognize them both and recognize when a problem is beyond the reach of the artificial world's tools. IME, the people who have been exposed to the real world have no problem recognizing the artificial. They may get significantly self-righteous that their world view is the real or good one (long look in mirror here... I'm back) but unless they are completely off the grid, they know damn well about the overlay. Does anyone truly believe  that hard work and reliability is the fast-track to promotion in a big organization? Or that brilliantly arguing your professor into a corner will improve your grade?

But it is possible to live entirely in the artificial world and to believe that it is the only world. That writing rules somehow, magically, controls events. And for the most part, this isn't only a safe bet but a good one. The artificial overlay is the most powerful of the two worlds right now in day-to-day life. Right up until it fails.


*When you reflexively think about "evil corporations" are you thinking about the ones who provide your laptop, phone, car and food? Or the ones who exist just to manipulate interest and debt? I'd argue that they are very different.

Take a Breath

There's a lot happening in the world right now. More than you know, but probably less than you fear. Take a breath. Tension, fear and anger all make you stupid. And the resultant stupidity is a tool for someone else. Don't be a tool.

People learn through story. News outlets make money through advertising. People are tribal.
News sells stories, not data. They don't just tell you what happened, but try to tell you why, and what it means for you, and have a cast of characters and sometimes a moral... It's not a conspiracy or deceitful. People bond to stories and "just the facts" reporting would lose all of their audience to something more entertaining.

In broadcast TV, radio and newspapers, the media sells you. They work to deliver a certain number of viewers to their advertisers. To be a successful business, TV news has to keep you glued to the TV through the commercials. In order to do that they need a compelling story. Or just to make you angry and afraid. It works doubly well, because angry and afraid people are easily manipulated, and that's what advertisers want. Who does your fear and anger serve?

Story and tribe. In the modern world, tribes are abstractions based on story. The narrative trumps the truth and it must trump the truth because not standing with the tribe is unthinkable. So when a cornerstone of the narrative is shown to be false, the tribe doubles down. They alter facts to fit narrative. They invent entire incidents to keep the emotional bonds tight.

A concept I stumbled upon recently, I'd credit it if I remembered who I heard/read it from: When you are offended by a social injustice, if you want to fix it, don't bother looking at who suffers. Look at who profits.

Works for other things than social injustice. Who profits from your fear and anger?

Another concept, one of my guiding principles for civilians caught in high-casualty situations: Don't make things worse. Don't increase the chaos. It's related to the golden rule of dealing with EDPs (Emotionally Disturbed Persons) to wit, Don't do anything that increases the EDPs adrenaline.

Anger and fear are contagious. They feed off each other. The infect others. They spread. And they make things worse. I know some of you have taken your fear or your anger as parts of your identity and don't want to let it go. Let it go anyway. From that mindset not only are you part of the problem, you are serving someone else.  Someone who profits from rage and chaos.

A Hint From the IDC

IDC is Instructor Development Course. It's not a standard "Master Instructor" or "Train-the-Trainer" course in that IDC is about teaching regardless of subject. Master Instructor and Train-the-Trainer courses are usually certifying people to teach a something specific. CRGI's IDC centers around self-defense instruction because that's our common language but we're definitely not teaching a system. IDC is about the "how" of instruction, not the "what." Which probably only makes sense to me.

Garry and I taught an IDC last week. We had an extra day (one day more than last time, two or three days less than we need) so we went deeper into the business stuff and curriculum development.

Here's a thought for curriculum development, a quick and dirty thought experiment.
If 1) someone you loved was 2) going into harm's way and 3) this person was completely innocent and 4) you had five minutes on the phone to tell them how to be safer, what would you say?

That's your most important thing. It tells something about how you prioritize. I think awareness is the most important skill, but five minutes isn't even enough to make sure we have a common vocabulary. I think the most important physical skill is surviving the unexpected ambush, but that takes more time and I can't do it in words. I have something for a short advice. So should you.

If you had two hours hands on, what would you teach?

That's your core. The things every students should get as soon as possible.

If you had more time, what would you add? What is your most essential four hours of information? Eight? Sixteen? Forty?

As you write this out (you will write it out, right?) be careful to note where you get redundant or start to add things that aren't strictly necessary. That's where you start transitioning from a survival skill to an art form. Still nice, but a different thing.

As you get more time you can go deeper into subjects, and with more time you can change the order. For instance, I think the most important thing for most students is to get grounded in violence dynamics, but that's not the first thing I do in a one or two day seminar. It works better if the ice is broken by physical play, they've already had the context talk which sets the need and several references to hunting versus fighting have been filtered in. Early things prime the pump for important things later.

