Making the Case for Violence book Archives

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Treat Everyone Like They’re Six Seconds Away from a Killing Spree & Other Philosophies of Good Neighborliness

September 24, 2024/0 Comments/in Kinder than Necessary/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

“Violence is the last thing I want to do, but it’s the first thing I will do.”

— Master Matt Suitor

Does knowing how to use the tool of violence inform your relationship with your fellow human beings? There are really two angles to come at this question from: knowing what violence entails (or “means”) and knowing how to get it done.

In terms of knowing what violence entails, i.e., the terror and ugly finality of it, the trend is clear: intimate knowledge leads directly to avoidance. The more one knows about violence, the less eager one is to get involved in it. Resolved, yes—eager, no.

This has a great deal to do with the narrowness of the tool, the fact that violence only does one thing: it shuts off a human being. The vast majority of your daily social interactions do not require this. It is unnecessary, therefore, to push social interactions in directions that could result in violence. Personally, I found I’m much more likely to capitulate and disengage by leaving the area, without a word, when confronted by someone with an obvious chip on their shoulder who has chosen me as the knock-off guy. Everybody wins—I sleep well, and neither of us gets a broken leg just because he was having a bad day.

My brother, Tony, tells a hilarious story in which a man accosted him by saying “Let’s fight!” and punching him (ineffectually) in the head. Tony thought about what that would mean—he saw himself breaking the guy’s leg and stomping a mud hole in him on the ground, and thought to himself, He can’t want that. So he said no. The guy persisted, again asking for a fight and punching Tony. Finally, my brother had it and shrugged, thinking, I guess that’s what he wants, and proceeded to make the guy’s head and feet trade places with a single strike. It wasn’t so much a “fight” like the guy was asking for as it was a “single man-stopping injury.” Tony knew that’s where it would go (and more importantly, that it could go either way); knowing how serious it was made him uninterested in going there recreationally—if he didn’t have to, he didn’t want to.

I find that I am possessed of a saintlike patience these days—somehow, somewhere, I developed the habit of giving pretty much everyone the benefit of the doubt. I do not begrudge those who are curt and prickly their public anger and annoyance. I just figure there are extenuating circumstances I’m not aware of and I have no desire to be the next point on the down-trending curve of their bad day. I do my best to treat everyone with patience and respect—and how is that different, really, from treating everyone as if they were six seconds away from a killing spree? I’d much rather be the control rod in the nuclear reactor than the ignition charge in their personal H-bomb.

This gets us to the second angle—beyond mere knowledge of violence and into confidence in how to get it done. Nietzsche said that courtesy comes from a position of power; I would say it comes from both the knowledge of, and confidence in, violence. Politeness flows from a desire to avoid violence coupled with the knowledge that if worse comes to worst, the skill is literally in the palm of your hand. Socially, you have nothing to lose. Rude people fear that courtesy is a sign of weakness, that something is taken from them when they wait their turn or let someone else go first.

Knowing how to get it done removes the uncertainty from the extreme end of the scale—the answer to “But what if he goes off?” is “I’ll break his leg and stomp a mud hole in him.” And so I find myself in the position of being resolved, but not eager. If I don’t have to, I don’t want to. If I have to, I will.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr (from 2007)

Gandhi with a Nuclear Weapon

September 17, 2024/0 Comments/in Kinder than Necessary/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

If a killer kills someone, no one is much surprised. Likewise, if the killer is killed by their intended victim, it’s just “job well done.” But if no one meant to kill anyone, and someone ends up dead, well, then it’s cartoon exclamation points all around. Everyone, including the newly-minted killer, is surprised. Cries of “How could this happen?” and “But I didn’t want to kill him!” ring out. In the end it gets labeled as an unfortunate accident.

But these “accidents” happen often enough that when a new one pops up, I can still recall the last one I read about. Primates have a territorial dispute, and begin vocalizing at each other to communicate their displeasure, then aggression in a sideways request that the other capitulate. When neither one backs down, it goes to blows, again to run the interloper off. Usually, this works out fine, as nature intended. But when it’s bodyweight + brain + concrete, one can end up running their rival not just off their territory, but off this mortal coil entire.

