Steve's Street Cred

Steve posted on his blog and I got contacted, blah, blah, blah... Steve and I thought it would be good to use it as a jumping off point for some thoughts. The italic stuff will be mine, the regular text is Steve's original post.

Right off, this isn't a debate or an argument. Like any two people, Steve and I see things differently. We also guess about what the other sees, feels or means. There is a lot of potential for learning in the gap between what the guy outside and the guy inside the skin see.

A bit more on the violence thing. Most of you here will assume that when I post such things about the reality guys, I am talking about Rory Miller and Mac and the other hardcore dudes like that.

You're right. I am. But it's not meant to be derogatory when I offer it.

And I know this. Steve understands and respects differences in perspective. I don't think he could write convincingly if he didn't

A couple thoughts to clarify things ...

I like Rory, and I believe what he teaches is valid and valuable. I've reviewed all his books, given them raves.

This is mutual...except for the valid and valuable, since Steve writes fiction after all... (joke).

I also believe that what he teaches is mostly geared for, and aimed at, people who are apt to find themselves in scuffles regularly. It's from and for people whodeliberately put themselves in harm's way. Soldiers, cops, bouncers, folks who go forward knowing things are about to get active.

No. Not at all. And this is a huge disconnect. The hard-core operators know this stuff. According to e-mails, what they really get from my work is 1) a feeling that someone else 'gets it'. Even within the operator world, it can get pretty isolated. You can be a qualified operator and never be activated. You can be activated and never see trouble...and some people, through luck or inclination or whatever see a lot, and it makes them think. there's comfort when you find other people are thinking the same things.

2) I seem to put things into words that they know on a gut level, and that's comforting too and

3) The words make it easier to teach to rookies.

But pretty much by definition, if I blow someone's mind, they weren't an operator.

As Rory has been all those things and has not-walked-but-run into the room as the shit hit the fan, I might be excused for thinking that's where he likes to play. I think he gets bored if somebody is not shooting at him -- and barely missing.

He has specialized knowledge, worth diamonds to people who need it. As he points out, he does violence for money.

That's a long way from where most of us live. It colors one's world.

Absolutely. I'm not sure if this is the place to express it, but there is no way to get the cumulative experience of violence while living a peaceful life. It does color my world. But the people who won't experience it more than once or twice in their lives will never get the underlying factors, will never even get the adrenaline under control enough to see what happens in so few encounters. Someone who has had sex a hundred times just understands it better than someone who has only had sex once. And way better than someone who has only fantasized about it. It doesn't mean that the lessons can only be understood by gigolos and hookers.

We want him on the wall. We need him on the wall. But on one level, I get the sense that he mostly wants to swap stuff with the other guys on the wall. (You might can add serious martial artists to the teaching pool, in that they are willing to pug in practice, and thus aren't completely against the idea of thumping or sticking somebody, should the need arise. People who could never hurt a fellow human being even in defense of their own lives don't seem to be good candidates for reality fighting.)

Absolutely true... for me. Because I get my learning from other guys who have been there. I really can't learn anything useful from someone who has only imagined my world. So, absolutely, I prefer to spend time with operators. Experienced martial artists, not so much. This may be my perspective but many of the 'experienced' are so choked with delusion that it is almost detrimental to talk to them. Back to the sex analogy, collecting belts or collecting porn aren't that much difference. Thirty years of memorizing centerfolds still isn't having sex. (man, I am going to get so many hits for this post off of perverts doing google searches). There are some exceptions, pure martial artists who can improve my body mechanics, but they are damn few.

When he's talking to guys like me, chair-sitters old enough to be his father, or people who hike a long detour to avoid the mean streets, he has to dial it down. We need to know about it, to be sure. We might need some of it someday, and it'll be worth diamonds if we do. But "might" and "surely will" are two different horses.

This is another disconnect, cause when things go bad it gets binary very fast. If you have basic common sense, you probably won't need it, but if you do (home invasion, workplace shooting, Bonding GMD) you will need it all, and probably at a level greater than I do. For me it is a surely. For civilians, it is a possibly... but if the civilian needs it the stakes and the obstacles will both be astronomical. There is no middle ground here.

Big attitude change from "this might happen" to "whenthis happens 'cause it's gonna."

And that creates an incentive to train smarter, (or, if you want to look at it this way) allows civilians to train stupid and it won't matter a lick...until it kills one or two.

Here's where I keep coming down to it: I can't tell you what it's like to be a soldier, cop, or bouncer, because I've never been one.

I think it's hard for Rory to tell you what it's like to be a civilian, because he's never been one.

Sounds cool, but nope. One of the neat things about our society is that there are no castes. Every cop has been a citizen. Every soldier has at least been a high school student. I was the shy science nerd. Mac was the hippie studying library science at Maharishi Mahesh University. We all, at one point, had our first fights. My training was world-class...and I was largely unprepared. What I do with my teaching, is to try to let people in on the stuff that I didn't get from martial training. The holes that left me unprepared. It is a huge list.

So my classes aren't mostly composed of cops and soldiers. There are a few and I think it has more to do with camaraderie than anything. But the majority are what you call serious martial artists who are just coming to terms with the fact that they know almost nothing about violence. They have spent decades honing a tool to be used if they are ever faced with violence, and they don't know what an assault looks like, or how to see one coming or what the opponents and attacks they will have to defend against even look like. How do criminals get you alone? How is a knife really used? How does a predator find out where to set up his ambush? What's the fastest way to tell a dominance game from a predatory interview? How do criminals get you to lower your guard? What does it feel like to kill or cripple another human? Why do so many people freeze and what can you do? What does adrenaline really do and how do you compensate for it?

So many questions and most people go their whole martial career and never ask them. That's what I do. Cops know this stuff.

Long Ago, in a Galaxy...

When I started in martial arts, there were lots of hints about mystical bullshit. When you got to your blackbelt level you would gain powers that weren't quite like the ones on TV, but really close. So I was told (often, it was one of my obsessions) that all expert martial artists learned to heal as well as destroy... but the people making that claim had somehow never got around to learning that part of it.

There were secret strikes that could only be divulged after your character was tested, but no matter how tested you were it wasn't quite time...and then you might happen to overhear the person withholding the information ask his instructor, and you might even hear him get the same run around. The mystical knowledge wasn't there.

But people want it and they want it bad. People really like magic. And if enough people want something, someone will supply it for money or sycophants or just for ego. And the cool thing about supplying magic is that the people buying it will do all the heavy work, suspending disbelief.

So I was attracted to instructors who not only could do things, but could explain it. If the instructor had amazing skills and his students sucked, he either couldn't teach or was deliberately withholding...and if the instructor sucked and the students thought he was amazing, it was a religion, not a self-defense class.

Brent Yamamoto and Kris Wilder, under the tutelage of Hiroo Ito, are doing some amazing stuff. Stuff that harkens back to the legends I heard as a wee beginner. It's not mystical. It is structure and slaving (in the engineering sense) small motions to big muscles. Applying bone rather than muscle. They are doing the things that the internal stylists talk about, but because they are learning and not parroting, they can apply them moving and even fighting, something I have seen rarely in internal stylists.

And they can teach. Their students are picking it up. Applying it.

My reductionist side wants to take it down even further, but that can wait.

For now, I know two men in the Seattle area, NW Martial Arts in Bothell and West Seattle Karate, who are teaching some of the things that the instructors in the eighties pretended to know.

--------------------------------------

Billings, Montana this Saturday. I'll be going through Spokane Thursday night if anyone wants to meet on the route.

A Little Contest

NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month, begins in ten days. The challenge is to complete a book of at least 50,000 words in thirty days.

My writer's group will all be on board, and so I will as well, with the caveat that I don't (generally) write fiction.

So I'm kicking it out to you. We'll make it a contest. You suggest in the comments what you want me to write about next. I'll pick a winner and give myself thirty days to write the first draft of that book. If it falls into a category that my regular publisher will be interested in and it holds up... the person who suggested the subject and title will get a signed copy. If it doesn't fit that category, I'll do it as an e-book and e-mail a copy to the winner.

