Rabbit v. Wolf Archives - Injury Dynamics

The Illusion of Fighting

January 8, 2025/0 Comments/in Rabbit v. Wolf/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

Violence starts at the top of the stairs—and only goes in one direction.

The back-and-forth that people seek in violence comes from two different ideas: 1) self-defense, and 2) a sport- and media-reinforced expectation of back-and-forth.

“Self-defense” says nothing about the other person. There’s just the self, and then working to keep yourself from harm. As an operational construct this kind of thinking makes it difficult to reach out into the fog beyond the borders of your own personal space and make the switch to you doing things to him. Think of the focus of effort as imaginary arrows—when you’re worried about what’s going to happen to you, some of the arrows point back at yourself, and retard the flow of focus outward (the arrows pointing at him, for things like actually hurting him). This gums up the whole process and has you working at cross-purposes. When both people are doing this, it looks like a classic “fight”.

The lucky thing for all of us—in terms of living a relatively peaceful life—is that very few people have experience with real, effective violence. This means that the vast majority take their cues for how violence works from sport and movies. In sport, the goal is to have a competition, to determine a winner through a process of rules—not to resort to the state of nature and put someone in the hospital or morgue. The perfect match would have both competitors able to compete again, and soon. In movies, real violence is too quick to build any kind of dramatic tension, and would be over before you looked back up from your popcorn. It is necessary, then, to have the engagement go on long enough to catch your attention, ratchet up the stakes, and build the drama toward a satisfying catharsis (the hero wins—or loses if we’re in the second act).

Effective violence is “nasty, brutish, and short”. It’s over before it really gets started, and ends up being shockingly anticlimactic. It only goes in one direction, driven by the person causing harm. (All arrows pointing in the same direction through him.) This is why the motto of violence is the opposite of the Hippocratic Oath: primum nocere (“first do harm”). Initial contact needs to be pathological, and then we stay close to do it again… and again… and again… We shove him down the stairs and then stay right on top of him to make sure he interacts with every step. We are the shove, we are the steps, we are gravity. We never part—we only meet, over and over again, until we are done.

We can see this in videos of effective violence—contact, overrun, stomping—which is exactly what we want our mat time to look and feel like.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr

Being the Better Monster

September 10, 2024/0 Comments/in Rabbit v. Wolf/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

In “Building a Better Monster”, I talked about how people build up insanely powerful adversaries (bigger, faster, stronger) and place them in impossible scenarios (it was a dark and stormy night, he has night-vision goggles and a gun that shoots chainsaws) and then ask, “How do I deal with that?” My advice was, essentially, build him up and then be him. Everyone gets the building up part—we’re all experts in that even before we walk through the door to train. The question is, of course, how to best get it done?

The short answer is: Figure out why you’ve decided it’s going to work for him.

And the even shorter answer to that is: INJURY. But you already knew that.

The long answer is: When you build the better monster you’ve already decided that he’s going to do something to you that you’re worried you cannot prevent and will have a poor outcome for you.

We can pick that apart to find the salient points, the places where you have recognized (consciously or not) several truths about violence:

1) He is going to do things to you.

This has two important components—the recognition that he has intent and resides in the cause state.

2) You can’t stop what he is doing.

This is recognition that blocking is a sucker’s game, that being in the effect state is not nearly as effective as being in the cause state.

3) Injury will make you helpless.

This is the “poor outcome” you fear—you get injured, go down and get more injured in a downward spiral that can only really bottom out with death.

The real trick to make this self-defeating process worth your while is to flip it inside out—you’ve built your monster, you’ve figured out why it’s going to work for him, now all you have to do is put yourself in the position of this impossible person. Think like the predator you are and resolve yourself to making the realities of violence work for you instead of against you:

1) You are going to do things to him.

2) He can’t stop what you’ve already done.

3) Injury will make him helpless.

Now you see how the two of you are interchangeable—the driver’s seat of violence is up for grabs and belongs to the first person to buckle in and romp on the gas. The other person gets run over and leaves a star on the windshield.

