A Brief Meditation on Combat

You really don’t want to win badly.

In the vast majority of attacks, the purpose is not to kill or even to wound but to show strength and thereby menace your opponent with the possibility of further attacks. The purpose of this threat is de-escalation. You want the fight to end quickly, and on your terms.

More often than not, when you have a single opponent, that opponent has allies who will witness the fight in some form or another. This means you are not truly fighting that single opponent but potentially the whole group. So even if your aim is to annihilate this first opponent, you must do it in a way that shows restraint and good form. You are demonstrating to your other potential opponents that you have much more power in reserve should they choose to continue the fight. Always offer them an out so they can stop fighting without losing too much face.

In this way, learning to fight well is literally the same as learning to minimize combat. I know this sounds like something right out of Kung Fu Panda, but it’s true. The goal isn’t to keep fighting until there is no one left to kill but to defeat your opponent as decisively as possible in a way that doesn’t lead to more fighting. This last point is crucial and helps to explain why wars never seem to end. There have to be voluntary rules of engagement, and they have be followed, or else it’s not war but mass murder. And murder tends to provoke revenge.

If you follow my posts, you may have seen that I recently got back into martial arts, and I did just finish a class this evening, but this meditation was actually inspired by an insult I received on social media earlier today. My response to it (after a good long delay to give my opponent time to cool down from their initial aggression) was targeted and effective but showed major restraint. Their response to this was better than I’d hoped for. A sincere apology with a brief explanation. It felt so much better than a flame war ending in a block. I definitely won, but the other guy didn’t lose. This outcome isn’t always possible, but it should always be the goal.