Rory Miller's Blog, page 17

Recap

This has been a long eleven days. Roughly eight hours a day of training preceded by an hour or two of prep and finished with four or more hours of campfire-level talk.  One or two hours (depending on the day) for travel.  I'm a little wiped.

Friday.  Landed at the airport.  Killed time until Marc's plane got in.  Lise picked us up.  Drive to Lise's for dinner, scotch, talks.  Of the four instructors, (yours truly, Kasey Keckeisen, Marc MacYoung and Steve Jimerfield) Marc and Steve hadn't met.  Lots of story telling.  I listened.

Saturday.  Eight hours of mat time with Steve Jimerfield as the lead instructor.  30-year cop, retired.  Even at his age he moved and adapted like a force of nature.  Good techniques, structure and thought process.  Every art, system and instructor is formed by his or her environment.  Steve's was as an Alaska State trooper.  Back-up hours away, criminals with high confidence that they could make your body disappear if they got the upper hand and an environment (cold, slick, hypothermic and numb) that in some cases was more dangerous than the bad guy.  He lived in a world that had no room for error and a teaching environment where bullshit would kill rookies.

All week, each class and each day was debriefed by the students and each day began with a safety briefing.  Starting Monday, each new skill was thrown back into the One-Step to begin the integration process.

And usually followed by dinner, scotch and cigars.  And talking.  Lots of talking.  I won't go into these much because in many ways it blended into a single long conversation.

Sunday.  Day two of the cold weather One-on-One Control Tactics, plus two hours on a little pain compliance tool called the Talon.  I'm not big on pain compliance, it's extra and pain is legendarily idiosyncratic and unreliable.  I can ignore it so I assume most bad guys can.  That said, "ow."  Nice little bruises.  Also- Jimerfield is an old judo guy.  Between the judo and the experience, he moves the way so many aikidoka try to move and fail.

Monday.  Our first hiccup.  This entire seminar was Kasey's brainchild to see how our styles meshed, whether we could work together and take the first steps to designing a combined lesson plan.  Which would be cool, because Jimerfield's DT program blows away anything I've seen and the program we designed at MCSO does, too, but in different ways.  The meld might be amazing.

Unfortunately, we'd promised a 1on1CT Instructor's cert and that requires 40 hours with Steve for the basic. So we had to split into two tracks.  Half of the mission was accomplished-- I got a good taste of how Steve taught, but he was going to miss most of what Marc and I taught.  So we split into 2-tracks and I didn't get to watch one of them.  Our track included:

Intro to the basic drill (with all the little lessons in that)

Context (me) With a segue into teaching philosophy and teaching methods for emergency skillsStructure while moving (Marc)Compliant cuffing (Steve) Power Generation (Marc's version)Power Generation (My version)TuesdayWarm-upSightless (me)Strikes to takedowns (Kasey)Violence Dynamics (Me)Threat Assessment (Marc)WednesdayOne StepPractical Locks (Me)Force Law (Kasey)Leverage (Me)Ground Movement (Me)Ethics and Application of Pain (Me)Counter Assault (Me)Drives and Impacts (Marc)ThursdayWe were joined by the RCSO combined SWAT for their regular training.  First part of their morning was getting them up to speed on our methods and, especially, safety protocols.  One of the few places I've ever seen where civilians are allowed and encouraged to train with high-end police units. Then:Environmental Fighting (Me)Weapon Retention (Steve)  I took the few civilians who didn't carry off to the side to cover spine manipulation, infighting strikes and creating and exploiting pockets of space.Blade defense (Marc)Neck manipulation and structure on the ground (Kasey)FridayOne of the themes that had consistently come up was the interplay between movement, structure, leverage and space.  Fighters that can actually use structure in a brawl are rare.  It's not, generally, something that young men grasp and the guys that get it rarely fight.  Good judo players are the exception.  Anyway, a lot of the 99% effective techniques were failing with Kasey (although he is a good uke) Dillon, and me because over the years we've learned to structure instinctively. So Kasey and I decided to do a class exploring how we were preventing or escaping techniques and how it could be used against us.Structure on the Ground (Kasey)Plastic Mind (Me)Size Difference Fighting (Marc)I know there was some more in here and some stuff I'm taking out of order.
Saturday, we had four new people joining us, and whereas every one of the regulars had agreed to get some sleep and start at ten, I couldn't reach these guys so I was there before eight.  Ran them through the academics-- Violence Dynamics and Context and ConCom.  Steve took most of the physical stuff.  It looked like fun.
Sunday, we met at the Mall of America for an advanced people watching course.  We included the Clothespin Game in the course.  Check out Drills for a description.  We broke into very small groups to draw less attention.  All of the students got a session with each instructor.
This was extraordinary, according to the feedback.  They got four entirely different ways of seeing the same thing and I'm frankly jealous I couldn't be a student for the other instructors.  Kasey used his tactical and sniper experience to show them space.  Marc taught a form of cold reading and evaluating relationships between people.  Steve used his extensive experience watching criminals to point out criminal and pre-criminal behavior and attitudes.  That's what I picked up in the moments I could eavesdrop and what I gathered from the debrief.  I hit:How to expand peripheral vision, including seeing both ways down a corridor when you break a T, and how to look directly behind you Shadows and reflectionsRisk assessment as separate from threat assessmentMoving without being noticed (stalking in the wild is about not being seen, stalking in crowds is about not being noticed)Active shooter options for civiliansDefensive observation in pairs or teamsAs you can see, a full week.  I can't even begin to describe how cool the students were.  Open minded, physically gifted, critical, smart.  Could not have wished for more.
Hopefully, I'll have more time for writing.  Things are already percolating.
Reminder:How to Run a Scenario in Port Townsend next weekend.A weekend at Soja Studios in Oakland the weekend after that.

