Mary Interviewing Little Lambs

This would be hilarious if it was not so scary.  It highlights the dangerous misconceptions held by most people who have never been in a life or death situation.  They believe that in an actual combat situation, they will be able to cleanly and distinctly make well thought out decisions about their self protection.  This is patently insane.  If you can make those well thought out decisions, it is not really a self defense situation, because your life was not on the line.  If it is a real self defense situation--defined by a criminal justice authority AFTER THE INCIDENT--then you do not have the time, luxury or even the capacity to make those decisions.  What Tim Larkin teaches is to use your body as a bullet, because in a real, justified, legal self defense situation, you would be perfectly justified in shooting the predator.  He simply teaches people how to use their body to apply that lethal force that a bullet applies for when you do not (for some reason) have a gun.

I once took a person shooting who said, "If I was attacked I would shoot the gun out of their hand."  I succeeded in not laughing in her face.  Do not carry a gun if you believe that is a possibility; if you ever find yourself in a self protection incident, it will be taken away from you by somebody with no conscience, and it will be used on you.  These idiots in the video do not understand what an actual self defense situation is.  They think it is a bar fight.  I have written previously about how most traditional martial arts are training people to bar fight, but calling it "self defense training."  Kickboxing competitions in a bar are really pointless, foolish and illegal.  That is not self defense.  As an aside, in an actual interpersonal combat situation, where somebody is trying to kill, rape or maim you, using those really cool Mixed Martial Arts skills that work so well against a single, unarmed opponent in a ring with a ref and rules, will guarantee your death.

What these people do not understand is that the only systems of unarmed self protection that are actually worth a darn, are things like Tim Larkin's Target Focus Training, because all they teach is how to kill and maim a violent predator.  You cannot negotiate with a lion trying to kill you.  You cannot Aikido its ass onto the ground and then think you can walk away.  If somebody is actually trying to kill, rape or maim you, you attack them with lethal force and the intent to kill them.  Maybe they get lucky and survive you emptying the cylinder of your revolver into their upper chest, but not because you were trying to "wound them."

Professional predators operate by ambush.  An ambush is confused chaos.  The confusion is terrifying, so much so that your cognitive brain shuts down.  When that happens, only your reptilian brain is functioning, and it will allow you to do only that which you have trained over and over again.  That means, if you train to shoot the high center chest of a silhouette, then that is what your body is going to do.  If you train to jab out someone's eyes with your thumbs if they grab you, then that is what your body is going to do.  If you train to try and put them in an arm bar--as cops and bouncers are trained and required to do--then that is what your body will do.  If you are not a cop or a bouncer, with backup, that last one will get you killed against a professional predator.  Why would you try to restrain somebody trying to stab, shoot, rape or mug you?  You do not have time to play around in an actual self defense situation--as determined by a criminal justice official AFTER THE INCIDENT--you only have time to react and do what you've been trained to do.  If you train to grab lions by the tail, you're going to lose, and you're going to lose huge.

There are some good systems of unarmed self protection out there, that teach using your body as a bullet.  There are some systems of martial arts that teach the right skills, but they teach you to do it in a bar fight and then go to jail.  Then there are some traditional systems of martial arts that teach grappling and kickboxing in life and death situations, and that is dangerous crap that will get you stabbed, shot or raped in a real self defense situation.  Do not make the mistake the Army did back in the 1990s and start training non-lethal MMA techniques for a lethal environment.  If you want to survive a life and death situation, you have to live and the bad guy has to meet death; that is combat.  If you are training to "wing 'em" then you are training to be a victim.  If you are training with the mindset that you will be able to think your way through an attempted murder or gunfight, you are--as the people in the video are--dangerously delusional.  It's over in under two seconds, the blood drains out of the frontal cortex of your brain as adrenaline floods your system and completely shuts down cognition.  If you haven't trained for it, you will freeze instead of fighting or fleeing.  It is absurd to think you will be able to make generous and pacifistic choices about just "disarming or disabling" your attacker in those circumstances.

Read Tim Larkin's book "When Violence is the Answer," and you will understand that the professional predators are not training in prison gangs for an MMA fight.  They are training to take what they want, and if you are a minor obstacle to them, they will simply kill you and then take what they want.  You have to be as lethal, as ruthless and as capable as they are if you want to survive a real self defense situation and not just beat up drunk idiots in bars.  Predators are not afraid of a sheep who knows Aikido.