So, since there's a chance that multiple people might want the same subject, you have to suggest a subject, a title (especially since I suck at titles) and leave enough information in the post that I can contact you (or at least give you a shout out) so I know where to send the results.

New Thing

With immense thanks to Steve Perry, I uploaded my first e-book last night at Smashwords.

It's the (much expanded) lessons from the Savvy Authors/RWA class on Violence for Writers from a few months ago. The formatting and uploading were surprisingly easy. The first cover design rocked, but unfortunately I don't have rights to two of the pictures (a friend-of-a-friend's picture from the al-Sadr Hotel bombing in Baghdad and one of a particularly bloody cell extraction)... but my lovely and talented wife came through with a nice cover.

If I get the time, I'll have to add it to my regular website and maybe put a paypal button right here for direct access.

Off to Seattle in a few hours for the two day seminar there. There's still room if anyone is interested. Details are at the usual place.

As Kai kindly pointed out, here's the link to the specific book:

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/27439

You can read about a third of it.

Nostalgia

I'm going to write the post now and set it to show up tomorrow. I do have a lot to write about the East Coast, but the blog is for me and there is other stuff echoing in my head right now.

Lunch today with an old friend and a new friend. I spent most of it catching up with Sean, listening to the changes at the old agency; the mistakes and politics and much of it, it seemed, was about broken people. Some good news, as always. Good people shine in shitty situations... but others seem to enjoy making shitty situations worse and murkier.

Then I stopped by the range to see another old friend. I should have expected it, but there were many old friends there. I caught them on a break so we were able to talk for a few minutes. The nostalgia hit hard driving home. These are extraordinary men* doing a dangerous, difficult and thankless job. They are the best of everything it is to be a man: intelligent, dedicated, trustworthy, courageous. MR will have his doctorate soon, may have it already, and teaches at a local college... at the same time he has been a father figure to new officers, a tactical operator and a fighter. Each of them is a story like that.

I know these men as efficient fighters; cold, level-headed planners; and good, friendly people. Dedicated family men. Those who have been thrust into the position are leaders. Not managers, but true leaders. Every last one of them has risked serious injury again and again to help others, and often the people they were helping are the kind of people that most civilians pretend not to see when they ask for lose change, or get outraged when they hear of their crimes.

I miss it. I miss the job and most of all I miss these people. If brother was a matter of choice, MP and SC would be my brothers. I hope my son grows up to be the kind of man that BW projects so effortlessly. If I were to be stuck in a room for years with one voice to talk to, it would be MR.

*Just so happened everyone there was male... trust me, the ladies who do this job can more than hold their own in every way.

Synthesis

Pieces of what follows will be from memory, so please forgive if the quotes are not exact.

RJ Nash, in "Condition Black" notes that the most common attack (male on female) is for the man to merely display a weapon, make a threat, and put his hand on the victim's upper arm and lead her away. It sounds so docile, so unlikely. Who would go along with a mere threat? Why wouldn't she simply...

Teja Van Wicklen, of Devi Protective Offense consistently finds the words to make things real: "It's not like screaming and bullying. Guys don't get that. He can hurt her and she knows it, but he says, 'I know you're afraid. Don't worry. Just don't fight me and I won't hurt you. I promise.' And she chooses to believe him even though she knows it's a lie-- an unsolicited promise is always a lie-- but she doesn't see another way."

Teja makes it personal, makes it real. I teach it dry, academic: Predators want you in your social brain. As long as you are being social, thinking you can control or at least influence the outcome by social skills (talking, bargaining, appeasement, flattery...) the predator knows you are both safe and completely predictable. If you are in your thinking, human brain, you might be smarter than the threat. If you are in your reptilian survival brain, there is no limit to the harm you might do. If your attacker can keep you in your social/monkey brain he knows that he is safe.

When I teach that the first hit after you break out of a freeze is done at half power, it is an observation. No one hits hard in their first strike of their first fight, not when they are surprised. For some unknown reason, it is almost always a tentative, half-power, powder puff. Almost more a signal of intent than a strike. I tell students that and caution them against it.

Teja talks of the consequences: "She tries to fight, but that first hit is half power, like you say, more struggling than fighting and he hits her back, hard. She's never felt pain like that and she is afraid to try again... and he says, again, 'Just don't fight me and I won't hurt you.' She has to believe it because it seems like the only chance she has is to believe he is telling the truth."

There are aspects of problems that I can never fully understand. We are all wired differently, all have different experiences. Teja is fast becoming my Subject Matter Expert for women's self-defense issues. Partially because she sees it so clearly but even more because she can explain it in a way that gets through.

A Few Tired Notes

I'm tired. My voice is shot. It's been a long not-quite-three weeks.

Basil Kemble came through with the venue like a champ and turned out to be a very cool young man. A lot of history and insight in a relatively low number of years. He'll be one to watch in the future.

This trip has been a journey on a lot of levels. New friends. New places. Finding commonalities with instructors who I really admire. Finding some new ways to put things into words, thought and action. This-- learning and exploring-- is what life should be, at least for me.

Some of it is a blur. In a sleep deprived haze on a train I wrote almost three pages of notes on the first two weeks. I could write as much on the last two days as well. Almost as much, anyway. Far too much for a single post..and as usual, I forgot to even take my camera out of the bag for the seminar today.

As always, so much we didn't get to...but so much that we did. I think a lot of people got a taste of the things I rate as important: how violence breaks down; that efficiency is the point of training; that they can measure their own efficiency; a little bit of what is in this world...

But no one got more than a taste. The big question, the one I will never have an answer to, is what will they do with the taste? I saw a few learn something, be impressed by the increase (in power or efficiency or tactical use) of a thing, and then go right back to moving just as they had done before. Most adapted, but some didn't and that always comes down to the teacher. How do I reach him? How do I explain to her?

I can argue that the student has responsibility for what they learn, I tell them to take that responsibility and own it... but when I am the teacher the responsibility is on me. Not because this is true, but because it is the only part of the equation I can control...

But what will they do with their taste? Hopefully research and learn more. Question. Healthy doubt. Move for effect instead of approval. Never separate judgment from application: "Just because this will work, does that mean it is the smart thing to do?" Will they keep the precious distinction between knowing how to fight and knowing when to fight?

Jack Hoban was a treat. It was a privilege to join his class in New Jersey. I loved what he said about filling space and seeing space; that technique was the absolute least important aspect of fighting-- many things.

But he taught something that blew me away. Ethics is integral to combat. It's a big section of the next book since if you train without regard for your personal internal beliefs, you will freeze. Force law and policy is the study of the ethics of violence.

A few times in my life in a major fight, I've focused energy as a care taker, tried not to hurt the threat, tried to talk him down in the midst of a struggle. Give him a face saving way to end things without injury. In the middle of a fight it has always felt extremely high-risk. I don't like the bad guy to have time to think. But it has worked very well. For me.

It never occurred to me to try to teach it. Too high-risk, and when it worked I was never really sure why. Jack Hoban teaches it. That in the midst of a fight, you can do what is best for both of you. I thought, for a jail-guard thug, I was relatively compassionate. I'm not even in the ballpark of what Jack is doing.

Cool. New levels. New paths. New mountains.

The Better Half

Once upon a time something very bad was (possibly) going to happen. I called home and asked for my gear bag. Ten minutes later, K dropped the bag off at a potentially unsafe place. She didn’t ask questions. Didn’t ask for reassurance. She never tried to make anything about her. “Call me when it’s over,” she said. Nothing else.

The perfect operator’s wife.

I realized today… during all the cool stuff: the hours, days, weeks and months of training; the fights and tactical ops; the time spent in Iraq and Ecuador… K made it all possible.