These things happen often enough that I would suspect you’re more likely, on balance, to be involved in this sort of situation than purely asocial violence. In other words, you’re much more likely to get slapped at than outright murdered. Misery comes from confusing the two.

If you train to kill and think that means you’re physically trained to handle the antisocial, it’s the same as carrying a gun in case you get into an argument.

If you train to kill and think that means you get to ignore the antisocial, you’re setting yourself up to be ready for the most unlikely event while ignoring the most likely. Chances are, you’re going to get caught wanting.

Because we train to use our bodies to cause injury, it’s easy for people to get the wrong idea—on the surface, martial arts and combat sports look similar to what we do. And since martial arts and combat sports do a great job of preparing folks to navigate that antisocial fog-zone, they then tend to think we’re training for the same thing, only in a “super effective” way. That’s like pulling a gun in a bar fight and “shooting to subdue”. There’s no such thing.

Still, people get all eager to lock horns. It’s funny to me (funny-strange, not funny-ha-ha) seeing as how we can still end up with unintended fatalities. If you ask a civilian gun owner, “How many gunfights do you want to be in?” the sane ones will all tell you, “None.” The sane ones understand what goes on in a gunfight, and would never choose to be there if they didn’t have to. If they should find themselves there, they will shoot to kill. But sane civilians don’t walk around looking for gunfights.

Again, this is painfully obvious when we talk about guns. But for some reason it’s less obvious with empty hands. Why? It comes down to expectations. We expect someone to die if a gun is involved—that’s what the modern handgun is for, killing people at close range. We don’t expect someone to die from a standard, everyday session of monkey politics. And yet death is one of the possible outcomes.

Me, I expect someone to die every time violence is used, and then breathe a sigh of relief when everyone survives. I have absolutely no interest in going physical with monkey politics. I don’t leave the house looking for opportunities to use my skills.

My aversion to violence runs so strong that it makes me something of a walking contradiction to my friends—I will do whatever I can to avoid physical, antisocial confrontation and yet won’t hesitate to stomp someone into the morgue in the asocial realm. I’m like Gandhi with a nuclear weapon.

For those of you feeling eager, or emboldened by your training, some advice:

You’re all set for the asocial. If someone wants to murder you, you’re well-prepared—knowledgeable, practiced, resolute. But don’t forget to make sure you’re prepared for the antisocial—sharpen those social skills, actively think about how you want to be in those situations. Will you join in and play along? Throw fuel on the fire? Push until they either back down or go after you? Or will you go completely sideways on them, defusing the situation, seeking to reduce their fear and channel their anger elsewhere?

Know where your buttons are and put lots of padding between them and the outside world. Work to recognize when you’re being pushed into a corner. And remember that simply walking away could save your life—or keep you out of prison.

As with the asocial, so with the antisocial: be prepared.

Chances are you’ll go your entire life without anyone trying to kill you. I wouldn’t make the same bet about some jerk calling you out.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr (from 2008)

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)

The Terror of Competition, the Pleasure of Predation

August 27, 2024/0 Comments/in Competition/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

A man approaches you on the street with a proposition: “See that guy over there?” He indicates a big, strapping fellow, his six-foot-four frame enrobed in 300 pounds of muscle. “He’s coming over here to wrestle you to the ground and choke you out for a million dollars. If you can pin him instead, I’ll give you the million.”

“B-but,” you stammer, “I don’t want to wrestle him!”

The man sniffs. “Doesn’t matter—he wants the million. Here he comes—best of luck!”

How does it feel to suddenly have this contest thrust upon you? To have to worry about your performance, and how it will stack up to his experience level? For all you know, he could be very good at wrestling—and even if you, yourself, are no slouch in the ring, he’s clearly way outside your weight class. And much, much stronger. As he begins to sprint toward you, you notice he’s a lot faster, too.

