Dulce bellum inexpertis. (War is sweet to those who have never experienced it.)
—Pindar
You don’t have to look very hard on YouTube to find videos of long-suffering kids reaching their breaking point with bullies and finally fighting back. The scenes vary in geography, gender, and the size and age difference of the kids involved, but each scene generally goes down the same way.
The video picks up mid-conflict. The bully is in full aggressor mode: stalking after the victim, cutting them off, pushing them, taunting them, and getting in their envelope of personal space, sometimes looming over them like a beast. The bullying victim is folded over, trying to make themselves smaller. Or they’re turned to the side, as if subconsciously hoping the teasing will just go away. Sometimes they’re backed against a wall, as if they are hoping to melt into it.
Then, suddenly, there is a shift. The victim stops, stiffens, and bows up. There is going to be a fight. The bully is almost always caught off-guard when this happens. Bullies typically pick their victims based on the likelihood that they won’t fight back. The fight might happen right then and there, it might have to wait until after school. It doesn’t really matter, though, because once the bully’s victim has had enough and finally decides to defend himself, the decision ripples through the playground or the schoolyard like a shockwave. The other kids start getting super excited. If the fight is going down after school, it’s all anyone can talk about. They can’t wait. If it happens right there in the moment, the kids immediately encircle the pair chanting, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” In the lead-up to the actual physical confrontation, the bully will often start talking trash in an attempt to humiliate or intimidate and regain the upper hand in his relationship to the victim. If the victim responds, it’s to show that the bully’s taunts aren’t going to work this time. They’re going to have it out once and for all.
Fights likes these are instances of what I call “social aggression.” They are quasi-violent scenarios that stem from conflict and jockeying within the social hierarchy. I call them quasi-violent not because I don’t take them seriously, but rather because they don’t always involve violence as we understand it—sometimes it’s just talking or threatening—and they’re less about physically destroying the other person than they are about asserting social dominance, gaining some advantage, or elevating social status. That’s why people instinctively want to gather around and watch these types of conflicts, because they want to see what happens.
Kids get so excited about these playground fights because there is valuable social information to be gleaned from them. Both fighters’ positions in the school’s social hierarchy are in flux. The bully occupies a position of power, and when his target finally fights back, that means his position is being challenged. When it’s all over, will there be a change in social standing? Will the bully get his comeuppance and be reduced to a pariah and a laughingstock? Will his victim be elevated to the position of nerd hero or defender of the meek and helpless? Or will the bully get the upper hand and the social status remain the same? This kind of aggression isn’t exactly tolerated—it’s the kind teachers usually break up and punish, after all—but it doesn’t destroy the social order in the school, either. Afterward, the kids will be talking about it excitedly in the lunchroom for the rest of the week.
And then there is the other way these playground fights and bully takedowns can go. These are the kinds of incidents that do not show up on YouTube. The victim has had enough, but he has only stiffened and bowed up in his mind. He—and it’s almost always a he—has no interest in fighting back at the center of a ring of classmates. Instead, he opens his backpack, pulls out a revolver, and shoots his bully in the head at point blank range. Do you want to guess what happens next? There is no excited chanting for a fight. No one is hoisting the bully’s victim on their shoulders and marching him triumphantly around the schoolyard. There is only complete and total pandemonium. Everybody runs and no one looks back. There is no social information to be gathered here.
That is the rough outline of any number of the school and workplace shootings that have dominated our news over the past fifteen years, and become (along with ISIS-style terrorism) the scariest, most urgent form of violence we face today. I call violence of this nature “asocial.” Asocial violence is violence that has nothing to do with communication or reshuffling the pecking order. Asocial violence is nothing like that: it doesn’t try to change the order, it tries to wreck the order. It’s the kind of violent interaction we instinctively run from—the kind in which there is only mayhem, death, misery, and horror. (The knockout game is asocial violence.) At the end of the day, all violence has the potential to be a matter of life or death. The difference with asocial violence is that death and destruction are not its by-products; they are its purpose.
It is essential we understand this distinction between social aggression and asocial violence right now. Social aggression is about competition; asocial violence is about destruction. Competition has rules; destruction has none. Social aggression is about communication—implicitly with status indicators but explicitly with lots of taunting and posturing. There is no talking with asocial violence. Open your mouth and you are likely to eat a lightning-fast punch or a jacketed bullet travelling at 2,500 feet per second.