Which leads us, through the clumsiest of segues, to the fact that no one is immune to violence, and what that reality does for him. And can do for you…

People seek training because what they really want is immunity from violence. It’s not the idea of doing it they find appealing, but the idea of preventing it. I know this was true for me. But then we give them an ugly, unpopular truth: Nothing can make you immune and you’re on your own. You’re either going to injure him, put him down and savage him on the ground or he’s going to do it to you. You’re not going to have superior, “no can defend” technique or superhuman abilities. It’s just going to be you and your willingness to tear another human being apart. You’re very probably going to take a beating in the process, and you can, whether through inaction, miscalculation, or just plain dumb luck end up on the receiving end of the tool of violence. No matter how hard and long you train, you can be murdered.

This is the bitterest pill to swallow. It leads to all sorts of “Well, what’s the point then?” questions. If I can end up just as dead with or without training, why bother? This disconnect is the same one that often occurs for people with firearms—they believe that somehow the gun will “protect” them, not realizing that they are going to have to shoot someone to death to make it work… and it’s even worse with knives. It’s going to be messy and noisy and scary well beyond what you can imagine. But the end result is, after a fashion, “defense” in that dead people can’t hurt you.

So why bother? Well, prior to training you were rolling dice. We show you how to play the game with loaded dice—you end up with an edge. That edge is only going to mean anything if you accept the inborn frailty of your body as you harden your mind to the task at hand: you, crippling another person for life. There is nothing you can do to make your body immune to injury; the only thing you can change is the intent in your head.

It’s going to work for him because he wants to cause injury and throws everything he has into making that idea a reality. He has intent. It’s going to work for him because he is acting on the realities of violence as they stand—he is going to use what works and get it done first because he knows no one is immune… he is acting on the fact that he can be taken. This is why he hits first, why he wades in and goes for broke. He knows if he breaks you first, he is far less likely to have any of it done to him. He knows if he waits he’s done for.

This is why you fear him. It is also the key to unlocking the power that causes that fear, the key to harnessing it and making his super-scary power your own.

Turn it inside out and wear it instead of having it wear on you.

Be what you fear.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr (from 2006)

Building a Better Monster

September 3, 2024/0 Comments/in Rabbit v. Wolf/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

Invariably, we get questions along the lines of “Okay, I get all the violence stuff—but what if he’s bigger-faster-stronger or [your favorite celebrity masher here] or has a knife-stick-gun-three guns?”

That’s a great question. Or it would be if that’s what they really meant. More often than not people build a monster in their head around a single overarching fear… And that fear is—

Not to be revealed until the end.

In the meantime, let’s take a look at some specifics:

When people look at a larger, stronger man what they’re really registering is his potential ability to generate power. He could pick you up and throw you across the room, right? Heck, he could probably kill you with a refrigerator if you tried to run away. What they ignore is that though he may have more human tissue than you, he’s still made of meat. And meat can be butchered.

Fast and skilled fall into the same category—the desire for a duel. This typically comes from people who are worried about “getting in”. This is particularly funny as I’ve never seen a prison murder where the participants had any difficulty getting in on each other; I’m sure this idea would make serial killers shrug as well. In short, professionals who use violence in their day-to-day are conspicuously unconcerned with getting in. And so should you be.

But what if he’s armed? Well, if I have a knife and he has a knife, I stab the knife, right? Of course not. So why the hell does this make a difference if he has a tool and I’m using fists and boots? It just means you’ll beat him to nonfunctional instead of shooting or stabbing him to nonfunctional.

Ah, but now we’re getting to the super-secret fear that is hidden at the core of the issue—these questions are all saying:

“I’m afraid he has the intent to do what I won’t.”

Everyone builds a better monster around the idea of superior intent. The bigger-faster-stronger smokescreen is just worry that he’s turned up willing to deliver a serious beating that ends in a brutal curbing while you’re just there to look hard or have a manly slap-fight. You know, the kind where no one really gets hurt.

The tool, though, now that’s different. When he pulls out a labor-saving device whose sole purpose is to rend meat and break bones, well now he’s showing superior intent—intent you’re worried you can’t match. If you’re just there to posture and look the part—if you’re just there for a duel to teach someone a lesson, then what the hell is he up to with that man-mangler? We all know the answer to that. Everyone recognizes, on a visceral level, that the armed man is displaying intent they themselves lack.

That’s what everyone’s afraid of. Superior intent. All the sideways questions, all the building of better monsters is just dancing around this issue—what if he’s here to kill me? I mean, really this time? The recognition that this just might be so, and you can’t or won’t match it, intent-wise, is the core fear that everyone harbors.