How’s it feel now?

Let’s try a different tack: Same setup, except the man says, “All you have to do is touch him, and I’ll give you the million instead.”

Feel any different?

How about if we qualify that touch a bit: “All you have to do is break something inside of him.” And you’ll get the million.

In the first case, the contest is sprung upon you, you’re not prepared, you’re being asked to compete with the man’s physical size and athletic ability. You’re being asked to perform at a level most of us can’t reach. You’re being asked to compete in such a way that is clearly unfair, and puts you at a disadvantage.

We could just as easily set up a scenario where you are suddenly tasked with debating international monetary policy, before an audience, with someone who may or may not be a Nobel laureate in economics. We’ve all got the basic tools, the components to compete in such a contest—we can speak out loud, we have experience with finances and money in general—and yet, the idea makes me sweat. Most of us can expect to get hammered and humiliated, everything we say twisted back on us with a sneer and derisive laughter from the audience.

In the second case where “all you have to do is touch him,” there is no performance pressure—we can all reach out and touch the guy, even if he wants to wrestle us. In fact, there’s really no way you can lose—how can he wrestle you down and choke you out without you touching him at some point? It’s so simple it’s ridiculous.

And sure, that “touch” can easily be used to break something inside of him, as in the slightly more difficult scenario. We all know he can’t successfully wrestle you without you crushing his groin or gouging an eye at some point. Everything he would want to do just pulls you in nice and close to those delicate anatomical features. Another easy win.

All of the above highlights another distinct difference between competition and violence—that impending competition brings with it performance anxiety as you realize you will be required to pit your skill against unknown thresholds: What if he’s the better wrestler, or speaker? It’s the worry that your meager skills will be outclassed.

When we remove the competition and go instead to a win condition that is not dependent on unknown thresholds (i.e., nothing about the man factors into the equation) there is no dread or anxiety.

Now, I know what you’re thinking—what about performance anxiety around getting violence done? Well, how anxious did you feel about merely touching the guy, really? Outside of counting coup, did your anxiety increase when it was qualified as causing an injury? If the answer is yes, then

YOU’RE STILL LOOKING AT VIOLENCE AS COMPETITION.

Violence, as the absence of competition, has no performance anxiety component. It really is just touching, if we mean it in the same way that we would smash a soda can flat, or slam a car door, or break a stick on the curb. The physics and biomechanics involved are all the same. Any considerations beyond that are imaginary. Hang ups, if you will.

As with pretty much everything in this work, the solution is mat time. It’s the second-best place to learn that competition has nothing to do with anything in violence, that size, speed, and strength have no bearing on who wins and who dies. Those who still view violence as a form of competition, a high-stakes one, act hesitantly on the mats; they keep their distance (even when they think they’re penetrating), flinch, hide and otherwise give poor reactions, and rarely employ body weight. They behave as if they are fundamentally frightened of what’s going on. Which they are.

Those who have figured it out by physically burning the idea out of their heads with hours of mat time throw themselves into the work with great relish, applying themselves bodily to every problem presented to them. The physical realization that violence is about a failure to compete, an end-run around competition, is liberating. Gone is the worry about being big enough, fast enough, or strong enough. The other person’s skill counts for absolutely nothing. It’s all about you, and only you. The other person is prey to be taken, meat to be butchered. The pressure’s off and you’re free to do as you will.

You’re exercising your legacy as a predator—and by all accounts, predation is pleasurable.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr (from 2008)

Hitter or Quitter?

August 19, 2024/0 Comments/in Social-Asocial/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

Most of what goes on in martial arts and combat sports works because people quit. They quit because it hurts, or because they’re exhausted, or because they start to listen to the little voice that’s telling them everything will be a lot better if they’d just give up and give in. More often than not it’s a combination of all these things at once; the question gets asked often enough, with each blow, “Why don’t you just quit?”, until they hit that personal threshold and just can’t take it anymore.

