Fake Martial Arts Show No Mercy
Violence is natural. In fact, violence is an essential part of our nature. We wouldn’t be here without it. Although no moral or ethical person would ever want to knowingly or intentionally inflict harm on others in the course of daily life, violence remains adaptive under some circumstances. To paraphrase Charles Darwin, we bear the stamp of our lowly origins. Understanding those origins and becoming proficient in the language of violence will not only help us establish a healthy relationship with violence but also, ultimately, reduce the chances of it finding us.
Violence comes in many forms, but for the purposes of this essay, I am speaking specifically about physical acts of force committed by individuals against individuals so as to subdue, injure, or kill. There is a truth to be discovered about violence; your preferences do not determine what is true. If you are more interested in what violence should be than in knowing the truth about violence—what it is, where it comes from, and how to manage it—then nothing I can offer here will be of much help to you.
Reality isn’t always comforting.
I did not begin my martial arts journey because I wanted to be a Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) fighter. This was decades ago, and MMA did not exist then. I did not start it because I wanted to be a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt. Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu was unknown in the United States at that time. I started my journey for one simple reason: I wanted to learn how to fight. I later dedicated my life and my adult career to training and teaching functional martial arts because I wanted to know how to fight really well. Along the way, I discovered and learned many things far more important than my original intentions presumed.
After leaving the U.S. Army in 1989, my sole focus in life became training in “functional” fighting—real martial arts. This is something I had been interested in for as long as I can remember—something that became an obsession for me after losing one too many altercations. Then, as now, there were a lot of martial arts styles from which to choose. Based on what I’d read and researched, I decided to train in what’s known as Jeet Kune Do (JKD), a phrase coined in 1967 and translated as “the way of the intercepting fist.” Many things drew me toward JKD, including, most notably, the writings and personal philosophy of Bruce Lee, the founder of the art: “Absorb what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is specifically your own.”
For a pragmatist like myself, this precept made perfect sense. For the traditional martial arts world, Lee was proposing something radical: cross-training. He was telling martial artists not to be trapped by the limits of a rigid martial arts system and to utilize and integrate what works from all systems. This was the core idea behind JKD, which initially drew heavily from Wing Chun, Northern Kung Fu, and Western boxing and later incorporated Filipino weapons fighting (Kali/Escrima).
I was particularly attracted to this idea because, in theory, it meant becoming well-versed in the “four ranges of combat,” a phrase used by JKD practitioners that is popularly attributed to Lee. These four ranges refer to kicking, boxing, trapping, and grappling. Kicking was for when you could kick your opponent but not yet reach them with your hands. Boxing was for when you could kick or punch your opponent but not yet effectively grab them. Trapping was for when you could kick, punch, and grab your opponent, but you were both still standing. And grappling was for when you were both on the ground. It all made sense.
I’d been in enough fights to know that where you wanted to be in a physical confrontation wasn’t always where you ended up. My skirmishes varied in outcome and detail. Some I won. Some I lost. The losses almost always occurred on the ground. And the ground happened a lot. I knew wrestlers were dangerous, at least as dangerous as boxers. But most martial arts systems at the time contained little to no effective groundwork. The attitude at the time was simple: you don’t want to be on the ground in a fight, so why train there? This, of course, meant that most martial arts systems missed the crucial point—just because you don’t want to be somewhere doesn’t mean you won’t end up there. By definition, your opponent in a fight is not cooperating. You have to learn how to fight wherever you are, not just where you wish to be. Your preference won’t always determine where you end up, but your opponent might.
Yet, despite the conceptual usefulness of the four-ranges-of-combat philosophy, I found the ground training in JKD to be quite limited in practice. Like the traditional martial arts from which it was drawn, JKD focused primarily on stand-up fighting. To its credit, however, JKD did offer one key advantage many of those same traditional martial arts did not. It incorporated Western boxing, and boxing, like other combat sports such as Muay Thai and Savate, involves sparring. I knew enough to know that any striking art that didn’t involve sparring wasn’t just missing the boat—it wasn’t even in the water. The promise of this was enough to make me want to engage with the art.