Collaborations

There are three classes that I think should exist but don't.  Maybe they exist somewhere, but I haven't heard of them.

1) A class for women going into law enforcement.  I wrote about this in "Violence: A Writer's Guide." Men and women are different.  And law enforcement, like it or not is a paramilitary, testosterone-laden and violence-driven profession. (Note well, I don't consider any of those things to automatically be negative.)  Not all, but most guys going into these professions have already handled the locker-room politics of team sports.  Many of the women going into the job don't know when they are being tested versus being harassed or when it is absolutely necessary to handle things yourself.  Many (again, not all) were raised that friendship comes from niceness and respect is assumed.  In this world, friendship stems from respect, which is never assumed and must be earned-- and niceness itself is suspect.  We lose too many good female officers on probation because no one taught them that being a nice person and being a good officer are unrelated things.

(I am aware that this sounds sexist.  FIDO.  One of the reasons that this class doesn't exist is because the politically powerful people who control the dialogue insist that men and women are the same.  This stupidity and blind ideology, no matter how well meaning, condemn too many women to failure.  The pretense that the world is fair or equal creates victims.)

2) Political survival for tactical leaders.  This class appears to not exist for two reasons.  Number one, the political players keep insisting that they aren't playing politics.  The other guys are playing politics, but not me...  So they tell the operators just to be natural and everything will be fine.  The second reason is that tactical guys have a couple of blindspots and an arrogance issue.  The blindspot?  We believe that 'playing politics' is an inborn things, some kind of genetic trait. The arrogance?  We believe we are above that:  "You play your silly little bullshit political games.  We're saving lives here."

Because of this some really good operators get punished or sideline.  How cool would it be if you could play the games well enough that your budget didn't get gutted every year.  And it's a skill.  As much resistance as there might be to such a class, it would be extremely effective.  Because if there is one thing good operators know it is how to learn and how to use information and how to adapt.  And politics is a skill.

For some reason, the first name that comes to mind for collaborating on this is Greg Ellifritz, which is odd because I've never met the man.

3) Nerd rehabilitation. The Conflict Communication material keeps turning over new rocks.  Originally intended as a de-escalation program for cops to manipulate crooks, the principles have worked for everything from negotiating huge business deals to family issues to getting along in the workplace.  The reason is that it is natural communication done consciously.  A friend pointed out tonight that ConCom has all the tools for people with no social ability (nerds was his word, not mine) to gain those abilities as skills instead of inborn talents.

All three of these would be good classes.  Valuable.  None of them do I feel fully qualified to design and deliver on my own.  Ahhhhhh, who am I fooling anyway?  As if there was enough free time...


