Violence is binary–either you are doing it, or you are not. There is no middle ground, no levels of severity. You can’t tear out someone’s knee or stab them in the heart ‘just a little bit.’ It’s all or nothing.
Attempting to put degrees on violence by going easy on the man or pulling punches only creates opportunities for him to get to you first. Remember that only serious, debilitating injury triggers a spinal reflex. A ‘boo-boo’ (like a minor laceration or contusion) won’t even slow down a dedicated person, much less stop them cold. (Here’s the quick and dirty way to look at it–if it wouldn’t stop you, what makes you think it’ll stop him?)
Simply put, trying to apply violence by degrees of severity will get you killed.
So what real choices do you have in violence? The short list says two. The long list says three. Either way, that’s not many. That’s why we always say that violence is a narrow tool, only good for one thing–shutting off a human being. It’s also why we say that while violence isn’t always the answer, when it is the answer it’s the only answer.
The short list is the binary one–on or off. You’re either plowing into him 100% dedicated to tearing his head off, dropping him, and stomping him into non-functionality, or you’re not.
Everyone has a pretty good grasp on the ‘on’ part. The ‘off’ part, strangely enough, is the one that causes the most unease. That’s because it’s all about the ego. It’s the walking away from a verbally abusive badass, it’s letting the jerk have ‘your’ parking space, it’s shrugging off a heated shove. In our darkest fantasies we would all love to give the above miscreants their just deserts–a good, solid beating to ‘teach him a lesson.’ It sounds good, it feels right, and it can get you killed. A good, solid beating to teach a lesson is not the same as tearing a man’s eye out of his skull and wrecking his body to the point where he could end up with serious brain damage–if he survives. Lesson-teaching is a social interaction. It’s about status. Communication. And that means it has nothing to do with violence.
The ‘off’ part is also about choosing when to stop using violence–when you recognize that he’s non-functional. We’ll get into that in more detail in just a moment.
The long list has three choices: on or off, and what targets to wreck. The third choice is the one that gives you a little bit of latitude in the outcome, but not a lot. Driving your fist into his solar plexus is very different from driving it into his throat–with the solar plexus his chances of dying as a result are small; with the throat you would expect him to die without medical intervention.
Target choice gives you a little bit of latitude, but violence is still violent. You’re always going to hit him as hard as you can, every time. And while the difference between a broken jaw and a broken neck is obvious, the broken jaw can still kill him if he’s got a bad heart, or if he goes down and strikes his head on the curb.
This is why violence is like doing surgery with a chainsaw.
If you’re going to do surgery with a chainsaw, you really only have three choices:
1) When to start in on him,
2) What part(s) to lop off, and
3) When to stop.
‘Starting in on him’ is when you touch him with the chainsaw. I think we can all appreciate that once you start, you’re committed. You can’t ever undo what you just did, e.g., you can’t ‘unbreak’ a knee.
You can decide what parts to lop off: taking his head off with the chainsaw will have an obvious effect, but even if you opt for the leg, he can still bleed to death. It’s a chainsaw, after all. It isn’t going to be nice and clean like a proper surgical kit.
The only other choice you have is when to stop. This is when you stop touching him with the chainsaw and turn it off. You’ll do this at the point where you recognize, to your satisfaction, non-functionality. Much in the same way that true injury is obvious and unambiguous, when someone goes non-functional, you’ll typically register it as you prepare the coup de grace. This is why, under optimal conditions, you’ll never accidentally kill someone with this stuff. That doesn’t mean it isn’t possible–it is. But unintentional death becomes less likely when you know which injuries are life-threatening and which are typically not.
Violence is a very narrow tool–it’s only good for a single job, and you only ever have (at most) three decision points when using it: when to start, what to wreck, and when to stop. That’s it. Superuncomplicated. When applied in this way, when applied like chainsaw surgery, you maximize your chances of being the one to walk away. Fiddling with it, adding extra levels or ‘what ifs, buts and maybes,’ pulling punches or otherwise trying to use it to do things it can’t do can get you killed.
Remember, when doing surgery with a chainsaw everything’s screaming, messy amputations. The most delicate procedures become gore-fests. And if the problem can’t be solved by on, off, or how bad, it isn’t a problem that can be solved with violence.
