You can say the realm of martial arts is divided between three camps — hobbyists who just like doing cool moves, combat athletes who compete, and salty “self-defense experts” who look down on the other two. I’d like to call out the last category of being bad at explaining what they do and why they hate sports and fun. I find that self-defense gurus tend to take themselves too seriously, making them easy to troll and criticize. However, in this blog post, I’d like to help give new ideas in better explaining the concept of self-defense.
Experts take from the same general script of “combat sports have rules, the street has no rules,” which isn’t completely wrong. However, they would then have to expound while also generalizing most self-defense scenarios. There are many different kinds of self-defense situations, each with their own context and criteria for the safest possible resolution. Definitions branch out further and it becomes intimidating and hard to understand for most people.
There may be a way to introduce the premise of self-defense more easily by starting with the vibe before going into the details of the different scenarios. It’s certainly not easy and I’m not claiming to have a be-all-end-all way to explain self-defense. In fact, with how long this blog post turned out, I may have done the opposite. But what I offer here is a different perspective that may help you come up with your own better ways to explain self-defense.
Bear with me as I painstakingly try to reinvent the wheel.
The Real Difference Between Combat Sports and Self-Defense
People often use too many words to lay out the differences between combat sports and self-defense. What I offer here is a much simpler and more comprehensive way to do so by using just one word — liminal.
Combat sports are held in controlled environments, where everything is regulated and managed to ensure safety, the fighters and their teams are thoroughly prepared for what’s to come, and the outcomes are mostly predictable. Meanwhile, self-defense often occurs in liminal conditions, where most factors are unknown and come up at inopportune times.
Many reality-based martial arts experts try so hard to explain what they do that they have to shit on combat sports in order to set themselves apart. There’s explaining nuances to casual audiences who know nothing about martial arts, then there’s making a complete hash of it by trashing established training methods by putting them in a box that’s not really there.
For instance, I dare say their favorite explanation of self-defense having “no rules” is wrong.
There’s No Such Thing as “No Rules”
Even life-or-death situations still have rules, namely the law. Even if you come out of it alive, if you main or kill the assailant, you’re likely going to be charged with a crime. Perhaps in the moment, you prefer going to jail than being dead, but getting charged with a felony can still negatively impact your quality of life to the point of making you wish you were dead.
Using either appropriate force if necessary or none at all by preventing violence with diplomacy are still more appropriate. You either evade, placate, or stand your ground. Chasing them down and neutralizing them are often deemed inappropriate in most jurisdictions. Of course, this is an oversimplification, but learning your country’s penal code is actually quite important for self-defense. You have to know your options and what you can get away with.
I say all this because in a lot of cases, so-called self-defense experts make it seem as if you have to go ooga booga when you have to defend yourself. Yes, the gloves are indeed off, but the law still applies. If you do end up deciding to assault them in return, especially if it can result in permanent injury or death, you should do so while being aware of the consequences.
The Random Element
Perhaps you can say combat sports are like chess, while self-defense is more like poker. The element of randomness makes the latter more treacherous due to unknown risks. While combat sports can still be pretty dangerous, you can at least train and prepare for them. Meanwhile, what makes self-defense situations truly dangerous is whatever you don’t see coming.
Skills acquired from combat sports can help you better defend yourself, making you more physically and technically competent to address the dangers inherent in self-defense, as well as be more physically capable in life overall. You can play your cards right, but you can always draw a bad card and get fucked over by something you didn’t expect. That’s not exclusive to self-defense, but also life as a whole.
The dweebs who scoff at combat sports for not being relevant for self-defense are merely lazy cowards with big mouths. However, they do have a point in those skills not being completely sufficient for addressing the liminal conditions of self-defense. You can understand where they’re coming from, but they’re just bad at explaining those reasons.
It’s like saying learning math is not relevant in everyday life. Perhaps you don’t need algebra or calculus for most of your existence, but being good at math makes you a smarter and more capable individual nonetheless.
A mathematician can be better at managing their money, a doctor can be better at managing their own health, an engineer can be better at fixing things around the house, a writer can be better at communicating their ideas, a trained martial artist can be better at staying calm in adverse situations. Of course, they can also be stupid, but the keyword here is “can”.
Liminality in Context of Self-Defense
The word liminal means a transitional state or space that serves as a threshold between “what was” and “what’s next”. Liminal spaces include train stations, airports, public hallways, stairwells, and other places you pass through to go from one place to another. Liminal states are psychological or social phases of change, such as adolescence, searching for a job, moving to a new house, waiting for test results, and so on.
