On Being Wronged and Maintaining Balance

The martial artist who practices balance will inevitably alienate most types of people they encounter.  The prudent will find them too permissive while the imprudent will find them too organized.  As such, a proper martial artist finds themselves assailed by vicious contradictory appraisals.  One will know they have achieved the pinnacle of balance by the diversity of their enemies, as evil assumes many forms in opposing a unified good.

You know you are walking the martial path in perfect balance when you are called too peaceful and too aggressive, too organized and too disorderly, too respectful and too flippant, too indulgent and too ascetic, too strong and too flexible, too emotional and too logical, too sexual and too celibate, and too loyal and too independent.  These paradoxical appraisals will begin to haunt an otherwise contented existence until one is tempted to succumb to the criticisms of one side or the other. 

When your gentleness has been met with savagery, your humor with dry antagonism, your love with hate, your care with recklessness, your inclusiveness with bigotry, your patriotism with treachery, and your good work destroyed utterly, you have finally reached the apex of martial development in the western world.  You will be feared and shunned, even as you inflict no harm and reject no one.

Paradoxically, though one could follow the iron rule by smashing unjust violence with righteous self defense, one can also defuse an injustice by applying an injustice in turn: granting the greatest gifts of mercy to the worst transgressors.  Thus the martial way does not split into opposition, but resolves into a unified paradox.  Peace as an end requires peaceful means.  It also requires violent means.  One's balance determines one's path.  It is possible to both lose and win.  Resolution is unnecessary.

Rational Self Control vs. Releasing the Animal Spirit

The martial arts can be tailored to suit one's life needs, and the conditions of one's life will influence preferred training methods.  The strain between rigid self discipline and emotional expression will always pervade one's training and there exist two ways of accommodating the animal side of human beings.

On one hand, the animalism inherent in conflict can be restrained, redirected, or soothed to peace.  Tai Chi and the internal martial arts put a leash on the inner animal when they teach how to control one's emotions.  This process begins with the direct civilization of the body's movements.  Every movement becomes an opportunity to practice increasingly intricate self control and discipline of one's body.  When the movements of the body are thus controlled, it becomes possible to develop combative prowess through the civilization of battle.  This process ends in the development of moral self restraint and the valuation of harmony, balance, or kuzushi.  By this method, the hunger for war is defeated in oneself, thus encouraging peaceful resolutions to conflict and the bravery that comes with moral certainty.  This method of training for battle is based on the notion that the fighter does not instinctively know the martial way and must discover the path through rigorous self cultivation.

To nurture this rational approach to self cultivation, asceticism and self denial become important abilities.  Fasting, exercise, meditation, and focused practice become a way of life which leads one to peaceful solitude.

By contrast, animalism can be unrestrained as completely as possible with strangely similar results for character development.  Such liberation training encourages instinctive physical responses to conflict and gradually enables the individual to take a life.  When an individual progresses to the point that they can take a life intuitively in the stress of physical conflict, they have fully expressed inner animalism.  In the throes of unwanted physical savagery, such an individual does not think, but acts out of immediate self love to preserve their safety and apply immediate physical retribution to an attacker.  This benchmark of capability begins as a selfish desire to secure one's survival and ends as an acknowledgement of the rights of all people to be safe from attack.  A savage warrior is first a brute, then an enforcer, then a politician, then a philosopher.  As such, unleashing the inner animal also cultivates rational self control, albeit through a more circuitous path.  This method of living the martial way presupposes that the animal side of oneself intuitively understands the martial way and must be freed to pursue it.

To nurture the animal side, one should fight, fuck, move naturally, and more fully exemplify emotional honesty.  These are the only necessary and sufficient conditions for animalistic martial development.  To better walk this path, trade calisthenics for endurance pad work and sparring.  Trade brinksmanship and self control for sex with actual partners and do not restrain lust or hunger.  Learn to crawl, jump, climb, and swim effortlessly and with great authority.  Express your anger, fear, cheerfulness, and sadness honestly in complete harmony with the present situation (no sadness during times of plenty; no cheerfulness during times of austerity).  Soon, you will fully express your animal proclivities and repeated conflict will develop your discretion.