The dull toll of fear echoing in the intent gap is what I hear whenever anyone asks one of these questions. They’re not even consciously aware of it. They’ll deny it when pressed.

My advice is to build your better monster—bigger, faster, stronger, meaner, armed in a dark alley. Add in a dash of rainy, moonless night. Pile it on.

And then become him.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr (from 2006)

Everyone’s a Badass

March 28, 2024/0 Comments/in Rabbit v. Wolf/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

(Note: Much of this revolves around intermale aggression, male power fantasies, and the paleolithic kabuki of male dominance rituals—but the message at the end is good for everyone, I promise.)

Human societies are fascinated with strength and power, especially obvious personal power: height, musculature, and a hair-trigger willingness to do violence are eternally impressive to us. We all desire what those attributes grant the possessor—to be respected, to inspire awe, and, perhaps, fear. When we are intimidated, we feel all those things acutely, most of all the gut-snarling fear. We feel it, and we want to make others feel those things, too. We feel it and realize we don’t want to confront the intimidating person… and wouldn’t that feeling be a very useful thing to project? Only if you want to take it to the physical, to have to use violence to back up your newfound badass attitude more often than you’d like. Intimidation is like juggling 13 double-edged swords and playing with fire simultaneously.

For our purposes we’re going to define “intimidation” as the antisocial process of going out of your way to make someone afraid of you. Most people take this a step further, not stopping at mere fear but going headlong into humiliation. Once they realize they’ve made someone afraid, they will typically push it and rub it in to humiliate the affected person.

(As an interesting aside, it’s a common truth that people who use intimidation as a social tool tend to do the things that intimidate them—they will project the behaviors that they, themselves, fear most.)

Why is intimidation so dangerous? Because it can get you killed, whether you fail or succeed. If you fail to intimidate the man, you have just escalated the situation—by saying, in effect, “Do you want me to hurt you?”—and now, unimpressed, he’s calling your bluff. If he’s the kind of guy who responds to threats with physical action, then it’s on. You just called it down upon yourself because you wanted to be a badass.

Usually, it’s not going to be a problem—if it went physical all the time very few people would do it, right? The problem is the people who get set off by this are the worst kind… and I hope I don’t have to tell you that choosing to escalate a screaming match to a life-or-death situation is asinine.

Let’s say you succeed in intimidating him. Mission accomplished, right? You put him in his place, you showed him (and everyone in earshot) who’s boss, you made him feel afraid. How could that possibly go wrong?

Yeah, I know—it’s a rhetorical question.

Let’s flip it around: He succeeded in intimidating you, he made you feel afraid. Maybe even made you feel afraid for your life. How do you respond? You know how to handle the physical side; you can take it there in a blink of an eye and shut him off. Maybe you just feel socially embarrassed and walk away. Or maybe you knock him down, knee him in the face and stomp on his head until he’s nonfunctional. Who can say? It’s going to be decided on a case-by-case basis.

What if you make him feel afraid? Most people will back down and disengage, usually while making even more noise than before. But there are some, the worst out there, who will take it as a threat and work to destroy that threat. They may go off instantaneously, or they may simmer for hours, days, months. In the long-term case, you probably won’t have the luxury of seeing it coming. And if you truly terrified them, they’re going to want to do things to even the odds—bringing accomplices and firearms, say. So, succeed or fail, intimidation can get you killed. It’s a sucker’s game.

“But Chris,” you say, “If I’m not intimidating then I’m prey!”

Let’s make a quick clarification here: the opposite of being intimidating is not the same as appearing meek, weak, or helpless—it’s simply not registering as prey. Looking like you know what you’re doing, that you are aware, yet comfortably unconcerned, is more akin to being socially remote. That is, you’ve got the NO SOLICITING sign out without being a jerk about it. Appearing unimpressed and unafraid is not the same as trying to be intimidating. You can project the confidence that you can handle yourself without threatening anyone.

A high order social skill? Probably one of the highest. And for many people, elusive. But it’s a lot less harrowing than running around being intimidating, which is exhausting and scary at the same time. I think of it like this: “Go out of your way to get to the rest of your day.” When in the social arena, be social, use your social skills, and treat everyone like people. In the asocial arena treat everyone like meat. Don’t confuse the two.

