CHAPTER THREE

MINDSET MATTERS MOST

Engage your mind before you engage your weapon… the most important six inches on the battlefield are between your ears.

—United States Secretary of Defense, General James N. Mattis (USMC, Ret.)

Look at this image. Imagine this is you. Imagine that the unthinkable has happened and random asocial violence has found you. What would you do? Really think about it. What’s your first move?

While you’re thinking, let me tell you what I would do.

My first move would be to continue choking my attacker. As his focus moves to getting my hands off him, it will expose his midsection and I will drive my knee into his groin. Bent over now, with his head leaning forward, his center of gravity will be out past his knees, which will allow me to grab his head and slam it down into the ground. And then reach down and slam it again. If he’s not completely incapacitated at this point and still poses a threat, I will step over him and drop my knee on his throat.

You were expecting me to think of myself as the figure on the right, weren’t you? If you’re anything like the overwhelming majority of people who attend my seminars, you answer that way because seeing ourselves any other way is unthinkable. Even now, three chapters into this book, the mental image I just sketched for you has you pressed back against your seat as you subconsciously try to distance yourself from the brutality. I want you to be honest with yourself. Where did you see yourself? The one being choked, or the one doing the choking? That self-reflection is important.

In February, 2015, I gave a talk called “The Paradox of Violence” at a TEDx event in Grand Forks, North Dakota. I joined a remarkable group of authors, educators, entrepreneurs, and experts from a variety of fields who’d trekked up to the frozen tundra of North Dakota in the middle of winter to give their own talks around the theme of “Launch.” My goal was to set audience members on a new trajectory for thinking about and understanding violence.

The image I placed at the beginning of this chapter was going to be an important part of my presentation. Unfortunately, not being the biggest event in the world, the TEDx-GrandForks organizers had not secured a projector for my use. So instead, near the end of my eighteen-minute talk, I brought two young men up onstage with me. It was clear right away that the guys who volunteered as my living models were uncomfortable with the role play that was about to take place.

I spent about thirty seconds setting up the scenario, then had the young men freeze in tableau when they found the same position as the figures in my training image. I gave the audience a few beats to process what they were looking at, then I asked them by a show of hands to tell me which of the two men they identified with. Nearly every person immediately placed themselves in the role of the victim, despite having just listened to me talk for seventeen minutes about the importance of not becoming a victim. That’s how ingrained this thought pattern has become in our society. Think about that: Culturally, we instinctively see ourselves as the victim.^*

Most people look at this simple image and place themselves in the shoes of the person in the compromised position for two reasons: First, our empathy kicks in and, not knowing the context, we instantly feel for the person who appears to be the victim. Second, we cannot imagine ourselves being capable of choking someone, deliberately trying to hurt them. We’re not violent people. We’ve been taught our whole lives to be polite and kind and peaceful, that violence is never the answer, because we’re the good guys. So, obviously, we can’t be the one in the dominant position.

From the perspective of ordinary social life, that is a normal, healthy way to think. Empathy keeps us human and defaulting away from aggression keeps us civilized. But if you’re concerned with self-protection, imagining yourself in the shoes of the person being attacked is the worst possible way to think. It is the beginning of your vulnerability to asocial violence. You must remember that violence is a tool, not a moral proposition. Using it effectively when you have no other choice doesn’t say anything about whether you’re a “good guy” or a “bad guy.” But if you tell yourself that it does, then it follows that a “good guy” could never get the upper hand in a fight, which means you’ve convinced yourself that “good guy” equals “victim.” We’re so used to equating “good guy” and “victim” that imagining ourselves on the winning end of a real, life-or-death fight seems impossible, almost forbidden. With that attitude, if you ever find yourself in a fight for your life, it’s basically over before it has even begun.

CRIMINALS NEVER SEE THEMSELVES AS THE VICTIM

I’ll tell you something that should make you shudder: when I show this training image to known criminals—and I have shown it to many of them—they uniformly identify with the figure on the left. They never in a million years imagine themselves as the victim on the receiving end of punishment. They don’t hesitate, either. Their response is swift and unequivocal: they’re the figure using violence successfully. Sometimes, they even tell me how they’d do the attack better: “You know what he should do…”

This gulf in self-perception might be the biggest mental obstacle I have to overcome with my clients—male or female, rich or poor, big or small. It’s also the biggest obstacle to keeping yourself safe. It’s as if the people who plan to hurt you can speak a language that you’ve deliberately chosen not to learn. I can (and will in Part 2) teach you all the physical principles of self-protection—punching, kicking, how to throw your body weight and target the vulnerable areas of the human body—but none of that matters if you are not willing to accept that, under the right circumstances, you can be both the “good guy” and the guy successfully using violence.

Critical to this shift in perception is the mental preparation necessary for setting your body into action at a moment’s notice. This involves hard-wiring yourself with the correct programming in the rare event that an asocial confrontation develops. Specifically, you need to be able to identify what’s available to you in terms of weapons and vulnerable body parts, and then you need to be able to inflict injury right away. Taking time to reflect on how you found yourself in this position, or waiting for your assailant to make the first move because you’re still thinking about yourself as the good guy on the right, will get you killed.

Predators don’t think that way. They don’t need to think about what weapons they might grab—they’re already wielding one (hint: it’s in the six-inch space between their ears). They don’t care about what we might do to them during a confrontation. Their only focus is on what they’re going to do to us. Often this singular obsession is a product of their criminal character, but there is a huge physiological lesson to be learned and strategic advantage to be gained from understanding it. The mind needs clarity to be effective, because it can really only process one thing at a time. The brain’s processing power is very fast, but when it counts, a millisecond can be all the difference in the world.