Counter assault is the most important physical skill, but it goes faster if the students understand drop step and structure a bit, so power generation comes first.

You get the idea. As a self-defense instructor, what's your core?

This is Life Stuff

Just finished teaching an Instructor Development Course with Garry Smith of the Academy of Self-Defence in Sheffield. Not planning on debriefing the class here. But there was some very big things that came up.

The course was a deep introduction to teaching: what it is, what it means, the breathtaking responsibility. In the end, teaching is the re-engineering of another human being. Think what that implies. A student will come to you and when that person moves on, he or she will move on as an entirely different person. If they do not, you have failed utterly as a teacher.

We can never give the student what they want. Humans want homeostasis and comfort and, in the end, they want to learn without changing-- which is impossible. They want, in a self-defense class, to learn about fear and danger yet never become uncomfortable. The essence of teaching is that it is transformative. True teaching is incompatible with homeostasis, with comfort zones.

During the course, what I kept picking up from student comments and questions was that everything blended. When you organize your concept of SD there will be Building Blocks, Principles and Concepts. But teaching, also, is composed of Building Block skills, based on Principles and understood by Concepts that change with experience. And so is business (we covered primarily teaching, curriculum design, critical thinking and business in the course.) In the end, consciously or not, you will live your life the same way.

Because living is learning. Unless you are working very hard to maintain your comfort zones, living is learning. Life is change. 

The Suit

Had to put on the suit this morning.

Last night, decided to check in on FaceBook and just happened to see an update on a memorial page and backtracked and... yeah. The memorial that was postponed? This morning. So I put on the suit.

2016 has been a year already. We all (if you've spent time in this world) have the list. As we get older, it accelerates. The people we know get older, and the old die, eventually. The list grows.

Ron was a good man. He was the training sergeant when I was hired on. At different times he was my sergeant and my lieutenant and my Chief Deputy. He envisioned and formed the CERT team and I was on that from our first call-out. Of all the administrators, he was the one we trusted. It was a simple question, really-- given the choice between an underling dying and your career, what would you choose? Ron was one of the few that we really felt would sacrifice his career to save a life. I know that sounds simple and obvious, but spend a little time in any government agency and see how rare it is.

Lots of stories, but they belong to us. And they'll be shared between us, when the time is right. NPNBW, brothers.

The service was well done, but my radar wouldn't turn off. I noticed the significant negatives. Who didn't show. What was not said.

I hate funerals. I've been to too many, but that's a stupid thing to say since one would be too many. At the same time, memorials bring us together, people who are usually too busy to get together, to just say "hi" find the incentive when someone dies. And I appreciate reconnecting, but hate the reason.

The suit symbolizes that. I've been fortunate enough to work jobs where suits were a rarity and when a suit would normally be required, there was a Class A uniform. So the suit, to me, mean a funeral.

At least I couldn't smell any lilies.

The Farm Boy Workout

One of the things I missed from being raised in ranch country was the work. No running water, we (I) packed it from the creek in five-gallon buckets. Enough for all household use and enough for all the animals that were penned and couldn't get to the creek themselves. The first two years, until dad installed a pump for the garden, that was watered by hand as well. Packing water. And splitting wood. And building and repairing fence. Putting up and repairing outbuildings. Milking cows.

Ranch kids tend to be really strong for their size. It's a side effect of manual labor as a way of life. But not all manual labor. There's a pretty nice whiskey called "Monkey Shoulder" named after the guys who shoveled coal. Lifting and tossing shovelfuls of coal for ten or fourteen hours a day, day in and day out will make you immensely strong-- in one motion. And kinda bind up your body for other motions. Not even talking about repetitive use injuries.

Ranchwork, you might spend a week digging postholes in rocky terrain. Shoveling is good exercise, but using a tamping bar ( six foot long, inch and a half thick steel bar pointed or wedged on one end, flat on the other) is a nice core workout. The next week pulling barbed wire. Summer bucking bales of hay and moving irrigation pipe. Splitting wood all year, but mostly in autumn. Packing water and milking the cows and goats every day.

The work is unpredictable. It was never three sets of ten reps. You bucked as many bales of hay as you had. Sometimes you could choose the pace, but if you saw dark clouds all of the hay had to be in before the rain got to it. You milked until the cows were out of milk. Total muscle failure or cramps in your hands? Tough. Stretch it out and keep going. We had a hard milking cow and at first my hands were going to muscle failure two to four times a session. Twice a day. Every day.

