When Violence Is the Answer: Learning How to Do What It Takes When Your Life Is at Stake

by Tim Larkin

If you take one thing from what you’ve read so far, I hope it’s this: anytime you attempt to bury your head in the sand and deny the existence of violence in your world, not only are you giving up your power, but you are giving it over to the very perpetrators of random violence whose existence you are hoping to ignore.

Dulce bellum inexpertis. (War is sweet to those who have never experienced it.) —Pindar

In social aggression scenarios, angry fighters will step up within striking distance of their opponent but not so close—maybe a half-step away—that they can’t dodge a wild punch. Stepping up to your opponent and reaching out is the hallmark of social aggression: cuffing, shoving, and punching to show displeasure. It shows a lack of desire to cripple and kill, it signals a healthy fear of the other man, and even a bit of respect for his personal space—it is, after all, giving him plenty of room to work. It says, “I’m pissed off, but there are still rules here.” As a result, injury is relatively unlikely in these kinds of confrontations, outside of a freak traumatic brain injury—which is the most common fight-ending injury we see in both street fights and competitive matches. (Usually they’re stopped well before that point by friends, teachers, referees, etc.)

After the action, “self-defense” becomes a legal question: it’s civil society deciding whether to give you an official pass for using violence to protect yourself or save your life. No jury would rule that what Sara did was “illegal.” But during the action, those questions go out the window. It is an issue of practicality in the most literal sense. In the midst of a violent encounter, to think merely of “defending” yourself—rather than incapacitating your opponent—is essentially to curl up in a ball and hope for the best. Waiting for your attacker to give up—or worse, expecting him to follow the rules—is, putting it bluntly, to risk participating in your own murder. Your only reliable course of action to save your life is to do what your attacker is trying to do to you, but do it more effectively and efficiently, and to do it first. To use the very same tool of violence.

When you’re staring down the barrel of a gun (literally and figuratively) with a violent asocial predator on the other end of it, you must remember that this is not a movie or a video game or a hero fantasy. This is not high noon at the O.K. Corral. There is no Good, Bad, and Ugly—there is just ugly.

Some of those men who sized up Conner in the CCDC were garden-variety thieves and drug dealers. Perhaps a handful were violent sociopaths. But there was no telling them apart on sight in the cafeteria, just as there was no telling any of those criminals apart on sight from the ordinary people on Fremont Street. That was my lesson for Conner: you can’t tell just by sight who’s a good guy and who’s a bad guy. Each one of the men who walked out of CCDC that day was, the day before, one of the guys in the cafeteria who stopped cold to size us up as potential threats. And if my experience watching Mike nearly bleed out twenty-five years earlier at the hands of a man half his size was any indication, there was no telling which one of those newly free men was the scariest, either. But remember: all of what I’ve been explaining goes both ways. Just as there’s no way to de-escalate a situation of true, asocial violence, there’s no reason to escalate a situation of social aggression. We learn the difference between the two not only to prepare ourselves to fight for our lives when we absolutely have to, but also to prepare ourselves to wisely back down when there’s no need for a fight.

I spent about thirty seconds setting up the scenario, then had the young men freeze in tableau when they found the same position as the figures in my training image. I gave the audience a few beats to process what they were looking at, then I asked them by a show of hands to tell me which of the two men they identified with. Nearly every person immediately placed themselves in the role of the victim, despite having just listened to me talk for seventeen minutes about the importance of not becoming a victim. That’s how ingrained this thought pattern has become in our society. Think about that: Culturally, we instinctively see ourselves as the victim.*

spend some time with the training image and think about what you would do if you were in that position, mindful of the fact that there is nothing to learn about violence from its victim, only its perpetrator. Sit with your gut reaction to it, whether it’s the “right” one or the “wrong” one. (Say what you will, but you cannot hide your own reaction from yourself.) Think about all the things this training image implies, everything it will require of you to become the one in the driver’s seat who is mentally prepared to act when the situation calls for it: from the pressure of your fingers and palms against the Adam’s apple and the hyoid bone of the neck, to the feel of a crushed windpipe and collapsed cartilage in the throat, to the sound of asphyxiation once you’ve gotten the upper hand. These are the lessons of the guy on the left, not the details of a heroic comeback story for the guy on the right.

“Good guys” need to learn what that gang member knew instinctively. There are no half-measures in life-or-death asocial violence. There is no bargaining or communication of any kind. There is only effective action with intent to injure and incapacitate. Whenever we take the victim’s perspective, we’re hobbling our minds and putting ourselves at a disadvantage. If we adopt the mindset of the aggressor, we flip the script and gain the edge. It starts by pulling yourself out of the victim’s mindset, into the mindset of someone who, if necessary, is willing to fight—to really fight—to survive.