Any technique that isn’t about career-ending, crippling injury is about compliance, about making the person submit—trying to convince them to quit. This is fine when the outcome isn’t critical, when what happens next is nice and social. It’s great for competition and the dojo. In fact, without this, sport becomes impossible, filled with sickening “accidents” and truncated careers; the dojo runs out of students as they succumb, one by one, to the brutal endpoint of their training.

Relying on your ability to make people quit, to have a higher pain tolerance, better conditioning, and an indomitable will—to outlast your foe while working them to the point where they cave—will get you killed in the place where those things don’t matter. If your would-be murderer is a quitter at heart, chances are you’ll be fine. But if they aren’t… if they don’t care about pain, or how tired they are, or if they lack that little voice that the sane call caution, well, then they’re not going to quit. Unless you know how to remove choice from the equation, they’re going to kill you. Even if it takes them a little bit of work to get you there.

If they’re a killer, they know it’s not about making you quit. They know it’s not about technique, or speed, or strength. It’s about results. They won’t waste their time engaging or setting you up. They’ll go straight for those results, breaking you, shutting you down to the point where there’s nothing you can do—not even quit—they’ll remove choice from the equation and treat you like meat to be butchered.

Your only hope is to know how to get those results, too—to know why those results happen so you can make them happen every single time, and get it done first. Toughness, bravado, ego, superior technique—these things mean nothing in violence. Going against a killer when the prize is your life is no time to hope for the best with a suitcase full of techniques you don’t fully understand—techniques that you hope will work but can’t articulate why they do. If you don’t know, with surety, the result you’re gunning for, and why that result occurs, you’re out of your league when it comes to violence.

And in violence there are only two kinds of people: those who know what they’re doing—precisely—and the dead.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr (from 2008)

Kill the Unknown

August 13, 2024/0 Comments/in Training/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

“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)

As Hard as You Can

August 6, 2024/0 Comments/in Mindset/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

Intent is what makes people scary. It’s what you instinctively fear in the criminal. It’s what society breeds out of domesticated humans. But what is it, really? It’s far too slippery to hold in the mind’s eye, an amorphous, ever-shifting gem shrouded in a halo of mystical mist… And what good is that to anyone? If you’ll bear with me, I’ll try to get it to hold still for a moment, throw some sunshine on the cloudy facets and get them to sparkle for you. I’ll do what I can to stabilize the whole thing—gaze into it, into yourself, and get what you can out of it:

Intent is single-minded, goal-oriented focus.

Intent is being focused on injury to the exclusion of all else. From the moment you perceive a threat to the moment that threat is gone, all you care about is causing injury. From the moment someone pulls up their shirt to show you a gun or from the moment you hit the ground face-first, you are on target acquisition and destruction. You will find your targets and smash them, never stopping, never hesitating until you get what you want: an injury. And once you get that first one, you’ll pile them on until the other person physiologically buckles under the mass of trauma and you make them capitulate, pass out, or die as you see fit. Intent is about what you are going to force the other person to do. Intent is making violence once-sided as quickly as possible and keeping it that way.

It’s not an emotional state—you’re not enraged or Hulked-out or seeing red; it’s just that out of all the myriad possible things you could do you are going to pick one (injury) and you’re going to get it done to the exclusion of all else, over and over again. One target, one injury. Repeat until it doesn’t make sense to continue.

Intent is how hard you swing the bat.

Intent is a self-realizing prophecy that cuts both ways—if you think you can do it, you will; if you think you can’t, you won’t. If I ask you to kick a soccer ball, how hard you kick it will depend on what you expect to happen. If you believe that the ball is filled with lead shot, then you’ll expect it to hurt and won’t kick it as hard as you can. In fact, you’ll be very reluctant to kick it at all, and your performance will be a reflection of that reluctance. In a word, it’ll suck.

If I tell you that if you don’t kick it over the fence I’m going to shoot you in the head, your performance will suffer even more. Your preoccupation with a negative outcome will sabotage your efforts. Your mind will not be focused on the task at hand. You’ll be worried about living and dying while simultaneously trying to succeed.

