Social Confrontation vs Asocial Violence

This is an adapted reproduction of three articles (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) of unknown dates by Tim Larkin of Target Focus Training (now Prot3ct). They were accessed on 24 May 2013. The articles no longer appear to exist online but have been reproduced here as they are felt to be very educational. ______________ Contact Bruce About PWP Links ______________ Photo Credits:- Angry Man (Tim Larkin/TFT) Man with Gun (Tim Larkin/TFT) Angry Man & Man with Gun & article title (Tim Larkin/TFT)

Social Confrontation vs Asocial Violence Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 1 I’ve been putting up some posts on the subject of the tool of Violence. This is very different from most views on Self Defence. I think today’s post clarifies exactly why this understanding is critical to you surviving what most people call “self-defence” situations… SOCIAL CONFRONTATION VS. ASOCIAL VIOLENCE: DON’T GET CAUGHT IN THE TRAP You’re in fifth grade and you’ve had it with the school bully. He’s been at you every day this year; humiliating you, taunting you, pushing you around. Giving you random shots in the arm that leave you sore for days. You’ve let it slide for months because you’re not a bad person. You’ve been taught to turn the other cheek, to meet violence with peace, knowing that bullies eventually tire and peace wins out. But mostly you’ve let it slide because you’re afraid. But today is different. Today he pushed you one too many times, and too far–he pushed you over an invisible line in your head and your fear evaporated in the heat of rage. You want to give it all back to him. You put your head down and charge him, knock him back and start swinging away, landing blow after blow against the sides of his head. He’s startled but quickly recovers and gets you in a headlock. As the two of you struggle, a crowd of children gathers around you, attracted to the action like iron filings in a magnetic field, all of them chanting in joyous unison: “Fight! Fight! Fight!” Suddenly, a teacher steps in and pulls the two of you apart, much to everyone’s disappointment. This is pretty standard stuff. We’ve all been there, whether you were a participant, or in the crowd that came running to see. Let’s switch it up a bit and suppose, just for argument’s sake, that instead of a fist fight the kid brings a gun to school and shoots the bully in the head. Do you think the other kids would gather around to watch, to cheer him on? What would you do? You’d do what any of us would do in the face of violence– you’d get the hell out of there. Both of these situations involve violence. So why are there two very different reactions from the crowd? We all know real violence when we see it–someone being shot in the head, or stabbed repeatedly, or kicked to death by a mob. We have a primal, visceral reaction to the real thing. It sickens us. And yet, we can watch a bloody and gruelling title bout with nothing but excitement, cheering for our favourite as the two fighters beat each other to the point of exhaustion. What’s going on here? It’s very simple, really, and has to do with the difference between social interaction and asocial violence. The first scenario (the fist fight) is inherently social; the bully, who occupies a position of power high up on the social totem pole, is being challenged. If the kid manages to cow the bully and make him cry, the kid will gain social status while the bully will lose status. Everyone gathers around because it’s important to see who will be victorious–you want to associate yourself with the winner and shun the loser. Such an upset, such a potential drastic change in the playground pecking order, is important to witness. The outcome of this event holds many repercussions for everyone in the social order. If the bully loses, he and his toadies will see their power eroded; kids will be less likely to hand over their lunch money. The kid who bested him will be a hero and automatically rise above the bully in social regard. If the bully prevails, the status quo is not only maintained, but reinforced. Once again, it’s extremely important, as a member enmeshed in this social order, to witness the contest and its outcome. The second scenario (the school shooting) is inherently asocial, that is, we instantly recognize that it has nothing to do with communication and there will be no change in the social order–there will only be mayhem, death, and misery. As such it holds no interest for the witnesses; it holds only terror. This is what we mean when we speak of a divide between social and asocial violence. They are two very different interactions with very different expected outcomes. And confusing one for the other can get you killed. Another way of looking at it is that one is a competition while the other is only about destruction. Competitions have rules. Destruction is just about who gets it right first… Happy Hour with all the Happy squeezed out of it! If we fast-forward the school yard scenario 12 or so years we end up with a bar fight. And what do we see there? Flaring arms and butting chests, enraged faces, shouted profanity. Throwing things. The biggest guy being ‘held back’ by a much smaller person. Pushing and shoving, trading punches to the head. And, more often than not, grappling and rolling around on the ground. This is classic inter-male aggression; it’s what you get when you mix alcohol, testosterone, and territorial tendencies in the presence of available females. And it’s the same behaviour seen across the animal kingdom. The thrashing, ranting and raving of the silverback gorilla, the head butting of rams, the clashing of male grizzly bears. All of these displays have everything to do with communicating displeasure and the threat of violence, but rarely, if ever, result in killing. The goal is to cow the interloper and run him off your territory, thereby gaining social status. Every aspect of the display is designed to convince the rival that they should capitulate. The screaming and shouting, the angry faces