If there is one reliable way to distinguish between the two kinds of violent encounter, it is the presence or absence of communication. If a man comes upon you from behind as you’re walking home from dinner and he puts a gun to your head and says, “Give me your wallet or I’ll blow your brains out,” that is fundamentally an act of social aggression. It may feel asocial, because you feel powerless when you’re taken by surprise, but how you feel has nothing to do with whether a situation is social or asocial. What matters is the intent and the action of the attacker. In this scenario, his primary motive is not to destroy, it’s to dominate. He’s using the threat of violence to make it easier to get what he wants. If the situation were asocial, if what he wanted to do was destroy you, you would not hear any words. You probably wouldn’t even hear the hammer cock before the trigger got pulled and the bullet left the chamber.
Social aggression doesn’t wear off after adolescence; fast-forward twelve years to a bar fight between rival fraternity members and the outline is the same. It’s still two guys exhibiting their inner-male aggression, thrashing, ranting, raving. It’s the silverback gorilla banging his chest. It’s the butting of rams’ heads. It’s the clashing of male grizzly bears. These are all bids for a kind of social status, and they’re all meant to be witnessed.
The schoolyard brawl and the bar fight aren’t usually life-or-death situations. Rather, they’re a form of primitive communication. It’s a social display that communicates, “I’m really agitated. I’m mad. I want to run this other guy off my territory.” And the other guy is responding, “I’m not willing to be run off my territory. I’m going to stand my ground.” The intent is not to inflict grievous bodily harm. It’s only to exert social dominance.
In these situations of quasi-violence, people rarely punch their opponent’s throat or kick them in the testicles or gouge out their eyes. They rarely try to inflict permanent damage. If you were to look at such a confrontation simply from the perspective of causing bodily harm, you’d call it wildly inefficient. I have studied video of countless epic bar brawls that have gone on for ten or fifteen minutes that left the combatants bloody and bruised, but also conscious, uninjured, and able to walk away. I’ve also seen guys beat each other senseless and then hang out afterward—like it was something they just needed to get out of their systems.
Many of us know how to act like jerks and add fuel to the fire, how to turn an argument into a shouting match that turns into a fistfight. It can be scary. It can be wrong. It can be extremely intimidating. But the aggressor is not deliberately trying to maim, cripple, or kill. He’s not trying to break down the social order, to sow terror and mistrust. The goal is to dominate, not to destroy. This is social aggression.
Asocial violence, on the other hand, is brutally streamlined. It’s quiet. It happens suddenly and unmistakably. It’s one person beating another person with a tire iron until he stops moving. It’s stabbing somebody thirty-seven times. It’s pulling a gun and firing round after round until he goes down, and then stepping close to make sure he has two to the brain, just to be sure. If you’re a sane, socialized person, thoughts like those can make you physically ill. That’s because you recognize them for what they are: the breakdown of everything we, as humans, hold sacred. Indeed, they are often a breakdown of the perpetrator of the violence themselves. They are no longer in control, they are no longer thinking rationally, they are no longer thinking at all. These acts represent the destruction of the social fabric. They’re devoid of honor. They’re acts without rules, where anything goes.
So why am I harping on the difference? Because our responses to social aggression and asocial violence ought to be fundamentally different.
Social aggression is avoidable—and you should avoid it. You can choose not to participate. You can employ social skills to remove yourself from the situation, or to de-escalate it. It comes with big, flashing warning signs—loud, dramatic, and recognizable social posturing. You can see it coming a mile away. These sorts of problems can usually be handled with social tools that we all know how to use. We’ve all talked our way out of a bad situation. We all know how to calm another person down. We all know how to back down ourselves. If we didn’t, none of us would have made it this far in life. Similarly, threats of violence with a clear purpose—like a robbery—can be terrifying. But they remain social interactions, with generally clear demands and big, flashing warning signs of their own; the lines of communication remain open. When he says, “Give me your wallet or I’ll blow your brains out,” give him your wallet and live to see another day.
You can rarely, if ever, talk yourself out of asocial violence. You have no idea whether the movie theater you chose is the one where a shooter with a full arsenal will show up looking like The Joker and acting like Bane.* You have no idea if your child’s school is the one where a deranged mind will decide to make his mark. Asocial violence doesn’t care about your social skills. Negotiating with a serial killer is like arguing with a bullet. If it’s coming your way, words won’t deflect it. If somebody has decided to stab you to death, capitulation doesn’t appease them. It only makes their work easier. When it comes to asocial violence, if you have not been able to foresee and escape it, you must render your attacker one of three ways to survive: incapacitated, unconscious, or dead. Understanding and accepting that reality, then training to deal with these unlikely scenarios, will give you the confidence you need to quickly and calmly identify the difference between social aggression and asocial violence, while setting your mind at ease that you’ll be able to handle whichever comes your way—de-escalating where it’s possible to de-escalate, and fighting to save your life where it is not.
