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.