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What Is Injury, Really?

April 24, 2024/0 Comments/in Injury/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

It’s the only thing that means anything in violence, or at least that’s what we’re always saying… But what is injury after all? And is there a simpler way to think of it, relate to it and thereby better relate it to others?

We’ll start with the dictionary definition of the word—The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 5th Ed. says:

Hurt or loss caused to or sustained by a person or thing; harm, detriment; damage, esp. to the body; an instance of this.

This is a good start, but it’s not quite as serious or stunning as I would like. While “harm, detriment, damage” are all good synonyms for what we’re up to, it’s still a little bit vague on the overall effect we’re gunning for. There are plenty of people out there, for example, who believe that they can sustain “damage” and keep going. And, of course, they’re right. We all can. But no one—NO ONE—can sustain injury the way we mean it and keep going. Period. So even the dictionary leaves something to be desired, a tightening-up of ambiguities.

These ambiguities flourish and grow into their own chaos-gardens in the minds of the average person—I daresay no two people’s definition of “injury” is going to be exactly the same. For some it is tearing a fingernail or stubbing a toe; others won’t declare it until blood is spilled. The difference between a lucky person unused to pain and a trauma surgeon is going to be vast. It’s a lot like saying the word “dog” out loud to a roomful of people—everyone will see a dog in their mind’s eye, but I daresay no two will be alike.

And still, for me, even with torn skin and spilled blood, we are not at a workable definition.

Our own textbook definition reads thusly:

The disruption of human tissue in a specific anatomical feature such that normal function is obviously decremented (and can only be regained through medical intervention), eliciting an involuntary spinal reflex reaction.

This is great for two reasons: it reinforces the universality of violence (as this effect can be achieved with any judicious application of kinetic energy, from fist to stick to bullet) as well as being specific enough to rule out hangnails and messy, but ultimately ineffective, minor lacerations.

The only problem is that for all its precise lawyer-ese it’s quite a mouth- and mindful. It’s not easy to remember, it doesn’t roll off the tongue, and you’re just plain not going to win over any converts with it. It’s thorough, but clunky. By seeking to be clear it loses its clarity and becomes next to worthless to you. Anything that gets in the way of your understanding needs to be retooled—like carving steps into an insurmountable cliff face.

This gets us to my current favorite way to think of injury:

Break things inside people so they don’t work anymore.

This is the way the sociopath approaches the problem, the way the Saturday night slugger thinks when he wades in to deliver a beatdown. It is the simplest way to think of injury. It paints a picture that’s easy to parse; even the ambiguities work in your favor. Does “they” refer to the people or the things inside them? Hey, either one—or both—I’m good with all of it.

This is a definition of injury you can take as your personal violence mission statement. It’s all you want to do; it’s the only measuring stick that divides success from failure. Easy to think, easy to say, easy to do.

It just goes to show that sometimes simple is better than precise.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr (from 2007)

The Absence of Choice

April 16, 2024/0 Comments/in Violence in the Wild/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

Violence starts where choice ends.

For social and antisocial interactions, this means you get to choose whether or not to be involved, and how deep your involvement will go. On the asocial side, you won’t have that choice. This gives us a nice, clean delineator between violence and Everything Else. As you’ve heard us say time and time again: if you have to ask, the answer is “no.” The reason we say this is because once you commit, your choices dwindle dramatically. Once you cross that line, you’re in it till you finish it. There are, to be sure, small choices to make—which target to wreck, when to stop—but none of them involve “unviolencing” him. Once you break that arm, you can never go back to just holding hands.

Make the choice you can live with. Be confident enough to be called a coward. I’ve walked away from situations where I was legally and morally in the right and no one present would have objected if I’d laid the jerk out. I’ve walked away while dodging ego-withering epithets and slurs to the accompaniment of the loud and obvious sound of my social standing being taken down a peg. (A whole peg!) I did this gladly because I was handed the luxury of choice and, to be quite frank, I just didn’t feel like it. “It” being the stomping, the screaming, and then having to do it to all his friends while getting punched in the head until I can’t remember second grade, maybe getting stabbed or shot or killed, or arrested and spending the night in jail, making bail, paying a lawyer and then getting sued. Not to mention having to look over my shoulder every time I stop to take a piss. All that crap is worth my life, but it’s not worth my time. Social standing is a manufactured illusion; losing it is nothing compared to the loss of an eye, or freedom, or your life. If your friends are truly your friends they will remain so; everyone else can go hang.

