There’s a long-standing fault line cleft through martial arts to separate them into Dead and Alive. So for example if you were to look at the tiny group of martial arts that are actually useful in a fight (and it’s nearest proxy where it can actually be tested – the MMA cage) you’ll see they all share several factors in common. Before you scroll down, just consider for yourself the commonalities between boxing, wrestling, judo, sambo, muay thai, Brazilian ju jitsu. Look at any decent MMA fighter and you’ll find they specialise in one or two of these arts. Outliers are extremely rare.
So what do they have in common?
- A rule set that allows full-bore competition against an opponent who is trying to beat you… without incurring serious injury.
That was Jigoro Kano’s revolutionary idea that led his tiny judo club to destroy all the ju-jitsu schools in the famous Tokyo Police competition. Remove the deadly techniques and leave the safe ones. While you can still kill someone with a BJJ choke, still knock someone senseless with a boxing left hook you can also control the environment so nobody is lethally injured in training. You cannot seriously train eye gouges and windpipe ripping without quickly running out of training partners. Kano made judo come Alive. Boxing was always alive. Fencing is alive. As is Kendo. The arena of competition (and sparring) inserts universal Darwinism into the fight game.
Back when Japan produced real badasses
Now consider the worthless martial arts…. Krav Maga, Karate, Ninjutsu, Aikido, Tae Kwon Do. What they all have in common? They are Dead. There is no serious competition (or in the case of TKD so removed from anything that resembles fighting it is simply the Dance Of The Foot Fairies). Dead martial arts fossilise. They have rigid grading hierarchies where senior grades don’t have to prove themselves. The respect for teachers is fake. It’s a bunch of guys who never get good at techniques that are never tested. It’s Bullshido.
So why the long preamble?
Martial arts are simply one example of incorporating compliance as a principle in your life. I uses the term in a specific manner to mean one of two things:
- Enticing another person to freely associate and cooperate with you.
- Imposing your will onto another person in free competition.
It’s free-market capitalism in the social world – people are either willingly cooperating in your enterprise or your enterprise is outperforming theirs under free competition. Anything else is socialism*. Now let’s apply that to your personal life. Are you avoiding the free market?
There are many activities that can be stacked into a weekly routine that do not require winning compliance from other people nor besting them in honest competition. When you sit down in front of your Xbox that’s just you and the games machine. The developer has even deliberately and painstakingly crafted an experience to make you feel like a hero. When you wank off to porn you are being guided along a sexual experience that does not require any compliance from a girl. When you read a book, even an intellectually challenging one that will improve your knowledge of life, you simply add it to your Amazon basket and send the money. You are living in a bubble where no-one needs agree with you.
Extortion and socialism, yesterday
Modern society has been crafted to allow people to live in bubbles of non-compliance. When they want something they pay for it, demand it from the government, or guilt-trip someone into giving it up. This is unlike traditional society which always had exams to pass, extended families to manage, neighbours to befriend, a neighbourhood to work with. We now live isolated lives where entire support systems exist to feed our delusions. We live in worlds where compliance is absent. A world where we don’t need people to freely associate with us because they like us and want to.
- Unemployment and housing benefit for those too inept or lazy to work
- Socialised healthcare and pensions for those too unept or selfish to save
- Prostitutes and porn for those men too unattractive to find women
- Video games, movies, books for those too socially awkward to have friends
- Gym machines for those too lazy to do real exercise
- Martial arts for those too pussy to fight in a ring
- MGTOW ideologies for those too far into denial to turn around their life
There are plenty of upsides to this societal change but a major downside is you are removing sources of external feedback from your life. You are not getting that vital ping with the reality to find out where you stand and how good you are at being a man. In economic terms, without a market you don’t have a price discovery mechanism. You don’t know your value. Usually it’s because you don’t want to know your own value because deep down you suspect it’s lower than your ego can handle.
My apology for springing a picture of pillow-biters on you above
Married guys are especially susceptible to this. Thinking they’ve escape the sexual marketplace, locked into a daily routine of boiling the frog, they are blissfully unaware of how they are degenerating and losing their SMV. Until divorce. So ask yourself are you a capitalist or socialist in your personal life? Are you seeking to avoid the marketplace, head in the sand? Just count off the activites that fill your week. How many of them require you to enlist the freely-given cooperation of others or for your team to best another team in honest competition. Examples of compliance / capitalism in action….
- Going out drinking with a bunch of friends
- A road trip with buddies
- Dating a hot girl
- Sparring at your boxing / BJJ class
- Winning an argument
- Having your work colleagues ask you to lead a project
Many activities which are good for your self-development and good for life-enrichment are also non-compliance / socialist activities.
- Reading / studying
- Writing a blog
- Travelling solo or always with the same friend
- Being disciplined about your nutrition
- Hitting the gym
Be careful with them. Its good to have a few but if you find you are always staying home to “work on my philosophy” rather than joining your friends at a party then you might have just life-weaseled yourself. Seek the feedback….. and what is the best possible source of feedback?
Daygame
When you step up to a girl and hit on her she will give you a comprehensive and accurate reality check. Daygame is your masculine mirror. When you are doing life right, the girls’ responses improve. There is no quicker way to rebase yourself than trying to get compliance from a girl you are trying to fuck. In daygame you can’t bully her with your seniority at work, you can’t buy her, you can’t out-maneouvre her in office politics. The only way you’ll get her to come on that idate with you is if she wants to. Free association… the building block of prosperous societies.
* socialism widely construed as an attempt to avoid free association and honest competition, and to replace it with violence, guilt-tripping and denial of reality.