There were no rest days. My friends who work out scientifically insist on the importance of rest days, but cows make milk every day. I think the body adapts to the conditions. Hmmm. Hitting one of the science versus experience paradoxes.

And little of this was working with ergonomically designed tools. Barbed wire is designed to keep cattle in, not to be carried or tensioned by human hands. You have to hold big buckets away from your body to keep your legs from brushing them and spilling it. And, nature of water and gravity, you always carry the empty buckets downhill and the full buckets uphill. Rat bastards. T-posts are ridged and nobby and carrying bundles of them digs into you.

One other thing that distinguishes ranch work. You worked hard at being efficient. Some days you were going to work all day and nothing was going to ease up until dark. So you used your whole body whenever you could instead of isolating. You rested or even just rested a part (like hammering staples with your left for awhile to rest your right arm) whenever you could.

Feeling nostalgic. Our little herd of goats, which is planned to be four permanent with 2-4 kids a year for meat is now at nine and they've denuded the fenced parts of the property. So K and I have spent most of the last two weeks (lots of breaks for other obligations) building fence to give the goats access to another huge stand of blackberries. Days of hacking paths through blackberries with machetes, cleaning the paths up with clippers, raking. Digging post holes and pouring concrete to set them. Pounding t-posts. Manhandling rolls of hopefully goat-proof field fence. Tensioning wire and pounding staples. Last couple of weeks I've been working like I was a kid again. And loving it. But feeling it, too. All the joints make noises of protest in the morning. It's been a good couple of weeks.

Reason as a Discipline

Neil hit a critical point:
"There are so many cognitive biases that I'm pretty convinced humans almost never act based on reason. But then that's what makes us who we are. Why try to be something we're not?"

Neil is right. Again, from ConCom, we spend most of our time in our Monkey Brains. Being fully in the human brain is rare. And it is probably just as much a Dunning-Kruger as anything else-- some of the least rational people I know insist on their rationality. Conversely the most rational people I know are always questioning themselves. In my opinion, the expert is not the one who can tell you what is right and what is wrong. The expert is the one who can argue from any side, explain why he or she believes that one side has more merit and is able to say, "Of course, I could be completely wrong because..."

Also remember that reason is a discipline. It is not an intention or an attitude. Declaring yourself to be reasonable or logical does not make it so.

From my current work-in-progress:

Understanding experimental design and logical fallacies are just two parts of a much greater skill. That skill is critical thinking. Like reading people, it is not binary. It is something that continually improves with practice but will never be perfect.

People are by nature, far more emotional than rational. Rationality is actually a rare and precious skill. Even more, survival, self-defense and the crimes that necessitate them are emotional hot buttons....

One of the biggest hurdles to true critical thinking is that we have a presumption of our own objectivity. We can look at all the people around us making stupid decisions clearly based on ill-informed emotion, and never, ever notice that we do it just as much. To actually be good at critical thinking requires a willingness to doubt yourself. Ideally, an ability to find the joy in error-- you only truly learn when you are wrong. Searching for your own blindspots is a life-long endeavor.

You can never be rational. We all have cognitive biases (See Heuer's Psychology of Intelligence Analysis for the most useful breakdown I've seen.) We all have blindspots. We have experience that shapes are perception and interpretation; ideas of normalcy that will be out of tune with many other points of view; habitual ways we analyze, interpret, and draw conclusions that miss other options.

There is no point at which one can say, "I am rational. I am objective." It is a skill. Something you get better at through dedicated practice. Like the Stoic idea of good, you couldn't get there. You work towards it. That's virtue.

It is really easy to analyze other people's positions, statements and stances and point out the logical fallacies, the facts they choose to ignore, and declare them irrational. It makes one feel superior. It's a trap.

The valuable skill and the discipline is to do the same with yourself. Know the logical fallacies well enough that you catch yourself when you use them. When you catch yourself shunning a source or a point of view, dig down and find the reason. And you have to learn to differentiate between your own excuses, justifications and the real reason. (Hint: justifications and excuses don't predict future choices.)

To reject reason because reason will never be perfect is to cut off your left hand because it will never be as dexterous as your right (see what I did there? Multi-lingual pun.) Or to reject being good because no one is perfectly altruistic. To reject all learning because we never know the universe...

Reason is a tool, and it is a tool that improves with practice. Further, it can sharpen and assess all of your other tools. It can be a check on your own integrity. Never perfect, but it makes things better.