It doesn’t mean you have to be everyone’s friend, a pushover, or smile at daily human ugliness. It can be as simple as biting your tongue instead of spitting fuel on the fire. Of course, the hard part is if you’re successful, you’ll never know it. You’ll never even be aware of the trouble you’ve dodged—you can only know the trouble you’ve caused.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr (from 2007)

Splitting Hairs or Splitting Heads: The Semantics of Violence

March 19, 2024/1 Comment/in Rabbit v. Wolf/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

There is nothing sexy about beating a man to death with a claw hammer.

Okay, let’s rewind a little bit. Once upon a time I had two very different (and yet not so) conversations about what it is that we do. The first one involved a grandmother and her very young grandson who just happened to be walking by class while we had the big door rolled up. She looked extremely uneasy, the child even more so.

“What is this?” she asked, eyes wide.

“It’s the intelligent use of violence as a survival tool,” I replied.

“Like self-defense? Like when you’re in trouble?”

I hesitated. I wanted to say “No, more like breaking people,” but she had asked with such hope in her voice, as in, I sure do hope this isn’t what my gut is telling me it is—please reassure me. So I blinked and let it go.

“Yes,” I said, “it’s exactly like that.”

Her face flushed with relief. It wasn’t what the awful knot in her gut said it was. These were sane people after all.

The second conversation occurred at my (then young) son’s weekly piano lesson. It turned out that I went to high school with one of the teachers, and when he realized this he googled me to see what I’d been up to for the previous 20 years.

“So, you’re still doing that martial arts thing?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I nodded, “but it’s not martial arts anymore.”

He frowned. “So it’s like self-defense?”

“No—more like beating a man to death with your bare hands.”

His eyes widened and heads began to turn. The metaphorical needle came off the record and the chatter in the room dipped a bit as people began to tune in to our conversation.

“But you don’t use any weapons.”

Once again, the hopeful inflection in the voice. He wanted me to veer back into something sane, and away from the idea of killing.

I didn’t blink. I gave it to him straight. “Sure we do—you can beat a man to death with a claw hammer or stab him to death with a kitchen knife. It’s all the same.”

That did it. Everyone in the room was listening now. Everyone had questions, and every single one of them was to try to get me to recant, to box me into a corner where I’d have to admit that what I meant was a sane, righteous, defensive use of force to disarm or disable an “attacker”—not the wonton misuse of power to maim, cripple and kill at will.

I was my usual courteous, approachable, informational self—but something told me that future conversations at music class would be strained. Maybe I should have told them it was just kung fu.

Often, when I’m attempting to explain what it is we do, I’m accused of splitting hairs, told that it’s “all just semantics.” That one person’s self-defense is another person’s claw hammer murder. But the ridiculousness of that sentence shows it ain’t so.

I’ve written previously about how socialized people like to fall back on euphemisms to distance themselves from the ugly, brutal reality of what has to happen in violence—namely you seriously injuring another person. Not stopping when they beg you to stop. Not interacting with them as a person, or even an enemy, but as meat to be torn to uselessness.

Describing it in these terms causes (dare I say) violent reactions in lay people as they instantaneously judge you to be adrift without a moral compass, operating at the debased level of the criminal sociopath—in a word, insane.

People parse killing in socially acceptable terms (martial arts, self-defense, etc.), to show other socialized people that they are not “bad”. When someone defies convention and steps out of bounds (“beat a man to death with a claw hammer”), the strong reaction comes from an unconscious, intrinsic understanding that if everyone’s playing by the same rules, we’re all okay. And as soon as someone decides not to, we, the people who play by the rules, are royally fucked.

This social parsing of violence then takes the next step up to seize the moral high ground where we all have permission to behave badly. Witness the “attacker/defender” dichotomy. If you are the defender, you are cleared hot, in pretty much everyone’s mind, to brain the attacker.

The moral high ground is also a cool place to be seen. There you are, on the wind-swept mountain top, beams of blinding righteousness radiating from your head. It’s super-sexy with a double side order of pizzazz. Having a black belt in martial arts impresses friends, and whatnot. Knowing how to kill a man is less cool in most circles. Being ready and willing to do so is another thing entirely.

