I read this recently on Rory Miller’s blog:
Most people train to bolster their fantasy life far more than they train for survival.
He’s talking about martial arts and real-world violence; Sgt. Miller has a very strong opinion about the way most martial arts are taught nowadays. I suppose he has a pretty unimpeachable perspective, being involved on a daily basis in putting down tough criminals.
But I wonder about the rest of us. I wonder deeply. Right now I’m sitting in a restaurant waiting for my dinner. Other than my year in the woods I have had so little direct contact with the sources of the food that had to die for me to live. Other than my few brushes with schoolyard violence, I haven’t had much contact with violence; I don’t have to bust heads or nuts on a daily basis either to survive or to make a living. I’ve taken classes in martial arts from people who tout valid lineages, most of whom also haven’t had backgrounds of street violence or military training or police experience. These instructors might be among those that Sgt. Miller would criticize. Unless you’ve actually been there and done that, or are expecting to, or been trained by someone who has, then you’re trying to match your life and your training to a figment of imagination — yours or someone else’s.
But here’s the thing. Aiming at a figment of imagination seems to describe my whole life. After all, I went to live in the woods, why? Because it was necessary to survive, physically? Absolutely not. I went for the fantasy. I took martial arts for the fantasy. But I also went to college for the fantasy. I became an acupuncturist for the fantasy. None of it was directly relevant to my immediate physical circumstances. But this applies to so many things. Will Smith’s movie The Pursuit of Happyness was about what else but a fantasy? But one made real. In many ways, you have to dream your life, before it can actually arrive into existence.
So what’s the problem with that? Well, I kind of laid it out in my critique of my year in the woods. To sum up, when things get hard, it creates a psychic split where part of you holds to the fantasy, at least provisionally, in order to try to actualize it; and another part of you wants to give up the fantasy as not actually real, and accept the cold, hard reality that’s right in front of you, because that’s where your power is: in the present.
Fantasy is about projecting yourself into a situation that’s other than who or where you are, because it offers something that the present moment does not. When you think about what to have for dinner you’re fantasizing. When you think about what career you want to go into, you’re fantasizing. It’s not healthy or unhealthy, it’s what we do. It can get healthy or unhealthy depending on how much you live in your fantasies proportional to what you do about those fantasies.
Ultimately I think it should be about having a useful fantasy that leads to a useful reality. Sgt. Miller’s critique is valid insofar as he’s talking about people’s martial art fantasies obscuring hard truths. Train for a fight the wrong way, or train for the wrong kind of fight, and you’re injured or dead.
Likewise, people trying to live primitively in the woods will quickly learn that it’s not all peace pipe, Native American songs, and laughing around the campfire, or whatever the fantasy is. It’s hard work, sweat, and tears. Alongside the good stuff, of course.
But which fantasy do you choose?
It seems to me that you can never know which is the right fantasy. Sgt. Miller, in that blog post, talks about how people don’t really train to things that could really happen, but they train for fantasy.
The people who need [self-defense skills], the ones most likely to be victimized are the timid, the unathletic, the unaware… exactly the group least likely to seek out training.
“I’m good enough for what I’m likely to run into,” he said, “I don’t need to train for your environment.”
It’s not true and it is terrifyingly blind… yet it is true. He is likely to run into exactly nothing in his life. He is adequately prepared for that. But violence comes in something closer to a hockey stick distribution than a bell curve. It probably won’t hit this kid. But if it does he will likely need skills and ferocity well beyond what I’ve needed.
But this leads to a strange expansion: If your current dreams and ideas about reality trap you into tunnel vision, then you have to find other fantasies. But how can you find them all? Because once you start looking, you get so many. You could get shot by a sniper. Your home could be invaded by men with guns. You could be walking your dog and get kidnapped. You could be poisoned. You could be blackmailed. Really, you can’t possibly train for all of these things. What roots you, then?