Egoism, Cultural Conscription, or Moral Exemplification? The Higher Purposes of the Martial Arts.

One obstacle to the pursuit of the martial arts as an expression of the martial way is a lack of clear purpose in training.  Philosophically, self defense can defend either the selfish interests of the individual, the cultural interests of a collective, or the universal interests of moral principle depending on how broadly the self is defined.

Mediocre martial training merely helps one defend oneself against attack.  Good martial training helps one defend one's culture against invasion.  But superior self defense helps one defend the moral right, regardless of personal interest or cultural convention.

A training studio of mediocre quality produces trainees capable of competently repelling, reversing, or even initiating attack without any discussion of whether initiation of force is justified.  Nietzsche's morality of power holds sway in such a dojo, resulting in strong willed, impulsive, dangerous trainees who feed into the cycle of violence and ultimately encourage its end by amplifying the consequences of conflict to their opponents.  The outcome of this training remains positive, even as the effects of this training on character development remain negative.  Reality based martial arts exemplify this acultural, amoral, and acontextual focus on defense of the physical self above all other considerations.

A training studio of good quality produces culturally aware trainees who exemplify the best social traits of a collective.  The Japanese dojo constitutes a culturally conscripting training environment in which individual trainees are enlisted as the physical and philosophical protectors of a specific cultural lineage and way of life.  Such training values hierarchy, tradition, and character development above physical power or martial efficacy.  In this setting, defense of a cultural people and way of life dominate over individual concerns.  Korean Hwa Rang Do constitutes one example of cultural conscription as a dominant goal of training.

A training studio of superior quality produces individually, culturally, and morally awakened trainees who have surpassed conventions, arbitrary affiliations, and provincial interests to explore the universal truths of conflict.  These individuals defend not only themselves and their cultures, but the very principles of honor, loyalty, respect, and human dignity.  They place moral principle above personal fate or cultural survival and do not fight so much as express universal truth.  They do not defeat opponents, but conflict itself.  Such warriors have surpassed the myopic battles for status, safety, and cultural affiliation.  They have merged their interests with the interests of the universe: the resolution of conflict and the expression of the natural order over artificial schemes.  The Shaolin temple, the Knights Templar, and other monastic warrior groups as they are idealized in art embody the moral exemplification of the martial arts.

Reality Based Self Defense: Implementing a Self Defense Laboratory

In order for a chosen training method to qualify as reality based self defense, certain parameters must apply.  These include:

1.  Free sparring, in which the only limitation is to avoid irreversibly injuring a partner.  Bruising, sprains, nosebleeds, and even mild fractures are to be considered necessary evils incurred in the process of removing restraints from the training setting.  These injuries are to be avoided when possible, and accepted as necessary risks when suffered.

2.  Minimal protective gear.  Bulky gloves and pads serve only to limit mobility and reduce the sensation of taking a full contact blow.  They also teach lack of control.

3.  The inclusion, where possible, of simulated weaponry in both offensive and defensive roles.

4.  The suspension or removal of hierarchical divisions between trainees to facilitate fighting 'honestly' with higher ranking partners.

5.  Continuation of the sparring session until a specified duration or technical goal has been reached.

6.  The continuous alteration of environmental factors including obstacles, corners, lighting, and angles of attack.

Such training should not constitute the sum total of training time, as this practice will develop timidity, hyperreactivity, and a predisposition toward avoidance in actual self defense.  Too much reality based training can motivationally burn out a trainee and reinforce bad habits while too little can result in overconfidence and glaring technical weak points which can be exploited by a skilled opponent.

When training in a controlled setting, a trainee should feel empowered and indestructible.  When training in a realistic sparring scenario, a trainee should feel humbled and even fragile.