-------------------------------
Coming up:
Nine days in MInnesota with Steve Jimerfield, Marc MacYoung and Kasey Keckeisen:
http://chirontraining.com/Site/Violen...

How to run a scenario in Port Townsend, WA:
http://chirontraining.com/Site/Oct-_P...

A long weekend in Oakland.  Ambushes and Thugs, ConCom and a Playdate.  Probably.
https://clients.mindbodyonline.com/AS...

Training and Selection

There's a trueism in elite teams.  You don't create extraordinary operators in training.  You discover them in selection. Then you polish them in training.

Want to have a stable of extraordinary fighters in any martial art?  Make the training tough.  Make the training so tough that 90% of your people drop out.  The people who stick with it will be tough and strong and endurant and have high pain thresholds.  They will be able to hold with anyone else.  Don't think for a second that it validates your training.  They were selected, not trained.  Your training did exactly jack shit.  If you set the selection bar high enough, you can be an unbelievably crappy trainer and your students can still hold their own.

This is on my mind. Jess had her first muay thau fight months ago now.  I'd heard it'd gone well but didn't get any details until we could sit down and talk during the Boston trip.

Looking at Jess, knowing Jess (and please, Jess, if you read this find the compliment in it.  I am so proud to know you) you wouldn't think of her as a fighter.  Slender, unathletic, health problems.  Not exactly social.  Not the kind of person you think of as a fighter, much less a muay thai fighter.  But she trained, she trained hard with a good coach...and she kicked ass.

Selecting for heart is cool.  But training heart is hard and time consuming.  There are no quick fixes, no program that will make someone brave.  It has to be grown over time and it takes an extraordinary teacher to make that happen.

To do it in sport is incredible.  To grow heart in SD is critical.  Selection in a self-defense school is toxic.  You wind up training only the people who have no need.  Those with a true need for SD, the victim profiles, would never pass a selection-based process.

There are very few who can do it, even fewer who bother.  And almost no one bothers in a competition-based school.  Except for Jeff and people like him.  Jeff is Jess's coach.

Play Dates

As always, Boston was fun and interesting.  Met a new branch of the Uechi clan and instituted something that I think should continue.

Paul DiRienzo of Metrowest Academy is a fun gut and a great host.  He's gathered or created (since that's what good instructors do) a fine set of people with good skills and open minds.  Logic of Violence and ConCom over two days.  Went well.

Spent most of midweek with Dr. Coray.  Some light hiking and quality time with her mastiff/pit mix.

Dinner with Wes and his lovely wife, L.  As always, insanely deep talk.  L has insights into a world I've never seen.  Wes is brilliant and entirely too self-effacing.  I think it would embarrass certain people, but sometime I'd like to do a post on people who should be household names in martial arts and self-defense.  People who are a full order of magnitude better than the 'masters' and champions you know, but teach quietly in their garages and basements; write treatises that they then file away.  If I ever write that post, Wes will feature.

Saw Jeff for just a minute during the week.  He was teaching a kid's class.  Jeff would also be featured in any piece about amazing martial artists who should be famous.

Met with Erik Kondo, for a big project that a few of us are working on.  More info on that later.  But it was enjoyable.  Erik is fun, intelligent... I have three pages of notes from our little breakfast meeting.

Then taking pictures for the cover of the Joint Lock video due out early in 2014.
This is not the picture, but the sign in the salon window was too cool so Doc Coray agreed to put on a lock:


And an evening class on Threat Assessment for YMAA Boston.  Ben was a warm person, a good host and he didn't mind getting bent and twisted for a cover.  Class went well, I think, but it was getting a touch frustrating, in that most of the teaching for the trip so far was talk.  It's important.  Most of the people who come to play with me have good physical skills.  But just because it's important doesn't mean I don't get bored.  I totally needed to get hit.

Which brings us to Saturday and the point of this post.  Molly-Mac came up with a last minute option for my free weekend, a place to brawl.  People came from New Jersey and Connecticut (I think those were the farthest) for a play date.

This was the deal:  Not a seminar.  No fee.  Donations would be gratefully accepted and split with the host.  Then it was more or less the VPPG formula.  Each participant got asked, "What do you want to work on?"