Somehow, the house keeps going. The first week I was enroute to Baghdad, the truck broke down, the pump went out that supplies water from the well, the dryer died. All handled. Kids and animals, acreage and small farm, livestock, the rambling house with all the books. K keeps it going. The kids are strong and smart and beautiful. Not my doing, I wasn’t here enough.

It suddenly hit me today that I only know half of the story of my own life. For every thing that I have done or experienced, someone was always taking care of the other half.

Rarefied Air

One of the most disturbing moments in the martial arts is when you suddenly realize that your instructors may not know what they are talking about. It’s not just in the martial arts, I see it other places too… and it’s also not just in my specialized field of real violence.

Probably the first suspicion, years ago, was in my first dabble with karate. It was a very strict traditional system taught by a junior shodan and an extremely cute brown belt at my University. At one point I asked about stances. The instructor said that they clearly weren’t for fighting, they were strengthening and conditioning exercises for your legs.

That made no sense whatsoever. Static conditioning is NOT good training for dynamic action. I didn’t have the words at the time, but I had this horrible feeling that he was just guessing.

The second instant was when I asked why we spent time on kihon and kata when sparring looked nothing like either. I’ve written about that before.

In other fields… recently, looking at marketing for Conflict Communications we’ve had some offers of help. Marc and I are both painfully aware that we aren’t salesmen and have no inkling of the process (there is a definite protocol to approaching certain groups.) It became painfully apparent that many of the ‘experts’ offering help had no more knowledge than we did. Often, all it takes to be a consultant is enough knowledge to make the clients feel inadequate, not necessarily enough knowledge to do the job. Lesson learned.

Then there are many things where the learning curve is extremely finite. You can stare at you navel for eternity, but skill acquisition and knowledge acquisition is time limited.

Do you stop learning then? Of course not. Maybe a better way to say it is that there is a limit to how much you can be spoon-fed. Taking in received wisdom, even from a reliable source (and those are rare in many subjects) becomes mutual navel-gazing quickly. Worse, it can become addictive.

Another conversation with Toby: “I took my first survival class when I was twelve and my last at fourteen. I already knew what I could be taught in a class. I had to go out and test it and think through it on my own.”

Toby also shared his system: go out and test. Try it out. Think it through, brainstorm. If you don’t have enough of a foundation, you pull back and research. If you can’t find an answer by research, then you look for a mentor.

Try-research-mentor.

Subtle difference between a teacher and a mentor, and I appreciate that Toby used that word.

People who have gone to the deep water or climbed the ‘path to the mountain’ have always been rare. Few communicate well. We make up our own individual languages for what we have seen and felt. It’s not a community with a common language that you can be raised in. And even the wisest don’t really know all that much.

It’s a big world, people. If I knew a thousand times more than all of you put together I would still be ignorant of almost everything in the entire universe… and each of you would know about things I don’t know.

Deep water or shallow, no one gets wet exactly the same.

Many paths up the mountain? There are many paths up many mountains. And someone else’s knowledge is at best hearsay to you. Learn for awhile, then play.

Non-Prescriptive

The survival class with Toby was, as usual, pretty damn cool. Good people, a nice place, self-selected new challenges...

At one point, while listening in on the introductory fire-starting class, one of the relative beginners started asking "What if?" questions.

Toby replied, "I don't want to be prescriptive." Given the vagaries of humidity and wind and available fuel, there are no primitive fire starting techniques that always work. Anything he told the student and the student memorized would be wrong in certain conditions. His goal and teaching method is to explain the principles that underlie fire: Fuel, air and heat; Heat moves upward; greater surface area for weight is easier to ignite, all else equal; small lights large; fuel and especially tinder quality...

Sound familiar?

There are limits, but survival is survival. Whether under sudden assault or soaked by a sneaker wave in a cool climate miles from help or warmth, survival only comes up where the normal expectations have already failed. If this situation was a normal social conflict where normal social tactics worked, it wouldn't be a rape or murder attempt. The fact that you are in an extreme situation pretty much dictates that the rules of the non-extreme world have failed or, at least, are in abeyance.

Techniques are prescriptive, and so they often fail. Sometimes they work spectacularly, but whether they work or fail is usually a matter of luck. Your prescripted technique works when it happens to hit the right problem. But we don't get to choose what kind of bad things will happen to us.

If you understand the principles, you can adapt. And the principles for much of violence, from how and why it happens to the physics of knocking someone down, are things we have dealt with on some level all of our lives. Sometimes it seems that training deliberately divorces what we do every day, our natural movement, from what we do in training. It implies that movement in a fight must in some way be 'special' and that almost always reads as 'unnatural' and often in practice is stilted, stiff, weak and jerky.

Even when prescriptions work, like in medicine (arguably...sometimes) they are based on diagnostics. If you can't understand the problem, you are unlikely to make the right choices. Survival, again- hypothermia is loss of heat. Fire, food and warm liquids generate heat. Conduction, convection, radiation, evaporation, respiration and elimination lose heat. When you know the problem and recognize you are in the situation, you can derive what to do.

Assault survival- if you recognize the situation, especially early, you have options... but if you misjudge the type of assault, especially the social/asocial distinction, your choices will backfire. And if you don't know the principles of assault dynamics, you put a 50% element of luck on top of whatever built-in possibilities of failure your solution has.

Non-prescriptive. Thanks, Toby. It's a nice way to think about it. Every so often things get clearer for what I am teaching. Diagnostics and principles are the core.

24 and Counting

In the last twenty-four hours, I've:

Gone for a long walk in a strange city.

Driven one of the ugliest cars ever (Scion).

Practiced wakizashi versus katana--live steel-- while completely hammered.

And explained practical maai better than usual.

Rolled with an Israeli bodyguard.

Got exposed to a new fitness system that seems made for grappling and shooting.

Compared entry tactics with a former AT specialist.

All in all, the way a day should go...

Student, Teacher, Explorer

"I don't know why he's taken me under his wing. He has lots of senior students, but for some reason he's really connected with me. I'm getting things they aren't."

Bear with me here. Said in different tones by and about different people, this could be a big red flag... but this was a special case and it got me thinking. Just speculation coming up, a possible way of looking at the world and training.

There are students and teachers. That can be a job description or a personality type. Either can be limitless horizons or can lock you in a box. In martial arts, it is far more likely to lock you in a box.

It doesn't have to be this way. I'm pretty sure it's not supposed to be this way, but it seems to wind up here far more often.

In martial arts, the student personality is weirdly passive. They train, which is good. Some follow fads and some latch onto instructors and follow them, but in either case following is the operant word. They collect techniques, they worry about moving right and when they get under pressure or get tested, they try to do what sensei would approve, not necessarily what would work.

If your hackles go up and you say, "Not me" or think that I am painting with too broad a brush, think about this: I've spent more study hours in martial arts than I would need for an MD. Far more than I would need for a business degree. The people who get MDs and business degrees spend countless hours studying real disease and real business. Outside of cops, in all the seminars this year when I asked if anyone had spent a single day in their years of martial arts training studying how real criminals really attack, one hand went up. One.

Memorizing assault statistics (the percentage of rapes conducted by strangers; robberies in daylight versus dark) is not research. It is trivia. They call it trivia for a reason, it is trivial. How an attacker holds a knife, range and terrain considerations, developing distance with or prior to assault...

So students follow a lead and in too many the parts of the brain that should be going, "This doesn't make sense, if I was a bad guy I would never attack this way," somehow turns off, and martial training in its way becomes as mentally passive as watching television.

And there are teachers. Some people start martial arts from their first day in teacher mode. They want to understand and explain. That's good. It's very good, usually. (Some do it for ego. They want to be in a place where people call them 'master' or some other silly title.) But most do it for love...and like many people that love a thing, they don't want it banged up. In a physical object that makes sense, sometimes. You don't want to break a Faberge egg.

On the other hand, martial arts should be about as far as you can get from a Faberge egg and you can't really understand something without taking it apart. Much less something physical and visceral and about conflict and contention... you can't understand it to any depth without road-testing.

