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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)

Tactical Cruelty

November 30, 2018/2 Comments/in Mindset/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

“Violence is the race for the eye.”

— Master Derrick Farwell

When he was a young Marine, Derrick sought effective hand-to-hand combat training, going where stories of ass-kicking and dread reputation led. One night he ended up in a dingy karate studio; the instructor was a Vietnam-era Marine from Okinawa, a compact, no-nonsense man versed in the stunning language of fists and feet. That same night a much larger, and thoroughly drunk man, came in and challenged the instructor to a fight in front of his students. The instructor demurred, and tried to get the man to leave. But he would have none of it, and so the instructor took him up on his offer with a blow to the solar plexus. They folded to the ground and began rolling, rolling, until suddenly the larger man screamed, leaped to his feet and fled the school with his hands pressed to his face. Meanwhile, below the look of grim satisfaction, the instructor’s gi was spattered with the big man’s blood.

Derrick credits this moment as a turning point in his training — not because he learned some cool new “go-to” move or an inspirational Bruce Lee quote — but because of a simple truth: the one who gets it right first wins. It’s not what you think you know or how you look doing it — what happened inside that ball of chaos didn’t remotely resemble a magazine photoshoot karate technique — it was a mess, figuratively and literally. But it was a mess that made a difference.

From that moment on Derrick would only listen to instructors whose training was a physical reflection of that awful truth.

This is why we will always speak plainly about our work — training people to use violence as a survival tool — and not waste anyone’s time with the expected and socially acceptable euphemisms of self-defense, self-protection, etc., etc. (Euphemisms that impose a potentially lethal drag on the needs of action. All language surrounding a thing tells the story of where you see yourself in that thing. Ask yourself: During your attempted murder, do you want to “defend yourself” or “attack and injure”?) We seek to communicate with those who know or sense this truth, and who feel something vital is missing in their current physical application.

It’s one thing to say, “When things get serious, go for the eye,” and another to spend every mat session doing what those words actually mean. We set foot on the mats assuming we’re already at maximum “serious” — we get straight to it… and make sure the blind man gets a broken leg and a head injury for good measure. Violence isn’t a contest or a game, and we assume the loser gets set on fire.

Training like this has two effects on behavior:

1. We will do everything in our power to avoid violence if we have a choice, and

2. We will do everything in our power to finish it first if we don’t.

If violence is the race for the eye, we’re going to cheat by starting at the finish line. Anything less is betting your life that the other person is nicer than you are.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr

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

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

VIOLENCE: If It Feels Right, It’s Wrong

February 22, 2018/2 Comments/in Rabbit v. Wolf/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

The way you’ve been taught to think and speak about violence is fundamentally flawed.

How do I know this? Because you’re taking the time to read about it here. Dangerous people, those who already know how to use violence as a tool, don’t go looking for answers on the Internet. They know in their bones the Iron Law of what physics does to physiology; they know that the person who gets it right first wins. They don’t waste time or effort on defense or protection. They know that the answer to every problem in violence is ATTACK & INJURE.

Imagine, if you will, a fancy dinner party where someone asks you about “that class you’re taking.” The entire table of pinkies-up dignitaries and chic-coiffed influencers pause mid-slurp to listen. So you say, “I’m learning how to defend myself from an attacker with a knife.” And the room makes an appreciative noise followed by a mild golf clap. Polite society approves.

Now let’s go back after you’ve learned the truth about violence. Someone asks the same question. So you say, “I’m practicing how to stab people in the eye when they’re not looking.” And the room makes the shocked sound of ruptured sensibilities, followed by you never being invited back again. What you said sounds crazy.

But how do you want to behave during your attempted murder?

Do you want to “try to defend yourself from an attacker with a knife” or “stab him in the eye when he’s not looking”?

Which one sounds more definitive? Which one would you bet your life on?

This is the difference between rabbits describing what wolves do, and what wolves actually do. When rabbits talk to other rabbits about wolf-stuff it’s with a mixture of disgust, fear… and queasy awe. But when a wolf comes for that rabbit, somewhere deep down inside that rabbit wishes it could do wolf-stuff. If only, in that too-brief moment, it could behave like a wolf.

That’s why we’re here.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr

Tag Archive for: language

Splitting Hairs or Splitting Heads: The Semantics of Violence

Tactical Cruelty

Stop Making Sense

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