Asocial means you have no choice, or, rather, the choice is something decidedly unchoosy like “kill or be killed”. (Which one would you pick? Yeah, everybody picks that one, too.) Because it’s hallmarked by a lack of communication, asocial comes on without warning, without preamble, like lightning out of a clear blue sky. One minute you’re worried about which curry joint to patronize and the next you’re getting stabbed. You’re down to those small choices, like which target to wreck, and when to stop.

From a purely mechanical point of view, in social and antisocial situations he gets to choose whether or not a technique works. All of your sundry come-alongs, pain compliance, joint locks and submission holds fall into this category. If he decides you “got him” and gives up, all well and good. If he decides the pain in his elbow doesn’t matter, well, now you’re stuck holding a tiger by the tail. And your Plan B better be really, really sharp. Especially if the choice he makes is to take it into the asocial and get to the work of injuring you.

The mechanics of the asocial violent interaction can be summed up in a single word: injury. Injury removes choice from the equation. He has no say in whether or not his eye comes out of his skull or if his throat crushes. He has no say in how his body will move next. The physical laws of the universe, and how well you’ve employed them, are the only arbiters here. If you did it right, everything breaks. He may wish double-plus hard on a falling star it wasn’t so, but it’s not going to matter one whit. Violence is the absence of choice, and he’s just along for the ride.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr (from 2006)

Mechanics of the Sucker Punch

April 11, 2024/0 Comments/in Violence in the Wild/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

Disclaimer

There are serious legal and moral problems with injuring someone who isn’t trying to injure you or hasn’t otherwise threatened you with serious harm or death. For the sake of this discussion on the idea of the sucker punch, or otherwise taking people out from behind or when they don’t know it’s coming, we’re going to assume you are right to do it—that your impression of the situation is such that you believe inaction on your part will get you (and/or others) seriously injured or killed.

To injure or not to injure?

We all know what to do when someone comes after us—get in there and cause an injury, then repeat until satisfied. But what if the person hasn’t crossed the line physically, but has let it be known to you, overtly or not, that violence is in the offing? This is everything from a hijacker telling you to sit back down on an airplane, or a mugger making his demand, “Give me your wallet,” and all the way down to a simple, “You’re not leaving,” as you try to go out the door after a party. You may stand there a split second, taken slightly aback by the seemingly social interaction—he spoke to you with arms crossed, rather than hitting you, or even cocking back to hit you, or even laying hands on you at all.

Now what?

This is where the judgment call starts. If you decide to work it out with social tools, then go for it. I wouldn’t recommend it with the hijacker, the mugger could go either way depending on your personal read of the situation, and the jerk at the party is even less clear-cut.

If you want to go physical and start injuring them, it’s best to dive in and get it done as soon as you make the decision. Waiting around to see how it develops gives the other person more traction, control, and confidence over the situation—this is how one man with a blade can take over an entire room full of people. The longer it goes on, the more in charge he is. If you take him as soon as you realize it’s a bad situation, he never gets the opportunity to assert social dominance. For any kind of hostage-taker, the most critical portion is first contact with the potential hostages. This is where he’ll either get everyone to capitulate, or it’ll all go to hell for him. It’s your job to punch his ticket and get him to tell Charon you said hi.

Let’s backtrack a little and take a look at the realities of violent conflict for the average law-abiding taxpayer. In all reality, you’re probably going to be the one getting sucker-punched. Because you’re not out looking for it, on the hunt, prowling for victims, you’ll typically know it’s on because someone is trying to do it to you first. Your part in this is easy—if you can still think and move, you’ll crush their groin or gouge their eye (or maybe some of both). Anecdotally, this is how it goes: “There I was, minding my own business, when this guy comes out of nowhere and punches me in the head.” The next part is about looking at a target and wrecking it. “So I look up from the ground and see his knee as he’s stepping in and I rolled into him and broke it.” The rest you know. Or at least can guess. (They survived to tell their version of the story, after all.) This is how it will probably come to you: Out of the blue, when you’re sick or tired, or otherwise encumbered, when you least expect it—almost by definition.

When you’re walking around with your head up, bristling with confidence, you send an unconscious message. When you walk like you know how to break a leg, predators read it and go looking for the stragglers in the herd. Most of the time you’re avoiding bad situations by simply looking like you know what you’re doing. I’m not talking about miming being a badass or walking around like you’ve got an attitude—everyone can see right through that (except maybe people you never needed to worry about in the first place). If you end up around truly desperate people the scary ones aren’t the jumpy, theatrically hardcore types. They’re putting on an act the same way many prey animals try to look like predators in nature (there’s a kind of caterpillar that has eyes on its butt so it looks like a small snake, for example). No, the scariest people are the calm, quiet ones. Why are they so calm? Because they know they’re apex predators. Nothing hunts them, so why worry?