Maintaining righteousness in the face of simple killing takes a lot of mental gymnastics. Many people advance schema using Animal Farm-esque stand-ins to try to illuminate the roles to be played. White hats and black hats. The protectors and the helpless. Guess what? Those are nice lies we tell ourselves to feel better about what it is we’re training to do.

There is no animal schema, no predator and prey, regardless of which one you think you are.

There are only naked humans, milling about on an infinite gray plane. You’re one of them, and everyone else is stuck in there with you. We all have the same set of advantages and disadvantages. Identical physical constraints and powers. We each possess the most dangerous weapon in the known universe, a human brain.

Everyone, exactly the same on a level playing field. Not comforting in the least, but then, when was the last time reality was comforting?

So how do we talk about it? Let’s look at some of the most common terms, and then I’ll toss mine in. And I promise it’ll be a live psychic grenade.

Martial Arts

This really only works in the ancient Greek sense, as in “the skills required by warriors to make war.” This sense has been completely lost in the modern day (think of the Olympic Decathlon), and I doubt anyone out there thought of “maintaining and operating a cruise missile launcher” when they read the words “martial arts”. More likely than not you thought of your local karate school. And until that kind of training is necessary for serial killers to ply their hobby, it will remain a misnomer for what it is we do.

Self-Defense

This is the next logical step. And yet, “beating a man to death with a claw hammer” tends to strain the definition of self-defense beyond the breaking point. Self-defense requires an attacker; it requires you to be second banana in physical terms (as the lowly, yet much loved defender), but don’t sweat it. ‘Cuz you’ve got the moral high ground, and that awful attacker had no right to be doing these things to you. Good luck, and remember this comforting fact: you are in the right no matter how it all works out.

Beating a man to death with a claw hammer probably isn’t allowed in self-defense, but—funny how the universe works—it may be just the thing that has to happen in order for you to survive. When given the choice between self-defense and survival, let’s all pick survival, shall we?

Fighting

This doesn’t work because it’s too wide open. You can fight with your sibling, your spouse, your boss. On the high end you can fight for your rights; on the low end you can fight for the TV remote. Do any of these uses make you think of stabbing someone in the neck? (I mean other than the TV remote one.)

Fights can have rules and referees. Murders don’t.

Combatives

No. Just no.

Hand-to-Hand Combat

Here we are—down to the hard-nuts, in your face, XXX-TREEEM!!! term. While on the surface it would seem to be the one we want, it’s still somewhat lacking. Hand-to-hand carries with it the connotation of back-and-forth, tit-for-tat. Most people would not readily apply the label to a man being beaten to death with a claw hammer. The question you have to ask yourself is: “Do the people who are best at violence in our society (the criminal sociopaths) truly engage in hand-to-hand combat?” I’ll let you answer that for yourself.

So, what is it we do? What words can ever truly communicate the essence of it?

At a seminar someone asked a foe-specific question about an extremely accomplished combat sports champion. This champion is big and tough and skilled. The question was, “How would you defeat so-and-so?”

To which I replied, without hesitation, “I’d start by hiring someone to shoot his dad.”

And that’s it exactly, rendered as precisely as words will allow.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr (from 2005)

That New Victim Smell

November 19, 2019/0 Comments/in Rabbit v. Wolf/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

If you have the nose for it, it’s more obvious than cartoon stink lines.

One of our Master Instructors, Dave S., went on vacation to San Francisco. A great thing about that city is that unlike most west coast cities, it is almost entirely walkable. He spent a week there with his wife, sans car or cab. It was all feet and open air.

This is a very different way of life for those of us down here in southern California. The San Diego/LA metrosprawl requires a car to get anywhere and so we spend most of our transit time alone and isolated from those around us.

Dave’s experience walking around a city where everybody walks means he saw lots of people every day—a tableau writ full of information for those who can read it. Gait, body language, the way people move when they come into close contact with others. These things tell the story of that person’s interior life, their secret fears and intentions.

In short, who’s a victim and who’s not.

The first words out of his mouth when I asked about his vacation were:

“Walking the city you could see the victims. It was really sad. You could scan the crowd and count them off: victim, victim, not a victim, victim. Some people I just wanted to grab and shake them and scream, ‘Don’t walk like that! Don’t stand like that!’”