But to this particular teacher personality, being sure is the hallmark of a good teacher and any test risks doubt seeping in...

That creates a need for a critical third type in martial arts. The explorer. This is what the instructor mentioned above sees in my friend. Toby will listen, he will learn and absorb...and then he will test it. Sometimes at great personal risk, sometimes just with common sense and doubt. The skills he picks up will not just be learned-- they will be put in situations where they will succeed or fail or expand. (That is a huge problem with preserving arts: sometimes in the road test you find out not that they were less than you feared but they were bigger than you imagined, and that means that you never understood them at all. Humbling.)

Toby's teacher, like many extraordinary (as opposed to merely good) teachers, spent most of his training life as an explorer. Not just learning everything he could, but risking and testing and sometimes failing. What comes out of failure is often more compact, useful and truer than what went in.

So he sees Toby and he shares more, because the student and teacher personalities don't get it. They don't understand the awesome power and freedom of doubt. They think that training is about answers and proficiency and safety, and the explorers see it as about clarity. Answers are dependent on questions. Proficiency can (read "Deep Survival") hamper adaptability. In a world with a 100% death rate safety is and always has been a complete illusion.

The explorers get a lot of shit, but they are the ones who will carry a living thing into the next generation.

The Big Scenario Training Post

This should probably be a book, honestly. Maybe an e-book. I'll keep you posted.

Scenarios are an attempt at what Tony Blauer calls the constant search for the best fake stuff out there. All training is fake. If you are learning to send people to the hospital and people don't GO to the hospital, every rep of skill is combined with a rep of a bad safety habit. That's just the way it is.

At the most primitive level, scenario training involves bad guys in armor and a cluttered/realistic environment. The armor lets the student unload. The environment either lets the student be creative or points out that they aren't creative and their brain is stuck. But that's primitive, because it still deals with the problem as if it were one of physical skills.

So here are some points:

1) Scenario training always has a purpose. This is an explicit purpose, and one chosen in advance. To face a common or deep fear. To force a student to keep fighting. To help them see a developing situation. To test their legal judgment or tactical awareness. To find the little part that still thinks this fighting like a comic book-- that little part will get them killed.

2) The best purposes are tailored to the student. If I know you can fight, I will test whether you can tell when to fight. Whether you have the capacity to run when it is prudent. Whether you realize that crashing out of a ring of threats to escape is a qualitatively different skill than defeating a threat. If you have given me a clue that you have doubts about your ability to injure, I will put you in a scenario where you have to unload...and I will describe, probably graphically, what you strikes would have done had I not been wearing armor.

3) It takes good role-players. Through a mask, the role-players must be able to show the difference between an inexperienced and hyper-adrenalized mugger and an old con who has done a hundred robberies. The students should be able to glance at you (in full armor) and get a vibe that you are young or old, male or female or whatever you need to project.

4) The role-players have to be sensitive as well. Not in the "I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings" sense. Screw that. Part of being a bad guy is taking delight in hurting people at their most emotionally vulnerable points. By sensitivity I mean something that's a little hard to explain without an example. Sunday, one of the students, Robert, just kept moving while I was trying to incite a riot. I could tell by my own feelings that there wasn't enough of a hook there for a bad guy to work himself into the right kind of frenzy. If I had been insensitive I might have escalated it where a real threat wouldn't, and inadvertently punished Robert for a good tactic. That's bad training. Good tactics should be rewarded.

5) You have to guard against 'weirdness creep'. There are a handful of things that are likely to happen. I keep a list of 25 good scenarios with me. For the students, these are cool and new. I've done each of them dozens of times. Role players get bored. So what do role players do? They have to fight the tendency to make the situations more 'interesting' read: weird. If I didn't guard against this, we'd have scenarios with trained ocelots and laser-guided sharks.

6) The debriefing after each scenario is a special skill. The student should do most of the talking, not the instructor (DO NOT use a group of students to show off your own tactical intelligence. Primarily, because it is useless for the student. Secondarily, because no matter how many times you have trained the scenario, when the shit hits the fan for real, you might do no better than anyone else. Accept it. Grow up.) Thanks to Peter Breton, who sent an awesome e-mail about his own scenario, I'll be looking at these from both a tactical (including legal) and a strategic level, something I've usually glossed over in the past.

7) Don't do too many scenarios. Like the first black belt test, only the first scenario really shows you what the adrenaline will do. If you put someone through four or five, the last few are run like a game. The novelty wears off. A peer jury helps a lot. Having friends who you have to convince that you did the right thing puts some social pressure (and the attendant neurohormone cascade) on the student. But it still turns into a game. My ideal rhythm is one scenario in the morning probing for weaknesses and a scenario targeted at those weaknesses in the afternoon.

8) Knowing it is a scenario makes people do unnatural things. Confronted by a Monkey Dancer in a bar, leaving is sensible. People leave in a scenario who don't leave in real life (and people step in who wouldn't in real life). That is stuff for the debrief.

Above all, be safe and learn stuff.

Damn

Boston is special.

The second day of the seminar went really well, and each time I learn more about how to present scenarios. That would be a whole huge post, maybe a book. Lots of scenario trainers work a scenario to test or draw out martial skills. That's a very different, limited animal than scenarios that test judgment and global awareness.

Anyway, the scenarios were a blast in a nightclub with a full bar and pool tables and restrooms with diamond plate on the walls (that can leave a mark). We had the privilege of Jamie, an experienced bar manager, explaining how he read the line when checking IDs at the door, mirroring timing and the flow of adrenaline... good stuff. Excellent fighters from Chris Dammann and David Weiss' crew, who took the drills and ran with them, increasing intensity and making stuff their own. Exactly the way it should be.

Bill Giovannucci's hero genes came out. That man needs to be a bodyguard when he grows up.

It's been a great weekend-- nargilah and cannolli and brawling and talk; philosophy and tactics and teaching. Pushed some buttons, which is important in scenario training, and found a few more of my own.

Then, to top it off, randomly ran into Dave Castoldi while looking to get some equipment. Wound up practicing knife defenses with one of the Grand Old Men of Small Circle Jujitsu in a store... that was pretty damn cool.

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Added Kasey's blog to the bar on the side. He's the complete package, with dan ranks in traditional, classical and sport arts as well as street experience (enforcement and SWAT). Plus, he's a blast to have a cigar with.

Big Mess

I like messy. That's good, because messy is the natural environment of life. We don't become humans in pristine test tubes but in liquid-filled icky wombs. Some people learn facts in well-ordered classrooms, but it pales besides the applications that they learn in the wind and weather and interference of the real world.

Life is messy. Conflict and violence are supremely messy-- and I'm okay with that. When you try to learn how to deal with violence (the essence of messy chaos) in the pristine setting of a training hall, you're missing the point. You (or your instructors) limit the chaos so that the solutions are cleaner and clearer so that you will feel more certain and safer. That's wrong. Hugely wrong on many levels, because the heart of violence is in the mess.

If we have seen, time and again, some of the world's most well trained martial artists in a real fight rolling on the floor throwing wild punches, where is the value in pretending that doesn't happen? What about getting really good at rolling on the floor and throwing wild punches? If you are going to go all cave man anyway, why not become the Michelangelo of cavemen?

Which isn't to say that there is anything wrong with martial traditions or techniques. Most work just fine... but only for the person who has adapted to the chaos and fear and adrenaline. If you are in denial about those, not only will you fail in accessing your awesome martial arts skillz... but you won't even succeed in fighting like a coordinated chimp.

But in that chaos, if you accept it and then embrace it, are an infinite number of tools and opportunities. The world is a big place and full of many things. Almost all of those things are gifts if you learn to see them and use them. The cluttered floors and cramped spaces of the real world are obstacles and shields and striking surfaces, if you embrace them. They are hazards if you ignore them. The wild attack pattern, whether of a drunk or someone trained differently, are easy to misdirect if you use them... and pathetic excuses for getting your ass kicked ("He attacked me wrong!") if you do not.