As my exposure to JKD progressed, however, I began to develop doubts about some of its frequently used training methods. JKD people rightly derided things like kata—solitary karate patterns acted out in the air—as counterproductive. Yet, following Lee’s death, many of the leading JKD instructors adopted a lot of one- and two-person forms, which in actuality were little more than kata themselves that had been taken from other, more obscure Southeast Asian martial arts. They would spend an inordinate amount of time on ineffective “hand-trapping” movements that bore no resemblance to anything that happens in an actual fight or within full-contact sparring matches—and little to no time on wrestling or grappling, something that did happen in almost every fight or full-contact match in which it was allowed. It did not make sense.
The unveiling of the JKD mystique began to progress exponentially for me when I moved to Portland in my early twenties. After several years of training daily at a boxing gym and teaching full-time at a JKD school, I realized my training philosophy and, above all else, my objectives were moving me in a very different direction from JKD. I would find myself daydreaming about the ideal training environment—the kind I wanted to be in, the one that did not yet exist. I imagined people fighting full contact at all ranges, with takedowns and ground fighting allowed, pushing the limits. I imagined athletes truly learning what it means to fight—intelligently—against a fully resisting opponent and growing, changing, and adapting from each experience. After all, how else would we know if what we were learning and teaching actually worked? If our techniques aligned with reality? I wanted to test everything we were doing. All of this I saw clearly in my mind, down to the minute details. In retrospect, it’s easy to realize that what I was, in fact, envisioning was something like an MMA gym. But the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), and the sport of MMA that followed, were still years away. At the most basic level, I simply wanted to know what was true.
And truth matters.
If you don’t value what is true, and if you don’t have an accurate mechanism for discovering what is true, you can, and most likely will, create conditions external to yourself in which you believe you’re flourishing when you are in reality floundering. Truth matters because if you don’t accurately map the world around you, you may find yourself moving farther away from your intended goals rather than closer toward them. As American philosopher Daniel Dennett so succinctly put it when discussing the scrupulously investigated medical advances that had weeks earlier saved his life: “Good intentions and inspiration are simply not enough.” Faith is not sufficient. You also have to be right. This requires reason and open inquiry.
Let’s consider the nonfunctional martial arts, such as Aikido. If the Aikido master is sincere with himself and others about his intentions, and those intentions revolve around maintaining a cultural tradition, getting exercise, or performing a two-person dance, then the activity of Aikido may be a very healthy thing for him. If, however, the Aikido master has the intention to learn functional self-defense, whether that intention is held privately or proclaimed publicly, then the activity of Aikido becomes something that moves him farther from his objective. In both cases, the man is engaging in conditions designed to bring about an outcome. But if those conditions don’t actually match the actions required to achieve that outcome in the world of noncooperating opponents, the activity itself can become deleterious to the goal. It becomes inauthentic. It becomes unhealthy.
I am not claiming that every truth is a fixed commodity, some object that remains unchanging, something stuck in time. But I am also not a believer in the postmodern idea that “science . . . is no more objective than Scientology” or a magical view of the universe that posits that no such thing as truth, as it relates to an external reality, exists. Some hold the belief that “Truth is a pathless land,” as Indian philosopher and mystic Jiddu Krishnamurti famously claimed. Like many aphorisms that get repeated often within “spiritual” circles, this claim could be true in a narrowly defined context, but that would not make it some kind of universal truth. Absent further definition or context, it is little more than what Dennett calls a “deepity,” which the Urban Dictionary defines as “Something that sounds profound but is intellectually hollow.” Like the phrase “Love is just a word,” it’s true in a trivial sense, false on a more meaningful level, and profound sounding only to those who lack an education in actual profundity.
Is the “true” distance from the earth to the moon something that cannot be approached by any path whatsoever? No, it isn’t. It can be discovered. There is an objective answer. The same can be said for virtually every empirical question. The process and tools we use to arrive at that truth are what matter. What matters for determining truth is our epistemology—how we know what we know. Are we taking scientific measurements, following scientific principles, and performing scientific tests, checking and verifying our results? Or are we pulling an estimate out of a hat? Or are we accepting as truth a distance revealed in a dream hundreds of years ago by some presumed prophet and transmitted across generations from teacher to student?
Indeed, one fallacy committed too often, whether in religion or the martial arts, is what’s referred to as the appeal to authority. The argument from authority can take several forms. As a syllogism, it often has the following basic structure:
A says P about subject matter S.