Verbal communication aside, distinguishing between social aggression and asocial violence in the moment is all about looking at the fighting posture of the aggressor. Once they have crossed the physical plane, as I call it, you can tell how serious someone is about inflicting harm by where he places himself to get the job done and how he uses his body to do it.
In social aggression scenarios, angry fighters will step up within striking distance of their opponent but not so close—maybe a half-step away—that they can’t dodge a wild punch. Stepping up to your opponent and reaching out is the hallmark of social aggression: cuffing, shoving, and punching to show displeasure. It shows a lack of desire to cripple and kill, it signals a healthy fear of the other man, and even a bit of respect for his personal space—it is, after all, giving him plenty of room to work. It says, “I’m pissed off, but there are still rules here.” As a result, injury is relatively unlikely in these kinds of confrontations, outside of a freak traumatic brain injury—which is the most common fight-ending injury we see in both street fights and competitive matches. (Usually they’re stopped well before that point by friends, teachers, referees, etc.)
Fights in the stands at a sporting event are a good example of this kind of confrontation: lots of shoving, flailing punches, glancing blows that stun but don’t injure. Even more illustrative are schoolyard fights between teenage girls. There is lots of pushing to maintain distance, windmill punching, and hair-pulling. Once both fighters have a firm grip on the other’s hair, the fight often deadlocks with each girl bent over at the waist ninety degrees, or sprawled flat on the ground, their arms fully locked out an impossible distance away from each other so that neither can land a punch. They look like deer with their antlers interlocked (which itself is a social competition display, coincidentally).
Some fighters, though, go from angry to aggressive and will gladly go toe-to-toe with you. Their trash talk gets inside your head as their bodies get inside your personal space, underneath your center of gravity. This is an escalation of posture that brings intimidation into play, but also increased effectiveness: the proximity will allow for greater follow-through, dramatically increasing the chance of injury and knockdown. These guys will push each other and go head-hunting, looking to punch each other in the face to shut off communication. They get aggressive because they literally want to shut you up, which is a hallmark of drunken bar fights and street fights. They are still in the realm of social aggression.
Then there are killers. The killer does not intimidate or talk trash. The killer doesn’t talk, period. Nor does he step up to his opponent or inside their personal space. He steps through his opponent. He doesn’t punch, he penetrates. He sends his entire body through his belt buckle, across the physical plane, and through the other man until he stands where the other man once stood. This maximizes injury and overrun, almost guaranteeing that his blows will knock his enemy down. And when the enemy is down, he doesn’t stop. He wants to erase and replace him. He goes to the ground with him, and doesn’t stop until his enemy is utterly disabled. This is not the kind of fight you stick around to watch. There is no rooting interest here, no social information to be gleaned.
That is the knockout game at its worst. That is the school or workplace shooting. That is Jorge Orozco and Officer Jeter. When Orozco turned on the 5'5" Jeter, he didn’t push her away or swing wildly to create some distance so he could run. He didn’t get up in the smaller woman’s face to intimidate her. He instantly closed the distance and put himself right through her, driving her into the ground with nine closed-fist blows to the face in nine seconds that nearly killed her.
That is asocial violence.
Though these kinds of conflict—social aggression and asocial violence—look and sound quite different from each other, our instinct is to apply the same set of rules to both, because our socialized minds don’t want to accept the possibility that the rare and unthinkable has found us, by no fault of our own. If we don’t have rules governing how we deal with the rare and unthinkable, then the rare and unthinkable can’t happen, right? Alternatively, we try to shove this unseemly business out of our minds by dismissing the distinction altogether: Why are we talking about this? Violence is violence; it’s all bad. We get ourselves into deep trouble when we take either one of these approaches, because you can’t play by rules that your attacker refuses to recognize even exist.
Rules, as a social construct, only work in a conflict when both sides honor them. Major League Baseball has a broad set of rules that generalize across the American and National Leagues. But when teams from each league play against each other during interleague play or in the World Series, they have to agree on which league’s rules govern or else the whole thing collapses. The idea that rules of any kind go away the second the other guy ignores them is generally unsettling and downright terrifying in the case of violence. But when you think about asocial violence through that prism, you start to realize that it’s a horrible mistake to use the same social contract that governs social aggression, to understand and navigate true asocial violence. During true violence, our usual social categories—good guy/bad guy, right/wrong, attacker/defender—cease to apply. These dichotomies are useful, but only before and after a violent confrontation has occurred. During the actual fight, they are utterly irrelevant, if not misleading and dangerous.