And any time you reject a tool, you reject part of your own agency

Heart and Ego

Walking out some internal stuff. Friend Steve Barnes put something up on FB:
"If your philosophy of life, politics, or humanity depends upon the average person being inferior to you, or other groups defined by race, religion, or sexual orientation being inferior to yours, it is safe to assume you are addressing reality through your ego rather than your heart."

I glitched on this hard. Not about the idea that there is something wrong with you if you look down on others. There is. The universe is pretty big and you are pretty small and if you need to look down on anyone, it is to stave off the fear that 50% of the universe, at least, is looking down on you.

The part I glitched on was the artificial duality of "ego" and "heart". And the implication that one was good-- heart-- and the other, ego, was bad. The monkey brain in ConCom is a functional definition of the colloquial term ego, so I agree that ego is not a good decision-making base. But also in the book, I point out that when you feel anything-- hate, anger or even surety-- you are physically incapable of making a good decision. There is a reason why doctors are not supposed to operate on their own children. Emotional, passionate people make mistakes. They are frequently wrong. And the power of emotion makes them deny it, even when things go horribly wrong. Then they double-down on the stupid.

Heart or ego? What about reason? Heart and ego are both aspects of the monkey brain. Can we get our human brain into the equation?

"If your philosophy of life, politics, or humanity depends upon the average person being inferior to you, or other groups defined by race, religion, or sexual orientation being inferior to yours, it is safe to assume you are addressing reality through your ego rather than your heart." 

Here's the deal. Feeling superior to others makes you feel good. That's the reward for the operant conditioning. BUT feeling good, following your heart... is the exact same thing. Both center on feelings. At first glance, one appears more self-centered than the other but really, not so much. Either option is pure monkey brain, manipulating feelings or tribal dynamics.

A lot of the glitch is in how I see the world acting today. In my mind, heart is "feelings." And I have a very bad reaction when feelings trump facts. Peace protesters who set fires and loot. Freedom activists who block access to speakers they disagree with. It is physically impossible to be for free speech and anti the right of anyone else to speak. It is physically impossible to be for cultural equality and anti genital mutilation.

A philosophy of life, politics and humanity dependent on heart with no leavening of reason? This is where it goes: At the mob level, flipping cars and burning buildings is "free speech".  And simply pointing out the damage they do is to their own communities or that their acts are unlawful is "oppression." At the higher level (and this is Steve's heart + ego) this is Stalin's 30 million or more killed for an ideal. For the common good.

Steve mentioned that pure reason was a trap. I agree. Socialism, communism, fascicsm were all great thought experiments, largely  conducted by the extremely privileged who had no idea how economics or human nature actually worked (hmmm. Maybe not true. The demagogues understood human nature enough to get people to buy in, but either didn't understand or were ignorant of the  Freeloader Problem. Or they simply didn't care as long as they were in charge of defining the "common good.")

But reason, as I define it, is the ability to use your skills to look at the world, to create hypotheses. To test them.

What, instituting socialism didn't create an immediate paradise? Let's kill a million people, that should get things back on track... (Stalin's Great Purge. Look it up.) Whoah and it still failed? Let's try it here. My heart says the ideals should work...

Heart and pure reason are both traps, because they are entirely internal. Until and unless your feelings  and theories are tested in the real world, they're pretty much bullshit. Masturbation for your ego. And right there we tie all three together-- heart, ego and pure reason. As long as they stay internal, they are all traps.

Here is where I like reason more. Of course, it has to be honest reason, not ego. Heart has a tendency to ignore the world when the world contradicts feelings. 30 million killed for an ideal is heart. There's no logic in that. Mob action is all heart (it's easy to lose your sense of individuality--ego-- in a riot.)

Reason can look at a protest and say, "Shit, we just alienated everybody." Heart says, "That felt so powerful, we must have changed some minds."

If heart goes external, fine. It has to have skills in data gathering and assessment, (and, kudos to Steve, he's taken some positions, set the criteria-- like infant mortality rates-- and when the criteria changed in the wrong way he was willing to change his position*) but if your highest priority is compassion and you can look at the world and see that your ideals increased suffering and you change, then heart is a compass. It will show the way. If you can't see the suffering or refuse to acknowledge it or explain it away to preserve your feelings, if feeling right is more important than other people's pain or hunger... that's not compassion. That's just narcissistic heart. What Sherlock would call "mere sentimentality."