When we say liminal in the context of self-defense, it describes spaces and situations that we’re totally out of place in, where we’re mostly unprepared for whatever unforeseen circumstances may occur. What makes the liminality of a self-defense scenario different from most other things is the possibility of permanent injury or death to one or both parties.
Depending on the intentions of the aggressive party, your options in defense are limited not only by the lack of sufficient information and foresight, but also moral and legal restrictions that may prevent you from addressing violence with equal or greater violence on your part. The setting you’re in and the people around you at the moment may not cooperate as well. All those limitations, the lack of control over conditions, and the adverse risk you’re unwillingly put in — that’s what makes a self-defense situation liminal.
Liminal self-defense is ephemeral, unpredictable, and dangerous.
While some would say it’s better to go to jail than buried in a grave, a major factor in the liminal conditions of a self-defense scenario is that you can’t be sure of what they want and what they’ll do if they do get what they want. The best you can do in most cases is to coalesce to their demands and hope against hope that they leave you alone without hurting you afterwards.
Whether it’s a mugging, a home invasion, a challenge, a murder attempt, or so on, you only get to label that event well after the fact. You can only know the truth of that moment in hindsight. For the whole time, you have imperfect information. If it’s a seriously perilous situation, you have to rely on your own wits, as well as luck and/or other people’s help.
Even if you’re defending against intruders in your own home, a place where you’re supposed to be most familiar with, the assailants themselves are unknown factors. You likely don’t know for sure what their intentions are, how many of them there are, what weapons they’re carrying, what they did before you saw them, and what their plans are to get out of that confrontation. Their presence momentarily turns your own home into a trap.
It gets even worse if they happen to have staked you out. They’ve scouted your house and the neighborhood, studied your daily routine, pinpointed where their objectives are, and taken note of all possible escape routes. Maybe they haven’t. Maybe they’re just desperate. Either way, you don’t know how prepared they are and what they really want.
You’ll want to be prepared with an equalizer like a weapon or a good security system that can either prevent that situation or at least even the odds. If they have more information than you, that puts you at a disadvantage.
In a great majority of self-defense situations, there’s an imbalance of intent and agency. There’s also the limitation of one’s own moral perspective in the heat of the moment. Are you sure you’re not the bad guy in that situation?
Role of Martial Arts Training and Physical Fitness in Self-Defense
That scene in Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark where Harrison Ford was confronted by a sword-twirling ne’er-do-well, only to shoot him dead with his revolver, has got to be one of the most influential pieces of media in modern history when it comes to falsely informing people of the ineffectiveness of martial arts in the face of real-life violence. They seem to forget that it’s a scene from a movie, not a LiveLeak or WorldstarHipHop clip.
Also, to make it look as if training martial arts in a predominantly combat sport context renders you incapable of fighting dirty — eye-gouging, biting, groin-striking, etc. — is absolutely ludicrous. Being good at martial arts, even if it’s just sport combat, can make you stronger, faster, and more accurate at hitting a bad guy’s testicles while not immediately running out of breath. Have you seen untrained and out-of-shape people try to throw a punch?
Then again, let’s throw them a bone since earning a living as a martial arts instructor is quite difficult, especially in today’s economy. They have to market their services somehow.
It’s not to say that you shouldn’t be able to defend yourself simply because you happen to be a few pounds overweight and too busy to train more regularly, but being physically fit isn’t just about being able to defend yourself. Being healthy and fit allows you to do more things in general, whether it’s in martial arts or other facets of life. How is that not a good investment of your time and energy?
The ultimate objective of self-defense and martial arts training should be the attainment of capabilities and attributes that allow you to improve and/or maintain your quality of life. This is true for hobbyists who train on weekends for fun and serious lifers who train regularly for either competition or self-defense.
Physical fitness improves quality of life, learning appropriate self-defense lets you maintain your quality of life, combat sports improves quality of life for those who derive value in competition, and so on. How that’s hard to comprehend for some people, I’ll never truly know.
Getting good at something, whether it’s in martial arts or other things, shouldn’t be only about being able to apply those specific skills. It’s about becoming a more competent human being.
Competent Self-Defense
The skill and level of agency in self-defense isn’t about being unassailable or impervious to damage, but simply having the rightest possible answer at the moment. You can do your best to be prepared at all times, but being hypervigilant to the point of paranoia isn’t the right answer either. The key to self-defense isn’t just vigilance or force, but competence.
If you’re generally incompetent in life, you’re less likely to be able to sufficiently defend yourself and your loved ones during and after violent confrontations. Being competent means you’re vigilant without being paranoid, prepared without being overencumbered, and capable without having to verbally declare it at all times. Competent people don’t tend to be arrogant cowards.