The best implementation of reality based training should be as a self defense laboratory in which rehearsed skills can be tested for efficacy.  Inadequate techniques can be readily exposed against a resisting opponent.

This author has learned much from removing the veil of false confidence, false safety, and false comfort provided in structured rehearsed training, such as:

*one handed gun disarms work very differently from two handed disarms, which require greater control and a reduced margin of error.
*knife disarms are nearly impossible before an opponent has been immobilized, even against an untrained opponent.
*kicks can provide distraction and distance, but can be easily caught if they extend above hip level.
*The single most effective knife attack is also, unfortunately, one of the most common and least discussed in self defense.  The sewing machine consists of firmly grabbing an opponent's shoulder with one hand while vigorously stabbing their torso with the other.  Once grabbed, a victim is very likely to be repeatedly cut or stabbed.  Distance is the best defense against a knife wielding opponent.  The best likely outcome of knife defense is deep cutting of the arms and significant blood loss.

The reader is encouraged to nurture their humility by training outside the safe confines of structured routines in the chaotic realm of reality based scenarios.

Quieting Inner Enemies

In psychology, there exists a notion of 'stimming out,' or nonfunctional self stimulation.  This blog itself could be seen as a form of self stimming, as the author receives no financial or social reward for updating its contents.  Self stimulation can be neutral, in the case of hand flapping, damaging, in the case of head banging, or beneficial, in the case of solitary physical fitness.

One can conceptualize certain inner cognitions as damaging self stimulation when they promote maladaptive behaviors or block adaptive behaviors.  Thoughts related to the opinions of others, one's powerlessness, and one's negative feelings can act as a form of self injury maintained through automatic reinforcement.  Such stims must be actively opposed by the sufferer in order to regain positive self stims associated with improved moral and physical health.

In a real sense, defeating outer enemies is merely a matter of defeating inner enemies of maladaptive cognition.  Every opponent wages psychological warfare by encouraging one to abandon adaptive thoughts for maladaptive ones.  Refuse to believe the opponent's frame of reference, and they cannot defeat you internally, even as they seem to claim an external victory.

It is the author's hope that the writings here serve as a beneficial form of self stimulation that can help guide readers along the martial path.

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.

On Krav Maga: The Artless Martial Art

To date, the lessons I've learned from Krav Maga and other military based arts become more simple and less numerous.  In short, the prime directive of Krav Maga is much in keeping with bear style kung fu: grow enormously muscular and aggressive while learning to mortally injure opponents as quickly as possible through sheer brutality.

For a rank beginner, these objectives satisfy basic self defense needs with minimal training time.  Almost no criminal, authority, or warrior wishes to engage a highly muscular, aggressive, efficient opponent who uses anger as fuel.

In elemental terms, the use of anger as fuel is much in keeping with fire while imposing bodily development exemplifies earth.  One might call Krav Maga magma: an unrestrained meltdown of aggression made more efficient through training.  Though the military application of such an approach is evident, the potential for moral damage to a practitioner is very real.  Magma does not cool like mere earth or extinguish like fire, but recirculates, consuming all it touches indiscriminately.

Since training in Krav Maga, this author has sometimes lost control of anger with even complete strangers.  These confrontations have remained nonphysical through sheer force of will learned elsewhere, such as through water arts.  This violent disposition is acceptable for a soldier, but not a civilian, and certainly not a warrior of disciplined self restraint.

Even in animal terms, Krav Maga's bear style leanings force some limitations on practitioners.  The bear is not known for flexibility, subtlety, grace, intelligence, or dexterity, and these limitations are evident in high level Krav Maga practitioners.

The most severe limitation of any martial system may be the exclusive focus on damaging opponents rather than improving practitioners physically, psychologically, and morally.  True warriors of the martial path hold the burden of compensating for the flaws in their chosen systems to achieve the elemental ideals of tiger or metal: a refined balance of all martial virtues.  Krav Maga exemplifies all the deadliness and none of the life of the martial arts.  It is eminently martial, yet completely artless.