Kill the Unknown

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”

— H. P. Lovecraft

Fear is a biological fact.  We are hardwired for fight or flight—remember, we’re the descendants of the ones who didn’t stop and think when the lion was bearing down on them.  We’re the kin of the ones who literally “went ape” and flipped out with either a rooster tail of dust to the horizon or by picking up a stick and getting busy.  But just because fear is a biological fact doesn’t mean that we have to give into it; we don’t have to feed the fear, allow it to grow fat on the shadows of our nightmares.  We can recognize (and be grateful for) the ass-saving properties of biological fear without bloating it out into the grotesquerie of all-consuming emotional panic.

We do this by killing the unknown.

Most people have no idea what goes on in violence outside of agony, mayhem, and death.  It is a Great Unknown; a bottomless, black abyss wherein we are free to paint our own personal pictures of horror with unthinkable outcomes.  When you replace that unknown with knowledge, with understanding, governing principles, and expected outcomes you take away the power of the unknown, starve it back down to a manageable size.  Fear of violence and the unthinking, blind panic it induces becomes simple biological fear.  Flight means you get the hell out of there.  Fight means you stomp and tear and wreak horror upon the other person.

There are two ways to make sure you’re filling in the blank spots on the violence map, changing “here be dragons” to “boot to the groin”:  the first (and most important) is asocial mat time, the other is simple visualization.

Each session of asocial mat time is an expedition into that Dark Continent, to lay bare its secrets, to find out that, indeed, there is no such thing as a one-eyed ogre with three arms that hungers for human flesh.  Every single turn of asocial mat time is you answering the question “What the hell goes on in here?”  Turn by turn you answer that question, completely and with certitude:  I crush his groin, I tear out his eye, I break his neck.  That’s what goes on in here.  Mystery solved.

Of course, we’ve all had the “zombie” dream—the one where you’re tearing into someone, breaking their leg, stomping their throat and they keep getting back up.  So you do it again.  You do more.  And still they rise and come at you…  Along these same lines we’ve all seen people that gave us pause, for one reason or another—he wasn’t just big, he was enormous; he had a swastika tattooed on his face and looked like he was at the end of his rope made out of a last straw; or, without knowing why, he was just… scary.  This is you remembering the tales of those one-eyed ogres that used to keep you up at night, and you’re wondering if maybe there was something to the myth, and that something’s right here in front of you.

You know he’s human.  He bleeds.  And if he bleeds, you can kill him.  You just have to remind yourself of this fact by taking a moment, whether right then and there or later (I recommend later… so you don’t set anyone off through body language), and imagine yourself breaking that person.  One injury after another, putting him down and then ruining a perfectly good pair of shoes on him until he’s a twist of flesh in the middle of a stain.  Imagine it in slo-mo, one broken thing at a time, or speed it up, watch your favorite parts over and over.  This is you, replacing a lie with two truths:  you know how to do violence, and no one is immune.  This is you, taking the time to remind yourself that there is no such thing as a one-eyed ogre.

When violence is thoroughly mapped out, option after option experienced in real time on a real person, you know what to expect.  There is no more “unknown” to swallow you up in blind panic.  As we replace that unknown with knowledge, we starve fear down to its biologic roots and inhibit its ability to grow unchecked through your mind.  Instead of giving in to it, feeding it, helping it, you’ll use it for what it’s for—and put your boot in the other person’s groin.  After that the rest is academic.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr (from 2007)