What about that weird middle ground, the halfway point between getting sucker-punched and the complete wave-off? We’re back at the party and the guy at the door crosses his arms and simply says, “You’re not leaving.” If you choose violence at this point, is there a best way to get into it?

As detailed above, the best way is NOW. You can throw out all pretense and concepts of technique and simply go for your target. Any defensive moves on his part are moot as long as you don’t play that game—if you’re going to compete with him, tit-for-tat, strike for block, then, yeah, he stands a chance. If you just wade in to beat him broken, that’s what will happen.

This is why we try to get everyone off of the idea of waiting, looking, and blocking. It’s a sucker’s game. For every two you block, the third one’ll get you. Out of all the video footage of violence I’ve seen, none of it—exactly zero—had anyone “defending themselves” successfully. The successful party was always—every single time—the one who did the beating. Or stabbing. Or whatever. The one doing it got it done. The one trying to stop it got done. Period.

So, if you’re worried about what he’ll do, you’re already on the wrong side of the equation. Instead of worrying, make him do something. Like lie down and hug his shattered knee.

That’s not to say there aren’t some interesting tactical considerations to take in executing an initial strike—there are, and we’ll be looking at them in detail, below—it’s just that they are minor and completely subordinate to the idea of wading in and causing injury first and foremost. Don’t get caught in the trap of “fancy”. Stick with what works because it works. Even if it seems beneath you in its simplicity.

Striking when they’re not looking

Alright, this one’s obvious. Just pick a target and wreck it. But everyone here already knew that.

Striking when they are looking

We’re back at the party. The man is standing between you and the door, thick arms crossed over his barrel chest. He just told you you’re not leaving and now he’s staring right at you, daring you to defy him. We’ll assume that other details of the scenario have led you to believe you are in danger (that’s why you were leaving, after all) and you want to get through him and out the door NOW.

There are two limitations of human vision we can exploit. The first is the fact that when you look straight ahead while standing, you can’t see your own feet. This blind spot is created by the lower part of your face, especially the cheekbones. So he can’t see anything that comes up inside a 45˚ angle off his cheekbones. This is why uppercuts work so well. Any low body shot will work, as well as strikes to the groin using hands/arms or knee/shin. If he’s looking you in the eye, he won’t see the boot to the groin until it’s too late. And here’s where we get into some advanced targeting because if you look down at his groin before you strike him, you’ll tip him off. Your targeting needs to be good enough that you know how to triangulate your foot into his groin based on where you can see his head is. (This ability grows from consistent of mat time with another human body, striking targets in all kinds of orientations. In the end you’ll know the human body as a mass of related targets so well that if you know where one part is, you can strike any other target you wish, without having to see it. This is why we push getting a reaction partner and hitting the mats regularly. This skill is a natural byproduct of that work.)

The second limitation of human vision has to do with the fact that we are predators. There are specific receptors in your eyes to detect motion across a static background. There’s wetware in your head that is specifically wired into these receptors to gage rate of travel and predict where the motion is going. What this means is that if you throw a big roundhouse motion, like a cowboy-style haymaker or other large overhand motion that breaks your silhouette and travels across the static background behind you, every human being on the planet is hardwired to see it, clock it, and intercept it. In the old days it would be to hit a bird with a stick; today it could be for him to simply get his hands up over his face and muck up your strike.

(As a side note, this is one reason people get killed by trains. It is incredibly difficult for us to judge the speed of something when it’s coming head-on. Laterally, across a static background, and we peg it. Coming straight at us, we’re not so good at. People walking on the tracks routinely misjudge the amount of time they have until the train is upon them—and the error typically kills them.)

So if he’s looking at you, don’t break your silhouette—use straight moves that go into the target from inside your outline. Stepping in and driving your fist into his solar plexus with your elbow in nice and tight at your hip fills the bill.

As an example of manipulating both limitations, look at a claw to the eyes. It should come up from underneath his vision and inside your silhouette, not from the far outside like an openhand slap.

And just to reiterate the Important Stuff:

It doesn’t matter if he knows it’s coming or not—get him.

Trying to play this like chess at 90 miles-per-hour will get you hit by the freight train of violence and send game pieces flying everywhere.

It’s not a game, so don’t try to play it.

Injure him NOW.

Manipulating social conventions

This is even more morally problematic, as we are now delving into the use of social tools to maneuver people into position for asocial opportunity. This is what the top-end, most cunning sociopaths are very, very good at—like the American mass-murderer Ted Bundy, for example. Everyone who met him said he was singularly charming; he typically used contrived social devices to lure victims into range (wearing a fake cast on his arm, or walking on crutches).

