Regardless of your IQ, your reflexes, your physical constitution, your resources and your opportunity relative to your target, all of which are obviously important, there is one thing that absolutely separates the warriors from the LARPers, and the winners from the losers.
A fighter’s mindset is the absolute foundational bedrock on which everything else that makes him a fighter hinges, and this is even far more important in real life than in set-pieces like a boxing or MMA match which have rules and are set in essentially artificial parameters.
In real life, there is no referee, the fight is not necessarily directly physical against another human and so on.
The last 3 years of total war have demonstrated that in order to depopulate you, personally and specifically, weapons of mass effect have been used against you. And if you pay any attention to these things, you will note that the primary weapon used was psychological.
The constant media bombardment of fear of the deadliest virus ever known to man in all of human history, was relentless. A virus so deadly that it turned out it had a mortality rate lower than the common flu. Nevertheless, it worked. People were scared, especially initially when nothing was known and the fake numbers and fake information coming through was apocalyptic in nature.
In parallel was run a massive campaign of economic destruction and psychological isolation and terror about your loved ones dying as well as yourself if you did not inject yourself with a genetic serum they SAID was safe and effective, but really was and is murder-juice.
And of course, they used the state sanctioned force to impose house arrest, business shut-downs, and fines and imprisonment for anyone who did not comply with self-tagging with totally pointless masks and so on.
You didn’t get the red commie bastards, freaks and totalitarian useful idiots charging your home with machine guns. It wasn’t required. They got you do do everything for them.
They used MINDSET against you. They affected YOUR mindset. And if your mindset was weaker than theirs you complied. The mixture of psychological warfare, gaslighting and actual physical and economic discomfort was enough to make the majority bend and take the genetic serum as deep as they wanted to shove it in you.
This was easily predictable on a simple basis: At a minimum, 80% of people will not fight back at all. And in the modern era, I think that number is probably well over 90%, but let’s remain optimistic and say it is 90% “only”.
That means that 9 out of 10 people will climb into the cattle cars when they are told the concentration camps are really not so bad and it’s for their own good they need to go there.
Of that remaining 10% very few would actually take up arms even in a real “we’re coming door to door to arrest and jail and forcibly jab all the no-vaxxers”. Historically the number is somewhere between 5% and 1%.
It is true however, that if/when that level of direct conflict arrives, that 1% or 5% or whatever it is, will get some effective and practical support by much larger number of people and in fact will even be able to double or triple its ranks quickly if they achieve some strategic (morale boosting) victories. At a certain point, the straw breaks the camel’s back and then you will find no one that argues against the tip of the spear. Almost everyone will have magically now become “the good guys” again.
As an Italian, we have a special understanding of this from WW2. We started out siding with the Germans, but as the Germans began losing, we gradually became pro-Allied powers, and by the time Italy was “liberated” we had made sure to kill Il Duce ourselves, to show what good allies we were. Everyone still remembers the Germans as the evil Nazis, and the Japanese as torturing freaks, but everyone loves the Italians. Well… except the incels, they hate us for stealing all your women and then some.
But you see my point.
Now, the beauty of the fighter’s mindset is that regardless of the weapons used against him, physical or psychological, the baseline features of a fighter’s mindset remain unchanged.
And that mindset is simply this:
A total devotion to winning the fight by whatever means.
I can hear the hippies and their “honourable” counterparts saying “well… well… not by ANY means surely!”
And that is the first hurdle. Every man has a set of morals and ethics, lines he will or will not want to cross and most would be very surprised to find out just how quickly and easily they would cross those lines at a run given certain circumstances. The primary difference between a warrior’s mind and everyone else is self-knowledge.
I am under no illusions whatever about my ethical limits, as well as all the other limits, physical, intellectual, and so on.
As the Greeks used to say:
Man – Know Thyself.
I literally went to Delphi in Greece, where that statement is said to have originated with the Oracle there. You can see images of that trip in the Image Gallery. And it is the foundational statement I have right from the start in my book on Systema.
If you know yourself intimately and profoundly, if you have found yourself repeatedly in situations that went beyond your self-perceived concepts of yourself and yet you overcame them, and you learnt your true limits better, then you will have no hesitation in knowing where your personal “line” is.
I certainly have no doubts on it. You can place me into pretty much any hypothetical or real situation and a “moral dilemma” is almost certainly never going to even slow me down for a fraction of a second.
That’s point number one of mindset: Know your ethical lines.
Point number two: Know your level of combativeness.
This is to a certain degree inborn, it can be developed, curated, certainly increased and refined, but ultimately, the level of combative response is yet another fundamental thing you need to be very keenly and deeply aware of within yourself. And it does not apply just to physical confrontations. It applies to any situation that requires confrontation. It can be business, a rude guy having some road rage, or whatever. Mine is specific to circumstances and can utterly confuse even people that have known me for decades. Yet it is very simple. I react usually in a fairly de-escalating way with people or situations that are not really immediate threats, unless of course, they tickle my injustice bone, which is something rather rarefied in design and quality, hence quite rare in the modern age, which again, surprises people at odd times. In life-or-death situations or ones that can be such for people dear to me, then, well, some might pity the fools that go there, but I am not one of them. The response will be likely to be nuclear and permanent, regardless of consequences.