And that's what we did.  Multiple bad guys was fun.  Nate took some impact on that one.  David asked some tough de-escalation questions.  Art wanted to play with close-range power generation.  Someone wanted to play with close range kicks.  I got to push my knee a little (first ukemi practice since the knee injury).

If time allows, I think Play Dates will be part of my regular traveling schedule.  Any time I have an extra day and a venue...

Dynamics

It’s not just you.  It’s not just the threat.  There is a layered interplay between and through the involved people in any situation.  It is affected by other people who might be around (witnesses and also audience) and even geography.  People who feel trapped respond very differently than people who feel free to leave.  The invisible thoughts and imaginary fears and beliefs have a huge impact on behavior.  The officer who has been counseled about a recent force incident will reliably have a slight hesitation in his or her next force incident.A hit is a simple thing and you can work to perfect your strike… but hitting someone is not a simple thing and will be affected by the threat’s movement and body composition and skill and positioning and to a great extent by his mindset.And your strike, which you have practiced to physical perfection, will be affected by your mind.  Sometimes, we call that choking.Logic of violence the other day, this was coming up a lot.  “Someone is approaching and you think he might have bad intent.  Do you make eye contact?”“What if the threat doesn’t respond to your boundaries?"“Can you back up while setting a boundary?  What if you circle?”The thing is, everyone knows the answers to all of these.  Humans are communicating animals—it is what we do.  But we don’t, generally, have a conscious skill at it and we do, generally, have an over-active “what-if monkey” imagination.  Do you make eye contact?  Where and how?  The rules for eye contact are different in some cultures, but you know the rules where you are.  Maybe not consciously, but you know them.  So it becomes ‘how’ you make eye contact.A smile can show pleasure.  It can show confidence.  It can show a snotty superiority.  But a big smile is the exact same facial expression as a grimace—what a chimp does when it is afraid—except for the eyes.So, do you make eye contact when you think someone with bad intent is approaching? Depends.  When you make eye contact, do you pair it with the body language of a terrified monkey?  Or the body language of a bored predator?  Do you have any idea how you actually look?This is huge.  Conflict Communications has the bones, all the underlying necessary structure.  Logic of Violence gat people thinking and looking at the problem. Both programs increase your ability to communicate mindfully.But it takes practice and a level of self-awareness.I don’t have the skills, but I’m curious what a good acting coach could contribute in the realms of crisis communication and self-defense.  Not acting as in faking, although there may be an element of that—but an actor’s job is to communicate consciously.  To send a specific message with face, voice and body language.Intriguing.Tying it back, since I went off on a tangent.Everything depends on interplay.  It succeeds or fails in the chaos of the Four Factors (You, Threat, Environment and Luck).  Skill in isolation is almost unrelated (maybe 1:3 correlation) to effectiveness in application.  That goes for physical skills and verbal skills and awareness skills (bad guys hide their intentions).Physically you must generate kinetic energy, get that energy to where it will do the most good, and make damn sure the bad guy is where you need him to be.  Verbally, you must be able to make sure that the message received is the message you intended to send.  Observationally, you must read the threat as well as signs of the threat's deception and signs of his or her skill at deception.Life is a moving target.

Mission Statement

In the ConCom model, every tribe has mores, which are more about how things are done than what is done.  Mores are the collection of beliefs and protocols that separate groups from each other.  We both hunt in the jungle, but I wear black feathers and you wear white.  We both think people should be polite, but my culture teaches eye contact is a sign of respect and yours teaches it is a challenge.  The how of doing something becomes very important.  Sometimes more important than the what.

Businesses use mission statement as a short hand.  All of the employees come from different groups with different values and protocols.  The mission statements and vision statements that organizations come up with are (subconsciously) trying to get their members to realize that when they are on the job, they are in a different tribe and these are the tribe's values.  "Duty, Honor, Respect" at work... but "Love" should be in your home mores.  You get the idea.

Yesterday, I wrote:


in this place and time and for my purposes and definition of best, etc*.


This might be the bones of a mission statement.  Might help explain the important differences.  So here's a stab at explaining those thirteen words.