For instance, before the action, the idea of “self-defense” is defined morally. The moral right to defend oneself from an attack is what puts violently attempting a rape and violently fighting off a rapist on opposing sides of the moral spectrum. No one would put Sara in the “bad guy” category for striking back at her rapist and accidentally killing him in the process.
After the action, “self-defense” becomes a legal question: it’s civil society deciding whether to give you an official pass for using violence to protect yourself or save your life. No jury would rule that what Sara did was “illegal.”
But during the action, those questions go out the window. It is an issue of practicality in the most literal sense. In the midst of a violent encounter, to think merely of “defending” yourself—rather than incapacitating your opponent—is essentially to curl up in a ball and hope for the best. Waiting for your attacker to give up—or worse, expecting him to follow the rules—is, putting it bluntly, to risk participating in your own murder. Your only reliable course of action to save your life is to do what your attacker is trying to do to you, but do it more effectively and efficiently, and to do it first. To use the very same tool of violence.
And yet, as sane, socialized beings, we continue to drag our rules into these places where they don’t belong. We want to somehow keep everything fair, on a level playing field. This is why most confrontations involving real violence go terribly wrong for the good guy. We’re constrained by a litany of social rules while the asocial predator is bound only by the laws of physics. All he cares about is how best and most quickly he can do you grievous bodily harm and end the situation. He’ll stab you when you’re not looking. He’ll kick you in the throat when you’re down. If things don’t look hot for him, he’ll capitulate to get you to let go, then pull his gun and shoot you. He’ll use your socialization against you—he’ll turn the social rules that normally protect you from harm into his most powerful weapon. But all his weapons are tools that you can use in turn.
When you’re staring down the barrel of a gun (literally and figuratively) with a violent asocial predator on the other end of it, you must remember that this is not a movie or a video game or a hero fantasy. This is not high noon at the O.K. Corral. There is no Good, Bad, and Ugly—there is just ugly.
In 2006, a young British lawyer named Thomas Pryce exited the tube station by his home. It was early January, about eleven-thirty at night. It was cold. Tom had just left a work function in London and he was hustling back to the flat he shared with his fiancée on a quiet street in an up-and-coming suburb of London.
On this night, he was followed by two young men in hooded sweatshirts who had robbed someone else earlier in the evening and saw Tom as another opportunity. They circled around in front of him and drew their knives, demanding his valuables. He quickly complied, handing over everything. If the incident had ended there, we might say that Tom used his social skills to escape an instance of social aggression. He saw assailants who, however intimidating and dangerous, were still offering a recognizable, if coercive, exchange—his possessions for his life, straight up—and he accepted the exchange. He kept quiet, offered no resistance, and gave up his property exactly how the authorities tell you to do it in a robbery situation like that.
Thomas was shaken up, but he kept walking home. Then the young men came back. This time, their knives were already drawn, their heads were down, and they weren’t saying anything. Thomas broke into a sprint, but they quickly overtook him and began stabbing him repeatedly, in the chest, the hip, the face, the hands, and the lower torso. He yelled frantically, “Why, why, why? You’ve got everything!” But they didn’t have everything. They didn’t have the one thing they needed once they realized he had seen their faces. They didn’t have his silence.
“He could identify us,” they said to themselves, according to the Metropolitan police who interrogated the men upon their capture, “we need to kill him.” That quick realization was all it took for those two young men to go from opportunistic robbers to cold-blooded murderers. Social aggression to asocial violence in the blink of an eye.
The lesson I take from Tom’s murder is how essential it is to understand the difference between the two types of physical confrontation. You need to be able to identify them in the moment, and you need to recognize that one can turn into the other very quickly when circumstances change. The kind of encounter that Tom endured initially—no matter how frightening it must have been—still presumed a kind of communication. He was in the kind of conflict that we can escape with our social skills: after all, giving up your belongings in exchange for your life is a kind of negotiation, even if it happens under extreme duress. If you can comply with demands, it means there’s still communication happening, which means there’s still a chance of getting out of there in one piece.