Even failure: once upon a time I was demonstrating a headlock escape on Andre Scott. Dre was a bodybuilder, enormously strong, an effective and well-respected sergeant...and the technique was totally ineffective. What I had been taught didn't work with a body-builder who 'posed' and turned his head away. So I had to look at what was right there, and what was obvious in the mess was faster and more efficient that the trained technique.

IF you can work with chaos, IF you can work with variables, IF you can see what is in front of your face and adapt to it, you can do amazing things.

If not, if you insist that the world conform to your sterile training, you will likely fail.

Messy is fun. Embrace the mess.

The Living Room

Sitting in the Living Room, a restaurant/bar in Boston. It's on the edge where the North End meets the waterfront. It's dead quiet this time of day, rocking at night. A good place to sit on a couch, drink coffee, and get some work done.

David sent me the galleys for "Facing Violence". Almost done today. Some quibbles with words and punctuation, realizing how much more I know about some of this stuff (especially legal articulation) than made it into the book... That's fine, in a way. Makes the seminars more valuable.

I very much like the section on avoidance and de-escalation, particularly dealing with dangerous ground and cultures or subcultures where you don't know the rules. One of the people who read an early draft shared the other day that the section turned out invaluable in a certain country in Africa where he was working. Book won't be out for seven months and it may have already saved a life. I'm pretty pumped. I did my happy finger dance.

Later tonight, meeting friends at a Narghila bar in the University District. All-day classes tomorrow and Sunday. The scenario day looks full. Right on the edge of too many. Hoping we don't get walk-ons, because I hate turning people away. Note to self: Scenario days shouldn't have the location posted.

Still plenty of space for tomorrow, however, the 'easy' day. Several are repeats as well, so I'll work in more of the advanced stuff I'd planned for Sunday. It should work out well.

K had a brilliant idea. Her belly-dancing classes have usually been set up as a limited days/weeks/hours class for a specific period and a specific purpose, e.g. a Monday and Wednesday nights from 1900-2000 for eight weeks (16 hours) to learn Algerian Tribal Dance Basics. Something like that.

It works around a lot of the issues I have with long-term training. It makes it easy to be modular: Eight hours for Conflict Communications. Four hours for violence dynamics. Menu of building-block classes at one hour per item. Specific immersion classes.

The idea deserves more thought, but it's something I could see doing as a regular thing. Take advantage of the good parts of dojo training while avoiding many of the problems.

Needs more thought.

The Three Golden Rules

Mac came up with the Three Golden Rules long before I was hired. By then, they were teaching them at the state academy. I found out, recently, that these are new thoughts for cops in other regions.

1) You and your partner go home safely at the end of each and every shift.

2) Get the job done.

3) Liability free.

The rules are dreams, of course. The only perfectly safe way to do the job is to avoid doing it...and some officers are skilled at that, whether it is answering the call for back-up a little late or finding a quiet place to 'patrol' or getting a desk job and moving into admin. There is no way to completely avoid liability, but the triple play of making good decisions, executing the decisions properly and writing good reports works wonders...

Still, if your training, your tactics, your policies and your equipment must serve these three rules. If you're training will get you killed or sued it is BAD training. If it won't get the job done, it is BAD training.

Sometimes the order gets perverted, and this is an abomination: when fear of lawsuits stops you from doing the job or you get injured because you were more afraid of the liability bogey-man than the rusty shank... that is so very wrong.

And when the perversion gets written into policy, when an agency or administration becomes more worried about 'managing perception' than getting the basic job done, at that moment they have changed from a useful and necessary thing to a leech. It takes only that one decision to change from part of the solution to part of the problem.

Does it seem wrong and maybe insufficiently heroic to put officer safety in front of effect? It's just math. This is one that people can write into policy until the sky falls down and never effect anything... because it is physically impossible to do the job from the grave. It's not just a cop thing. Same for medics and firemen and the people trucking in food after a major natural disaster. You can't do the job dead. Worse, every cowboy who recklessly gets himself in trouble draws resources away from the original problem.

There's a line there, a balance. And, like most people, I think my line is perfect. Those who value safety more I privately think are a little cowardly. Those who value safety less I think are reckless. I never met a lot of the later.

Enabling, Responsibility, Hunger and Insecurity

A couple of good comments on the last post that got me thinking- about complexity and reward and punishment and insecurity and hunger. This might seem like a tangent rather than a response. Let's see.

I'm reading "Life at the Bottom" and so far, it is brilliant. Brutal, dark...but important. I then went on Amazon and read the reviews of the people who hated it. That's always educational. The voices were pretty much universal: The author is blaming the victims.

Not at all, at least not as I read it.

People are lazy. So are all animals, especially predators. When life is marginal, you expend as little energy as possible. When you have excess, it isn't spent training or saving for a rainy day...predators toy with victims that squeal. It is entertaining. Excess energy is spent on entertainment. Watch animals.

The dream, for years, presented in many of the psychology and sociology classes that I took, was that if no was in want, if everyone had shelter and food and warmth, that they would then start creating art and bettering themselves. That's not the way it works in nature. That dream has crashed every time it has been tried, but some people still believe. It seems many of our institutions are set up with that belief. Look at nature.

There are few things in psychology that are rigorous enough to be called 'laws' but one of them is that behaviors that are rewarded increase; behaviors that are punished decrease.

So if you reward violent behavior and addiction by moving people up on the list for subsidized housing, you get more violence and addiction. If you move people down on the list for holding a job, you get less of that. (The idea behind it is to fill the greater need...which is a human ideal and noble and all that, but people are at least as smart as monkeys and even flatworms can be taught to run a maze with simple conditioning.) Noble ideas sometimes fail because nature trumps.

If you give people money for neither holding a job nor going to school you get more of that behavior...especially if you remove benefits from people who start taking classes.

People are not stupid, and if the rewards and punishments are blatant or extreme enough, even the most socially conditioned, hard-working good guy will come to feel like a schmuck for working hard when the reward is the same if he didn't work at all.

So, socially and talking about "Life at the Bottom," we have to be careful when our programs designed to solve problems become enabling. We also need to be aware that bad people can abuse any system, and will do so more when their bad behavior is excused and has no consequences. Personally, we have to realize that, again, the only person who can be genuinely interested in change for the better is the one who must change. Maybe it sounds like blaming the victim, but it goes back to the responsibility of necessity. No one can change your life for you.

Here's the bridge:

We are biologically designed to be lazy, and most of us are very comfortable. I've noticed that many of the most extraordinary people I know had very marginal childhoods. Whether hunger or violence or ostracism, all had time, moments to years, of tangible fear that they fought by gaining strength or skill or insight. These "children of adversity" or "compulsive competents" eventually attain or exceed the comfort and security of those around them... but they never quite feel secure. Part of them is always afraid of being hungry again...and so they use the intelligence and drive to get better and better and better.

And when we see the people around us put the same drive into the most passive entertainment they can find (drugs or TV or...) we think they are stupid. They aren't. They are just comfortable and lazy.

Which brings us to the Dunning-Kruger effect mentioned by Charles James in the comments on the last post. The basic idea is that smart people tend to underestimate their own intelligence and stupid people tend to over-estimate. In other words, stupid people think they're smart. Smart people think they are stupid.

I think the mechanism is simple. Laziness and comfort. Animals work to get out of bad situations. They don't work, generally, to improve good ones. If you are insecure (and it's not just an attention-seeking ploy of a codependent personality) you will do something about it. If you are afraid of the dark, you might get a flashlight.

When people get over the fear, they get comfortable. Laziness kicks in. People who are worried about being smart enough study. People who have decided they are already smart enough start entertaining themselves and lose touch with the world. People who are insecure in their fighting skills train hard and seek new teachers. People who are comfortable come up with reasons why this is unnecessary.

Even in relationships. Our relationship has been going for 24 years (in 13 days) because I know I am not worthy of K and have spent my life trying to be. If I ever decided I was good enough, it is a small step to taking things for granted...