When the criminal sociopath looks for a victim, they do the same thing Dave was doing. They scan that tableau and register everybody as a target or trouble. And because they (usually) didn’t get out of bed this morning looking for a fight, or an epic battle, they slide past the trouble-makers and focus on the targets.

To the trained, and to the predator, the victims stand out. They can smell it… and see the stink lines. Acting tough doesn’t hide it. It just amplifies it.

You can’t pretend to not be a victim. The difference between victim and not-victim is unconscious confidence. It radiates from the core, outward, and shines like a beacon even when you’re not paying attention to projecting anything. Your gait, your stance, your body language will give you away, one way or the other. If you know what to do, it shows. If you don’t, well, that’s where the smell comes from.

This is the real utility of training for violence. The chances of you actually having to use this information in a life-or-death situation are so small as to approach zero. (Of course, if you do find yourself there, nothing else will do. Just as knowing how to swim is the only thing that will keep you from drowning.)

But you’ll never know how many times being trained saved you from getting picked out of the herd as a victim in the first place.

In my experience, this training changes the way people walk, stand, and carry themselves. It gives you that unconscious confidence that is beyond badass posturing or bluster. It’s always on, even when you’re not paying attention.

Though it’s a cliched martial arts oxymoron to “learn to kill so you never have to,” it turns out there’s a kernel of truth in that fortune cookie notion. As a husband, father, and instructor this is what I want for my wife, my kids, and the people I train. To be able to pull the trigger on it if that’s what’s required, but really to never, ever have to in the first place. To get passed over when someone’s sniffing for victims.

That’s what I want for you: to never know how many times this training has saved you from trouble.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr

Keeping It Simple

August 2, 2018/0 Comments/in Rabbit v. Wolf/by Taylor Good

In nature, everything takes from something else. There is no evil and there is no innocence. The relationship of predator and prey is a fixed equation, but the variables can be fluid. One day you are predating on a blueberry bush, the next day you’re lunch. So all animals, even apex predators like grizzly bears, killer whales or human beings can run either set of behaviors: predator or prey.

For predators it’s simple. ATTACK. They incapacitate their prey by inflicting grievous injury, often (but not always) resulting in immediate death. In true predation events the outcome for most prey animals is inevitable no matter what they do. Ultimately, the only long-term effective response to death rate is birth rate.

For prey items however there are actually five recognized responses to a perceived threat: fight, flight, freeze, posture or submit.

Fighting is hard work and a risky business. It is seldom employed in the animal kingdom except by prey animals attempting to wrest themselves from the current day’s menu or by individuals of a social species testing/reinforcing the legitimacy of their hierarchy.

Flight, with its low cost-to-benefit ratio, is often the preferred response. This covers everything from going out of your way to navigate around a sketchy area to running in terror from a rustle in the bushes — as long as there is a flight window with enough time and space to make the success of a flight attempt likely. This is how most potentially dangerous unknowns are dealt with in the wild.

The freeze response occurs when the efficacy of a potential threat is being evaluated or as a last-resort form of concealment from a predator that might be inside the flight window. This too is a very economical response as it costs almost nothing to be still and it makes for effective camouflage as most predators visually scan for movement. This innate response in animals can be beneficial, like when a newborn elk lies perfectly still (and nearly scentless) at the feet of a marauding grizzly sow — or maladaptive, like when a deer is “caught in the headlights” of an oncoming vehicle or an office worker huddles motionless in plain view while an active shooter manipulates their third reload.

If physical contact is imminent the decision becomes whether combat can be avoided or not. Animals attempt to avoid combat whenever possible because it is likely to degrade their function… even if they’re successful. A mountain lion with a broken jaw doesn’t get better; it slowly starves to death. In order to avoid the perils of physical combat, animals may posture or submit. Posturing is an attempt to intimidate your way out of combat while submission is an attempt to capitulate. I use the word “attempt” because unlike with fight, flight or freeze, these two options (posture/submit) put the ball squarely on the other side of the court. Unless the motivations and inclinations of the other individual(s) involved (as in the social dynamics of a wolf pack) are intimately understood, these options have the very highest cost-benefit ratio and are therefore extremely risky.

So what’s the lesson in all this? Behaving like a prey animal is complicated and treacherous. Better to keep it predator-simple: Attack and injure!

