Social Matter

I took a few years of karate when I was a kid. Mostly because I wanted to climb to the top of my household’s hierarchy of sons (I was the youngest), and I thought a black belt would help me realize those ambitions. But it wasn’t long before I was having visions of even grander triumphs. I got a few katas down, learned some sweet moves, survived some sparring sessions, and suddenly I was a badass. I remember daydreaming about meeting a mugger “on the street.” (He would have a knife of course, which I would handily disarm just like we had practiced in class). I remember drifting off to sleep at night almost wishing for a break in so I could jump kick the burglar from the top of the stairs and rescue my whole family. Heroism was just one, tiny self defense situation away.

Fortunately, no actual mugger ever disabused me of my middle-school delusions of invincibility. It was actually a copy of UFC 1 (rented surreptitiously from Video World) that planted the first seeds of doubt. Maybe karate wasn’t the end-all-be-all of combat prowess after all. That wiry little fellow with the ground game seemed to do alright…

Even after I lost my youthful naivete about martial arts, though, I kept an amateur’s interest in self defense, combat sports, the like. And one of the more interesting books I’ve read over the years on that subject is Meditations on Violence by Sgt. Rory Miller. Miller teaches self defense, and he works at a prison on the “Corrections Tactical Team,” which is basically the correctional officer version of SWAT. They’re the guys, for example, who suit up and do “cell extractions” when an inmate flips out and decides he’s going to set his mattress on fire. As you might imagine, these situations eventuate in violence pretty frequently, so Miller has thrown and taken his fair share of punches, knees, elbows, headbutts, etc.

Meditations on Violence is excellent on its own terms, and I’d recommend it to any guy who wants hear a straightforward and level-headed “comparison of martial arts training and real world violence” from someone who has spent decades in both of those trenches. But I think it’s interesting ideologically as well. There are lessons to be applied.

Miller’s theme throughout the book is that there is a giant disconnect between how people train for violence and how it actually happens. People tend to think like the middle-school Glanton, or just slightly more realistic. Their training methods inculcate that mindset. A kung-fu practitioner or an MMA fighter, for instance, will almost always practice in optimized settings. They’re in a well-lit studio, calm and among friendlies. Sparring happens under controlled conditions with clearly demarcated start and end points. The amount of contact a drill will involve is agreed upon ahead of time. In other words, there are all sorts of mutual understandings and protocols in place to make the violence fairly safe and manageable.

This is all well and good, especially if you’re into martial arts for the sport or fitness aspects of it. But Miller points out that over time these practices create certain subconscious expectations about fighting that the real-world often cruelly violates. When that happens, even experienced practitioners get caught up in an adrenaline dump and are unable to respond efficiently to the threat. You may have a lot of training in hand to hand combat. You may be an animal in the ring. But that doesn’t do you much good when someone hits you with a bat from ambush. And there are gentle giants out there who will do just that.

One of the concepts Miller describes is the “predator mindset,” which he says is common among the criminals that he works with but foreign to most normal folks. The predator mindset is “implacable, cold-blooded, and calculating.” It “reduces the target of the assault from a human being to a resource.” Miller insists that, to the predatory criminal, you’re just a wallet, or maybe even just a thrill. He also says that “cheating has no meaning in the mind of a predator,” that there are only “tactics, odds, and meat.” A true predator, in other words, would cheat even if you talked him into an arranged bout in controlled conditions. He would cheat “in profound ways. Not the little ways, like illegal nerve gouges in the grapple, but big ways like getting a bunch of friends and weapons and finishing the fight in the locker room before it even starts.”

I’ve argued before that there are important parallels between physical conflict and ideological conflict, and I’ve argued before that conservatives tend to mistake the nature of the ideological conflict we’re engaged in. Well, without getting too dramatic about it, I would argue that the difference between the mind of the predator and the mind of the normal person is exactly the difference between us and our most dedicated enemies. It’s not that they’re monsters, exactly. It’s just that their concern is winning, acquiring the resources they want, pushing their agenda. The fact that we cry foul on so many of their maneuvers is irrelevant to them. We act as if we’re in the studio training. They act as if they want our cellphone.

Miller wraps up Meditations on Violence with some thoughts about how the average person can be more prepared to defend their lives should the need ever arise. And he’s insightful there, too. He talks about the idea of giving yourself “permission” to defend your life, which resonates with me. It’s an odd thought, yeah, but it makes sense. He says you should give yourself permission, ahead of time, right now in fact, to be rude if you need to. (You don’t have to stop on a poorly lit street to talk to some shady character just because he has a sob story. Keep walking. Be rude.) He wants you to give yourself permission to cheat. (Yes. You’re allowed, even encouraged, to bring a gun to a knife fight.) He wants you to permit yourself to act: “You do not need to wait until he draws the weapon or until he points it at you, or until he hurts you.” You’ve got permission to hit first.

Worth meditating on a bit, of you ask me. From a self-defense standpoint, and, yes, from a political one. One of the reasons why the Left perpetually sets the agenda is that they’re the ones acting, and so the Right gets stuck in re-action mode. Because we still tend to think of all this as a sparring match rather than a violent assault. It’s certainly not a war. It’s a civilized disagreement. I mean we’re going to resume harmonious relations with the progressive coalition at some point, right? They’re not going to displace us entirely and throw our children to the dogs, are they?

Read Miller’s book if you’ve got some time over the holidays. Try to recognize a predatory mindset when you see one. Give yourself permission to discard whatever notions of fair play you need to in order to not fall prey to it.