A should be trusted about subject matter S.
Therefore, P is correct.
Person A may be correct, but a claim based solely on the authority we have granted this particular person as it relates to a particular subject is not evidence. In other words, just because the Pope or Albert Einstein or Ip Man says something does not make it true.
But let’s be clear with our definitions here, so we don’t fall into commonplace philosophical quagmires. For my purposes, I consider a statement to be true if it accurately describes or accords with the world—or, put another way, with facts and reality. When understood in this way, truth isn’t a thing: it is a measurement of how well something we as humans believe or propose aligns with reality. By extension, this means that truth can admit to ever-increasing levels of refinement. For example, Einstein refined Isaac Newton’s theory of universal gravitation with his theory of general relativity; he did not invalidate Newton’s work. Today, Einstein’s theory of general relativity is believed to be “truer” than Newton’s theory because it has been shown over and over again to align more closely with reality both in experiments and in real-world applications, and not because of Einstein’s IQ or reputation. But as with Newton’s theory, Einstein’s theory is also likely incomplete. This means some yet-to-be-born physicist may well refine our current understanding of gravity and come up with a new theory that even more closely aligns with reality.
From a practical standpoint, we are always better off thinking we don’t have a good mechanism for discovering truth than thinking our flawed mechanism will lead to truth. We are always better served by knowing we don’t know than by thinking we know when we don’t. As Darwin noted, “To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact.”
When we pretend to know what we don’t, we cannot grow. Once we believe that all epistemologies are created equal, we have effectively walled ourselves into the penitentiary that philosopher Peter Boghossian refers to as doxastic closure. Our beliefs become fixed because we have no reliable way to revise them. Whenever someone is unwilling to admit that some methods are more accurate than others, they have tipped their hand: they are choosing willful ignorance over the sincere search for truth.
If someone has a callous disregard for the truth or adopts an attitude that either denies the possibility or importance of truth, no progress is possible. Even if someone is sincere in their beliefs, personally authentic, and honest to others about their objectives, meaningful progress is possible only if they have critical-thinking skills and a proper epistemology. Absent a proper feedback mechanism, a self-correcting mechanism, the best they can hope for is to stumble forward blindly through sheer luck. More likely, they will fall behind painfully. They will think and act as though they possess the truth even if they are dead wrong. Being willing to revise your beliefs and change your mind is the first step on the path called improvement.
In the traditional martial arts that rely on kata or forms, there is no self-correcting mechanism. More simply, there’s no way to determine whether the movements being taught and performed are in any way effective. This is true even for those techniques or combinations that are only practiced against compliant or nonresisting opponents. Anyone can look like they have amazing martial skills with the right demonstration partner, but to truly judge the efficacy of a technique, you need to look at the behavior of the “feeder,” or attacker, and not the demonstrator. Anything can appear functional when total cooperation is involved. And the first thing to notice about most traditional martial arts demonstrations, and a great deal of what passes for training methods within traditional martial arts, is that the attacker is almost always cooperating.
The Kung Fu student steps out with a forward-lunge punch, locking his arm in the air and freezing in a manner that no real opponent on planet Earth will ever mimic. The Kung Fu master looks amazing as he executes multiple deadly strikes against his frozen, immobile opponent. The student drops in a heap.
The Aikido demonstration partner, known in Japanese as an uke, runs forward, his arms mimicking the downward strike of a sword in a manner and form that no modern, angry, violent attacker will ever use, and the Aikido sensei gracefully steps to the side executing a perfectly done—and perfectly choreographed—throw. The uke lands gracefully.
The Kali guro stands ready, stick in hand. His partner swings wide, locking his arm in place in a manner no primate with a tree branch has ever mimed. The guro then deftly deflects, disarms, strikes, and sweeps his “opponent” in an impressive-looking display. His opponent falls, weaponless, defeated.
All of this is very common. And all of this is very make-believe.
There are a number of rationalizations for this kind of dead-pattern charade. First, you will hear this is only the first step in the process. Once the movement has been “mastered,” the students begin to use these techniques against resisting opponents. This is almost never true. If it were, everyone would quickly realize that the movements and responses themselves don’t align with what happens when someone really resists, a reality every student who has ever tried to use these movements against someone who is actually fighting back quickly, and painfully, realizes. Next, you’ll hear that the movements themselves are “too dangerous” to be used in live sparring. This, too, is a lie. There is no movement, no technique, no strategy, and no “art” that is too deadly to train against a resisting opponent in a manner that is functional and safe.
