This may sound obvious, but there a lot of things violence is not. It is not a particularly rough cage-match; it is not a bar fight where everyone's sharing beers ten minutes later; it's not getting your nose bloodied.

Many people would call those things violence, and under that banner find them repugnant, negative, and to be avoided. While the avoidance part is common sense (unless you're into those things, which is fine for you), none of these are violence as we define it. That's because we prefer to have a much more narrow definition: violence is what happens when someone sustains an injury.

So what's the bloody nose? The lacerated eyebrow? The egg-sized hematoma on the shin? Much like the lay public would call the previous situations 'violence', the medical community would classify those various tissue manglings as 'injury'. But that's not good enough for us--we need a narrow definition: injury is when an important anatomical feature can no longer do its job, resulting in a decrement of normal function. Something so important gets smashed that the man literally cannot go on.

Our narrow definition give us the following picture:

Violence is when people get broken such that they don't just quit, they quit working.

or

"It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye."

In the end, we have to ask: why bother? Nit-picking over such narrow definitions makes us look like jerks when discussing 'violence' or 'injury'--saying that most of what happens in the UFC is not violence (save the few unfortunate career-ending injuries) and most of what people think of as injury is not really (anything you can 'walk off' is just an inconvenience).

What does hewing to such a narrow definition do for you?

Two things that go hand-in-hand to make you scary-effective:

1. You know exactly what you're gunning for

and

2. You know whether you got it or not.

With a narrow definition, there's no wiggle room, no 'I sorta got it' like you're kinda pregnant. The narrow definition keeps things tight and binary--either you got it or you didn't. It keeps you from having to worry about an entire spectrum of goals or events--you just want one. Injury.

The narrow definition keeps you from screwing around with things like making people submit, tiring them out, besting them strength-to-strength. It keeps you from confusing these things with effective violence.

Best of all it keeps you from being surprised when the guy you thought you just dropped comes back at you.

A narrow definition of violence will save you wear & tear--and maybe even your life.

Labels: injury