This may be morally rough ground we’re on at this point, but the misuse of social tools is brutally effective.

The most basic use would be the “false capitulation”. This is where you pretend to give up to get an opportunity to injure him. It can be everything from talking to him, “It’s cool,” or “Okay, you got me, I give up,” to simple body language, palms up, arms spread. Or a combination of the two to get you in close enough to strike while getting him to let his proverbial guard down. I know people who have done this, and it works great.

You can also talk to him to get him to look away. Ask a question and point, and as he looks, drop him. It’s a popular tactic of muggers to approach their victim and ask what time it is—when the victim looks down at their watch, the mugger strikes, having manipulated the situation to gain surprise.

A more advanced, and insidious, version is using your social tools to befriend him. Get him to close distance to shake hands. Then break him.

Of course, the big question on everyone’s mind right now is, “How can I keep from getting taken by these tricks?” The big one is to trust your gut†—people trying to hide something look like they have something to hide. This may manifest itself as small, consciously undetectable tells that you will pick up unconsciously. Your unconscious will then attempt to communicate with you by giving you a “gut reaction”—queasiness, butterflies, or other uneasiness. Trust your gut and act on it. Ask questions later.

To wrap up, there are some interesting tactical considerations you can exploit when going in first—when the situation is teetering on the razor’s edge between social and full-blown asocial. You can exploit the limitations of human vision to “hide” a strike and you can use social tools to manipulate people to your advantage—getting them to move, look away, or disregard you as a threat.

But all of these things pale in comparison to wading in NOW and injuring him. If he knows it’s coming and can see it’s coming that awareness will only work in his favor if you’re playing by the rules—if you are in competition mode. Then it will be a tit-for-tat exchange. If you wade in simply to beat him toothless and witless, then that’s what’s going to happen—whether he saw it coming or not.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr (from 2006)

†And the hair on the back of your neck (or forearms). Piloerection—hair standing on end—is an unconscious threat response left over from when we were much hairier animals. This response is the result of ancient, unconscious brain structures recognizing a threat and attempting to make you look bigger, like a startled house cat.

Violence in the Antisocial Realm

April 4, 2024/0 Comments/in Violence in the Wild/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

The use of violence can have unintended consequences. Tearing into someone physically can end up killing them, even when you didn’t mean to. And if the after-the-fact circumstances don’t allow for killing, you can be subject to serious legal (and life-changing) consequences down the road. These consequences are the reason we do not recommend using violence in antisocial situations—wrong tool for the job and all that. It’s far better, in the short- and long-term, to disengage and get the hell out of there.

That’s all well and good, and in a perfect world things should be so clear-cut and easy. But we don’t live in that world, and they’re not. Those “unintended consequences” cut both ways—say the other person just want to “kick your ass” and you end up brained on the sidewalk as a result. Everyone ends up sad, and they’ll cry in court about how they didn’t mean it, it was all a terrible mistake, their life is ruined, etc. Fat lot of good that does you.

And that’s why I’ll never tell you to hold back and take a beating.

So the question is, how do you use violence in the antisocial arena?

The sad answer is, pretty much the same way you do in the asocial arena. You need to break things inside of them so they don’t work anymore.

There are a couple of important ideas you need to understand, and keep in mind, if you’re going to use that stick of dynamite to open your car door, after all:

Don’t pull any punches

You cannot “go easy” on them just because this started out as an antisocial situation. You have to strike them as hard as you can, every time, in a target, to smash it beyond functionality.

Go in 100% dedicated to tearing their head off

If your intent is anything less than full-bore, you will get less than effective results. If you don’t want to hurt them, don’t worry, you won’t. They may not be so kind to return the favor if given half the chance. You can’t afford to screw around—the only way their ribs are going to break is if you make every effort to do so.

This all-or-nothing approach will save your ass—it gets them to nonfunctional so rapidly and efficiently it’s over before you know it. This is where you have to take it, as soon as you decide it’s on; you have to finish it on your terms, immediately. You cannot afford to get drawn into any back and forth—you need to injure them, take control of the situation, and end it on your terms now.

Take one of my brother’s stories for example: the man was inviting him to participate in an antisocial interaction. Tony knew that that’s nothing to screw around with, and he was only willing to take it very seriously, by dishing out man-stopping injury. That’s where his reluctance stemmed from. But when push literally came to shove, my brother was unwilling to simply take a beating and risk injury for himself—and so he ended the situation with a single strike.

