Years ago during my time in Prison, I was trained to fight by the men there. I was a child bound over to serve time as an adult and Convicts adopted me not long after I arrived.
What we did was intentional, not just brawling, we actually practiced day in and day out training. Not in karate or any other formal martial art, but rather in raw, savage anything goes fighting. The kind without limits or rules. The kind where I've had my fingers, nose and jaw broken more than a few times.
Every encounter was to be treated as life and death because every one of them potentially was. They strengthened my body, killed the nerves in my hands, feet, shins and forearms, and forced me to lose day after day, year after year. When I finally became good enough to beat any one of them on any given Sunday, they started fighting me 2 and 3 at a time.
“Why do we learn to fight?”
Every single day without fail, whoever was leading would ask that question. My taught and programed response was, "so that we don't have to". It took a very long time to understand why we did that and what it meant.
In the beginning I was simply too young and naive to understand why the most dangerous men society had to offer would preach such a thing. Especially given how violent I was personally.
We trained right out in the open. The guards and staff allowed this because they would bet a great deal of money on us. This gave us the freedom to fully commit to the regimen. Our training became a sort of pit fighting spectacle. They even smuggled in resources we would normally never have access to because they wanted us to get better. They would invest in us. I'm sure that seems against their best interests given that they were the guards locked in there with us, however the opposite was true and they knew it.
This brings me to the truth about violence people fail to understand. All violence is fear based. Fear for yourself, for other's, for losing something, not having enough, being used, betrayed, discarded, etc. All violence begins with fear.
This is not to imply victimhood in victimizers. When it comes to responses and consequences, only what we do matters, not why.
Even when it appears it's being utilized to gain power and to steal resources by fearless men, the initial fear of not having those things is what drive them initially. Even when it seems like it's being used because the one being violent enjoys it, even that grew from a fearful insecurity where he learned to feel pleasure in proving that he's not a part of the victim group. Just because you can't see the fear doesn't mean that it wasn't the spark.
This is especially true in smaller scenarios involving individuals or groups. The closer you get to a single person, the easier it is to identify the brand of fear that drives him in that moment. That said, the overwhelmingly vast majority of individual violence is born from self preservation. As it turns out, the cure is to teach that man how to be good at violence. That's what I'm focusing on here.
This was the hidden truth that those seasoned prison guards understood. The better we became, the easier the their job would be because our presence alone largely kept the peace. No one wanted to start trouble in a block full of maniacs which was how we were perceived by the gen-pop. Our lock was the quietest, most respectful and relaxed in the entire institution.
For me, being not only good at violence, but being competent and comfortable with it, changed my perception on everything. I saw that I was little more than a feral animal when I walked in. I was comfortable yet not competent.
Through this training and other unexpected lessons, I realized that almost every problem I had ever had before was my own fault. Either because I started it out of insecurity or was unable to disarm it out of ignorance.
Suddenly I wasn't looking for a fight to prove myself nor was I threatened into reacting out of fear. Where once even a perceived slight was enough to set me off, now I could shrug off a grown man's direct threats.
As it turns out, it's difficult to be threatened by a man's anger when the whole time he's showboating you're thinking 'I hope for his sake he's just venting'. When it dawns on you that you're the monster in the room, it's difficult to be in a fearful position. Which means I no longer felt the need to prove myself nor did I need to take things to where they didn't need to go.
Additionally, others can smell this on you, call it a leftover survival instinct, and if you give them a way out that saves face, they'll take it every time. That's the beauty of it. Because you're not really feeling threatened, you're clear headed enough to facilitate this outcome.
It's all about real, hard earned confidence. Not the kind you get from supportive people but the kind you earn through survival.
Through overcoming relentless and brutal losses you learn you're not made of glass. You understand what you can take and walk off. Then, through rigorous training you know what you're capable of doing to others. Which, unexpectedly, makes you not want to.
Most people don't really know what's on the other end of their punch, they can't predict the likely outcome. However, because you understand completely what the results can be, you begin to look for ways around it, ways to avoid what you feel is the nearly inevitable result.
In an average fight, no one has any idea what they're doing let alone what is going to probably happen. However, in these same situations, you're confident in the outcome and frankly aren't interested in doing it.
When I can look at a man who's threatening me and know for a fact he won't take things as far as I will, I no longer care if he gets away with running his mouth.
Naturally using myself and my unusual experiences is an extreme example to make my point here. That said, sometimes extremes make for a stronger position that we can then temper for using in the real world.
Life out here is light-years away from the constant looming shadow of violence in a high security prison. This means that achieving the same results requires far less with a more reasonable approach.
Your coworkers, strangers in the street or even a drunk at the bar likely don't have much practice murdering people. The fact that they fly off the handle in the first place is a safe indicator that they don't know what real violence is either. Those who are good with violence tend to be more cautious with their speech because we understand what escalation can lead to first hand.
Out here, the benefits I speak of can be achieved through learning a martial art, boxing, wrestling, pick your favorite. They all lead to the same place. Commit and learn.
In summary, a greater capacity for violence leads to a lesser interest in it. First, learn to fight. Next, become comfortable and willing to do so. Lastly, make peace with what could happen to you and what you can do to others. After a while you'll forget what anger felt like and feel embarrassed that you ever let something trigger you at all.
Learn to be violent
Learn to fight so that you don't have to.
Most will disagree with me but the logic of your position also applies to being armed. On October 7, the Hamas terrorists were armed, the Israelis massacred were defenseless. The unanswered question is why did Israel disarm its citizens most of whom are IDF veterans and leave them vulnerable to mass rape and murder by Hamas? An incredibly stupid decision because their disarmed status virtually invited the attack and the Israeli government is clearly culpable. Every Jewish family in Israel (and with growing antisemitism here, the US) should have a 9 mm handgun, an AR15 rifle and plenty of ammunition for both. Every adult and teenage member of the family should be proficient in their use. Have anti-gun Jewish politicians in both countries learned nothing from the Holocaust and the latest slaughter? Isn't it time for the Jewish people to tell them to go fuck themselves? This is the reason I go armed every day and always will.
A great bit of writing, thanks, I really enjoyed reading it. It’s visceral, I can feel the words. You and others may laugh (or not!), but your style reminds me of Hemingway sometimes; no flowers, little window dressing, just palpable words describing things within us that aren’t easily drawn.