{"id":2000,"date":"2019-08-01T16:37:41","date_gmt":"2019-08-01T20:37:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/?p=2000"},"modified":"2019-08-01T16:37:41","modified_gmt":"2019-08-01T20:37:41","slug":"fighting-evil-inside-martial-art-guided-chaos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2019\/08\/fighting-evil-inside-martial-art-guided-chaos.html","title":{"rendered":"Fighting Evil: Inside the Martial Art of Guided Chaos"},"content":{"rendered":"

Big Conservative media celebrities have regularly chastised the left for failing to acknowledge the existence of evil in our world.\u00a0 Yet while the left is indeed a moral swampland, Big Conservatives should remove the boulder from their own collective eye first.<\/p>\n

Violence, whether it is politically-motivated against those who leftist thugs deem insufficiently progressive, or whether it is a garden-variety street attack, is a subject about which Big Conservatives, if they speak about it at all, do <\/em>little to nothing.<\/p>\n

For example, recently, the District of Columbia Police Department released some particularly graphic video<\/a> footage that subsequently went viral.\u00a0 The video showed two (apparently) white men, tourists, being brutally beaten by at least a dozen black teens, both males and females, outside of the prestigious Washington Hilton hotel.<\/p>\n

With some notable exceptions, Big Conservatives scarcely noted this event.<\/p>\n

Nor did they spend much time drawing the public\u2019s attention to the plight of Andy Ngo<\/a>, a gay Asian reporter who was pummeled by \u201cAntifa\u201d punks for doing nothing more than covering one of their demonstrations. Evidently, his Antifa assailants determined that Nygo was a \u201cconservative.\u201d<\/p>\n

And even when Big Conservatives do talk about violent attacks against innocents, they only talk; <\/em>never do they use any of their immense resources in influence, connections, and wealth to mobilize the like-minded and encourage the law-abiding to fight this evil by defending themselves. <\/em><\/p>\n

In glaring contrast to the virtual reality, the Unreality, constructed and inhabited by our academic and media elites, retired Marine Lieutenant-Colonel Al Ridenhour<\/a> forces his martial arts students to come to terms with the real world, <\/em>in all of its ugliness.<\/p>\n

Colonel Al, who participated in numerous combat operations and multiple tours in such hellholes as Iraq and Afghanistan, and who taught his Marines both armed and unarmed combatives, is also a Senior-Master instructor of the martial art known as Guided Chaos (GC).<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

GC is a unique martial art that was founded nearly 40 years ago by John Perkins<\/a>, a veteran of the Yonkers Police Department in New York. \u00a0Grand Master Perkins, beginning from the time that he was a small child when he began learning from his father and uncles the American Indian fighting arts, spent his life traveling the world and studying various combative systems.\u00a0 By the early 1970s, he was engaging in illegal pit fighting in places like Newark, New Jersey.\u00a0 Unlike contemporary Mixed Martial Arts (MMA), with its various rules and regulations, the only rule, so to speak, by which Perkins and his opponents were bound is that which constrained them from killing one another.<\/p>\n

In addition to training elite police and military forces, Perkins has also trained security professionals, some of whom have gone on to serve as bodyguards for such world-renown figures as Pope John Paul II.\u00a0 Perkins himself supplied protection for Malcolm Forbes, Werner Erhardt, and Moshe Dayan, the former Prime Defense Minister of Israel.<\/p>\n

But it was during his time on the streets of Yonkers as a law enforcement agent that Perkins, the veteran of over 100 documented instances of brutal street violence, had ample opportunity to study the dynamics of the latter.\u00a0 Subsequently, he concluded that much of what is taught in most traditional martial arts schools is of questionable practical value given the chaotic and ever-changing dynamics of a raw predatory attack, an attack which, like the recent attack at the Washington Hilton alluded to above, invariably comes \u201cout of nowhere\u201d but is \u201ceverywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n

Consequently, Perkins devised a revolutionary new system\u2014the product of a lifetime\u2019s worth of experience\u2014that would enable people to defend themselves by focusing upon, not a variety of sophisticated (but impractical) techniques, but the mastery of the motion in their own bodies.<\/p>\n

Moreover, mastery of one\u2019s body\u2014irrespectively of the age or even condition of this body<\/em>\u2014could be had, Grandmaster Perkins discovered, by way of familiarity with the universal principles and concepts of the human body. <\/em><\/p>\n

As Master Al repeatedly stresses in his written work as well as when he is teaching his students in person: \u201cThe human body is the human body.\u201d<\/p>\n

The tautological nature of this proposition aside, it encapsulates an insight of which far too many people, both within and beyond the world of martial arts, fail to grasp.\u00a0 And it is for this reason that Master Al, in underscoring it to his students, helps to knock out two birds with one stone by instilling within them a confidence in themselves while simultaneously lessening their fear of potential adversaries on the streets.<\/p>\n

The human body, you see, can only move so fast\u2014regardless of how big, fast, and strong a person may be.\u00a0 This being the case, in order to prevail in combat, one\u2019s objective must be that of the matador who prevails over the bull, an animal that, obviously, is exponentially bigger, stronger, and faster than any human being.<\/p>\n