— Taylor Good

The Silence That Comes After

July 13, 2018/12 Comments/in Rabbit v. Wolf/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

Unlike most physical endeavors, ours has no target demographic. It’s not possible to tell whether or not our training will resonate by just looking at someone. I’ve seen young, smart, athletically-gifted people miss the point entirely and fail out of the first testing cycle; at the same time I’ve watched out-of-shape, “least-likely” people (who I’ve pegged as quitters inside of a month) end up going the distance with an eerie, natural ease. And I’ve seen everything else in between… with the only common feature among those who take to it being the fact that they took to it. Something spoke to that tiny sliver of sociopath lurking inside them.

Of course, this is a huge problem when it comes to running a business; what we really need is to know who this stuff resonates with — in terms of a marketing pie chart — and then aggressively market to that segment. But when that thing is the littlest bit of non-pathological sociopathy — essentially being lit up by hands-on domination and obliteration via the breaking of the human machine — well, you can see the problem in trying to figure out just who to send a postcard to.

The obvious answer would seem to be found in evangelism, with excited practitioners sharing their newfound experiences of happiness (the feeling as power increases) with like-minded individuals — and here we hit the other issue in spreading the word: the more people train, the less they want to talk about it. Talking about the truth of it makes you sound like a psychopath; watering it down to make it palatable is disingenuous and causes people to recoil when confronted with the actual thing:

“How do I defend myself from [insert Facebook terror of the week here]?”

“You don’t. The only available action is to hurt people so they can’t continue.”

“But I don’t want to hurt anybody!”

“Then you won’t.”

And so on until either you give up or they’re convinced you’re crazy.

So much easier, then, to never even mention it, to keep it as a delicious secret that only you know and no one else suspects — the credo of the ambush predator: While you were sleeping in front of the TV, I was practicing putting my fingers into people’s eyes.

I run into this in ongoing training all the time.

“Bring your friends and family!” I say.

Everyone looks back with pained faces. “Tried it once, got weird looks,” is the usual reply, “not interested in doing it again.” Besides, they think in quiet asides, It’s my delicious secret.

You’d think I’m writing this to admonish you, to get you out as ambassadors for this training, to earn hashmarks on your hilt for every body you bring into the fold — and you’d be wrong. I’m just as guilty as everyone else who’s ever hit the mats: I don’t talk about it, I don’t proselytize; when people ask me what I do I demur and get them talking about themselves. (This works great, by the way.) It’s my delicious secret that last night, while they were sleeping in front of the TV, I was puzzling out the smallest discrete set of movements necessary to dislocate a shoulder with a baton.

So this is here for no other reason than to wonder at the phenomenon: the fact that those who train shut up after having joined a silent cabal that meets in secret to study the undermining of Nature’s pinnacle.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr

Naked Ape Kung Fu

June 15, 2018/3 Comments/in Rabbit v. Wolf/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

I did not enter this monastery by choice — I was born as another twist in the labyrinth, a monument to the winners who at one time had their hands around throats as a matter of course. We are all of us the spawn of killers.

As predators we have “theory of mind,” the ability to construct simulacra of our prey inside our skulls, to intuit how they will behave — essentially running their behavior-set as a simulation so we can plan on how to zig when they zag. We can think like an animal, communicate with them (especially fellow mammals), and even put the construct in the driver’s seat briefly in order to experience “being” that animal. This ability gives rise to things like shamanism and domestication. When the topic of how a person should fight comes up, there are, inevitably, references to much more powerful predators, e.g., “like a tiger.” Big cats are impressive, terrifying, and ferocious — all aspects we’d like to take on when circumstances revert to a state of nature.

So, which animal should you fight like?

Being civilized and embedded in modern humanity, we forget that we’re the top predator on the planet, and that we long ago solved the equations for the intersection of hominid skeletons at speed. We had the solution before we had the language to describe it: all the ways you can line up ramrods of bone through an eye socket, all the ways he might move to prevent it, a possibility space of geodesics. (Imagine the human form waving all its limbs around to describe a shape, DaVinci’s Vitruvian Man rotated in three dimensions, if you will.) Before language, formal society and civilization, this solution set had but one outcome: your genes went forward in time; the losers, not so much.