Strangely, if ego goes external, it also works. I ran across a really old (I think Italian) essay years back that explained why pride was one of the seven deadly sins, but vanity was a virtue. The two had always been synonymous to me. The essay said that pride was a sin because people who already thought they were all that and a bag of chips (paraphrasing, obviously) didn't care what other people thought, whereas vanity was all about what other people thought, so it was a great motivator to display the virtues valued by your group.

Same with ego. Narcissistic personalities think that everybody reveres them, and so treat others contemptuously. But people obsessed with earning that reverence have to work for it, and usually have to work for it in socially-approved ways. So, it's rare, but even ego outwardly directed and with feedback from the world, can be a compass.


*One of the reasons I can talk to Steve about anything. He can disagree honorably. It's a rare trait.

Sacrifice

Going to try to capture the thought I woke up with this morning. It was about sacrifice throws, sutemi waza, and how many principles they illustrate. I just thought about linking to a video, but this is kinesthetic, and video doesn't show the most important stuff.

Principle: Balance. The essence of balance is that the Center of Gravity (CoG) must stay over the base. The base is the space enclosed by the outer edges of the points of contact with the ground. That was a mouthful. When one person is standing normally, the base is defined by the outside edges of the feet and two imaginary lines, one running from toe to toe, the other from heel to heel. The base is a rectangle.  When a person is standing in a bladed stance, say, left foot pointing right at the threat, right foot back and perpendicular, the base is a triangle. If a person has their left foot and knee on the ground, left hand on the victim's throat, right hand raised to punch and right foot on the ground, the base is a matter of connecting the dots: left foot to left knee to left hand to right foot and back to left foot.

That's the base. As long as the center of gravity stays within the lines, the person is on balance. If the CoG leaves the base, the person is off balance and starts to fall. If he or she can't get the CoG back inside the base (or, more often, move the base under the CoG) the person falls. Simple.

Concept: In a fight, it's always about more than one person.

Back to balance. In the set up for a sacrifice throw (and not just a sacrifice throw, remember I'm just using it for illustration) you have two people with bases and CoGs. Simultaneously, as soon as two people grip up, you also have a four legged animal with a shared Center of Gravity. Get it? I can defend my balance and try to manipulate his or I can just skip to the chase and manipulate our balance. In a sacrifice throw, the instant I drop weight (all of them, really. By definition.) or slam my body into his knees (yoko wakare) two of this animal's four legs, the ones I control, have just collapsed. Know any four-legged animals that stay upright when two of their legs disappear?

Concept: Psychology matters

One of the things that strong young men tend to do in a clinch is lean into each other. Maybe it's because they don't want their pelvises to touch. Maybe it's because they are instinctively trying to show off their strength to female chimpanzees. People in a monkey dance mindset tend to sacrifice control of their individual base and trust in the shared base, which makes them far more vulnerable to sutemi waza. This illustrates more than one principle. Not only does it make balance easier to exploit, but it also increases the leverage when the technique is applied, uses gravity and exploits momentum.

Principle: Exploit momentum. Sometimes I write it as exploit force. It's been a core principle of every system that was ever actually used in violence. From unarmed to guerrilla warfare, when you are outmatched in size and strength your best hope is to use that strength. Force is much easier to steer than it is to stop. That's just physics.

In the sutemi waza example, not only is his leaning weight a force that can be exploited, but if you can time it as he surges with his leg power, his force adds to yours and to gravity.

Principle: Use gravity. Let's face it, gravity is stronger than you are. And all of that force is free. And using it is, literally, as easy as falling off a log. One of the reasons I didn't link to the animated videos I found was because it looked like tori (the thrower) was pretty much just laying down. When someone gets a good sutemi on you, suddenly all of his weight is hanging from your shoulder, neck, or extended arm and you have damn few choices. Gravity is used to force the fall. Gravity is powerful, quick and gravity never telegraphs. You might, but gravity doesn't.

Principle: Leverage. Leverage comes up everywhere. The more the person is leaning, the longer distance the CoG is from the base, the more leverage. The higher the pull and the lower the blocking action (provided they are going in complementary vectors) the better the leverage. On and on.

Principle: Structure (and Void). In a sacrifice throw you are manipulating structure and exploiting a void. You need space (a void) to fall into. Without that, you just slide down the other guy's legs and wind up in a very vulnerable position. Some of the sacrifices, like yoko wakare can block the uke's knees, freezing his structure and increasing the impact of the fall through leverage.

There's more, obviously. Each of the principles could be explored for a lifetime, and almost any of the sacrifice techniques could be dissected. Good physics is kind of awesome. One way to think of it-- mechanical advantage. Any good technique you should be able to see why it has a mechanical advantage either over-all or in particular situations.