Regardless of how well-meaning our intentions, if we are wrong about the facts or deny them out of distaste for what they imply, we are inviting harm both to ourselves and those in our care. When it comes to the martial arts, truth cannot be avoided in the face of a malevolent attack.
Truth is the angry street fighter who doesn’t give a damn about the Kung Fu master’s reputation. The fighter has no intention of throwing a punch and locking his arm out in a typical Kung Fu pose, one that mimics the only types of punches the master has practiced against. That fighter is a vehicle of truth the moment he throws a real punch to the master’s face, tackles, mounts, and pummels him into unconsciousness. Truth doesn’t care about the Kung Fu master’s opinion of what a fight should be or how many compliant demonstration partners he has beaten up.
Truth is the BJJ blue belt with two years of training who politely asks for a match with a larger, stronger Aikido sensei with twenty-plus years of training, and who then takes him down, holds him down, and quickly chokes him, forcing the Aikido sensei to submit by tapping out, time and again, until his ego can take no more. That truth doesn’t care that the effective and gentle movements used to control the sensei were out of line with Aikido’s utopian fantasies about what human movement “should be.”
Truth is the man who grabs a large stick and swings it the way any human being with bad intentions will swing an impact weapon. Crashing through the Kali guro’s block, cutting open his face, and repeating until the guro gives up. That truth won’t care that the stick did not move in a manner that conforms to how the guro practiced, how the guro assumed it “should be.”
The above scenarios are not speculation. All three have occurred. Admittedly, such anecdotal stories prove nothing, but they are illustrative of the problem. Thankfully, we can rely on a more rigorous method to discover truth in personal combat. The beauty of martial arts is that, unlike more theoretical subjects, the techniques and styles are all testable. The tests themselves are all repeatable. And the results are all very predictable. Anyone can look amazing with the right partner. Anything can look functional when the person having the demonstration done on them cooperates with the person doing the demonstration to them. But for the martial artist seeking reality, it is the resisting opponent who offers them truth.
Unless you’re foolish or a sociopath, you will want to experience that truth in a training facility—and not in a parking lot, where the stakes are much higher and the potential outcomes far more severe. You want to test that truth always, every day, every week, every month, and every year you train. That does not mean training needs to be rough or lead to injury. People who think it does haven’t been exposed to the correct training methods yet.
Why does truth matter?
Because when it comes to self-defense, if your beliefs about reality don’t correspond to reality, the end result will be painful at best or fatal at worst.
The world of traditional martial arts, like religion, is overflowing with superstition, creation myths, miracle stories, antiquated training methods, and all manner of woo-woo. This is exactly the type of thing Bruce Lee intended to change and wanted to move martial arts away from. I have run into people who feel that explaining all of this is a waste of time, because they think those who fall for the fantasy-based martial arts, or for any con game or superstition, are stupid, lazy, or both and thus deserve their fate. I don’t share this opinion.
As relates to my own martial arts journey, why did I want a training environment with nowhere for the ego to hide, an ongoing experiment designed to give the most accurate feedback possible? Why did the functionality of what I was going to do, the authenticity of it, matter so much? The answer is a universal one, available to everyone: without authenticity, without self-honesty as it relates to our intentions or motives, we will not be able to see the world as it actually is. And unless we are willing to see the world as it is, we won’t even know the right questions to ask, let alone find the right answers. Those questions, when matched with an accurate answer-seeking method, a practical epistemology, lead us ever closer to truth.
This essay is excerpted from The Gift of Violence: Practical Knowledge for Surviving and Thriving in a Dangerous World, which is available for purchase at these paid links: Amazon, Bookshop, and Pitchstone.
Matt Thornton has been teaching functional martial arts for more than thirty years and holds a fifth degree black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. His organization, Straight Blast Gym, has more than seventy locations worldwide and has produced champion MMA fighters as well as world-class self-defense and law enforcement instructors. He lives with his wife Salome and their five children in Portland, Oregon.