The essential problem in personal violent conflict is the belief that the social contract is bulletproof.  Or, at the very least, that it still applies to you even if the other guy has chosen to completely ignore it.

The initial assumption is that everyone holds to it in a similar fashion.

A little life experience, a little paying attention, and you come to realize that it just ain’t so.

This is a hard first step towards figuring violence out, one that is a shock even if you don’t have to learn it the hard way.  (Anyone reading this has already figured this out.)  But this potentially life-altering shift in perspective is useless if you continue to use the social contract as the lens through which you view violence.

This is how we all arrive at the “bad guy/good guy” and “attacker/defender” dichotomies.

We use our social perspective to make a judgment about who’s right and who’s wrong, define those roles and then pick the one we aspire to.  We all want to be the good guy, and since bad guys attack that makes us the defender.

Now that we’re stuck with it — it can be even harder to shift that perspective than learning that not everyone holds to the social contract as closely as we would like.

Let’s look at two scenarios:

  1. A man breaks into a home and surprises a woman in the kitchen — he grabs a knife off the counter, stabs her in the neck and she bleeds out.
  2. A man breaks into a home and surprises a woman in the kitchen — she grabs a knife off the counter, stabs him in the neck and he bleeds out.

In terms of social and legal considerations, right and wrong, and how we would personally feel about these two situations (cheering one and feeling sickened by the other)…

MECHANICALLY, THEY ARE IDENTICAL.

The best information in violence comes from the worst people; dismissing it because they are “evil” or “in the wrong” is what hamstrings us sane and social folk.

The fact of the matter is that regardless of how polite society and the law will view the act later, in that moment of violence there is a winner and a loser.  And in the two scenarios above the winners won for the same reasons.

You need to look at the facts of violence without regard for the social contract.  Clinging to it will fix your attention on the loser and lock you into a vicious circle of trying to figure out how to counter the winner.  Not only does this set you firmly on the back foot, but it means you’ll miss the best information available — what the winner did to win.

Why or how it started doesn’t matter. Motivation, social standing, societal inequities, and how the law will view the act after the fact do nothing to alter the physical facts.

What you need to see are the mechanics of it working and ask yourself:

  1. ”Who’s winning?”
  2. “Why?” and
  3. “How can I improve their process?”

We are not recommending that you aspire to live your lives like these people — only that you function like the winners do in the moment of violence.

In violence it’s not about right or wrong, or attackers and defenders — it’s about winners and losers.  Someone’s going to win and someone’s going to lose, and the reasons for both are always the same.

If you’re going to pick a role out of the mishmash of labels we all love to apply to these things, don’t be a defender or even a fighter — be the winner.

Until next time,

Chris Ranck-Buhr
TFT Master Instructor

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