Like and Share
Soule
Easy 6

The Problem of Denial

Modern American institutions of education and socialization produce one thing in greater numbers than any other profession: victims-in-waiting.  Our culture has become so Anti-Violent that when violence finds average citizens, they are completely unprepared for it.  I always look back at the time after World War Two when America was accustomed to violence and people knew how to protect themselves.  The uncomfortable truth that nobody likes discussing is that to survive a violent encounter with a professional predator, you cannot be civilized.  A true Self-Defense Situation, where somebody is trying to kill you, rob you, rape you or maim you, is not civilized.  In fact, I would define such acts of anti-social behavior as “the abandonment of the social contract that allows civilizations to function peacefully.”  When that contract is abandoned, behaving with civility is dangerously absurd.  The Greatest Generation understood this.  Their children, grandchildren and now great grandchildren, do not understand that the breach of a social contract means the rules are literally discarded.  This is contrary to any training, education or expectations most civilian members of the Baby Boomer, Generation X or Millennial generations have ever received.  They have not been well prepared to deal with behavior that is anti-social; anti-social (or sociopathic/psychopathic) behavior literally means behavior against the nature of society.  Professional predators exist purely outside of the nature of civilized society.  The effect of this is that the majorities of three generations of Americans have no concept how to react to, or survive, situations that suddenly abandon the rules of civilized society and turn violent. 

               The so-called “self-defense” industry does not have a very good answer for this problem, either.  This is why they teach bar fighting (as discussed here), because that is physical violence within the arena of a social construct, and they don’t have to address this problem within the mentality of three generations of customers.  A situation which is actually adjudicated by a criminal justice official as Self-Defense does not exist in an arena of a social construct.  A true Self-Defense Situation exists in the arena of anarchy—or combat—which are really the same thing because anarchy will inevitably lead to combat.  Anarchy is the absence of the social contract, any social construct or any civilizing norms to control violent behavior.  Preparing people to survive an encounter in that environment requires overcoming generations of pacifistic socialization in America.  Socialization defined in the true sense—adapting a person to life in a society—which indoctrinates them to expect rules, constraints and protection from anarchy.  How do we overcome that socialization?

               This is the biggest challenge facing those who teach self-protection, in which definition I am including every combat veteran and every cop who has ever been in a gunfight, because I believe to overcome the socialization of victimhood in America, every cop and veteran has to be an instructor in this mentality.  The American Army has traditionally had a very good system for overcoming that socialization; they use the veterans of the previous war to train the recruits for the new war.  And they train them as brutally as possible to prepare them for the absence of civilization one finds on a battlefield.  But, how do you replicate that for the civilian world?  People who have been victims of anti-social behavior do not need convincing of the threat, and they are frequent enrollees in self-protection training; but how do we convince the potential victims of the need to train to survive in moments of anarchy?

               This is not something that can be trained easily outside of the military system, where there is no quitting, and the instructor literally owns your body.  It is not a skill that can be taught, in other words.  We can teach people how to fight, how to shoot, how to be aggressive and how to win, but only if they accept the necessity of learning those skills.  To accept the necessity of learning how to kill a person with a screwdriver in an alley, one has to first believe and accept that the alley is potentially in a state of anarchy.  That flies in the face of all the socialization, all of the systems of government and all of the psychological defense mechanisms built up inside every modern American to protect their “inner child” from the truth.  The truth is that somebody who is a productive, functioning member of a society is also a victim-in-waiting for when that society—rules, codes, laws, morals, norms, commandments, canons and standards of behavior—disappears in a dark alley behind the barrel of a Saturday Night Special.  Acceptance of that truth is very difficult absent experience in anarchy.  But acceptance of that truth is a prerequisite to any effective training in self-protection.

               We can teach people to punch, kick, shoot and even win in a controlled competition with the rules, codes, morals, norms, commandments, canons and standards of behavior associated with a society that loves bloody sports.  But nobody can convince somebody else that her life may be in danger if she walks down that alley; for her to accept the truth, she has to accept the possibility that the rules of the social contract can be discarded, and that is a scary reality to live in for most people.  But, once a person accepts that truth, then he becomes very committed to learning the skills necessary to survive such anarchy long enough to get out and back to the social contract.  Acceptance of the dangerous nature of the world, and recognition of the tissue-paper-thin and flimsy nature of the social contract, cannot be learned from a lecturer.  It has to either come from one’s socialization early in life—being raised by a combat veteran for example—or come from a moment of clarity about that flimsy nature of the social contract.  Tragically, most times that moment of clarity comes after the façade of civilization is shattered and the person becomes a victim.  What I want is for every American to accept the truth about such dangers before a professional predator drags you into anarchy as a victim.  If you do that, then you will never be a victim; you may lose in combat, but it’s not because you will be helpless, like a victim.

               Each student has to believe that the façade of civility, civilized behavior and civilization itself can be snuffed out—as happened in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina—with very little effort from the anarchy-loving and entropy-driving universe.  The fact is every successful violent crime is against a person who believed it could never happen to them; every foiled violent crime is attempted against somebody who understands that it could and they prepared for it.  The only way to be the latter instead of the former is to accept into your belief system the fragility of civility, and then train to survive the moments of anarchy that follow its collapse.  If you change your mentality, any combat vet or gunfighter cop can teach you the skills you need to survive those moments.  But if you don’t change your world view to acceptance—instead of denial—of the dangerous world we live in, then studying the skills for decades will not prepare you for anti-social predators and you will still be a just another victim-in-waiting.

Step 1: Stop being Cleopatra, Queen of Denial.  Accept that the world is a dangerous place.

Step 2: Get more dangerous than the world.