False Confidence: Power Without Humility

One major dilemma present in martial training concerns the necessity of teaching proper confidence to students balanced by proper respect and humility.  In a purely civilized context it may well be appropriate for a dojo or fighting gym to merely teach students proper respect and restraint and little else, as there can be no excess of respect in a civilization.  However, when preparing students for uncivilized conflict, it becomes imperative to remove restraints on aggression to ensure decisive action by cultivating a taste for righteous victory.  Therefore character development in the martial way seeks a balance between power, so that a learner need fear no evil, and humility, so that no good or weak person need fear them.

In the modern physical culture of the west, power without humility has become a standard training modality with troubling implications for martial development.  Paraphrasing Steve Maxwell in a recent podcast with Mike Mahler, everyone wants to feel like a fighter, but no one wants to get punched in the face to earn it.  This reality is seen in countless 'empowerment centers' such as CrossFit, self defense classes without sparring, New Age feel good yoga, and other forms of martial development which bolster confidence at the expense of humility.  Some of these training methods even explicitly accept this imbalance (In CrossFit, a trainee becomes 'unfuckwithable' or 'elite,' in Krav Maga trainees learn to hit hard, but rarely ever sustain blows (at least in litigious western cultures), and in New Age yoga, false inner divinity is often prematurely embraced before proper knowledge of austerity).  The result is that martial training for most individuals has the effect of amplifying their worst character traits (impulsivity, narcissism, aggression) while diminishing their best (patience, humility, mercy).

Teaching power without an anchor of humility would be bad enough if it merely produced obnoxious, hyperaggressive paper tigers, but worse yet, it sets a dangerous precedent in training.  By only training in situations where one feels confident, one can overlook situations of clear disadvantage.  A Krav Maga class encouraging one to attack multiple opponents has failed to teach proper retreat or escape.  A CrossFit class encouraging personal records at the expense of gradual progression has failed to teach injury prevention or rehabilitation.

Power without humility develops false confidence that is dangerously likely to set a trainee on a path of conflict, disappointment, weakness, and defeat.

By contrast, consider a simple program of progressive calisthenics such as Convict Conditioning, which requires many months of wall, counter, and knee pushups before a trainee 'earns' the ability to perform full pushups on the floor.  Such a program develops a strong sense of humility and physical limitation by pushing trainees to their physical limits on allegedly 'easy' exercises.  One month of such humbling work can have better effects on a person's character than years of false confidence developed by forcing out pushups with bad form.  When paired with martial arts training, such a program can nearly ensure proper adherence to the martial way by ingraining restraint, patience, and perseverance into one's character.  This author credits such training as a key attribute underscoring numerous educational, professional, and interpersonal victories, any of which could have been easily lost to insufficient patience, humility, or mercy.