I think you will find Dunning-Kruger everywhere, and I think the mechanism boils down to "People with a perceived need to increase competence will continuously improve. People with a perceived sufficiency of competence will cease to improve."

That was long and rambling. Anyone want to try to boil it down to one paragraph?

Responsibility

No one cares about your safety but you. That’s not really true. Your family and friends care. Sometimes I (or people like me) are paid to care… but when it comes down to survival it’s only you.

People confuse concepts like "responsibility" and "blame." Further, they confuse victims and potential victims, and they blur these distinctions inside fuzzy head that sometimes can't tell the difference between the world that is and the world that should be.

In the world that should be, maybe you have the right (another word that many more use than understand) to go where you want and do what you want. Some feel self-righteous and add, "so long as I don't hurt anyone else."

Water is wet. Bears eat meat. To insist on a right to jump into the ocean and stay dry or to invade the space of a hungry bear and not be eaten is infantile. And to insist on some imaginary right to indulge in high risk behaviors and to somehow, magically, be exempt from consequences is equally infantile. Your safety is your responsibility...

And that is where, sometimes, the first cries go up: "That is blaming the victim!"

No, it isn't. And the inability to distinguish between responsibility and blame is crippling here. In the world that is there are things that suck. Economies go bad. People are poor. Sharks eat surfers. Conmen swindle the elderly. Rapists attack the vulnerable.

You could, theoretically, change the world. Make it more fair and equitable and just and vegetarian... but all of that has consequences as well. People taken care of may cease to take care of themselves. Eating lower on the foodchain increases the carrying capacity, and organisms have a tendency to breed to their carrying capacities.

And some parts of the world don't want to change. If you are very lucky (or unlucky) someday, a rapist may try very earnestly to explain that mere sex isn't even in the ballpark of what he experiences in a rape. Tigers don't want to (and couldn't survive) going vegan.

The surfer's safety is his own responsibility-- because the shark doesn't care. To expect the shark to care harkens back to winnie-the-pooh, a safe bear. The college girl getting drunk in a crowd of strange men has to take responsibility. In a pool of possible predators, she is the one who cares...and even hoping or expecting a genuinely good guy to intervene is, at minimum, giving up her autonomy, becoming a helpless passenger in her own life. Those are the people who all too often become victims.

Your safety is your responsibility because no one, especially the predators, can be expected to care..and if you don't care enough why should anyone else?

Kris Got Me Thinkin'

Oakland was encouraging. Things I am trying to do got put into words better than I could. Then Kris called the other day. We spent a lot of time talking about how comfortable laziness can mimic blatant stupidity; that being a good observer was one of the most useful skills in any arena.

Kris, as he is wont to do, told me what I should be doing next.

He suggested a four-day curriculum. Maybe more, give or take. It resonated.

Ballparking here, just speculating:

Introduction day- same as my regular basic seminar.

The basic seminar is an intro. In eight hours we cover safety; the basic drills; fighting to the goal; elements (Legal/ethical, Violence Dynamics, Avoidance and de-escalation, Counter-ambush, Breaking the freeze, and Aftermath) of self defense-- with extra lectures on both self-defense law and violence dynamics; Usually power generation and blindfolded infighting.

Second day

Like we've done at Oakland and Seattle and will do in Boston in a week:

Groups; ground movement and ground brawling; environmental fighting; dynamic fighting; sometimes close range weapons defense; then scenarios with peer juries where the students have to explain choices legally and tactically.

Those are as far as I've gone. The rest?

Conflict Communications could easily be a whole day. The real bones of where conflict comes from and how to manipulate the social piece.

I'd love to include the DreamTeam: three days of lessons on observation and violence taught by people who lived the need.

I'd have to break down how many hours would go into what I call the building blocks: Power generation; targets; strike conformation; inside strikes; grappling movement; grappling from the ground; locks; takedowns; neck attacks (bone, air, blood); entries; leverage points; core fighting; core defense; spine manipulation; pain; MPDS and effects and actions paradigms... how many more, really? Are there any of these I can cut down? Each takes less than an hour.

A class on teaching methodology. How to use the tools, what the tools are for. Finding glitches. Pushing over the edge (ethics and dangers). Proper scenario design and debriefing. Teaching students to teach themselves. Teaching students versus teaching material... others?

The big list of Principles, the things that make all other things work.

Possibly a companion talk on Concepts or even mindgames, ways to think and how to discuss mental processes that are outside of the common frame(s) of reference.

There's enough there to keep me busy for awhile, ya think?

MindPlay

Part of this is about engaging the correct part of the brain...and paying respect to the parts that will be engaged despite your desires.

One of the biggest lies in self-defense training is "You will fight the way you train." No, you won't. Not the first time. You will try and there might be some resemblance but likely (assuming you don't just stand there, frozen) you will have a pretty severe dump of hormones. Adrenaline and stuff like that.

That means you will lose most of your peripheral vision, seeing a small patch in front of you with useless clarity and completely unaware of people (or fists or boots or blades) approaching you from the sides or below.

You will likely lose part of your hearing. The idea of not being deafened and shocked by gunfire in an enclosed room sounds pretty cool. Not being able to hear your partner say, "Behind you!" or the first responding officer yelling, "Drop the weapon!" is much less cool.

The blood pools to your internal organs, one reason among many that you will lose sensitivity as well as coordination.

Thoughts may be crystal-clear and completely irrelevant. Illogical, obsessed with irrelevant details and almost always stubbornly stupid.

So you fight the way you trained except with a body that is suddenly partially blind, partially deaf, insensitive, clumsy and stupid. Other than that... yeah. You fight the way you train.

Provided, of course, that you trained for fights as they happen, but that's another post for another day.

The most powerful ego strokes after the Oakland event came from private e-mails, talking about some changes in the writer's regular training. Finding and exploiting weaknesses without thinking about it. Getting to better positions subconsciously because it felt right. Flowing not just between different levels of technique but different levels of intensity and connection.

We know that the hypercritical inner voice is suicide in a fight. How much of your personal training caters to that voice?

We know that our programmed social responses are only appropriate for certain levels of conflict...and in almost every instance those levels can be avoided. How often do we practice jettisoning that conditioning? Do we specifically train in when it is appropriate to do so?

We know that submission, like fighting, is a habit. How can we choose to believe that surrendering our own insights and autonomy to someone whose only real qualification is a darker strip of cloth will not condition us to submit to a threat with a gun?

We know all this...

How does a cat play with a mouse? How does a leopard kill for food? How do we slaughter and hunt and why is that so different from fighting? Why do so many have to work themselves up to lay hands on another person (and when you run in to someone who doesn't need to work himself up, you become a toy, because you get caught in social conditioning that he has jettisoned.)

What are the mindsets that work? How can we access them, get comfortable there?

Just a taste made some profound changes in some people. Qualitatively leaps in people who already had serious skills.

Deep Water

I got the T-shirt from Robb Buckland of FEARS ltd. And I've been listening to The Blessing's "Prince of Deep Water".

There's no bottom to deep water. Nothing you can stand on. Nothing you can touch. It is emptiness, except for things that might eat you, things that live in the deep water. Things you can't see from the surface. You are small, and deep water is the Abyss. The thing that Nietzche was afraid to look into.

The depths are transformative. Whatever you were on land or in the shallow water, you had something solid to touch. That lack of something to touch defines deep. At the very least, you must be in over your head. It is transformative, it must be, both because you need to learn to live, see, think and breath without your reliable constants...and because it is a world in which your reliable constants have never even existed. That which feels eternal, never existed at all. Not here. Not in the deep water.

No matter how closely you watch the shallows, no matter how many years you spend wading at the shore, no amount of concentration will turn shallow water to deep. Depth is a thing that is there. You must go to it. You can not create the abyss in a safe place. If you have touched the abyss and not been changed, it wasn't the abyss.

There's lots of deep water out there. Mine. Yours, maybe.

Joe Lewis'.