Of course, you wouldn’t want to shout it from the rooftops that you can hold your own. In fact, not having the urge to do that is a part of being competent. You don’t attract unwanted attention, keep your cards close to your chest, and quietly work on the things you need to focus on. If you have a different opinion on the qualities of competence, feel free to share them below.
More than knowing how to throw a punch or kick, more than being a paranoid schizophrenic who thinks the CIA is about to kill you, more than bringing a knife or a flashlight to defend yourself, you have to actually be a competent human being.
A competent human being does not provoke others into violence, whether they’re under the influence or not. A competent human being does not willingly put themselves in dangerous situations. A competent human being does not run away while leaving their companions behind for predators to feast upon. A competent human being does not only keep themselves safe, but also everyone else around them.
Competence is the most powerful thing in the universe.
To become competent is simple in concept, but not easy in execution. If being disciplined, punctual, vigilant, principled, hard-working, and smart were easy, everyone would be competent. This goes for learning how to defend yourself and your loved ones, as well as everything else in life. It also goes into understanding context and nuance in every situation.
Training the Nervous System
More than strength and endurance, the most important part of the body in self-defense training is the nervous system, from your brain to how it connects with the rest of your body. If your nervous system is not prepared for violent situations, you won’t be able to perform when it’s called for. Even the act of giving up your possessions during a mugging is in itself dependent on your nervous system not suddenly freezing up when you’re confronted.
Being able to stay composed during confrontations isn’t just about confidence or dominance, but being mentally prepared. Of course, you can’t prepare for everything in a self-defense situation, and most options you’re given might as well be gambles. Your nervous system has to be able to handle such conditions, with adrenaline and cortisol surging throughout your body.
You can also ignore the problem and hope you never have to deal with anything like that. You can become a recluse by never stepping outside your own home and minimize the chances of a violent confrontation or accident. If you stay relatively healthy, you’ll live a long time, but you likely won’t live a rich and fruitful existence. It takes courage to step outside your comfort zone.
Courage is not having no fear, but taking action even if the fear is overwhelming. We must understand that fear is natural and not to be feared, unlike what Franklin D. Roosevelt famously stated. Fear is a compass that points towards the path you must either walk or avoid. Deciding which you should do at the moment and immediately acting upon it within milliseconds requires a sense of immediacy most people don’t have.
It takes courage to either defuse the situation or run away. Talking an attacker down takes nerves of steel, coalescing to their demands while keeping your wits about you calls for calmness, and being able to run away without hitting a dead end or getting hit by oncoming traffic requires situational and spatial awareness. Most people freeze in such a predicament.
You must also reprogram yourself to act appropriately in social situations, especially if you happen to be the aggressive sort of person. Use polite, diplomatic language as much as possible. That doesn’t mean you should become a complete square, but you also shouldn’t try to act cool or tough when it doesn’t come naturally to you. Even knowing if it actually comes naturally to you takes tremendous self-awareness that informs your decision-making.
The ego is the greatest hindrance to effective self-defense and survival. Thinking either you’re so strong and capable that you’re impervious to misfortune or too weak to do anything about it can lead to either false confidence or complete lack thereof. You can be confident enough to prepare yourself for whatever you may encounter but not too confident that you willingly put yourself and others in harm’s way. The ego avoids discomfort, and that leads to disaster.
In order to train the nervous system for such scenarios, you must encounter resistance and discomfort on a regular and repeatable basis. Training means it should be difficult enough without being impossible to bear and get through. Iteration and repetition will allow you to practice motor skills, correct common mistakes, and understand strategies and tactics.
While detractors would criticize that as training that will likely go to waste, it’s still better than doing absolutely nothing. They may even think since there’s no way to prepare, you might as well offer yourself to fate and let nature take its course. That’s a dumb way to live life.
After all, it’s better to train and not need it than not train and end up needing it. Martial arts training that includes effective drilling and controlled sparring is perhaps the most readily available avenue for simulating self-defense scenarios with levels of resistance and discomfort that can be tweaked and adjusted accordingly. You’re not trying to become a superhero, you just want to not shit your pants when you happen to get caught in a bad time.
However, it’s not the only way to train the nervous system to deal with adrenal situations. Playing sports, traveling to unfamiliar places, meeting new people, doing hard work, and regularly putting yourself in uncomfortable situations can all help make your nervous system get more comfortable with being uncomfortable. That can go a long way to being able to better deal with unwanted events and nasty surprises with unpleasant people.