say “I’m seriously agitated!” The flaring arms and out-thrust chests are to make the person look bigger in an attempt to scare off the rival. Pushing and shoving are for physical intimidation and to show strength and power. Punches to the head are communication as well; interacting with the head and face are an attempt to access and show displeasure with the person who resides in the body. Clinching and rolling around on the ground is a great way to look viciously engaged without hurting or getting hurt. The bar fight looks and sounds like it does because it is a display, meant to be seen and heard by all those in attendance. The participants are doing these things because no one really wants to seriously injure the other; in fact, if you interrupted them and offered them handguns to shoot at each other they’d probably think you were insane. Asocial violence is brutally streamlined by comparison. It starts quietly, suddenly, and unmistakably. It’s knocking a man down and kicking him to death. It’s one person beating another with a tire iron until he stops moving. It’s stabbing someone 14 times. It’s pulling the gun and firing round after round into him until he goes down and then stepping in close to make sure the last two go through the brain. If you’re a sane, socialized person, those images make you physically ill. That’s because you recognize them for what they are–asocial violence. The breakdown of everything we humans hold dear, the absence of our favourite construct, the very fabric of society itself. It’s an awful place where there’s no such thing as a ‘fair fight’ or honour. It’s the place where there are no rules and anything goes. It’s the place where people kill and get killed. —– end of Part 1 —– In Part 2… why asocial violence is such a very different beast than we’ve been led to believe, and why you cannot handle it using social tools. In fact, attempting to do so is what makes the average citizen such a brilliant victim. Part 2 The Essential Differences Between Social Aggression and Asocial Violence Social Confrontation is: Avoidable Survivable Can be solved using social skills. Asocial Violence is: Lethal Unaffected by social skills and requires decisive action. The violence that comes from social posturing is avoidable; it is often loud, dramatic and instantly recognizable. You get to see it coming. And that means you can dodge it if you choose to. If you don’t choose to (or cannot) leave, these sorts of problems can be handled with the social tools we’re all familiar with. We’ve all talked our way out of a bad situation-you wouldn’t have made it this far in life if you weren’t good at negotiating. We all know how to calm someone down. We all know how to capitulate. We also all know how to act like a jerk and add fuel to the fire and turn an argument into a shouting match, a shouting match into a fist fight. The important point here is that in social situations, you have a choice. Social aggression is also eminently survivable. The typical goal in a bar fight is not to kill anyone-it’s simply to best the other person and dominate them physically. Does this mean you can’t be killed in a bar fight? Of course not. What we’re saying is that the death rate in the typical Saturday night punch-up is far lower than one would expect, with the bulk of fatalities being accidental, and the rest because one person really did want to kill the other. You can get killed in a bar fight, or an argument over a parking space, or any other trivial social status confrontation. It’s just highly unlikely. Asocial violence, on the other hand, cannot be handled with social tools and is far less survivable. Negotiating with a serial killer is like arguing with a bullet-if it’s coming your way words are not going to deflect it. If someone has decided to stab you to death, capitulation only makes their work easier. Confusing the Two The big problem arises when we confuse the two-when we don’t know there’s a difference between competition and destruction, between social and asocial violence. No one’s going to get confused in the ring; we are all very good at recognizing social competition, a contest of strength, skill and desire. We cheer for our favourite and the best man wins. It works out great as long as we’re all playing by the same rules. The big problem is competing with someone who wants to kill you. As social beings we try to drag our rules into a realm that is completely devoid of them-the asocial violent act. This is where things go terribly wrong. While we try to impose our rules to keep everything fair and above board, the killer is only recognizing the laws of physics and how they relate to physiology. In other words, he’s going to stab you when you’re not looking, he’s going to kick you in the throat when you’re down. If things don’t look so hot for him he’ll capitulate to get you to let go so he can pull a gun and shoot you. He’ll use your social baggage against you. Violence has nothing to do with competition or communication. It’s purely about destruction. The scariest person in the room is not the shouting, screaming, gesticulating weightlifter making snarling faces - it’s the 5’4″ gangbanger quietly sliding a blade out of his pocket. He’s not going to draw attention to himself; if he wants to kill you, he’s not going to talk about it. He’s just going to get it done. The good news is that true sociopathy is rare. The bad news is that you can’t really tell the difference. Nor can you read people’s minds to find out their intentions. Faced with these realities, you need a tool that is going to work 100% of the time on 100% of the population-one that is going to work equally well on everyone you use it on. Social persuasion techniques like pain compliance and submission holds require the other person to play by the rules and capitulate. It’s not going to work on everyone, and the people you want it to work on most-criminal sociopaths-are just plain not going to cooperate. This begs the question: why is it that the people who are most successful at using violence have almost no training? What