There’s only one way to get better at staying in Cause State: deliberately thinking about your decision-making process ahead of time. It allows you to react with speed and decisiveness. Speed and decisiveness aren’t inborn characteristics for most of us—we have to learn them. Anybody can train themselves to behave this way, but like all training, physical or mental, the behaviors you want to build have to be practiced slowly, deliberately, and repeatedly, so that they are ingrained in your brain and ready to activate in the heat of the moment. So that they will come as second nature when you must execute at full speed.

The very same principle—action, not reaction—applies in life-or-death situations. And the very same practice and discipline can help make it a part of our lives. In a life-or-death situation, a reactive response or lapse in focus can be fatal. Survival isn’t the exclusive province of the bigger and stronger—it goes to the person who approaches his or her circumstances with the proper mindset, takes control of the situation and acts to cause decisive injury instead of reacting to the effects of someone else’s choice.

Put the idea of an assessment phase out of your mind. There is no dropping into a fighting stance. There is no waiting to block or counter. Those are parts of the Effect State—the defensive mindset—and that will get you killed. If you can “put your dukes up” in defense, waiting to see what your attacker does first, you can use the same motion to be proactive once you see your first, best opportunity and put your fingers into your enemy’s eyes or your forearm through his neck

Some people just call this attitude “confidence,” while others call it an “offensive mindest” or “aggression.” I call it intent. As in, “intent to cause harm,” because that is the cleanest, simplest way to describe the actions of the winners in every knife fight, prison yard fight, convenience store hold-up, and bar fight I have analyzed over the last twenty-five years.

EMBRACE THE UGLY In the end, this is why there’s no such thing as “self-defense”—there’s no protecting yourself in a life-or-death fight without being willing to use the very same tool of violence that your adversary wants to use against you. People who survive such encounters do so because they have the mindset and the intent it takes to do real harm to another human being when real harm is what’s required—either because that mindset was ingrained in them all along, or, more realistically, because they deliberately cultivated it through training. I know that this is an unsentimental, unromantic, even brutal lesson about violence. I am asking you to embrace the ugly, to think about violence in this pragmatic way, because that is precisely how your enemy thinks. To defeat him, you need to think like he does. Make no mistake, for the purposes of saving your life—or someone else’s life—I am asking you to mentally prepare yourself to think like a criminal when the situation calls for it. That doesn’t mean I’m teaching you to become a criminal. I am just depriving the criminal of their asymmetric mental edge over you. These mental tools don’t turn off an empathy switch when they are in the hands of good people like you. Learning how to use the tool of violence doesn’t just make you a violent criminal, just as learning to use a hammer for carpentry doesn’t make you use it for assault, or learning to drive a truck doesn’t make you steer it into a bunch of tourists on the streets ...

If you think you’re the guy on the ground, you’ll end up being the guy in the ground.

Watching criminals commit violence has taught me that there’s only one reliable way to determine intent, and it’s not by looking at their face, but by examining how they interface with their targets. Those who are most effective at teaching and practicing self-protection can tap into this kind of intent when they need to, not by making a scary face, but just by getting the work done.

the goal is to produce enough trauma to trigger a spinal reflex reaction, which causes the body to focus on the injury.

His list was as long as the one given to special forces officers at the JFK Center at Fort Bragg. The content was only slightly different. The major difference was the mafia leader’s focus on human anatomy. It was the dominant subject on the reading list, by far. It formed the gang’s blueprint for success in using the tool of violence.

This focus is not unique to the Mexican Mafia, of course. Every major gang that I’ve studied—the Aryan Brotherhood, the Mexican Mafia, the Black Guerrilla Family—has an edict that members in the upper echelons must study anatomy. They’ve all composed reading lists like the one the Mexican Mafia leader relayed to his prison interrogator.

The rules of asocial violence are very simple: don’t make yourself a target, focus your mind, know the human body, act first, intend to injure, don’t stop until he’s incapacitated or dead.

You don’t have to be in a foreign country to find yourself in a similar situation. When you’re interacting with someone you don’t know, you simply cannot take it for granted that they share your assumptions about what is and isn’t allowed, about what will and will not lead to violence. You can’t assume that others are reluctant to use violence against you or that they view escalation as something to be avoided. Until you know that person, they’re foreign to you.

That’s why, wherever possible, the smart play is politeness, accommodation, and de-escalation. Unfortunately, we don’t learn that from movies, because polite, de-escalating accommodation doesn’t feel very satisfying when we’re especially aggrieved. Interestingly, criminals often understand that better than law-abiding citizens

“civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their sku...