The T-shirt from Robb is one of Joe's favorite sayings: "Follow Me To The Deep Water."

It's over here, but you have to let go of the bank.

Quote from Mariusz...

Last night Mariusz said:

"...he said it was difficult. It might take twenty-five years and then your martial art would suddenly achieve a new level. I can't help but think that if something takes twenty-five years you are probably getting it despite the training, not because of the training."

Excessive Construction, Maybe

Sometimes (maybe this happens to other people) when I'm trying to simplify teaching methods I hear, "Maybe that applies to someone with your experience, but a beginner would never get it." Or, even, "Some of you guys who have been doing this so long forgot that you had to learn it."

There's good and bad in that, truth and fiction. Some of it is accurate, but much of it is defensive.

So, the truth- I'm shitty at teaching breakfalls. I've been doing them so long that I really don't remember how the early classes were set up. I'm good (clearly a bragging story: once in Dynamited Cave I fell off a simple climb. It was at most twelve feet total and easy so we weren't roped in. When I fell I was only maybe five feet above the floor... but it was the usual lava tube floor of broken up rock and aa lava. Sharp and hard. I landed in a perfect right side break fall, except that my body was bent and wrapped around all the significant sharp boulders. Some scratches, nothing else...but I was able to adapt a ukemi on a hard, irregular, sharp surface with the glance from a flashlight as it fell.)

Bragging, but the point is that I can tell you how to do it, maybe even make up some drills... but the only way to learn to do it that fast is to do it a lot in ugly conditions... but I don't clearly remember how I learned the very basics of ukemi. Sort of, but in my memory it seems like just a few minutes of training.

But...

My son is getting heavily into gaming. He takes his world-building very seriously. He is trying to figure out the imaginary physical laws of an imaginary place. What the politics are, what the gods do... so little of that matters.

Do we live in an aristotelian, newtonian or einsteinian universe? Do you realize how little that knowledge, or the perspective, affects people's lives? Newtonian mechanics got us to the moon, but the average guy watching his TV and driving his car didn't know or care from Newton. If string theory proves to be true or if it doesn't will directly affect the lives of a handful of physicists. The rest of our species has lived for hundreds of thousands of years without even asking the questions.

My son thinks that worldbuilding involves having all the answers. He doesn't understand that it is supposed to be fun, and that means giving the players the right kind of questions. Human-sized questions. Questions they can relate to. Things that they can do in small ways, safely-- like talk to girls or stand up to someone scary... things they can barely do in real life.

Which brings up another puzzler-- people who are afraid to tell their boss 'no' fantasize about fighting dragons. People who don't understand their own wives and children and live in constant conflict feel perfectly qualified to criticize high-level diplomacy. People who do not know their own mind or the mind of their closest friends will tell you what God believes...

It may seem I'm wandering, but these things are related. I'm not talking about action under stress right now. I'm talking about training. When we (I think most will agree, hence the we) denigrate training or training methods, most of the time it has nothing to do with us forgetting our baby steps. None of us popped out of Zeus' head ready to rumble. We remember, sometimes painfully, the slow progression and the learning curve.

What we do see is the hours and the effort spent on things that are completely irrelevant. The training for attacks that don't happen. The inbred layers of defense and counter that only apply--or work-- in house. The minute dissection and bickering over details... like criticizing the penmanship in the Declaration of Independence.

Too many hours spent building things-- whether physics for an imaginary world or series of actions to respond to a wholly imaginary attack that don't exist and wouldn't matter if they did. It's a human sized world with human-sized problems. Learn to deal with those and you'll see some deeper connections.

Blast from the Past

David mentioned this in a recent comment. This is my first-ever online article, written at the request of Fabien Senna of Cyberkwoon. A lot of the thinking seems primitive and incomplete at this later date. Baby steps.

THE RULES

Are there really “no rules in a street fight”?

I think that this attitude is somewhat naïve. Of course there are rules of physics and biology that affect what is possible and effective. Any training that ignores that fact is clearly dangerous. But there are other rules, too- chemical, social and psychological rules that dictate much of combat. Most people are as unaware of these rules as they are of the grammatical rules of their native language- they are invisible, either innate or such a part of our upbringing that they are unquestioned.

Ffab asked me to lay out these rules as I know them. Here goes.

Let’s start with chemical, because it is easier and less subjective.

When subjected to a threat, such as real conflict, your body will release chemicals and these will affect your body and mind in certain specific ways.

Bruce Siddle has studied this phenomenon, and found that heart rate, measured in beats per minute, is a good barometer of the other effects. Note that this is a hormone induced increase in heart rate. BPM increases caused by other things, such as aerobic workouts will not have the same effect. Also be aware that a hormonal jump in heart rate can be almost instantaneous.

Here are the rules of chemical fear:

If you get scared enough that your heart rate goes over about 115 BPM, you will start to lose your fine motor skills. That means your precision grabs and locks are gone.

About 155 BPM, complex motor skills deteriorate- you lose your patterns, combinations, traps and sweeps.

About 175BPM, planning and thinking are severely compromised. You lose your near vision, peripheral vision and depth perception. Your hearing will deaden or be lost.

Above 175, if there is anything in your bladder, you will lose it. Most will freeze or curl up in a ball and wait for mommy to save them. Only the grossest of physical activity is possible- running and flailing.

In short, the more desperately you need your skills, the less you will be able to rely on them. If you ever hear or say or think, “If it was for real, I’d do better” know that it is a lie. When it is for real, you will do much, much worse than in practice. The belief that people improve under stress is a myth.

These stress levels can be induced in most people with nothing more than aggressive verbal threats.

The rest of the rules are both far more subjective and harder to say for certain whether they arise from biology, psychology or social forces.

THE MONKEY DANCE

Remember the saying: “When two tigers fight, one is killed and one is maimed”? That’s a lie. Like other mammals, when tigers, bears, dogs, etc battle their own species, they have a built-in ritual combat to prevent injury. Deer go antler-to-antler, not antler-to-ribs.

Humans are apes. Like most animals we have a built-in ritual combat to establish social dominance or defend territory. It is nearly always non-lethal.

The Monkey Dance is a ritual, with specific steps. The dance, I believe, is innate. The steps may be cultural. In my culture:

1) Eye contact, hard stare.

2) Verbal challenge: “What you lookin’ at?”

3) Close distance. Sometimes chest bumping.

4) Finger poke or two handed push to the chest.

5) Dominant hand roundhouse punch.

A Canadian friend informs me that step 4 in his neck of the woods is knocking the other person’s hat off. Like I said, steps may be cultural.

A few points-

-The Monkey Dance is almost always a male thing. I honestly don’t know the female equivalent either in humans or other animals.

-Most martial arts (and most adolescent combat fantasies) are based on this model. It is much easier to prevail in a scenario that is already genetically designed to be non-lethal.

-The Monkey Dance can almost always be circumvented by either lowering your eyes and apologizing or ignoring it entirely- keeping extremely relaxed body language and treating the verbal challenge as a serious, thoughtful question.

-If you start the dance, you will probably not be able to stop. You have 50 million years of conditioning to overcome. I usually tell my students that you don’t play the dance, the dance plays you.

-Most incidents are resolved by one of the parties backing down long before violence starts. As Grossman pointed out in “On Killing” even major battles are far more often won by display than by combat.

-A professional can finish an encounter quickly by jumping steps. In other words, if the threat is on any step below four and you take physical, decisive action, he will be unprepared. His mind expects all of the steps to be done before things get physical.

PSYCHOLOGICAL RULES

#1: You don’t know if you can do it ‘til you’ve done it. Despite all the posturing and talk, most normal humans could not kill another human. Maybe by pushing a button, certainly not up close and personal. Col. Grossman estimates that less than 2% of the population (whom he terms ‘aggressive sociopaths’) can kill without serious psychological repercussions, if at all,other than under extreme stress.

