Kill It Simple, Stupid

Violence is simple.

How simple is it?  We can answer that with two more questions:

1)  How is it that untrained people prevail? and

2)  How is it that untrained people prevail over trained people?

Because for all their blissful naïveté, the victorious untrained have a firm grip on the tool of violence.  This fact stands because violence is much simpler than people would have you believe; it’s much simpler than you want to believe.  The idea that violence is difficult and requires years of training—and that years of training will protect you from the untrained—are comfortable, comforting thoughts.  I read somewhere once that the little lies we tell ourselves on a daily basis, the small untruths that shape our subjective realities, are what keep us happy.  That the people who see the world and themselves as it “really is” are the clinically depressed.  Accepting the simplicity of violence is an unpalatable dose of hard reality.  To learn that you are never immune and that someone who is completely and conspicuously untrained can murder you is acutely unsettling.  Even depressing.

If, that is, you’re a blood-bucket-is-half-empty kind of person.

I like to look at it from the other side—the blood bucket is half full, and I’m going to use him to fill it the rest of the way up.  If violence is so simple that even the untrained can use it and prevail, then even a little bit of training is going to make you really, really good at it.  And if you’re reading this, you’ve already had a lotta bit of training.  You’re way better than you think, if only you’d let yourself be.  (To wit:  You know far more about wrecking people than a serial killer does.  The only thing that could possibly hold you back is a lack of intent; what the serial killer lacks in technique he more than makes up for with a monomaniacal will to get the job done at all costs.  But you already knew that.)

Violence is much simpler, even, than we present it to be.  We have spent a lot of time teasing out the common elements and finding ways to communicate them to you.  It comes across as a ton of material that people mistakenly believe they must master before they can be effective.  For all that, we’re only ever really talking about the rock to the head… and what is the rock to the head but a big hunk of kinetic energy driven through a vulnerable target?

Everything else is just detail work, an exploration of all possible combinations and configurations for using your body as a human wrecking machine, with and without snap-on tools.  Violence seems complicated if you think this detail work is required to be effective, if you think you need a black belt before you can seriously injure someone.

Forget everything you think you know about how it should go down:  violence is you injuring people.  It’s throwing yourself at them to break things inside of them—you are the bull in their anatomical china shop.  Violence is you violating every tenet of polite society and destroying the only thing that any of us ever really own.

It’s simpler than you think because it has nothing to do with thinking.

Violence is all in the doing.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr (from 2006)