In my own life, I generally operate as if I’m at the run-down gym, not the nicely-polished fitness chain. That’s how you should operate, too. If I’m talking to someone I don’t already know personally—a foreigner to me—I assume two things: 1) we don’t live by the same social contract, and 2) I’m six seconds away from them unleashing a shooting spree. That doesn’t mean I’m jumpy and paranoid. It means I’m as kind and considerate as possible. If every stranger lived by a different set of rules (at best) or was just looking for a reason to start firing (at worst) how would you interact with them? You’d be polite and accommodating, too. Criminals don’t need to be taught this lesson, or if they did, they only had to learn it once.

HEADPHONES AND SMARTPHONES If there is one common thread to all the surveillance videos of male-on-female attacks that I have studied over the years, it is the presence of headphones on the woman’s head. When you wear headphones, you lose environmental awareness. When you take away your sense of hearing, you’ve handicapped yourself before an assailant even enters the picture. Without your sense of hearing, you’re a prime target for mugging, sexual assault, and any other crime that relies on the element of surprise.

I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to remember that real-life violence isn’t a competition. Predators aren’t looking for a challenge. If you give them enough hoops to jump through, more often than not they’re going to pick someone else. They’re looking for the easiest victim—the lowest-hanging fruit. It’s like that old joke about the two hikers in the forest who come across a hungry bear. One of them stops to put on his running shoes. The other tells him not to bother, since there’s no way a person can outrun a bear. His hiking partner says, “I don’t have to outrun the bear. I only have to outrun you.” Be the hiker in the running shoes.

You get everything you want exactly right. Practicing violence is training for survival. When you’re in a fight for your life, you never want to do something that you’ve “sort of” worked on or gotten good at “more or less.” Everything you go for, you want to get exactly right. That means if you miss it in training, slow down. If your mass wasn’t fully involved, slow down. If the strike, joint break, or throw didn’t work the way you intended, slow down. Adjust the pace of your training to make your practice perfect.

Look at firearms training. If you have a good instructor, you’ll first learn how to dry fire without any bullets. You’ll learn all the fundamentals of holding and aiming a gun. After you’ve internalized that information, you’ll dry fire at a stationary target, learning how to pull the trigger with as little jerk and lift as possible. Then you’ll learn how to load the weapon. Next, you’ll start shooting with live ammunition, usually one round at a time in single-shot groups. You’ll slowly and deliberately try to hit your target, repeatedly. Then you’ll move on to multiple-shot groups, where you fire a quick succession of shots at the target. Once your aim is consistently good (which could take days or weeks), your instructor might introduce the concept of a moving target. If you maintain accurate targeting in that phase, the instructor will introduce the next phase—which is hitting a moving target while you’re also moving. At any stage of the game, if there’s a failure or regression of any kind—if you start to lose your targeting capacity and your shot groupings start to widen—you’ll default back to the slow, deliberate targeting of a sedentary target. This is how skilled instructors train beginners in the basics, but it’s also how the best in the business stay sharp. The system never changes: break everything down to fundamentals. Repeat, repeat, repeat. When you can perform those fundamentals in your sleep, you’ll know you’ve mastered them.

Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, but not for the reasons you’d suspect. Born in the French West Indies in the second half of the eighteenth century, Saint-Georges was also known for being a duelist and champion fencer. Early in his career, while other fencers practiced fast footwork, elaborate strikes, and clever distraction techniques, Saint-Georges spent most of his time going through a peculiar training routine. He would draw three dots on the wall and spend an inordinate amount of time slowly and deliberately poking each dot with his sword. He’d step in, and thrust. Step in, and thrust. Over and over again.* It was a regimen that earned him continual mockery from people who had never seen him duel. When they did, the mockery disappeared. In duel after duel, Saint-Georges would dispatch his opponents with uncanny accuracy and lightning-fast efficiency. He was so good, so accurate, so effective, that even in social situations it was said that he could flick the buttons off the shirt of any man within his sword’s reach. It was an incredible feat—not only of dexterity, but of consistency—and one for which he was given the nickname, “The Button Man.” Saint-Georges understood the importance of precision. With most his time spent on just three simple targets, Saint-Georges certainly wasn’t having as much fun as his rivals. His had to be the most tedious, most basic training technique of any of them. It was also the most effective.

Sound familiar? This is precisely how firearms training progresses.

If you train slow, you never outgrow the basics, because the training hardwires them into your instincts while simultaneously taking conscious thought out of the equation for when you need to operate in a hurry. In the context of violence, it might sound something like this: “Okay, If I’m trying to crush the throat, I want my foot to be placed here when I deliver the blow. I want to step through and use my ulna bone [pinky side of forearm]. I want to step all the way through the individual so I end up standing where he used to be. And I want to make sure I have good, solid structure as I strike the throat.”

There’s no other way to put it: slow practice is deep practice, and deep practice leads to mastery.