How Lifestyle and Career Choices Affect Your Self-Defense
To conclude this blog post on self-defense, here’s an appendix. Pardon me as this lengthens this blog post even further, but I had to write about something I read in the comments section of this video by Armchair Violence. While it’s the sort of explanation I criticized at the start of this piece, it’s still worth watching.
“Lifestyle and career choices matter for your safety. There are two factors. One is the obvious one that if you live as a cop or career criminal, or missionary to somewhere poor and war-torn, you’ll be in constant contact with scary armed people, and you’ll need to have more tools and strategies.
The other thing is how many strangers you interact with. If you work the teller in a convenience store you’ll be in contact with thousands of strangers every month. Some of these will be dangerous, because out of a thousand random people some will be mentally ill or habitually violent.
But if you work on a farm or in a small office, you can go months only interacting with the same dozen people. So, if your life brings you into contact with a lot of unknown randos, you need more judgement and (a) bigger tool box.”
My personal self-defense philosophy boils down to interacting with as few strangers as possible since my current lifestyle only requires me to be out in public once or twice a month. That narrows down the possibility of encountering assholes, which is a luxury I relish. Other people who have to commute to work and/or face people on a daily basis don’t have the same luxury.
The way I do things doesn’t directly apply to them, even if I’ve had plenty of experience in the past. The many confrontations I’ve had a decade or two ago does inform my current strategies, but conditions are somewhat different now in the 2020s, so I can’t be too sure of them whenever I’m asked for advice as someone who is known within the circles I frequent who knows more about martial arts than the average person.
My supposed expertise is still limited by my own perspective, even if I’ve had a considerable amount of experience in the past. That’s why I’ve had to always preface my answers with “I only know what I know.”
“Second thought is that a lot of people do go through life using the same one-size-fits-all solution. Because it works really well nine times out of ten, or ten out of ten in their small office. But that can give them the illusion that it’s foolproof and make it harder to do something different if the situation demands it.
If you’re from a background where vigorous debate is the normal method for conflict resolution, you will tend to win arguments with people from less debate class families. Actually, it’s the verbal equivalent of training mma and going against people who can’t fight: you’ll cut them to pieces as if they were children.
You can go through life verbally sparring your equals and bullying the normies. Then you apply it against someone who can’t talk so (well) but is habitually violent, and it will blow up in your face. This works both ways: someone who is used to resolv(ing) conflicts successfully with physical violence might get very self-destructive in circumstances where throwing fists is 100% the wrong solution.
Actually, being an abusive bully can seem like a winning strategy for a long time and then suddenly get people in weird no-win scenarios, like those Karen videos show.”
A person’s history, especially their formative years, can go a long way towards informing them how they deal with social confrontations. How they learn to deal with them during their youth in the environment they grew up in can form the basis of how they deal with the rest of their lives.
That bit about bullying is also interesting as there’s truth in that. Many bullies become so in their youth out of survival, joining cliques to not be on the other side. Those people then grow up and go about their lives. While the fantasy of bullies peaking in high school and not doing so well in adulthood is prevalent, perpetuated by Hollywood movies and young adult novels, the truth is they pursue careers, get married, have kids, and do pretty well for themselves.
Whether they regret their bullying past or pass on their tendencies to their successors, that depends on the individuals themselves. Unfortunately, bullying is a major part of the human dynamic, and confronting it with violence is the lowest tier of defense against it. If you continue to rely on it as your first line of self-defense, you may be a bully yourself.
“And the third thought is that most people who hurt other people, hurt people they know, most of the time. Because they’re always there, and because no one can piss you off like someone you care about.
Luckily, most people are too inhibited to punch someone else in the face, even if they just hurt you worse than anyone ever did in school or at work. If you train yourself out of these inhibitions you need to be more self-aware and controlled than normies need to, lest you hurt someone you care about.
Or get yourself in prison.”
A big part of learning to move past such tendencies is to actually confront your past trauma and clear your emotional debt. You can’t keep distracting yourself and push your emotions away then expect yourself to never have to deal with them ever again. You can never know for sure if you’re actually acting out due to your repressed emotions, which can result in harming others.
Trauma does not get stored in memory, but persists as a state. Whenever you’re put in situations similar to traumatic moments in your youth, you revert to that state. For example, if you were abused as a child, you can become that child once again. Processes like getting psychiatric help, cognitive behavioral therapy, communicating with your family and partner, and doing self-work like journaling all go into working on those repressed emotions.
The sooner you do the work to clear emotional debt, the less you’ll inadvertently harm people. That’s more important than learning self-defense.
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