{"id":2328,"date":"2021-04-03T11:59:40","date_gmt":"2021-04-03T15:59:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/?p=2328"},"modified":"2021-04-03T11:59:40","modified_gmt":"2021-04-03T15:59:40","slug":"victory-not-survival-warrior-flow-combatives-becoming-good-and-dangerous","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2021\/04\/victory-not-survival-warrior-flow-combatives-becoming-good-and-dangerous.html","title":{"rendered":"VICTORY not SURVIVAL: Warrior Flow Combatives, Becoming GOOD and DANGEROUS"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the contemporary United States (and the Western world generally), misconceptions concerning manliness abound.\u00a0 These misconceptions derive from a variety of sources that I identified in a previous article.\u00a0 There the focus was specifically upon the confusion that prevails over the nature of a violent engagement of the type that occurs in a true self-defense situation.\u00a0 Yet this is not unrelated to the broader topic of manliness.<\/p>\n

Over the last few years, an industry of YouTube podcasts hosted by former mobsters and former criminals of every conceivable sort has emerged to advance the campaign to glorify scumbags that Hollywood launched decades ago.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s right: Glorify<\/em>.\u00a0 Those who continue to depict the thug\u2019s life as anything other than the Godless, demonic, cowardly, and unmanly mode of existence that it is romanticize it.<\/p>\n

Whether incorrigibly hypocritical Hollywood filmmakers who throw their support behind Democrat politicians who are eager to deprive law-abiding American citizens of their Second Amendment rights while glamorizing violent, gun-toting thugs on the big screen or podcasters who were one-time members of La Costra Nostra or tatted up ex-convicts who purport to have gone straight\u2014these characters are all peddlers of crime porn who regal their audiences with thrilling tales of the Outlaw\u2019s exploits in exchange for money.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

In the case of the criminals, or ex-criminals, it also gives them tireless opportunities to depict themselves as not just \u201ctough guys,\u201d but guys who are tougher than the vast majority of other human beings, and particularly those ever-growing numbers of average Joes who subscribe to their channels.<\/p>\n

Of course, every merchant selling their wares in this genre swear that they do not mean to glorify anything, that, in fact, they are supplying a public service announcement insofar as they are trying to deter younger people from following in the footsteps of those who have lived the Thug Life.\u00a0 Maybe there\u2019s some truth to this, for some.\u00a0 Yet there can also be no denying that the other considerations noted also figure prominently as motives.<\/p>\n

At any rate, and as I said, if these guys really <\/em>want to deter younger guys from pursuing a life of crime, then their messaging must be unambiguous.\u00a0 Thus far, from what I\u2019ve been able to gather (and, admittedly, not being in the least enamored with anything that these guys have to say, I am not a consumer of their product), their messaging is mixed, at best.<\/p>\n

When they acknowledge that neither they nor anyone with whom they ever associated during their lives as criminals were men<\/em>, i.e. males who were good, strong, true; when they concede that, as male members of the human species, they never mentally and emotionally advanced beyond being juvenile delinquents, that they pursued their own self-interests by way of the path of least resistance and at the cost of breaking the hearts of their wives, children, and parents\u2014then <\/em>their messaging will be clear.<\/p>\n

So be it.\u00a0 A virtue, though, of this genre of \u201ctrue crime\u201d is that it supplies those who are interested with constant reminders that dangerous two-legged creatures live among us.\u00a0 And it is this knowledge, and this knowledge alone, that motivates some men and women to train in self-protection.<\/p>\n

Yet it isn\u2019t just their victims, but the dangerous criminals, and alleged former criminals, who style themselves \u201ctough guys\u201d because of their penchant for cruelty and their history of preying upon the weak, the outnumbered, and the intimidated who are also imperiled.\u00a0 They\u2019ve drank their own bathwater, swallowed their own shit, and forgotten, if they ever knew, a life-or-death lesson.\u00a0 As USMC Lieutenant-Colonel Al Ridenhour, a combat veteran of four tours of duty and 100 combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and the founder of Warrior Flow Combatives<\/a>, puts it: \u201cThere\u2019s a place to which you can\u2019t go\u201d with either God or a certain kind of man, namely, the kind of person who is a student of his system.<\/p>\n

Those who prey upon innocents are wicked.\u00a0 And while the compromised, lukewarm Church of present times would have us forget it, the truth is that God despises the wicked. \u00a0This is established throughout the Bible.\u00a0 Take Psalm 5:4-6, for example:<\/p>\n