makes the criminal sociopath so effective? Social Permissions: Monkey See, Monkey Do As social, sane people, we tend to think of violence in social terms-either by framing everything as the schoolyard David and Goliath or by believing that if we take our social rules with us into the void place we can somehow hang onto our humanity and therefore not stoop to ‘their’ level. We tend to think of violence as a force continuum where if he yells at you, you can yell at him. If he pushes you, then you can push him. If he throws a punch then you can hit back. We also believe that the worst kind of violence, that which results in death, happens somewhere out at the end of this progression, if it gets pushed far enough. The problem is that it is not necessary to get “worked up” or walk through all these various steps to get to serious crippling injury or death; punching someone in the throat or stabbing them in the neck is readily available at all times, in all places. This is what the criminal sociopath knows. Can someone ramp up through all the steps and whip themselves into a frothy frenzy that ends in killing? Yes. But what the criminal sociopath knows is that he can get there instantaneously. He can go from smiling and shrugging to stabbing in the amount of time it takes him to reach into his pocket. And the really scary part is so can you. Violence is always available; you just have to choose to do it. You don’t need to walk through the social dance one step at a time to get there. You don’t need to get ready, or drop into a fighting stance, or give a verbal warning. You can swing the tool of violence whenever you wish, at a moment’s notice. And this is exactly what you must do in the face of asocial violence in order to survive. Part 3 Once you understand the difference between social aggression and asocial violence, you can make informed decisions on what you’re looking at - if it’s a ranting, noisy display, you have a choice. If someone pulls a knife and cuts you, you won’t make the fatal mistake of asking them why. What you may have thought of as a single, sweeping continuum from hard stares to yelling to shoving to trading blows to grappling to killing can now be seen for what it is: a social display of aggression where the end-goal is not killing. The end-goal is social dominance. Now you understand that the tool of violence - the destruction of the human body with the goal of shutting down the brain - is always available. You don’t have to work your way through a step-by-step process to get charged up in order to use it. And neither does he. This should be the most sobering point. If you get into a rough-and-tumble bar fight to show him what’s what and he decides that he needs to injure you, that’s what’s going to happen. You think you’re going to trade blows. He just wants to stab you. Something is terribly out of balance here and you’re going to pay the price for playing by the rules in the place where there were none. If, on the other hand, he just wants to compete with you for respect and territory, then it’s all going to work itself out like it always does. The problem is that you have no idea what he’s thinking as you stand up to go after him. Will he play by the rules? Or will he feel so threatened that he will resort to violence to injure you, put you down, and end you? You won’t know until it’s happening, and that’s just not a smart bet. Your best bet is keeping the competition in the ring-not on the street where it’s completely uncontrolled-and keeping the tool of violence for solving the problems that only that tool can solve. Like when someone wants to seriously maim or kill you. Being able to recognize the difference between social posturing and asocial violence will allow you to assess situations and make an informed decision on whether or not (and to what degree) to get involved. If you find yourself asking “Should I hit him?” the answer is probably No. The only reason you are even asking is because something deep down inside of you has recognized that, from a social and moral point of view, there’s something iffy about responding to the situation with violence. It’s the little angel of conscience on your shoulder, whispering in your ear. Asocial violence is easy to recognize. It’ll make you sick to your gut and freeze your blood. You won’t have time for internal debates. The debate won’t even come up. In its place will be a sudden vacuum devoid of moral or ethical considerations. A vacuum that must be filled with decisive action. Attempting to communicate in this silent void is to assist in your own murder. Your words, your body language, your very humanity, mean nothing to the criminal sociopath. He won’t even blink when he pulls the trigger. Keeping the social and asocial clear, clean and separate will save you a lot of trouble. It’ll keep you from breaking someone’s neck in a bar fight and it’ll keep you from negotiating with a serial killer. It keeps surprises to a minimum, and that’s always a Good Thing. In Summary When we think of violence we think of social interactions gone wrong-the bar fight, and at the outer end, the mugging. We prepare for these situations from a social point of view; we look through our social tool box to try to find remedies. Asocial violence is a very different beast than we’ve been led to believe from our social perspective, and cannot be handled using social tools. In fact, attempting to do this is what makes the average citizen such a brilliant victim. The criminal sociopath knows that violence is good for one thing and one thing only: shutting off the human brain. Confusing the two is bad for your health. Recognizing the difference between them saves you a lot of trouble. ************ This is an adapted reproduction of three articles (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) of unknown dates by Tim Larkin of Target Focus Training (now Prot3ct). They were accessed on 24 May 2013. The articles no longer appear to exist online but have been reproduced here as they are felt to be very educational.

Also see:- Violence articles