Non-lethal target selection (or tool switch-up)

You probably don’t want to start things off with a fist to the throat. Or a baton to the head. Or a knife through the solar plexus. In general, you’re going to want to stay away from targets and striking profiles you know to be lethal. Absent that, be sure to use tool configurations that change the nature of the injury (an open hand to the throat (choke punch) instead of a forearm; a forearm to the side of the neck instead of a knee drop).

But let’s be brutally honest here—don’t be fooled into thinking this changes anything, really—they could still die as a result (reference every “man killed with single punch” news story). What I’m saying is don’t do anything you know for a fact will kill them.

Understand that once you go physical, their conception of the encounter may change dramatically

Perhaps they were only thinking of “teaching you a lesson” but now they’re afraid for their life and willing to defend it with lethal force (pulling a tool or otherwise “getting serious”). If you’re going in with less than everything you’ve got, chances are you’ll screw up, lose control of them and give them an opportunity to, for argument’s sake, shoot you dead. Also, be aware that they may have allies who may come to their aid—be fully prepared to have to injure pretty much everyone in the vicinity.

Those last two issues, the fact that they could die regardless of how “careful” you are and the fact that your crossing into the physical plane can get you killed, are the chief reasons we don’t recommend using violence as a tool in antisocial interaction. More often than not, your life (losing it or changing it forever) just isn’t worth whatever it is you’re “fighting” for. Betting your life in order to win it back will always make sense—that is, in essence, what the asocial is all about.

The above issues are what you need to be aware of, in advance, should you decide to use the tool of violence in an antisocial situation. Whether because the situation has turned or spiraled out of “social tool” control or other factors lead you to act, you need to know what you’re getting yourself into and enter into that decision with full knowledge of the pitfalls and possible outcomes.

While I will never expressly recommend it, sometimes you are forced into a position where it’s either that or take a beating (or worse) that risks your own well-being.

What I will recommend is being smart about such things and hewing always to the idea of exhausting all options when given the luxury of a choice, and carving a path of destruction through the other person when you’re not.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr (from 2007)

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)

Stripping the Fat to Find the Bone: Reason in Violence

March 13, 2024/1 Comment/in Mindset/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

Sane, socialized people see resorting to violence as the unique purview of the frustrated simpleton, the enraged id unleashed, and the insane. By saying you are willing to use violence as a survival tool you are also saying (in the layperson’s mind) that you are a card-carrying member of one of those groups.

Sane, socialized people want desperately to ascribe “reason” to violence. It’s a scary, random thing that they (typically) only ever think of as happening to them. If they can hitch it to a reason, then they think they can use their social skills to avoid it by:

– Staying away from performatively antisocial people.

– Being nice.

– Avoiding the insane.

Not bad ideas in general, but hardly enough insurance for you, personally, to bet the rest of your life on. “Speak softly but carry a big stick,” and all that.

The essential problem is that when the layperson looks at the idea of violence without reason they see (rightfully so) the very definition of a monster. And you just said you were one.

They don’t understand that a tool is just a tool—picking up and using a hammer to drive nails doesn’t mean you’re any more likely to run around the neighborhood smashing car windows than you were before you picked it up. Of course, the layperson sees an increased likelihood of vandalism simply because you picked up the tool. They suffer from an underlying assumption that there is reason and purpose to it—you only ever pick up a hammer to nail things, right?

For a sane, socialized person who happens to be trained in the use of violence as a survival tool, you are no more likely to use it inappropriately, in monstrous fashion, than you were before you were trained. In fact, you’re probably less likely to seek out “opportunities” to use it now that you know, without ambiguity, what’s at stake. (Nobody’s willing to die for a parking space. Unless you live in Southern California.)

But it is this dispassionate, morally neutral view of violence that is troubling to the average person. There has to be a reason behind it, passionate and evil, or there is no social blanket of rules woven thick enough to keep them warm against the shuddering cold void of the universe laid bare.

What they need to understand is:

It’s not from a lack of options.

It’s because your long utility belt of shopworn social tools failed to get the job done. The tool of violence is only good for one thing—shutting off a human brain. It’s the end of the line, the final option in a long list of tools and techniques. If you’re injuring people, you’ve run through and exhausted all the other social tools and arrived at the last one, glinting cold and hard in its “in case of emergency break things” box.

It’s not out of anger.

Heightened emotions are not a requirement for injury. In fact, killing with dispassion is the hallmark of the sociopath. This is the stickiest point for most people—they assume that if you don’t have to be “worked up” in order to injure people then you’re empty inside, too.

It’s not insanity.

If you were sane before, you’ll still be you on the other side. Crazy is not a requirement for injury.