Focus on reality as it stands, not on all possible outcomes. Focusing on things that may or may not be true, or are demonstrable falsehoods, is the “feeding the phantoms” that we discussed previously. Thinking that there’s nothing you can do, or that you cannot injure the other person, or that you’re going to die are all outright lies until proven true. Why put your efforts into your own defeat? It does nothing to aid you in shaping the reality you want. In violence, the reality you want is the one where the other person is injured. Everything you do must get you there by the shortest possible route. To consider failure is to aid in your own destruction.

Intent is how much of yourself you’ll put into getting it done.

Here’s a nifty fact: the one thing that all survivors have in common is that they believed they could survive. The circumstances are immaterial, whether it’s a crash, drowning, fire, wilderness, or violence. Survivors report time and time again that when they reached the lethal decision point—am I going to live or die?—they all unequivocally, steadfastly chose to live. They believed they could. I’ve never heard a survivor say, “and then I quit and waited to die.” (Okay, to be fair, I have heard that—but this was from the ones who were saved by others who refused to give it up.) Survivors believe they can alter the outcome.

So, back to the soccer ball. If I hand it to you so you can feel how light and eminently kickable it is, and then tell you that our goal for this training session is to see how far you can kick it, then you are free to work on the mechanics of running up and kicking it with your whole being.

This is what we are attempting to do with our training, only instead of kicking soccer balls we’re kicking people in the groin. If you show up with false assumptions, believing that even though you felt the ball, and it was indeed light and bouncy, it will still hurt when you kick it, or that you are incapable of kicking a ball very far, then anything I do to train you is for naught. You sabotaged yourself before you even set foot on the pitch. Negative expectations lead to diminished results.

Believing you can do it, expecting to get it done, gets you what you want. Intent comes down to wanting to cause an injury more than anything in the world. Focus your mind in that direction, onto that single vulnerable target, and your body will follow suit. You will plow your entire mass through that throat and crush it. All because of the simple belief that you can do it.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr (from 2006)

PS. Intent makes people scary because it trumps technique. Intent, coupled with a very basic understanding of targeting, will always beat superior technique alone. This is why we always say that techniques are worthless, and that the criminal sociopath, for all their lack of formal training, is a formidable human wrecking machine. These two facts reside on either side of the same coin. If we fuse the two, if we take superior technique and drive it mercilessly with laser-like intent, we end up with the scariest human being possible.

And that would be you.

Time to Stop Lying to Yourself

July 16, 2024/0 Comments/in Mindset/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

Experienced instructors are some of the most relaxed people I know.

The question, of course, is why?

When you have the mechanical ability to cause injury and couple it with the driving motivator of intent, everything throttles back and gets calm and easy—you’re not out spoiling for a fight or giving yourself an anxiety disorder by obsessing violently over every human being who brushes up against you.

This is what I was getting at in “Scenario-Based Training vs. The Hard Knot”. You simply cultivate the skill, and the will to use it, and then sit back and relax into the rest of your life. Should the need arise, you pull out the knot and brain people with it. Then you tuck it back where it belongs and get on with living. (I should note that I’m not talking about a ball of twine here—in my mind it’s an infinitely folded tessellation of agony, a world-heavy, fist-sized sphere from which no light can escape.) You don’t walk around brandishing it high over your head, mad-dogging all comers with a halo of purple lightning dancing about your enraged features. You tuck it behind a smile.

Without intent, without the implacable will to wield the knot, it’s not much better than yoga. Physically challenging, yes. A survival skill, no. (As an aside, it’s critically important to note that the criminal sociopath has very little training—a deficit they more than make up for with vast, raging reservoirs of intent.) So why do people have such a hard time with intent? And most importantly, what can you do about it?

People have a hard time with intent for a number of reasons: They suffer from a natural disinclination toward violence, they worry about what the other person will do, and they think violence is mechanically difficult.