Fantasies come in several varieties. You’re either running towards something, or you’re running away from something. And, you can be running towards or away from an identity (as in, “I want to be a comedian,” or, “I never want to be like my father”), or you can be running towards or away from an experience (“I want to travel the world” vs. “I’ll never be raped again”).
Because of the way this is set up, most people let previous experiences or future expectations root them. Either they came from a hard situation, or they’re about to go into one, that’s why they know how to fight. That sounds pretty reasonable. Sgt. Miller says that if you didn’t come from a hard situation or are about to go into one, and therefore you don’t give a shit about defending yourself … then you’re shit out of luck! Damn. I mean, what can you do about that? Really it can get to a point where you’re worried about everything.
Here’s another example. Take the whole collapse-of-civilization thing. There are lots of people out there that believe our civilization is in decline. They vary as to the story. Some say it’ll bust all of a sudden, and within a few years. Others say it’ll take a long time of ups and downs. Still others don’t even believe we’ve peaked.
What you choose to do with your life depends on which story you hold to. Some people are busting ass out in the woods already. On the other end, some people are still expecting the eternal bull market to return eventually. But who’s right? I’m a bit sympathetic to the doomers, but they were around just before the whole Y2K thing too, and look how that one turned out. In a general sense, you could go round and round convincing yourself of so many different possible realities, and still be wrong, still be blindsided. You can just drive yourself nuts trying to figure it all out.
How do you choose which fantasy to follow? Because Sgt. Miller is wrong, too. Those people who don’t follow a “useful” fantasy … well, do they necessarily live useless lives? There’s something about a little bit of madness that’s kind of divine, whether it’s Arctic explorers or comic book artists, people who aren’t content to survive life by living the way things are “set up” to live, but have to follow the beat of their own drum even if it leads off a cliff. And sometimes it does, but sometimes they take off into greatness. We hear about people doing crazy stuff and living life and maybe sometimes dying from doing really stupid things — and other times surviving to just have an awesome story to tell. If you always go for what’s realistic, how do you know when your longshot fantasies might actually come true?
Plenty of arguments on both sides. I don’t really know either way. I’m just sayin’ that the hard-nosed Mr. Miller has a definite point, that doesn’t always hold up. And when applied to life in general, I’m inclined to go his direction, which is the same direction that my parents and society and most other people say is the safe one and the right one, and certainly when applied to violence and life-or-death situations you gotta be nothing less than harshly realistic.
… But then there’s a faint fae light beckoning yonder …
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David- bring it back to living in the woods. I haven’t read your whole catalog, but I know you’re familiar with Tom Brown, so let’s look at it from the scout level- you develop the skills to go into the woods, keep yourself insulated, hydrated and fed (shelter-water-fire-food) with nothing, not even clothes. That’s a pretty profound experience.
Lots of people teach survival classes. Because they go camping or hiking, they can test the little stuff- land nav, purifying water, a few edible plants. Even at the instructor level, the farther you take it (longer term stuff- tanning hides, making tools and weapons, preserving food) (or intensity stuff- field medicine on yourself, finding water in arid environments) the fewer who have actually done it and it turns into a big circle-jerk of people reading each other’s books.
When I rip on the fantasy boys, and they do bug me, it’s because they not only never went into the woods but they are reading campfire stories they don’t understand to each other. And calling themselves “Master woodsmen”. Many of the campfire stories are hundreds of years old and it has been generations since anyone understood them.
Goals, plans and dreams are different than fantasies. Fantasies are similar, but they prevent you from feeling a need to taste reality. Fantasies are like TV and heroin: excuses not to do anything real but still feel good about yourself.
You’ve gone into the woods. Your dreams (or fantasies if you want to call them that) are qualitatively different from those of the people sitting on their couches and watching reality shows. You are qualitatively different from the people who don’t do.
Every last person on this earth can be amazing just by doing stuff. No one can be amazing just sitting on their ass listening to other people’s stories. I am pretty hard nosed on that point.
Take care. Hope to finally meet you when I return to Oregon.