The simple fact is that there is no reason to it. You’re not injuring someone because of any extraneous reason—you’re injuring them to shut them down. If you’re in there to “fight for your life” and he’s just in it to kill you, you’re probably going to get killed. The person with the clearest, cleanest, and smallest achievable goal will tend to prevail. This is what we mean when we say “intent”, which is another way of expressing monomaniacal focus. The focusing of your entire will and effort onto one small thing at a time—destroying a single square inch of him.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr (from 2005)

Spiritual Enlightenment, Competition, and the One-Way Street of Violence

March 7, 2024/0 Comments/in Competition/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

Note: Another one from 2006, so the argument is rough-hewn. I make the same points better, later—but this stands as a hopefully interesting artifact showing the genesis of my thought process.

Violence and How It Relates to Its Social Children: Martial Arts and Combat Sports

Violence is eons older than polite society. It had long been the dominant tool of last resort before anything even remotely human strode the savannah. But once we were here and began to pull together and organize against this hostile environment we call home, it became crucial to put limits on violence within society; you can’t build a pyramid if everyone’s busy choking each other out.

We added rules, decided society-by-society when it was appropriate and when it was not, who could do it to whom, and the state sanctioned the use of the tool on those who broke the rules.

This is the necessary order of history.

Violence, then, gave rise to traditional martial arts, which in turn produced combat sports. Makes sense, right?

It’s not so clear-cut to everyone. If I had a steel penny for every time I’ve heard someone refer to our training as being just like this or that martial art or a “really brutal” version of combat sports, I’d be able to fire torpedoes full of cash down on Bill Gates’ head from my solid-gold orbital railgun.*

Because the family tree goes

rock to the head –> crane style –> wrestling match

and not the other way around, this view is a funny one.

What we do is not the next step in the evolution of modern martial arts; it’s a return to the root of the whole matter. “Back to basics,” if you will.

Martial Arts: An Empty Bottle of Violence with a Child-Proof Cap

Long ago, the martial arts were the initial attempt to codify and keep knowledge of violence to train elite troops. As time went on and the schools got further and further from that original purpose—training for war—the teaching was more and more diluted with philosophy and religion. As well it should be—it’s wasn’t necessarily a Good Idea to train the average person in the skills of total war.

Instead, martial arts staked a claim to the foggy gray expanse of the antisocial realm: how to behave when dealing with social belligerents. Or, more plainly, how to be the best damn bar fighter to ever sit a stool.

This is the area that martial arts are famous for: “How do I deal with a drunk?”

It all starts with a bunch of rules on social decorum—essentially a checklist of social tools to try and defuse the antisocial bomb. When all that has been tried, and failed, then comes the fighting stance and perhaps a verbal warning: the stripe on the skunk, the cat arching its back and hissing. Then comes blocking, and “techniques” designed to convince the unruly to quit: punches, kicks, joint locks, etc., etc.

For the most part, it works. Martial arts have taken ownership of the antisocial realm and worked very hard to give practitioners a road map to navigate all the pitfalls and minefields. And if the situation is truly just antisocial in nature, blocking, punches, kicks, joint locks, etc., work well.

Combat Sports: Violence Made Palatable

Thanks to the internet, media that used to take some effort to get are now readily available—like video clips of unrestrained violence. There is, however, little interest in such things. Sane people cannot stomach real violence—we literally have a gut reaction to it. And it’s unpleasant.

Movies that attempt to recreate real-world violence—with an unflinching eye and no stylistic embellishments—make people leave the theater.

But what if we could make violence palatable? What if we could titillate and tease with just enough action to excite the predator within us all while maintaining enough padding to keep from scaring the higher-order functions?

Let’s say we put rules on it and make it a contest of strength, skill, and will instead of maiming and killing. I bet people would pay money to see that.

And they do.

But still we’re sickened when someone actually breaks an arm or loses an eye.

That’s because obvious, crippling injury is coloring outside the lines—it’s not social anymore. As long as we can all enjoy the sensation of watching the schoolyard tussle without crossing over into the schoolyard shooting, we’ll pay to play.

Violence: Not Just “Anything Goes” but “Do Your Worst”

What we strive to teach you is not just martial arts knobbed up to 11 or combat sports without the rules—it’s to get back to the genesis of all the rest of that stuff. It’s back to basics.

When people think of violence as martial arts gone wild, they are trying to drag an antisocial tool into the asocial. To be metaphorical, it’s like trying to use a crowbar as a lockpick—wrong tool for the job. To be more concrete, it’s like putting out your hand and shouting “No!” to dissuade a sociopath from killing you.