The natural disinclination toward violence

Not wanting to physically hurt people is healthy and sane—but ultimately an impediment to survival when someone poses the question to which violence is the answer.

You need to get over the idea that anything we’re up to here is social in nature. This is why it’s so critically important that your mat time is as asocial as possible—no talking, no nervous laughter, no checking your partner’s face for feedback. The only time you should be looking at a face is if you’re taking an eye out of it.

I’m not talking about getting fired up and hating your partner. I’m talking about dispassion. Lose the emotional triggers—you’re not here to communicate, and raging at your partner (or their targets) is still communication. If you’re working with your “war face” you’ve kicked the social but are busy reinforcing the antisocial. What you really need is to get off the any-social, and get to its absence. That voidspace is the psychic storage shed for the knot.

Worried about what the other person will do

Let’s be blunt: Injured people are helpless. Ask anyone who’s done it. The first injury converts a functional person into a gagging meat-sack. Every injury after that is like busting apart a side of beef with your boot heels. This is why experienced instructors are so damned relaxed (and courteous, for that matter). This is also why they won’t hesitate to be the first one doing it. (It’s the ugly truth that no one wants to talk about—how people really respond to serious injury, about how when you cause one, you’ll know it because what you see next will stick to the inside of your eyelids for the rest of your life.)

What is the other person going to do? They’re going to break and behave like an injured person. They’re going to go to the worst place they’ve ever been. And you’re going to put them there.

The question you have to ask yourself is, will you worry about what they’re going to do, or will you make them worry about what you’re going to do? (Hint: pick the one where you’re in charge.)

On this same topic, you need to get off the whole “attacker/defender” merry-go-round. In any violent conflict there’s going to be, by definition, at least one person doing it to another. Be that one person. Decide it’s you, now, and every time after now. Out there it’s always your turn. If you must think in terms of there being an attacker, then it’s you.

Choosing to put yourself in second place is not the best strategy for a win, no matter how much we may venerate the underdog. In a “fair fight” or a contest, the underdog is the hero. In violence, they’re dead.

Quit empathizing with the dead person. You’re doing it because you’re nice, you’re doing it because you’re sane. In a social context, it makes perfect sense. In violent conflict your social skills and mores do nothing but prevent you from surviving. Empathizing with the dead person at the funeral is sane and normal. Empathizing with them while we’re all trying to decide who the dead person is going to be means you’re it.

Bottom line: decide who has the problem—is it you, or is it them?

Believing violence is mechanically difficult

Outside of the psychosocial issues, violence is really, really easy. We’re all predators, we’re all physically built for killing. Violence is as easy as going from where you are to where the other person is and breaking something important inside of them. The rest is academic.

How easy is it? General consensus says easier than free practice. You get to strike as hard as you can, follow all the way through on everything, you don’t have to take care of them, and it’s over so fast you won’t even have time to break a sweat or even breathe hard. The only hard part is giving yourself the permission to be inhumanly brutal, giving yourself the permission to survive. (I recommend you vote for you every time.)

Thinking that violence is mechanically difficult (and thereby trying to give yourself an out so you don’t have to face your own intent problems) is akin to thinking that swimming in the deep end is any different from swimming in the shallow end. Mechanically, it’s the same—swimming is swimming—the difference is all in your perception. In the shallow end, you can touch bottom and can save yourself from drowning by standing up. In the deep end you’re on your own—it’s sink or swim. So everyone thinks free practice is the shallow end; there’s no risk, you can always “stand up” when you get into trouble. That would make the street the deep end—no backup, no safety net, just swim or die. I’ll grant all of that as true. Just remember, always, that no matter where you’re swimming, mechanically it’s all the same. The idea that there’s a difference is an illusion that takes effort on your part to make a reality. Stop feeding the phantoms and just swim.

Intent—your will to cause injury, your drive to get it done—is completely up to you. You need to start thinking about it now, personally letting go of the things you’ve kept between the “you” you love because they’re a lovable, good person, and the “you” that can stomp the throats of screaming men.

