The Warrior Scholar Ideal: Managing Fear - Why Train in Self-Defense? 008

In our previous installments we covered various dimensions of fear and how we manage in a state of heightened arousal. As authors of The Warrior Scholar Ideal Revisited, we are not just theorists of the arts of combat but practitioners of the laying of hands to do violence. We are well aware of the physical and psychological aspects of how humans respond to getting hit with bone jarring force. The weaking of knees, the buzzing in the head, the constricting darkness and dissociation of the spirit as our soul’s grasp onto our bodies returning us to the fray.

A major component to our training is not only to learn how to move with ruthless intention but how to evade getting struck, be it hands, blade, or bullet, in the first place. As Miyamoto Musashi admonished, “No man is invincible,” referring to the realization we all must come to that we are only human, and all are vulnerable on some level for death is no respecter of persons.

Thus, the importance of training in a manner that takes into account that as mere mortals from the clay we arose and to the clay we shall return. It is between the book ends and how we choose to position ourselves in the world that matters. We have a choice we can live a life full measure or one of irrational fear and anxiety.

The student of “self-defense” desires, fundamentally, to manage his own fears.

If he is to be successful, he must, first of all, realize this fact.

Second, he must explicitly, unconditionally, accept the nature of the fear that he seeks to manage before all others. He must accept that his is the most primal and universal of all fears, for it is not the fear of spiders or public speaking, say, that possesses the student of self-defense. No, it is fear of falling victim to the violence that motivates him.

Third, given the object of his fear, he needs to grasp that it is not some mano-a-mano duel, a one-on-one confrontation bound by rules (that are either formal, as in sport, or informal, vis-à-vis the proverbial schoolyard “fight”) for which he trains. Rather, the purpose of his training is to prevail over the worst of the worst, the merciless, the criminal.  

Fourth, this last insight in turn should help him to see that any training methodology that would have him assume stances or execute premeditated “techniques” of the kind proper to such “combat sports” as boxing, say, or MMA, is most emphatically not going to be maximally conducive to the achievement of his goal: In a real attack, unlike in a boxing match, there is no time to “square off” against the attacker, and the dynamic, adrenaline-charged conditions of the attack promise to preclude the successful administration of any techniques that undoubtedly worked when the self-defense student was practicing them on a stationary object or with a cooperative training partner.

In an attack, the enemy gets a vote.

Fifth, the self-defense student, determined to manage his fear of succumbing to a violent death, needs to notice that while his fear transpires between his ears, as it were, in his psyche, it also pervades his body. Human beings experience their emotions throughout their bodies. This being the case, if he is to manage his fear, he must resolve it in his body. Talking about his fear with others is certainly helpful. Talking about it to himself is essential. Yet talk must be accompanied by physical exercises. His training methodology, then, should aim to relieve his body, to the greatest possible extent, of the tensions that at once reflect and reinforce his fear.

Sixth, in recognizing that he, being human, is a psychosomatic unity, that fear is felt in the body, the self-defense student needs to select an art that will develop his whole body, that will enable him, in other words, to achieve body mastery. While many arts focus primarily upon techniques, upon moves, the self-defense student must realize that, since it is the management of his fear of violent death for which he trains, and because fear lives within the body, his martial training must cultivate within him ever-more refined movement. In learning how to move one’s whole body with maximal efficiency, and with the express purpose of attaining martial excellence, the self-defense student will be able to both evade and strike from any and all conceivable positions to which his body is naturally capable of moving.

And the better he trains his body to move, the more positions in space-time he’ll be able to assume. The better, the more efficiently, the more subtly, he learns to move, the more possibilities for striking (and for avoiding being struck) will materialize for him.

Seventh, your average law-abiding citizen is averse to thinking much about violence, let alone to training to master its use. There remains ensconced in the consciousness of the average inhabitant of the contemporary Western world the persistent notion that violence is exclusively within the purview of two and only two classes of people: criminals and agents of the government. Decent folks, civilians, it is thought, can never resort to violence, either because they aren’t capable of doing so competently or because doing so will make them indecent.

The self-defense student must recognize this idea for the fiction, the insidious fiction, that it is.

