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

by Tim Larkin

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 ...