We can only show you how to mechanically take someone apart—pulling the trigger on it is up to you, and you alone.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr (from 2006)

Scenario-Based Training vs. The Hard Knot

July 9, 2024/0 Comments/in Social-Asocial/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

When people say “scenario-based training”, it’s code for “all the crap that comes before the actual violence”. The yelling, the approach, the grabby man-dance. Of course, once the violence starts it’s all the same old, same old: injury, injury, injury. Pedestrian, predictable, and downright boring. All the stuff that comes before, all the stuff that people are fascinated with, is, for our purposes, a waste of time.

The lead-in to violence for any given scenario is typically antisocial in nature, leading to questions like “How do I deal with his behavior?” and “When do I decide to injure him?” You already have the skills to deal with the former—talk him down, capitulate, or get the hell out of there. As for when to tear into someone, that’s a personal judgment call you have to make in general terms ahead of time; in specific terms it’s based on your read of the situation. If you recognize a threat and you think you can’t live with it, then get busy shutting him off. If you think it’s something you can live with—merely antisocial in nature—then act accordingly. Use your social skills, or set a new 100-meter dash record, or tear into him as you will. In other words, act according to your comfort level.

This threshold will vary from person to person based on life experience. Some people can stomach all kinds of crazy antisocial behavior; others will brook no threat whatsoever. Either way, it’s a personal judgment call. This means your response to that stuff is up to you to figure out, for yourself, on your own time. We’ll hand you the tool—you have to decide when you’ll swing it.

Another reason people want all the upfront stuff is because they are not in a hurry to get to the wreckage. They’re afraid. They want to stay in the semi-social realm for as long as possible and want to hang onto the idea that they are the Good Guy. If we maintain an attacker/defender dichotomy, i.e., “He came after me, so therefore he’s the Bad Guy, which automatically dubs me the Hero,” we keep things nice and social. And for us sane humans, social equals comfortable. Remember, we have, as a species, a natural disinclination to violence; society wouldn’t function if it were otherwise. Violence turns our stomachs. People will go to great lengths to avoid discomfort.

Do you really want to spend your precious training time working within your comfort zone in contrived, antisocial scenarios, with only a small percentage given over to the actual work of violence? Or do you want to work where actual change occurs, the point where all violent acts become the same—the point of injury?

Look at it this way: we could waste your time by having you role-play stage productions of Serpico such that for every 20 minutes of mat time you only get two where you’re actually booting people. Instead, we have you experiencing violence for the full 20 minutes. Yes, half of that time is spent reacting for your partner, but you are still working where the buzzsaw hits the bone, at the point of injury. If you know what you’re doing you can actually learn more about violence while reacting than when it’s your turn. Ask anyone who’s been used by an instructor for a demo. It’s a difference you can feel. (Sometimes unfortunately so.)

Free practice is the only “scenario” you want to train in. To maximize your skill, you need to practice that skill. In this case the skill is injuring people; it stands to reason that you want to spend as much time as possible at the point of injury. That’s what free practice is. It’s you, changing everything in your favor, taking control of the man, the situation, through injury. What came before is immaterial—it has no bearing on what you’re doing to him. Did he yell? Or pull a gun? Did he grab you and knock you down? His ruptured groin doesn’t care. Neither should you.

Now, for all that, the single caveat: if your job is hallmarked by common occurrences that lead to violence (as in law enforcement or the military) then working those specific scenarios has merit. Car stops, room clearing; these scenarios are useful exercises for those who can expect to encounter them—but they’re pointless for the rest of us.

Here’s what it comes down to: use free practice to wrap and entwine the hard knot of skill within you, learn to use your mind as a weapon and your body as a tool for violence. Then you can walk the Earth free of “rehearsal anxiety”, free in the knowledge that if your current problem—no matter how it developed or came upon you—can only be solved by shutting down a human being, you know where the off switch is. And once you reach for that switch, all violent conflict becomes the same.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr (from 2006)

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