An in-depth analysis of the concept of violence and such concomitant ideas as those of, say, coercion, power, aggression, and even “the State,” would undoubtedly reveal multiple reasons for rejecting this ubiquitous assumption. For now, though, suffice it to say that with the exception of those few people who style themselves exponents of pacifism—itself an incoherent position—no one would think to deny that violence in the cause of the defense of innocents, whether oneself or others, is eminently righteous.

To reiterate, the fundamental, morally-relevant difference between the student of self-defense, on the one hand, and, on the other, the bloodthirsty, is that the former is committed to using violence if and only if there is no other alternative to becoming a victim of the latter.

Eighth, to cement this distinction in his mind, the self-defense student must simplify matters as much as possible for himself. Toward this end, he should repeatedly tell himself:

If at all possible, avoid placing myself in a potentially problematic situation. Don’t even be there in the first place.

If, though, avoidance somehow fails and I wind up in an exchange with an aggressor, then, if at all possible, I will do everything within my power to deescalate tensions so as to preclude them from culminating in violence.

If, however, de-escalation fails, then, and only then, will I unleash the dogs of war.

Nor is the use of “war” here rhetorical, hyperbolic, or figurative. Many within the self-defense industry insist that “fighting,” “the use of violence,” “self-defense,” “self-protection,” and “the martial arts” all refer to different things. Conceptually speaking, these distinctions are not meaningless. They can even be thought-provoking. But for practical purposes, and in the interest of gaining clarity of vision for if and when his moment of truth arrives, the self-defense student must regard them as distinctions without a difference, the products of exercises in pedantry.

Regardless of the labels that people choose to assign to it, the violence for which the student of self-defense trains to become a peerless wielder is the violence of war. “Martial” means “of or pertaining to war.” Historically, the practitioners of the martial arts have been warriors who brought their skills to bear upon the enemy on the battlefield. The martial arts are the arts of war. The law-abiding citizen who trains for self-defense is, fundamentally, no different than any soldier from times present or past in that he trains, not to win an ego contest with some asshole by whom he feels “disrespected,” but to prevail in battle over an attacker who is trying to end his life or the lives of his loved ones.

Just as a hand-to-hand combat situation between a soldier and an enemy on the battlefield is an instance of mortal combat, so too is the use of hand-to-hand combat on the part of a civilian who is attacked on the streets or in his home no less a potentially mortal encounter. It is this for which the student of self-defense trains.

In the spirit of simplification, of clarity, he needs to continually remind himself of the formula that promises to deliver him victory:

Move first. Move better. Move with ruthless intention.

Move first: This doesn’t necessarily mean “strike first,” though striking is obviously a mode of movement, and striking first is always to be preferred. Yet moving first could be something as simple as making the subtle adjustments within the self-defense student’s body that need to be made in anticipation of doing whatever he needs to do to defeat the enemy. This anticipatory movement is a form of speed that, as such, already puts him ahead of the enemy’s movement.

Move better: To move better than the enemy is to move more efficiently, more smoothly, more fluidly than him. Smooth movement is also deceptive movement: It’s difficult to detect. Within smooth movement, every adjustment of the body—from repositioning one’s feet ever so slightly, to stepping off-line, to creating space by concaving one’s chest, to kicking and striking—is the equivalent of a “sucker punch”: These adjustments, occurring, as they do, in seamless continuity with one another, disorient the enemy’s sense of time long enough to gain the advantage over him.

Move with ruthless intention: Moving before the enemy moves, and moving more efficiently than he moves, are, for the most part, necessary for victory, but they are not sufficient. The self-defense student doesn’t train to move well for the sake of moving well. He must move with every intention of removing the enemy from the land of the living.

Finally, the self-defense student, interested, above all, to manage his fear, should stop thinking of himself as a self-defense student.

As at least one person has memorably remarked, “No one wins on defense.” Of course, outside of sport, defense is the only justification for the use of violence by decent human beings. But while defense is the reason for the use of violence, once the defender has decided that he must engage in it, his defense must, and can only be, a fierce offense. He must be ruthless.

The self-defense student isn’t, then, so much a “self-defense” student, but a student of combat. And he trains to become a peerless combatant.

Better yet, he trains to become a warrior. 

Jack Kerwick, Ph.D.

LtCol Al Ridenhour USMC (ret)

Authors, The Warrior Scholar Ideal Revisited