The Absence of Choice

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)