In this place and time:  Dealing with the threat and environment that exists.  For civilians, training with respect to current law, who the student is (as a victim profile), weapons availability and actual criminal predation patterns.
          This is, for me, one of the big differences between SD and MA.  Martial arts is partially about preserving a method, a set of mores.  Many instructors start by teaching escapes from a wrist grab--- because 130 years ago, in Japan, it was the most important self-defense technique for one strata of society.  The koryu mindfully preserve cultural artifacts.  Far too often the gendai arts preserve artifacts mindlessly.
           And place and time changes.  The situation is different in the jail, at home, traveling, in Iraq or competing.  Competition is the easiest because it has the fewest variables.  Not the easiest to do--grasp that.  Because you can set the variables you can set competition right at the edge of what the contestants can handle.  But by far the simplest to train for.
For my purposes:  Changes by student profile.  But the essence is this: I don't want the three a.m. phone call that Officer D is dead, and I hate visiting people in hospital.          For pure SD students with no experience, I want them to be able to recognize and avoid a situation if possible; if not have the tools to survive an ambush; and get a leg up on dealing with the chaos of a bad situation.  I need them to be adaptable enough to deal with a situation where they cannot know the parameters in advance.           For experienced martial artists studying violence, they already have good physical skills.  Any athlete has good physical skills.  They need to know where those skills fit, what they will face, where their training has created false expectations.  They need to know context.  This is my biggest group.            For force professionals, they need to be able to adapt to situations where they cannot know the parameters in advance and they must be able to integrate all of their resources (and know when, due to space or time, their options are limited) and adapt.  And that has to be taught in very limited amounts of time.  This is the group that is most precious to me.
My definition of best: The most important metric is maximum adaptability with minimum training time.
            Measuring anything this chaotic is tricky, but that's the best I can do.  And it works when you set it as a goal.  Best example is the lock training.  I consistently get untrained people improvising joint locks under light pressure in an hour.  They don't know the name of a single lock and couldn't pass the lock portion of a traditional JJ yellow belt test, but they can find a lock, including some exotic ones, in a brawl, something many blackbelts can't do.  I think that's more important, hence 'my definition of best.'            And the biggest gains in efficiency don't seem to come from adding skill, bur from removing constraints.  Still working on the implications of that.

Nobody Is Wrong Here

Spent a fantastic weekend at Water and Steel. A lot of moments for me.  Learning, thoughts.  Good people.  The instructors-- Professor Trigg and Kelly Worden were the headliners. Alex Corper was a blast and Randy King is an up-and-comer who is going to change the martial arts world from an unexpected angle.  There were other classes I missed-- sorry, guys, but someone had to run into town for gin and you know we couldn't trust the Edmonton crew with that kind of responsibility.

Lots of differences between the instructors, and that's what I wanted to talk about.

Got to play with Kelly Sunday morning.  He was teaching single stick as it relates to empty hands and he was kind enough to play with me between the lessons.  Almost everything he did was different and sometimes contrary to the way I teach and think.  Pattern, timing and rhythm.  He gives them as a platform to build from, I treat them as an addiction and distraction to be avoided.  Kelly could take the concept of timing and tie it three dimensionally, not just to rhythm but to pitch, and that gives you an entire extra dimension in which to manipulate the opponent.

We teach differently.  We think differently.  And both ways work.

As different as the paths of learning, the movement in students isn't that different.  Some differences. For instance Kelly likes a little more distance than I do and his preferred point of action is in the limbs and mine tends to be in the core.  But the essence-- the NSI guys can strike, throw, lock, grapple and incorporate weapons.  It's all integrated.  The faster things come, the more they adapt. And everyone is having fun.  When people giggle when they get hit, you have a good school.

I only got two sessions with Leonard Trigg and didn't get to cross hands.  I'm usually resistant to calling people (and very resistant to being called) master or professor or sifu. (Less resistant to sensei, since I came up in those systems and early habits are harder to break).  But Trigg is one of those guys that you look at and get a feeling that a name isn't enough.  You feel that there should be a title.

Quiet, incredibly self-efacing.  Soft spoken enough that everyone goes silent when he talks.  And tough.  Moves flawlessly, hits hard.  The professor taught a sequence in steps.  Within that sequence were offense, defense, shutdowns, target preps and transitions.  Everyone got it. No child left behind.  And I saw several people spontaneously using pieces of the sequence later in more random play.