Wrong tool for the job, indeed.

When people think of violence as “combat sports without the rules” they’re also missing the point. Again, they’re thinking of violence as “anything goes” when it’s actually “do your worst.” While it sounds like pencil-necked semantics, it’s really a chilling distinction.

“Anything goes” means you can do anything, and when left to their own devices people will tend to choose non-awful things. Innate squeamishness will keep sane people away from the eyes, as seen in periorbital scratching, where people who were being strangled to death—murdered—chose to scratchat the eyes rather than dig them out. What other situation, outside of your own murder, could be more “anything goes”?

Violence, on the other hand, is “do your worst”, as in “go straight to the end of the list, pick the most godawful thing, and start there.” It means you will start by taking the person’s eye, then break their leg to drop them, and stomp them like you’re making an apocalyptic vintage from the grapes of wrath. No ifs, ands, or buts, no veering off from the socially unacceptable, the horrible, or the sickening. In fact, those things are your stock in trade. They are the tools you use—not “techniques”.

In violence you don’t best the person or even win—you do horrible, sickening, awful things to them. You do them first, without hesitation and without stopping out of pity or horror.

Is it really any wonder, then, that our ancestors sought to minimize and hobble violence with social constraints, limits, and rules?

— Chris Ranck-Buhr (from 2007, footnote 2020)

*Do you have any idea how much it costs to get a solid-gold, steel-jacketed I-beam into orbit? $227,057,702 in 2020 dollars. Yeah, I did the math.

Filthy Lies

February 28, 2024/0 Comments/in Training/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

Every now and again something gets stuck in my craw, jammed in there so tight that the only things that are going to get it out are a tire iron and a liberal dose of bile. Here’s some of both for three things that got stuck in there recently—lies I hear people tell themselves, and each other, about training for violence:

⁂ Intellectual understanding of the material is key.

The criminal sociopath knows only one thing about violence—that the person doing it wins. And even that statement is too wordy. That’s not to say the average criminal is stupid, it’s just that they tend not to introspect on the topic much beyond a gut/operational level of what’s required. When asked to articulate what works in violence they’ll tend to speak to injuries, e.g., “Knee ‘em in the groin/stab ‘em in the neck/shoot ‘em in the head” sorts of answers.

Intellectual discourse on the subject is an exercise for instruction, not for doing.

Your best bet for getting good at violence is to practice doing it—not sitting around talking about it. You should really only be sitting down and talking about it because you’re wiped out from practicing so damn much.

⁂ The technique will take care of everything.

No, it won’t. Either you’re going to take care of it, or nothing’s going to happen. “Doing a move” is like throwing a hood ornament at someone—when what you really want to do is hit them with a truck that just happens to have a hood ornament bolted on the front end.

Knowing how to set up a specific joint break is not the same thing as breaking a joint. Likewise, knowing the precise “hand wave” to “claw the eyes” is not the same as causing a serious eye injury. A subtle distinction? It has to do with how far into/through the other person you’re thinking. A typical technique stops at the outer boundary of your skin—it’s a subjective, personal exercise that has very little to do with the other person or even realistic results. You know what it’s supposed to do, but because technique focuses primarily on hand waving and foot placement there’s really no way to be sure of the outcome.

Breaking out beyond technique means looking through an anatomical feature inside them and converting it into an unrecognizable mess. It’s starting with the result you need—injury—and working backwards from there to figure out how to get that result. Or, to put it another way, technique is like obsessively polishing an empty gun. What you want to do instead is study gunshot wounds and figure out how best to make those.

⁂ I can’t be expected to do it because I’m not ready.

You’re half right. You won’t be able to do it until you give yourself permission to. The only gatekeeper holding you back here is you. So why not take the time, like, right now, and decide that you CAN for a change?

Everyone reading these words has the potential ability to blind someone, make them vomit their own gonads, bust their leg and stomp on their neck to end them. The only thing missing is your full force and effort, the physical symptom of a little something we call intent, and that’s just you giving yourself permission to do what your inner predator wants to do anyway.

“I’m not ready” is kung-fu theater bullshit. It’s a responsibility dodge. What you’re really saying is, “I don’t want to be responsible for screwing up. I want to be able to blame the training.” You gotta wake up and own it. You gotta take responsibility for what you know and what that makes you. To do otherwise is to let yourself down—it’s participating in your own murder.

To be honest, nobody’s ready; nobody wants to go there. But the last thing you want when you do end up there is to be dragging a big, heavy sack of self-doubt along for the ride.