Unfortunately, the situation turned asocial very quickly, for reasons Tom could not have foreseen. The rules that he believed were governing his initial encounter ceased to apply when the two men returned. His attempts to communicate, to negotiate, to make sense of what was happening, all of it fell on deaf ears and was met only with more violence. His only hope lay in recognizing, quickly, what kind of situation he was in, and acting accordingly. In a phrase: using violence. By the time he realized the shift from social aggression to asocial violence—if he ever realized it—it was too late.
To be fair to Tom, his was not an unreasonable or uncommon response. We’ve seen it many times before. In one infamous incident from 1994, the husband of figure skater Tonya Harding hired a man named Shane Stant to break the leg of Tonya’s main rival, Nancy Kerrigan, so that she would be unable to compete at the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway.
Stant made his move after an early January practice session in Detroit just as Kerrigan came off the ice, smashing her a few inches above the knee of her right leg with a telescopic police baton. Stant failed to break Kerrigan’s leg—only badly bruising it—but the footage captured immediately after the incident shows an understandably hysterical Kerrigan on the ground holding her leg, repeatedly shouting “Why, why, why?” Unlike Thomas, she wasn’t trying to reason with her attacker, but she was trying to reason with the universe. The rules by which her world operated don’t account for this kind of violence. Something important to keep in mind is that just because this happened in the context of personal rivalry and competition, doesn’t mean it wasn’t also asocial. The Harding camp was not trying to intimidate or dominate Kerrigan; it was trying to destroy her.
Stant blindsided and cold-cocked Kerrigan. There was absolutely nothing she could have done differently to protect herself. But Tom Pryce’s situation was a little different. When escape was off the table, the only thing that could have helped him was a fuller understanding of the tool of violence and greater preparedness to take immediate action. Instead of turning to flee, he needed to turn and fight. Because when an aggressor doesn’t care about your reasons or your rules, and isn’t interested in having a negotiation, no other strategy tends to work. Especially when you’re outnumbered. Tom’s only hope was to inflict injury first. But before his survival depended on that, it depended on recognizing, as soon as possible, that he was not in a situation of coercion and communication, but in a situation of life-or-death violence.*
For any semi-self-aware individual, it’s clear quickly that two hooded men following you home in the middle of the night are probably not good dudes. That’s an easy determination to make when it’s you, two strangers, and an empty street. But what about at a bar or a music festival or a state fair?
Let me spare you the suspense: the scariest guy in the room is rarely the tattooed weightlifter making snarling faces and threatening gestures. That guy, while potentially dangerous, is openly and obviously posturing to stake his position in the immediate social hierarchy. The guy you need to worry about is the one you don’t suspect. The one who doesn’t posture or talk. The one who, if he really wanted to harm you, would quietly slide the blade out of his pocket without drawing attention to himself and get it done.
In the mid-1980s, San Diego was a pretty rough place. The post-college crowd hadn’t found the city yet and we were still a couple decades away from the influx of people from other California cities getting priced out of their areas and coming down for the cheaper cost of living. Back then it was still mostly a military town and a way station between Mexico and all points north and east. It could get pretty hairy.
After getting medically rolled from the SEALs after my inner-ear injury, I had some time to figure out what my next move was going to be. I spent a fair amount of that at a notoriously tough bar called Jose Murphy’s, where my brother worked as a bouncer. This was one of those bars where all the local cops knew all the bouncers by first name, and vice versa. Members of the Hells Angels and Mongols motorcycle clubs were frequent visitors. Fights were a nightly attraction.
The lead bouncer at Jose Murphy’s around this time was a guy named Mike. Mike was 6'8", fully tattooed, and built like a dump truck. Nobody messed with Mike and, understanding his obvious size advantage and natural intimidation factor, he didn’t mess with anyone unless he absolutely had to. One weekend was especially rough. The place was totally packed. There were fights every other hour, it seemed, for two or three days straight. There was never any downtime for Mike to relax and catch his breath. He had the perfect temperament for a bouncer, but even he had his limitations.
Last call on the final night of the weekend could not come soon enough. When it finally arrived, Mike turned on the lights, cut the music, and started ushering customers out the door. People who got in under the wire for a last round were encouraged to drink up and get out. Wisely, most people complied. But there was this one guy at the end of the bar who just wouldn’t budge. He was unremarkable and skinny, hunched quietly, sipping away at his beer, ignoring the orders to leave. He hadn’t made trouble the whole night, keeping entirely to himself. That didn’t earn him any brownie points with Mike at two a.m., however. Mike wanted to get the hell out of there, go home, and wash off the last couple days.