I learned very little about Professor Trigg's thought process.  Two shy people tend not to make deep conversations on the first meeting.  But his teaching method was very different from mine.  And it worked.

People get tribal, and I have to watch for this in myself.  Water and Steel was an opportunity to see a whole bunch of excellent things that were different.  Challenge myself.  I do believe I'm working on a superior training methodology (in this place and time and for my purposes and definition of best, etc*.)  If I saw something better I'd be doing that.  But it's good to get a solid reminder is that there is no 'one right way' that there are a million ways to be excellent and to create excellent students.  And a lot of those methods will be better for many people than my methods.

That's what diversity is all about.

Kelly, Professor Trigg-- Thank you.  It was a genuine pleasure.



* That might be a blog post tomorrow.

Minimal

Move less.
If I had one piece of advice for the physical aspects of self-defense, it would be two words.  Move less.

Fighting is like marble sculpture.  It isn't like painting or architecture.  It is like sculpture.  Because moving well has nothing to do with adding things.  It is all about cutting things out.  You make a sculpture out of a slab of marble by taking out all the rock that isn't the form.  Sculpture is removal.

So is the art of good movement.  Absolute efficiency is not having a millimeter of unnecessary motion.  You don't defend if the strike is going to miss by a fraction of an inch.  Your own strikes do not go through any unnecessary distance.  Avoid decelerating to zero except with linear impact.

In sparring, there is a lot you can do with extraneous motion.  You can fake, disguise your telegraphs, change your rhythm.  But when you need to take someone out, for that matter, when you need to do anything quick, no extra motion.

And that's not how we teach it, usually.  The good martial artist can do more stuff than the beginner.  He can do the flashy moves.  The TV martial artists-- Bruce Lee hitting bad guys who just stand there in rapid fire strikes, clearly five times as fast as the bad guys can move.  Congratulations.  Those are the skills you need to beat someone 1/5th your speed-- and, in case you missed it, if you have superspeed you don't need any skill.  The best martial artists move more than the beginners.

And one of the side effects-- if the stakes go up, it becomes even more critical to move less.  A knife coming at your belly has no margin of error.  Bad things require maximum efficiency, not more cool moves.

The best fighters move less.  The best fighter, the best athlete in any speed game, moves less than the second best.  Not more.

For Tiffani

This is that question Tiffany asked yesterday:
So... today in class we were having a discussion on bullying. Having been bullied as a child I made the comment that I was against it and stop it when I see it happening. A girl turned to me and said that bullying happens, its normal, and to toughen up because there is nothing wrong with it and it never goes away. While I agree it never goes away, I disagree that its normal and there are no adverse effects from bullying. Marc MacYoung and Rory Miller, I'm curious of your perspective on this. Is bullying harmless and how do you deal with a bully?

For the record, what to do about bullying is here.  Two lines in the second paragraph covers everything that works.


This isn't as clear as we would like.
Part of it is the way Tiffani subtly reframed the questions.  If something never goes away, then it is the normal state.  It will take an act of will to create an unnatural state where this doesn't happen.  And her arguer never said that there were no adverse effects.  Nor that bullying was harmless.

So, clearing up, there is no bad guy in this disagreement.

Is there "nothing wrong with bullying?"  There's all kinds of things wrong with bullying.  Does anybody like to be bullied?  Barring certain personality disorders, I mean.  But there are some benefits.

Augustine, in "The City of God" was trying to explain why good things happen to bad people.  One of his arguments was that it is not the event that is bad.  Olives and olive leaves both go into the press.  The olives come out as pure, valuable oil and the leaves come out as mangled garbage.

Everyone has been bullied.  Everyone.  And the reactions to it are critical to who we become as an adult.  Tiffani didn't like it and won't let it happen for others.  Her reaction to bullying, whatever age it happened at, cemented one of her most admirable traits.  I went through a progression as a kid.  I would fiercely defend any of the littler kids on the playground, but it was years before I realized I had the same right to stand up for myself.  Then I went a little too far the other way, making a point that I could bully big strong people who liked bullying the small and weak.  In hindsight I can see I was just as bad, and felt fully justified because I only bullied bullies.  But I bullied them, I wasn't merely assertive or just trying to get their behavior to stop.  I wanted them to feel what others had felt.