Can you kill someone with your bare hands? Yes, you can. Everything outside that mechanical fact is illusory.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr (from 2007)

All the Reasons Why You Can’t

February 22, 2024/0 Comments/in Training/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

No sane person wants to be involved in violence. If you did, all you’d have to do is run outside and punch the first person you saw in the neck as hard as you could. Getting involved in a violent act is easy—the fact that you don’t go looking for it is a testament to your civility, sociability, and sanity. Everyone’s willing to cop to this. Other than baseline humanity, the primary thing that keeps you away from violence is fear. This, no one wants to admit—so they come up with layers of excuses to cover the fact that they’re simply afraid. All the reasons why you can’t are really just facets of a single reason: you’re afraid.

There’s nothing wrong with being afraid—a little fear is healthy—and to paraphrase Eddie Rickenbacker, America’s top fighter ace in World War I, there is no courage without fear.

What’s wrong is lying to yourself about it, making up ego-salving excuses why you can’t do it.

Finally, collected in a single place (other than the inside of your skull), here are all the reasons why you can’t:

Physical

Not Enough Training

“I don’t have enough days/months/years/belts/levels, etc., to be able to hurt someone.” If only you had more time in, you’d be ready. Maybe next month. Maybe next year. The sad part is you typically don’t get to pick when it happens, so, ergo, you’re as ready as you’re ever gonna be. And the fact that most people who successfully use violence—professional criminals—have little or no training whatsoever blows this one out of the water.

Not Coordinated

“I can’t move like you guys do.” Neither could Frank the Lawyer, the self-proclaimed Most Uncoordinated Person in the Universe. I trained Frank for about a year, a year spent lying awake at night agonizing over his personal safety—he was the only person I ever trained who I prayed would never, ever be called upon to use it. He was literally the most uncoordinated person I’d ever met. He had two left feet—and that was just his hands. Fast forward five years later when I get a phone call from him and he tells me how he took out two muggers, one of whom had a knife. To quote him, “It was just like a movie.”

This was the guy who convinced me that if he can do it, literally anyone can. Scratch that excuse.

Not Able

The wheelchair-bound, the blind, a guy with one functional arm. What do they all have in common? Not this excuse. These are all people we trained—and they were more than capable of getting it done right. What’s your excuse? A bum knee? I got two of ‘em. You have no excuse. Even if it’s as severe as the ones above, it didn’t slow anybody I know down. It only slows you down if you want it to.

Mental

Not Cut Out for It

If you’re human, you are. You’re born to it, built for it, and the only reason you’re here is because all your ancestors did it to everything that got in their way. If we could bring back a Neanderthal, I guarantee he’d piss his hides at the mere sight of you. You might not think of yourself as particularly scary that way, but then you’ve forgotten that your kind wiped his kind out. Whether you like it or not, everyone’s cut out for the commission of violence.

“I could never do that to someone!”

This is typically code for “I had no idea people did that to each other and so I’m going to go unilateral for the peace-thing with the idea that if I don’t do it to anybody then no one will ever do it to me.”

You’d be amazed at what you can do when the social security blanket gets stripped away and it’s just the screech and sparks of your life rubbing up against the steel deck plate of reality.

A gentleman once openly scoffed at me and said, “I could never kick someone in the throat when they were down.” Really? Not even if they were down because they were picking up a crowbar to brain you with? You really are very sporting about your own murder. Closed-casket funeral notwithstanding.

What he was really saying was that he was afraid. As we all are. But he was lying to me about it, as if I wouldn’t notice, and worst of all, he was lying to himself.

If he’s lucky, it’ll never matter. And statistics are on his side. If he ain’t lucky, that ego’s gonna get him killed. And for no good reason other than he was unwilling to admit a small, universal weakness.

I have to tell you, Rickenbacker’s quote startled me. I mean, he was the top American ace in WWI. He once dove on and single-handedly fought with a formation of seven planes. Seven to one, by choice. A stone-to-the-bone killer. And he admitted to spending most of his time terrified out of his gourd. But then, as he said, courage is the act of overcoming fear.

So get over it. You have no excuse. You’re not saying you can’t, you’re saying you don’t want to. Well, none of us do.

Train hard, to the best of your abilities, and know that it’s more than enough. It’s served people who were smaller than you, weaker than you, less well-trained than you, when it counted most. And they’ve all made it back alive and well. So can you—but only if you quit with the excuses and get to work.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr (from 2006)

Tag Archive for: Making the Case for Violence book

What Is Injury, Really?

Violence in the Antisocial Realm

Splitting Hairs or Splitting Heads: The Semantics of Violence

Filthy Lies

All the Reasons Why You Can’t

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