Now, raw survival is one thing, but nature prefers that we not murder ourselves out of existence (animals that do are just proof that the system works); this necessitates some kind of formalized, non-lethal competition. If we can assume the loser doesn’t get eaten, then capitulation becomes an option. Add language, formal society and civilization — dimly understood conventions giving rise to rules and laws — and you take the geodesics of the solution set and weave them into the Gordian Knot of fighting. We all agree to agree that while fighting like hell is human, treating each other like prey is verboten.

And so the modern human is stuck in a state of perpetual competition — touching the blurred surfaces of those possibility spaces (the slapping of hands, the imposition of artificial rules) instead of striking at the heart of the thing as Alexander the Great might, cleaving through the tangle with a single stroke to render it undone. At Injury Dynamics we go straight for the heart of it because what you are facing is the planet’s most potent nightmare — the species that brought you genocide and nuclear weapons, with a natural propensity and hunger for organized warfare; have you met humanity?

Don’t get me wrong: I would love for this discipline to be rendered unnecessary — for there to never again be cause for a human to kill another human — but unilateral disarmament is only possible within the make-believe confines of polite society, and even then it turns out to be a terrible mistake when you meet the ape who revels in his authentic self and honors the ancestors at your expense.

In the end this thing is quintessentially human, as important to wholeness as spirituality — and it is in denying what we are that gives rise to the deadly stresses of modern life. What we have to offer is more than a mere survival skill: training is the experience of feeding what you are, leashing the beast, letting it out of its cage and taking it for a walk on the mats.

With that handled, you are free to be the one who does everything in their power to prevent violence (knowing its true face, and where even the mildest of provocations can go) — knowing full well that should you ever meet that fellow ape who lives and takes as our crude ancestors did you can remind him (if only briefly) that you remember where you came from, too.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr

Stop Making Sense

March 23, 2018/0 Comments/in Rabbit v. Wolf/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

There are no contradictions in the physical world. At the scale of our experience the universe is a perfectly tuned machine that simply does what it does — everything can be mathed out in a predictable dance of cause and effect. Contradictions only exist in human language, a necessary construct to provide flexibility in social interaction. Our survival as a species depends on our ability to make non-deterministic, nuanced, judgment calls. We have a word for the kind of hyper-literal people who are incapable of that: psychopaths.

The cause and effect of violence — a simple physical interaction like a finger in the eye — contains no contradictions. In terms of monkey-see/monkey-do training, nothing could be more straightforward… until we try to make violence fit into a social framework, round-holing that square peg with the mallet of language, contradictions meant to make ourselves feel better about doing it and to communicate our sanity, stability, and continued trustworthiness to others. In other words, to convince everyone — including ourselves — that we’re not psychopaths. But there is nothing about “self-defense” that suggests the finger in the eye. Indeed, such language obscures the necessities of physical action, injecting our hopes and fears into the matter — thick strokes of contradictory emotional content that obscure the requirements of cause and effect — language that acts not as a window but as a painting.

Trying to make violence “make sense” is pointless, and even dangerous — violence is by its very definition irrational, an utter failure of everything language seeks to build. This is why the finger in the eye is not “self-defense”, and why “self-defense” does not communicate the physics of the finger in the eye. There are lots of ways to describe the simple physical act of breaking the human machine, and the most direct and straightforward are naturally repellent. Our response to this must be to understand that it is a separate thing from our emotional selves and our desire to cooperate with others — it’s not about maintaining our social standing, it’s about maintaining our existence during the very thin slice of time of our attempted murder. And it’s okay for the descriptions of the action required to hurt another person so they can’t continue to be chilling, disturbing, and otherwise uncomfortable. We’re describing facts, and the more we use language that gives us comfort or distance from them the less likely we are to be able to execute on those facts when our survival is at stake.

There are two ways to arrive at what’s required:

We can do violence every day, where we will learn a thing or two through trial and error, and how we do that work will begin to converge toward a specific point — form following function where all effective violence ends up looking the same, or
We can look at examples of that work (videos of effective violence) and emulate that movement on the mats, all the while seeking hard, spare language that describes that mechanical work (and the results) in the clearest way possible.

What’s required is the objective description of science, not the poetry of the heart.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr

The Illusion of Fighting

Being the Better Monster

Building a Better Monster

Splitting Hairs or Splitting Heads: The Semantics of Violence

Stop Making Sense

ABOUT

TRAINING

MEMBER RESOURCES