That's still stronger than I like to admit in my psyche.

So, "toughen up."  That's actually good advice.  Discipline, strength (physical and mental), whatever it takes so that other people can't control your emotions is a good thing.  And it is woefully hard to get tough or strong or brave or compassionate or even loving if those qualities are never challenged.

The most formative thing in high school for me was football.  My school was small. Graduating class of six.  My junior year, for the first time in almost a decade, they had enough boys to field a B-league (eight man) football team.  If I went out for it.  As a junior, I was almost the smallest kid in the school.  I didn't break 5 foot tall or a hundred pounds until the summer before my senior year.  (I did basketball and track, too.  Really small school.)  It was a lot of pressure, but we had a team and I played.

And I learned more about human dynamics, and power plays and politics and bullying in that locker room than any academic could ever dream.  As did damn near every male (I have no idea how women's team sports are) who has been through the same thing.  Most importantly I learned that size was not a tenth as important as the willingness to stand up.  And knocking people down was not as important as getting up yourself.  And stepping in to help others is noble, but expecting people to step in is stupid.

And there is a qualitative difference in every aspect of life between the men who have navigated that experience successfully and the ones who have not.  I see most of the anti-bullying industry as weak people who failed at overcoming it as children fantasizing about a solution from the distance of adulthood.

Sometimes I see anti-bullying causes as wanting to create a world where it is safe to be weak.  And I get that.  I like the idea of a safe world.  But I virulently despise the concept of a world of the weak.  The mild.  The insipid.  And that is one of the inevitable unintended consequences of making a world too safe.

Much of 'good' is unnatural.  It takes a sustained act of will.  It would take an enormous and coherent act of will to make bullying go away, and even then it will keep cropping up. But if we were to raise children in that perfect environment, would we make them incapable of dealing with adversity?  Would the weirdness of people who believe that hurt feelings are are more real than spilled blood, spread?  Would our society become a hothouse flower, beautiful but incapable of surviving without the charity of others?

If people never learn to stand up, they become dependent on others to stand up for them.  It's personal, but dependency is one of my core sins.  It is the other half of slavery.

FB World

A friend asked a question on FaceBook today that I can't answer on FB.  Can't answer it there because the answer isn't simple, and FB is a place for simple things.  A place where people put up links with built-in outrage and a dearth of thought, nuance or truth.  I have a compulsion: if it is something I care about, to go back to primary sources.  And there are some common FB sources that I just discount because every one I have checked out has been a lie.

But they are easy.  Short videos.  Impassioned speeches.  Headlines.  Soundbites. It takes absolutely no effort to find vitriol-disguised-as-fact to support whatever emotion-laden thing you choose to believe.  But if you go to primary sources and have even basic skills in critical thinking, it is almost all bullshit. No, not bullshit.  It is entertainment designed for no other purpose than to get you to read it and spread it.  You are the product of this business.  And it is brilliant at manipulating you.

Statistically, most of you will get half of this.  You will immediately realize how true it is for the other side and completely dismiss that you partake of it too.  The more raw intelligence you have, the better your justifications will be, because your limbic system trumps your neocortex.  As long as you have the emotional attachment, your intelligence is a slave to your tribal identity.

Your emotions, not your intelligence decides what is 'right' and then your intelligence is drafted to prove why it is right.  I've talked with pagans and shamans and christians and muslims and atheists.  High end, intelligent people.  They disagree.  Think about two icons of the American right/left divide say, Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton.  I'd put both their IQ's above 130.  There aren't a lot, maybe any, top people in any field who are actually stupid.  But what they believe (feel) trumps.

And the soundbite world of FB is perfect for this.  Thinking is work.  Research is work.  Evidently, people hate work.  We all pretend we think for ourselves, but if someone gives us a factoid that supports our worldview, the question of truth doesn't even enter our minds.

Life is about the questions, not the answers.  If you accept the answers without the questions, you are giving up part of your life.  It's hard, I know.  And it can be stressful to live in a world where things are fairly complicated and there aren't many clear-cut bad guys and there really isn't a simple solution to big problems and there is a very real possibility that even the big problems themselves might not be what we think... but part of being an adult, as Kai says, is your comfort level with ambiguity.

Think, dammit.