Hi Rory, thanks for commenting. I keep forgetting about the whole blog pingback thing.
Funny you mention Tom Brown; he’s one of the main people who have, on the one hand, made such a fantasy out of being a tracker/stalker/scout, and, on the other hand, inspired so many ordinary people to get into primitive skills and Native philosophy. So I see a lot of grey in that spectrum.
I pretty much agree with you about what you call “fantasy boys,” they have them in every field (and I’m currently privately raging about them in my own field of healing arts). But on this point I would sink the discussion to the level of terminology here, and describe them as embodying only a specific pathological usage of fantasy. People who dream a world that they aren’t as serious about connecting to reality.
Still, when you’re dealing with anything that doesn’t have a high chance of resulting in injury or death, then it gets harder and harder to tell exactly what’s a useful fantasy and what’s a diseased one. Some people have made pretty ridiculous amounts of money doing impossibly stupid things, for instance. So what’s real?
With this, I totally agree. And it makes me want to get out and do more stuff.
At any rate, I look forward to meeting you if you ever make it down my way.
Ok, so this may be in the realm of fantasy exactly as you (both) are complaining about, but:
I spent a lot of time focused on things that aren’t currently real in my life. I do this because, while I can live as I am well enough for now, it is not enough in the grand scheme. So a very large portion of my life is focused on searching for the “something more” than I feel must be there, that I yearn for.
Now, I’m perfectly willing to acknowledge that *some* of this is escapist dream stuff – scifi and fantasy books, computer games, these are entirely unproductive – but I have to ask, is *all* of my dreaming invalid? I dream like this because things hit me, there’s some kind of a pull, a call, that I can’t just ignore. But I have to (and try to) reconcile it with my reality, which is currently pretty mundane.
I guess this is the little bit of madness you’re talking about, David. And I’d say even the dreaming of it can be useful if it keeps me (mostly) sane, while I figure out how to act on it in a way that is actually compatible with my reality. Maybe.
(P.S. Rory, this is entirely related, and makes me again exactly the fantasist you speak of, but even though I have not experienced violence in my life, and even though I know I would probably freeze and wet myself and cry the first time it happened to me, I’ve been reading your posts this evening and something deep and very primal seems to connect with what you write. And it doesn’t *feel* like wishful thinking. I’m, again, not sure how to reconcile this with reality.)
Matt-
You wrote: “scifi and fantasy books, computer games, these are entirely unproductive…” Not always. Some kids read SF when they were kids and it inspired them to be scientists. That’s productive. But some kids read the exact same material and used it to avoid doing the math and science homework that they needed to make it real. Then it is destructive.
In my field, the equivalent is to train in a martial art and bury your head in the sand when someone talks about how fights really happen, or the medical, legal and emotional consequences. “My instructor taught me everything I needed to know and it is unfair to say that your experience is in some way more valid than my training.” Is exactly the same as saying, “I don’t need to study math to be an astronaut! I’ve seen every episode of Star Trek and their technology is centuries ahead of anything I can get in highschool.” It’s the same argument, but unfortunately the people saying it can’t see that.
I get pissed when people teach from this point of view because it can get innocents killed.
Now for you, Matt- if something ‘deep and primal’ is touched by my writing, that’s meaningless. If just being aware of this deep and primal thing is enough for you, then it’s useless. A masturbation fantasy based on violence instead of sex. (that would put you with the majority of MA, BTW).
If it scares you and you go into this deep denial, or worse, create some myth of an inner darkness that must be contained, it’s worse than useless.
If you follow the touch and figure out what it is, what that part of ‘you’ is- not by just navel gazing but by actually seeing what it is when it is real, then you will grow very fast in ways that I can’t predict. That can be cool or can create a monster. Usually cool if you have an inner ethic.
We’re all going to hang up on the language here. I’ve said before that the difference between an excuse and a reason is that a valid reason can predict future behavior. It drives action. In this case, the difference between some of what you and David call a fantasy and what I disparage by calling a fantasy is that the good one presages action. The bad one is a sure sign of inaction- unless some other aspect of ego gets involved.