On a more personal level, one of the defining moments in a new officer’s career is the first big fight. There are three types of people: some run to the fight, some run away and some freeze. Despite any fantasy, bragging or even true confidence no one knows which category they are in until the first time. That’s why all old timers watch the new guy.

There is one more category- the one who can walk to the fight, but that seems to be a matter of experience.

FACE CONTACT

In our culture, adults do not touch other adult’s faces. When it happens, it is a sign of great intimacy. Adults may, however, touch children’s heads and that makes it very powerful. Touching another adult’s face is a show of extreme dominance, showing that the toucher considers the recipient a child. Just tousling hair can cause extreme feelings of humiliation.

This has evolved in the prisons into a systematic attack- the “Bitch slap”. A slap to the face, properly executed, can be physically devastating. Even without proper technique it can be psychologically debilitating, shocking the victim into a child mentality, paralyzed and submissive.

This taboo is so strong that many people freeze when they strike another person in the face even in sparring. You may also.

TALKING

Talking and attacking appear to be wired separately. What I mean is that I have never seen someone throw a sucker punch, no matter how subtle, while talking normally. Yelling, sucking in breath, suddenly silent, yes. Not talking. Right now, try to hold a normal conversation with your monitor. Talk about the weather. Throw a punch without a give-away in your voice. I can’t do it. Haven’t met anybody who can. New training goal.

Conversely, while the threat is talking is almost always a free shot. It seems to take a small amount of time to switch from conversation mode to defense mode.

FEEDING FRENZY

Remember the Monkey Dance, dominance, non-lethal jazz? That all goes out the window when attacked by a group. You’re no longer a part of the contest to see who is the bigger monkey. The contest is between the members of the group and they will be competing on your body.

PREDATORY VIOLENCE

Though most martial arts train pretty well for the Monkey Dance, true predatory violence is another animal altogether. If a predator has targeted you, it is because he sees you as prey and he will stack everything in his favor. You will be smaller and weaker, injured or tired, distracted, unprepared. You will not see the first attack. You will not see the weapon. You will probably be injured before you are aware of being attacked. It will happen at a place and time of the predators choosing. Nothing will be in your favor. The initial assault will knock most people over the 175 BPM mark instantly, leaving only an uncontrolled, flailing berserk or a stumbling sprint as options.

Defending against the predatory attack, in my opinion, should be the aim of serious self-defense training. It is entirely different than training for the Monkey Dance. Not one instructor in fifty realizes that. You need to realize it.

LawDawg Talks

Talked to the LawDawg the other night. It was brief. It sounded like he was between domestic assignments, but the essence...

Pros and amateurs deal with things differently. They think about things differently. Most of what amateurs default to, in interpersonal violence, are mistakes from the pro's point of view. If the threat is expecting you to do something (your natural default) doing that expected something is just ...stoopid.

So LD pointed out that when Monkey Dance violence starts to kick up, the monkeys playing go head to head... but the pros don't. Unless they get hooked emotionally, almost all pros create distance and time. The MD will burn itself out if you don't feed it.

Get it? Amateur response to Monkey Dancing is to stand up, squarely, to the challenge. Pros get out of there. NOT because it is dangerous, but because it is meaningless. IF the pro has to deal with the monkey dancer (not the MD itself, but if, for some reason, we have to take down someone who incidentally is Monkey Dancing) we do it from surprise (usually skipping steps in the dance is all you need) and break a lot of other 'rules' too, like getting to the guy's back. That allows us to use a lower level of force than we would need if we let it escalate to a fist fight.

If something suddenly turns lethal, say a guy who appears to be Monkey Dancing pulls a knife, the amateur gets the hell out of there. I can't speak for all pros, (there's a continuum of skill and commitment) but the good operators I know immediately close on a lethal threat. This goes for the military as well-- the response to an ambush is to immediately counterattack into the ambush.

It may be counter-intuitive, it may clash with our instincts, but it is the option with the best chance of survival. The bad guy expects you to run when he pulls a knife. That is part of his plan. If his plan was to let you go, then running will work. If not, it is much easier to kill someone when you can't see his eyes and he isn't trying to smack your brainstem and break your knee.

In the cases that deal with violence, the amateur and professional responses are nearly opposite. Then, in dueling-based martial arts systems, it seems like the solution is to refine the amateur response. It kind of works-- if you can apply extreme skill to the stupid option you might still win, but it doesn't magically turn it into the smart option. And maybe that's why it takes years to learn to win versus days, because you are starting from a stupid premise and have tons to overcome.

Maybe. Everything is speculation.

But the professional point of view is actually pretty simple. The amateur's is intuitive, the professional's is logical. Since training is largely a cognitive game, I can't help but think that the professional's point of view could be learned side by side with the techniques of a system.

Like a Criminal

Updated the website to include information on Boston and Billings, Montana. With Seattle, that will be three seminars in October.

Boston

Billings

Seattle

Still working on getting NYC or NJ going, which would be a fourth October gig. Crazy busy, but cool. San Francisco/Oakland next weekend. Enough with the crass commercial announcements.

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I'm toying with an idea that is either too obvious or too dumb, and I'm not sure which. At the Crossing the Pond event in Seattle, I noticed that almost all the instructors were advocating getting off line. I made a big point that got attention: "It is easier to beat people up from behind them." Did anyone not know that? Really?

Kris Wilder, in "The Way of Kata" made the point that almost all of the Goju-ryu kata are designed to get you to the enemy's flank, to the position I call the dead zone. That sweet spot behind the threat's elbow where he can't effectively put any attacks on you without your permission (actually, I'm working on some options in the VPPG) and you have all your fire power plus the ability to screw with his center of gravity and structure.

So we were all teaching it and some of the stuff was so obvious/stupid that it was almost embarrassing to mention. And yet almost every time a drill moved towards contact, almost every time the students and even some of the instructors were working with a partner, feet would reverse or movement would change and the students wound up fighting face-to-face.

The instinct to as Marc puts it, go straight up the middle, seems pretty powerful. And many still do it, even when they know it is stupid. Even when they have just been given and reinforced tools for taking the back.

When I look at systems, how many work at getting the back? Some of the grappling systems, of course... but in others, a face-down pin (which is as good as it gets, in real life) don't even count. How many have been taught, formally to get behind the enemy? And of those, who practices it and when does instinct take over and keep them in the kill zone, practicing for sport or duel and imagining combat?

It's in the kata. That long step followed by a 90 degree pivot takes you off line and puts you on the flank. But the McDojo master says you are turning to face a new opponent. Whatever.

Playing with the words "fight like a criminal"- what does that mean? Take every advantage you can. Don't cripple yourself with allegiance to imaginary rules or expectations. Get the job done, safely. Practically- get behind. Use a weapon. Get surprise. Get numbers on your side. Choose to attack the small, weak and unprepared. Start friendly.

And almost all of them are the exact opposite of what is taught i martial arts and self-defense courses. "That's not martial arts! That's ...that's ...that's just beating people up!"

Who brought that distinction to the table, I wonder?

Busy Boy

Hmmm. Looks like the blog broke 100 followers. That's cool.

Working to get two October seminars set up on the East Coast. It's actually short notice, but I think/hope it can work. I really want to do a bar brawl with some of the Boston crew. That will be a blast for everybody. Also trying to set one up near NYC, probably on the Jersey shore.

San Francisco (Oakland, technically) is coming up in two weeks. The venue looks very cool. It will be a chance to see Maija and Mariusz again as well as maybe meet Scott. Talk more with Dale and E. and Earl and Raj and...

Seattle is a go for October 23-24. Should be fun. And Brent can help me with that retarded looking kick.

Also getting something on the Wyoming/Montana border. Date is set, but I don't know the venue or whether it will be open.

October is shaping up to be a big month. Toby is going to be doing another survival weekend, this time in Massachusetts, and that's always fun. It's also a big incentive to go to the East Coast.

Steve Miller is setting up a "Jam Session" September 18-19. I may be dropping in. KJ will be there, and that's always good.

Hope to see some of you here, there and everywhere.