\u201c[God is] not a God who delights in wickedness; evil may not dwell in you.\u00a0 The boastful shall not stand before your eyes; you hate all evildoers.\u00a0 You destroy those who speak lies; the LORD abhors the bloodthirsty and deceitful man.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s Psalm 11:5:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe wicked, those who love violence, he [God] hates with a passion.\u201d<\/p>\n

We could go on.\u00a0 The point: God detests the evil and promises, from the book of Genesis through to that of Revelation, that He will insure that the evil receive their just desserts\u2014death.<\/p>\n

The bad guys\u2014as well as far too many others who aren\u2019t bad guys, including those who train in martial arts\u2014forget, in other words, that the bad guys are mere mortals. \u00a0Because they are mortal, they can be injured.\u00a0 They can be crippled, tortured, raped, and terrorized.<\/p>\n

They can be killed.<\/p>\n

In short, all of the unimaginably brutal things that they can and, in some instances, have done to others can be done to them\u2014and not, necessarily, just by other career criminal vermin.<\/p>\n

This last idea needs to be underscored, for most people, especially bad guys, apparently forget that one needn\u2019t be a criminal\u2014one can be thoroughly contemptuous toward criminals\u2014to kill a person with only slightly more effort than is required to extend one\u2019s hand and touch that person.<\/p>\n

If a person can bleed from a paper cut, then he can bleed to death<\/em> courtesy of another mortal.<\/p>\n

As a human being, the most dangerous, violent low-life predator on the planet is, essentially (even if relatively speaking), as anatomically and physiologically restricted as is the most frail and timid of elderly women.\u00a0 This brute fact means that the elderly woman could drop his miserable ass under the correct circumstances\u2014particularly if she trains<\/em>, as the predator, like all criminal predators, has trained all of his life, to become a killer when she needs to become one.<\/p>\n

The criminals are mortals, like you and I.\u00a0 They are bound by the same laws of physics and human physiology that bind the rest of us.\u00a0 What fundamentally distinguishes the criminal predator from otherwise decent people is that the latter have scruples that the former lacks.\u00a0 Predators have a ruthlessness that gives them an edge over those upon whom they would prey.<\/p>\n

The good news, however, is that this ruthlessness is, overwhelmingly, learned. It wasn\u2019t learned through any kind of formal training, true, but, by virtue of a lifetime\u2019s worth of cultivating vicious habits, it was learned all of the same.\u00a0 What this in turn means is that if criminals can learn how to be ruthless, so too can decent folks.\u00a0 Only in the case of the decent who seek out competent instructors to teach them how to be ruthless, their ruthlessness will not be a vice but, rather, a virtue\u2014a martial <\/em>virtue.<\/p>\n

It will be a character excellence, the excellence of a warrior<\/em>, for unlike scumbags who are merciless toward unsuspecting, innocent people who they regard as nothing more or less than a resource, the decent who train to become ruthless train to become merciless only toward the wicked, toward those who imminently threaten them, their loved ones, or other innocents in their presence.<\/p>\n

Warrior Flow Combatives is unique among combat systems inasmuch as it seeks to make good people by making them into dangerous people\u2014dangerous for criminals who may have otherwise preyed upon them. \u00a0It aspires to do this<\/em> by instilling in students \u201cRuthless Intention,\u201d a mindset necessary to, as Mushashi, a 17th<\/sup> century Japanese Samurai warrior memorably stated, \u201cattack with a feeling of constantly crushing the enemy, from first to last.\u201d<\/p>\n

God has supplied all of us with everything we need to protect ourselves against the designs of the evil.\u00a0 Musashi made this point as well:<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is nothing outside of yourself that can ever enable you to get better, stronger, richer, quicker, or smarter.\u00a0 Everything is within.\u00a0 Everything exists. Seek nothing outside of yourself.\u201d<\/p>\n

The training modality of Warrior Flow is predicated upon this truth. \u00a0Jordan Peterson shared a brilliant insight during an exchange with former Navy SEAL Jocko Willink when he said that a \u201cgood<\/em> man must be a dangerous<\/em> man\u201d (emphases added).<\/p>\n

To be good, a person must become dangerous, for the world is full of those who are dangerous but evil.<\/p>\n

Learn to become good and dangerous by training in Warrior Flow Combatives.<\/p>\n

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

In the contemporary United States (and the Western world generally), misconceptions concerning manliness abound.\u00a0 These misconceptions derive from a variety of sources that I identified in a previous article.\u00a0 There the focus was specifically upon the confusion that prevails over the nature of a violent engagement of the type that occurs in a true self-defense…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2328","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nVICTORY not SURVIVAL: Warrior Flow Combatives, Becoming GOOD and DANGEROUS<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"noindex, nofollow\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" 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