The matador defeats the bull, you see, not by moving more quickly than the latter, but by moving sooner. <\/em><\/p>\n

Similarly, Master Al, in educating his students into Guided Chaos, teaches them how to become unavailable <\/em>to an assailant, or assailants, <\/em>while at once becoming unavoidable <\/em>to them.\u00a0 Like the matador, a person must aim to move from where the enemy strikes before those strikes hit their target.\u00a0 At the same time, a would-be victim must leave the enemy no<\/em> escape<\/em> from the Hellfire that the Colonel instructs his students to rain down upon their attackers.<\/p>\n

If his students have any ambiguity regarding his objectives, Master Al disabuses them of it from the outset: \u201cI\u2019m teaching you,\u201d he states bluntly, \u201chow to kill the bad guys.\u201d<\/p>\n

There are incalculable other benefits to be had from the study of the martial arts, including the martial art of Guided Chaos, but in the last analysis, the essential purpose of any and all of them is, or should be, well, martial <\/em>prowess, the ability and the will <\/em>to crush into oblivion those who would make themselves the adversaries of the entire human race by besieging the innocent. Regrettably, Guided Chaos is rare within the contemporary world of the martial arts inasmuch as it fulfills this purpose.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m teaching you how to kill the bad guys.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

As Master Al said to me when, during one of our earlier training sessions, he observed my knee injury: \u201cOk. You\u2019ve got a knee issue.\u00a0 All this means is that if you\u2019re ever attacked by multiple people, all of them have got to die.\u201d <\/em>He then added: \u201cThis isn\u2019t a bad problem to have.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was then that I was truly convinced that I was studying the right art, and under the right instructor.<\/p>\n

The reader shouldn\u2019t be confused as to what Master Al is and is not teaching:<\/p>\n

Firstly, it goes without saying that the Colonel expects that his students will fight if and only if they must.\u00a0 <\/em>Trouble-making, as well as brawling for the sake of brawling (i.e. when it is possible to diffuse a conflict), are the stuff of punks, of \u201ctough guys,\u201d and is unequivocally renounced by the practitioners of Guided Chaos.\u00a0 Master Al and the instructors of GC aim to make warriors\u2014<\/em>not \u201ctough guys.\u201d Moreover, warriors exist for the sake of destroying those \u201ctough guys\u201d who would threaten them or innocents.<\/p>\n

Secondly, precisely because GC is oriented toward the cultivation of the Warrior mindset, it is designed to equip students\u2014to repeat, students of various ages and body types\u2014with the resources they need to protect themselves if and when they are preyed upon by predators.\u00a0 GC, in other words, is not sport.\u00a0 It is meant to empower students to save their lives and the lives of other would-be victims by, if need be, sending the enemy to the afterlife, as Master Al often colorfully (and encouragingly) puts it.<\/p>\n

Thirdly, key to the Warrior Mind State (of which Master Al says much more in his impending book, about which I\u2019ll write more at a future time), is what the Colonel calls \u201cruthless intent<\/em>.\u201d\u00a0 The latter is the will, \u201cthe moral will\u201d and \u201cperfect clarity,\u201d as he describes it, to smash attackers into oblivion.\u00a0 This is something that each person must ultimately marshal for himself.\u00a0 In theory, it\u2019s something that each person can <\/em>unearth for himself.\u00a0 Master Al helps his students tap into their own angers and fears by, not just teaching them how to move and strike within their own bodies, but as well by using the confidence-building language that he uses when, for example, he informs them that he\u2019s empowering them to kill bad guys, or when he issues his Categorical Imperative:<\/p>\n

Become lions<\/em>!\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

Yes, Master Al, this retired Lieutenant-Colonel from the United States Marine Corps, is not exactly enamored by talk of Wolves and Sheepdogs. These conventional metaphors, he insists, reinforce the fears constitutive of a \u201cstatist\u201d mindset insofar as they exacerbate the impulse of the average person to turn to \u201cexperts\u201d\u2014the police, the military, etc.\u2014for protection.\u00a0 After all, it is soldiers and law enforcement officers alone who, according to this paradigm, are the Sheepdogs.\u00a0 All other law-abiding civilians are the Sheep, and the evil-doers, \u201cthe bad guys,\u201d are the Wolves.<\/p>\n

Master Al demands of his students that they aspire to become lions, for neither the Wolf nor the Sheepdog will stand a chance against the Lion.<\/p>\n

Viciousness, ruthless intent\u2014this is the stuff of the Lion.<\/p>\n

Master Al Ridenhour is doing the Lord\u2019s work by helping average, law-abiding folks discover their inner warrior by fulfilling their obligation<\/em> to protect themselves and their loved ones while asserting their right, <\/em>a right that Master Al unabashedly identifies as an endowment by God, to do so.<\/p>\n

In contrast to Big Conservative media, the masters and instructors of Guided Chaos don\u2019t just pay lip service to evil.\u00a0 They recognize the reality of evil and have committed themselves to combatting it by helping the decent to do the same. \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Big Conservative media celebrities have regularly chastised the left for failing to acknowledge the existence of evil in our world.\u00a0 Yet while the left is indeed a moral swampland, Big Conservatives should remove the boulder from their own collective eye first. 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