Rory,
Well, I see the particular point you’re trying to make. No substantial disagreement from me — just that, again, if you’re not talking about things with immediate life-or-death consequences, it’s not always clear when someone’s got their heads permanently in the clouds and when they’re just letting their dreams gestate.
But regarding your original post, I thought you were referring not just to those who already train for violence but willfully deny reality, but also to “the timid, the unathletic, the unaware,” and how they are the ones who most need to train to shed their fantasies of safety. That was what I was responding to. I still have difficulty knowing how an average joe can prepare for all eventualities — something will always be left undone, and hence remain in the realm of fantasy (dreams never put into action). Or how an average joe can even know what they’re training is real or not, if “reality” can be the vague possibility of being ambushed by masked gunmen. Thus my question of how to determine which of those dreams/goals/”fantasies” you train toward.
Nah, David.
What I meant was the ‘timid, the unathletic and the unaware’ are the ones most likely to be targeted. That is what the bad guys look for, hence they are most likely to be attacked by a predator. That wasn’t about shedding fantasies, that was just a ‘people who spend a lot of time on boats have more need to learn to swim’ observation.
There is some dynamic in that, and maybe it is a chicken/egg question. If one chose to train seriously, confidence, physical ability and awareness all go up, and that makes you less likely to be chosen. Couch potatoes are easier victims and don’t train. Three things and I’m not sure which can be picked as the causal factor. Is there a victim personality that equates with a dread of getting out of the comfort zone? Or is couch potato laziness the cause of both? Or is the divider people who decide to do something, like train, and people who don’t?
But this aspect had little to do with fantasy.
I see.
Maybe you weren’t saying it, then, but your post sparked the question of what, in practical terms, a fairly unathletic person like me, with little realistic expectation of engaging in violence as a matter of course, would choose as a training goal. Because most things I see available as classes to the general public are fantasy-based, or some variant. Karate or taekwondo or MMA or Brazilian jiu jitsu for competition, or for fitness or rock-hard abs, or for the nifty colored belt; stuff like bujinkan for the ninja mystique; traditional internal Chinese arts for spirituality or health or some long-term prospect of eventually being able to knock out your attacker in twenty years using qi. Or harsher stuff for military or LEO. Or quick-and-dirty self-defense targeted towards women who want to deal with muggers and rapists. Do you see what I mean? (I’m aware I’m way oversimplifying all of those, but there’s an element of myth to each of them; if not, the Gracie name would have no power to it, and the word “ninja” wouldn’t be so evocative.)
If a couch potato wanted to step out the door, there isn’t really any clear way to do so without running into fantasies, and said couch potato has no way of distinguishing the real from the dream, except hard experience.
I mean, it’s because violence is so relatively rare for the rest of us that fantasy can be so prevalent, otherwise it’d be an efficient matter of natural selection.
What’s an average joe to do, I wonder.
And by fantasies, here I mean both, how to avoid the unrealistic fantasies of those who would teach, and, how to choose a dream/goal that’s still relevant to an average person, rather than law enforcement or military. So, I guess two separate concerns, not necessarily related.
That goes back to one of the wrong bell curve assumptions: There’s no low or average level of violence. I mean, statistically you could derive one, but if someone picked you for an attack, it will be a thinking, experienced human who has stacked everything to win. If that happens, you often need the harshest, grittiest stuff out there. The halfway training of most dojos doesn’t even comprehend what the problem would be like, much less have an answer. The likely victims need the hard stuff to have a chance, unfortunately the easy stuff is easier and people become likely victims by consistently choosing the easy stuff…
And, as you point out the fact that most people can’t tell a good instructor or technique or idea from a bad one without some exposure to the problem.
Well, shit.
[...] even martial arts comprise an artificial environment. This was the context of my recent conversation with Rory Miller. Ultimately, to me it seems that all matters of [...]