Point number three: Emotional Control.
If you can’t keep your eyes open the minute someone throws a punch at you, you can’t duck it effectively. If you can’t stay calm when the violence is about to kick off, you get tunnel vision and miss things. If you can’t keep thinking while fighting, you will not see the best opportunities. If you let your emotions control you, your enemies will use them to do so. Emotional control can only be increased by placing yourself in emotionally difficult situations repeatedly. It is, essentially, a desensitising process. And again, it applies to all facets of life. If you are too scared to ask a pretty girl out, you will never get a date with a pretty girl. If you force yourself to ask every pretty girl for a date, over time you will learn to adjust and not get freaked out. And eventually, asking a pretty girl for a date will have the same emotional content as drinking a cup of tea.
Point number four: Know your triggers.
Everyone has these, and you need to know precisely where they are, why they are, and be able to be non-reactive to them. Sounds impossible right? Not really. If your level of combativeness is extremely high but your emotional control is low, you will likely end up in jail later, even if you win the fight. Or, you might get the bad guy in front of you, but not his whole crew.
If on the other hand you have extremely high combativeness and also extremely high emotional control, you will react only when doing so ensures not only that you avoid punishment later, but that you get the bad guy, his crew, his family and acquaintances, and his pets too. And will have the truck with salt delivered just in time over the ashes of his entire genetic line. Having triggers doesn’t mean you have to react to them instantly.
Point number five: Patience.
This is a difficult one, and most people that (think) they know me will laugh at the idea I could teach anyone anything about patience. Keep in mind that my last employer had printed two of my sayings and pinned them up on the wall of his office under the label Giuseppe’s Sayings. They were:
- False modesty is not a virtue, and
- Patience is an excuse for the witless
And mostly it is. However, there are things at which my patience will wear out most everyone else. I grew up in a family of hunters, and learnt from a young age that I had a natural talent for waiting in order to get that kill shot, or find that animal, or track it. Then I worked in security and that same skill was honed when investigating people and crimes and frauds. The ability to bide your time when required, so as to get the best of your enemy, is innate in me, and I am not sure if it is genetic (I suspect it is) but as with anything, it can probably be improved upon, that said, I think a predisposition for this, if you have the other attributes too, especially combativeness, makes you a dangerous enemy.
Point number six: Speed of Variation and Improvisation.
A real fighter can instantly alter his trajectory if the conditions suddenly change or require it. This is something that has all the above elements in part, and experience and genetics as well as IQ to a certain degree all blended in, but can be dramatically improved by playing out scenarios in your head almost constantly and thinking of alternatives and situational changes. If you also train this way, it improves your ability dramatically. Systema uses many fun such “drills” that have unexpected, unorthodox components in hand to hand training, but you can use the same general attitude in (as usual) all aspects of life. It is a mixture of quick thinking, willingness to act at a moment’s notice, the ability to calculate probabilities on the fly on the basis of the multiple variables of a dynamic situation while being objective about your own abilities. The switch from patient observer to sudden striker in the event of a hunt that changes suddenly, the ability to throw your opponent off guard by doing the unexpected, all can be used in most interactions too. That chubby girl cockblocking you from her hot friend you’d like to get to know better and maybe get together with? Instead of remaining stumped or quiet at her rudely trying to show you up with inappropriate (and often untrue) public statements? Counter-attack instead.
A simple example from my debauched past need not be as drastic, you can tone it to the situation, but to her “Leave my friend alone, she has a boyfriend and is not interested in you!”
Instead of looking like a deer in headlights, you could instantly respond with “What? Oh you got it so wrong! I was only trying to speak to your hot friend in order to get close to you! I can tell YOU don’t have a boyfriend, and I’m into getting the plumper lonely ones away from the herd, you know, for the added meat when I axe murder them and cannibalise them. Come here, my soft, dear girl, do you like Chianti?” Anyone listening to this is bound to laugh, especially if they have seen the Hannibal Lecter films or series. And it also neutralises her. Of course it is also a filter for how “woke” her friend is if she freaks out at the “plumper” comment, and so on. In short, you have put the enemy off balance and at the same time undermined their position while still keeping the original target in your sights, though indirectly, for example, by turning to the pretty girl and asking with obviously feigned nonchalance “Does your boyfriend like fillet mignon? No, just you then for dinner?” The triple entendre is baked in (which I only realised long after I wrote this, during a second pass hours later to correct for spelling etc, because it is honestly the kind of sentence that just comes to me, the skill has become unconscious).
The more dangerous a situation is, the more likely that the fog of war is more, and in those cases, being able to improvise can literally mean life and death.