Like any good bouncer, Mike gave the guy three chances. The first one was a heads-up to all the customers that the bar was closing. The second one was a direct warning to the guy at the end of the bar. The third one involved taking his drink and physically removing him off the barstool. When even that didn’t work, Mike’s frustration boiled over and he got aggressive. He got in the guy’s face, towering over him, collapsing every centimeter of personal space, then trying to move him off his stool, and finally dropping him to the ground. It was a classic instance of social aggression. Mike wasn’t trying to inflict injury—he was asserting his position as the bouncer and showing his dominance over this patch of real estate. Unfortunately, the other guy didn’t read it that way.
What Mike hadn’t noticed while he loomed over the uncooperative patron was the blade he’d quietly slipped out of his boot. He wasn’t on the ground for more than two seconds, but in that time he managed to slit Mike’s left Achilles tendon and, on the way up to his feet, slash his femoral artery. He immediately slid out the back door, and before anyone knew what was happening, Mike was in a heap on the ground in the middle of a quickly expanding pool of blood.
Mike was having a bad day, he was exhausted at the end of a long shift, he got sloppy, and he let this guy, who wasn’t the last one to leave and wasn’t overtly being a jerk, get under his skin. Mike also had the great misfortune of getting overconfident with his size and his social position. He misread the man across from him, thinking by size disparity alone that he couldn’t possibly pose a threat. But the man turned out to be a convicted felon and career criminal who came from a world where the kind of imminent threat that Mike was posing was almost always a lethal, asocial one and should be responded to swiftly and in kind.*
The good news is that true criminal sociopaths like this are rare, just as asocial violence is rare compared to social aggression. The bad news is there’s no way to identify them, just as there is no way to read their minds or guess their intent.
I tried to teach my son Conner that lesson the summer before he went off to college. I arranged through some law enforcement buddies to take him on a tour of the Clark County Detention Center (CCDC) in Las Vegas. The CCDC is a medium-security facility in downtown Las Vegas that can house up to one thousand inmates—many of them violent offenders. As the guards got everything set for our tour, Conner and I sat in the processing area and watched as the staff brought in new inmates just starting their sentences, and released others who’d just finished theirs.
Our first stop was the cafeteria, where inmates were fed three times a day, hundreds at a time. Like a typical young kid who was nervous and unsure, Conner approached the entrance to the cafeteria with his hands in his sweatshirt pockets. The guard spotted it right away.
“Hey! Get your hands out of your pockets.”
It startled Conner for a second, so the guard explained.
“Those guys in there are on constant lookout for threats. Danger can come from anywhere and anyone at any time. They’ve never seen you before, they have no idea who you are. And you come in there with your hands in your pockets? That’s a double red flag.”
Sure enough, we walk into the cafeteria and it’s like a record scratch. Everyone stops what they’re doing and immediately sizes us both up: Threat or not a threat? It was probably the first time Conner was conscious of another human being looking at him and figuring out if he might have to kill him at some point.
The rest of the tour was uneventful but enlightening. When we walked out the front door of the CCDC, Conner reoriented himself and made for the car. I stopped him and told him to come back over by me and look two blocks down the street.
“What do you see down there?” I asked him.
“That’s Fremont Street.”
“What’s in there?”
“Shops.”
“What else?”
“Tourists.”
“How many tourists do you think are down there right now?”
“I don’t know, a thousand maybe?”
“Remember all those guys we watched walk out of this prison when we were waiting to start the tour?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You think any of them maybe went down there?”
“Maybe, yeah.”
“Okay, go find them.”
“Go in there and see if you can find them.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Exactly.”
Some of those men who sized up Conner in the CCDC were garden-variety thieves and drug dealers. Perhaps a handful were violent sociopaths. But there was no telling them apart on sight in the cafeteria, just as there was no telling any of those criminals apart on sight from the ordinary people on Fremont Street. That was my lesson for Conner: you can’t tell just by sight who’s a good guy and who’s a bad guy. Each one of the men who walked out of CCDC that day was, the day before, one of the guys in the cafeteria who stopped cold to size us up as potential threats. And if my experience watching Mike nearly bleed out twenty-five years earlier at the hands of a man half his size was any indication, there was no telling which one of those newly free men was the scariest, either.
But remember: all of what I’ve been explaining goes both ways. Just as there’s no way to de-escalate a situation of true, asocial violence, there’s no reason to escalate a situation of social aggression. We learn the difference between the two not only to prepare ourselves to fight for our lives when we absolutely have to, but also to prepare ourselves to wisely back down when there’s no need for a fight.