The above pretty much defines the mindset. Of course, resources, possibilities and so on are all important, but remember that third worlders with inferior technology by a few levels (in traveller terms), inferior equipment at all levels, and inferior training and opportunities still kicked the crap out of the most powerful military in the world. Twice. (Vietnam and Afghanistan). What they had, was a mindset that squished the American one at fifty paces with merely a glance.
So. Focus on building up your mindset. The rest will follow.
Here is a book/game I wrote to help you begin developing it and learning by playing, which is the best way to learn, how to imagine and resolve various scenarios.
Training in Hand to Hand after 50
I received an interesting email from a reader of the blog who is also a Kurgan TV member, in it he mentioned how he felt his hand-to-hand skills were probably his weakest link.
It is a sad fact of life (or maybe a divinely good one, it’s hard to tell while we are still roaming the Earth) that as you become
olderwiser your body begins to tell you that you no longer need to do all that physical stuff quite as energetically. It can tell you this in a number of ways, including failing you in ways that take long to heal.At some point, I would not want to get into a fight with a half-dozen twenty-somethings with my bare hands.
I did once hold off about 25 “youths” ranging in age from I’d say 12 or 13 to 23 or so. This was in December 2015 so I was 45 already, but I had managed to get myself in a doorway, meaning they could only come at me at most 2-3 at the time and none actually stepped forward. If they had it would have been reminiscent of that scene from a Bruce Lee film. There were no camera in that particular spot of London and as some had bottles in their hands and such, it was likely some might have had knives too. If they had stepped forward I would not have held back with any strike at all and I would not have been concerned about consequences afterwards, as 25 people, even if untrained and pack-like can definitely kill you if you give them any leeway, but inside a gateway that was flanked by solid face-brick columns, I really was not worried. They clearly were as they repeatedly taunted me to try and get me to step out of the doorway, and I taunted them back about being weak little bitches who couldn’t take me even though they were a couple of dozens of them. One threw a bottle at me, which I caught and threw back, narrowly missing his head, but none of them ever stepped forward so after a while I just went through the gate and closed it behind me and went home.
The mentality switches too though, even as your body changes, and as I get older, I think while on one side I’m not as prone to the impatience, and quick temper of youth, and will generally try to avoid issues before they even become issues, if I were forced into a situation now, I would be far less forgiving in my approach. I would be far more concerned with ending the threat as fast and absolutely as possible than whether the other guy would be able to walk or chew solid food again or how badly they might fall flat on the floor and never get up again.
I learnt from 4 decades of martial arts that if I am injured or somehow limited, or scared for others near me, paradoxically, I become far more dangerous than if I am fighting fit and not worried about the confrontation. And an older guy is a bit like a wounded animal. He just wants to be left alone and if you attack him, well, he’s not going to play nice. At all.
If you are only starting martial arts in your fifth decade, you need to approach it a bit differently. Train slower and do a lot more repetitions (ie the “boring” training that the young guys don”t like, but that is really how you develop a skill) and make sure your movements are correct and as perfect as you can get them while you do them at super slow speed in a controlled environment and progress to faster and harder only gradually and always keeping excellent form. A fitness regime to complement your training is also advisable and you need to figure that out yourself on the basis of where you are and what you wish to achieve.
Nothing is impossible, there are 90 year olds doing 20 pull-ups a day, and there are 30 year olds that are obese and will almost croak of heart seizure if they have to run 30 metres.
All that said, my dad, when he was in his 60s stopped an armed robbery. He did karate from a young age and was renowned enough in Italy that when I took a taxi to see his old Sensei in Italy, the taxi driver, knew who my father was by reputation alone. And he’d been away from Italy for over 20 years already. However, when faced with multiple armed robbers in a store, he did not rely on fisticuffs. He used his .45. And he didn’t just wave it about either.
The point being the as you get older you need to adapt to your changing physical circumstances. If you live in a country where it is possible for you to get GOOD combat training with firearms, then do that. And become a regular. Most people, even “trained” ones, completely fall apart under real life scenarios, so your training needs to incorporate high stress and realistic situations within the realms of keeping safety standards too. And no matter how “realistic” training will NEVER get the adrenaline flowing like a real-life live or die scenario, but this is where obsessive repetition under as many different conditions as possible becomes paramount.
These are just some general points. There are, of course, freaks of nature that will take healthy 20-something thugs out while they are in their 70s.
A local man was in the newspaper because he saw two immigrants of African descent harassing a young woman, who was also an immigrant, but of European descent. The man was in his 70s but nevertheless confronted the two thugs, and when they thought they could get physical with the old man, he laid one out with a right cross. he’s been a semi-pro boxer in his younger days. The other thug ran away after he saw his friend hit the pavement cold.
And I am aware of a little old Russian soldier kicking the crap out of two guys that were twice his size and mean, without breaking a sweat. So, while I hope to not have to deal with young punks in my 70s, if I do, I will be taking very much a more Jonah Hex/Punisher approach than a Batman approach.
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By G | 26 April 2023 | Posted in Guns, Martial Arts, Social Commentary, Systema, Systema