If you are thinking about what your attacker might do, or why he has picked you, then your brain’s focus shifts toward the defensive, reactive posture of a victim responding to someone else’s aggression, and it puts you way behind the power curve. When you lapse into a defensive mindset like that, you’re automatically at a disadvantage, because reacting is always slower than acting. While you’re thinking, “How will I defend myself if he punches my throat?” your attacker is already punching your throat.

While you’re sorting through options, his body has one simple command to follow: hurt them. Kill them. It is this clarity of mind and straightforwardness of action that most often makes the difference between success and failure in actual life-or-death situations. There is no other way around this basic truth: you can’t act with the kind of speed and decisiveness necessary to prevail in a violent encounter unless you’re mentally prepared to be the guy on the left.

So, spend some time with the training image and think about what you would do if you were in that position, mindful of the fact that there is nothing to learn about violence from its victim, only its perpetrator. Sit with your gut reaction to it, whether it’s the “right” one or the “wrong” one. (Say what you will, but you cannot hide your own reaction from yourself.) Think about all the things this training image implies, everything it will require of you to become the one in the driver’s seat who is mentally prepared to act when the situation calls for it: from the pressure of your fingers and palms against the Adam’s apple and the hyoid bone of the neck, to the feel of a crushed windpipe and collapsed cartilage in the throat, to the sound of asphyxiation once you’ve gotten the upper hand. These are the lessons of the guy on the left, not the details of a heroic comeback story for the guy on the right.

These are the movements you will need to practice with a partner at a proper training tempo (which we will cover in Chapter Eight), so that if you ever find yourself needing to execute them in real life, it won’t be the first time you’ve choked another human being, but the 301st time. For most people, inflicting debilitating injury like this is such a foreign concept that the kind of deliberate, purposeful visualization I just described feels premeditated, almost pathological. Yet that is precisely the goal, just as it is with every other constructive use of deliberate, purposeful visualization.

Jason Day is one of the most popular professional golfers on the PGA tour, not just for talent or his ability to hit it a long way, but also for his pre-shot routine. It’s unlike any other golfer in the game. He addresses the ball, takes two practice swings trying to mimic the feel of the shot he’s going to attempt, then he steps behind his ball, closes his eyes and visualizes his shot. It is a very detailed visualization: he has a picture of himself addressing the ball; he has an image of his target, which is small and specific; he sees his swing go back and then come through the ball; he watches the ball take flight; then he follows the trajectory of the ball as it lands and bounces. He does this before every single shot he takes in every single tournament he enters, whether it’s on the tee, in the fairway, or on the green, at a pro-am or at the Masters. The results have been undeniable: He is a major champion, a ten-time winner on the PGA tour, and he’s spent extended periods ranked #1 in the world.

Do you know what never happens during Jason Day’s pre-shot visualization routine? The ball never hooks into the trees. It never goes into the water hazard. He doesn’t chunk it into the bunker or fly the green. He doesn’t four-putt. No, he stripes it. He hits the ball down the center of the fairway and lands it right where he wants it. His approach shots into the green roll within eight feet of the cup. His putts for birdie, for eagle, for the win, land dead center in the middle of the cup with perfect speed.

Why do you suppose that is? Because there’s nothing to be gained from imagining failure when we’re practicing for victory. And yet that is what we do all the time when it comes to violence. We look at the losing end of a violent encounter—if we allow ourselves to look at anything—and we try to make it work, rather than look at the winning side and try to mimic what worked.

The reason we make this mistake is because we are locked into a mindset where only criminals are successful with violence. Why can only criminals act with such dominance and effective decisiveness? Why can’t the good guys win, too? If we continue to tell ourselves that a “good guy” can never get the upper hand in a fight, if we won’t even allow ourselves to imagine it, then we’re setting ourselves up to lose the fight for our lives before it’s even begun.

Your goal is the reverse: visualize yourself as the dominant person in the conflict, and remember that you can be dominant and the “good guy” at the same time.

THE FANTASY OF DEFENSE

“What do I do if someone tries to stab me?”

I have had this question posed to me at least a thousand times in my professional career—from students, acquaintances, media, you name it. I know where this conversation will lead, but still I start by offering real, actionable advice they can use to seize the initiative and survive the attack. Here’s how you take his eye, crush his throat, or break his leg.

Nine times out of ten, the audience member is aghast at the severity of my recommendations. So they rephrase the question.

What they really want to know, they say, is “What do I do to prevent someone from stabbing me?” I have answers for that question, too. So do you. We covered some of them in the last chapter (how to distinguish social aggression from asocial violence) and we will cover the rest in Chapter Five (how to de-escalate a situation; how to use our social skills to avoid dangerous situations; how to let go of your ego, to apologize, to let the other guy have the parking space), but those answers don’t satisfy them, either. What they want is something in between: a reliable way to stop the stabbing once the stabbing has started. A way to protect themselves against violence without having to use it. Sadly, there is no such thing. There is no “in between.” If you want to prevent violence and avoid life-or-death situations, be smart and use your social skills to de-escalate, deflect, and disengage. If you want to survive violence once it’s begun, to quote the poet Robert Frost, the best way out is always through. The only reliable path to survival is to use the very same tool of violence your attacker is trying to use against you, but to use it better.

In an ideal world, we’d be able to block our way to success—we could keep deflecting attacks until the aggressor gets tired and gives up. We could defend ourselves from violence without really using violence. I wish our world worked that way, but unfortunately it doesn’t. It’s a fantasy perpetuated by way too many bad self-defense classes. In the real world, I have learned that blocking, countering, “using his energy against him,” and a whole host of other martial-arts-based techniques are all dangerous conceits that do little more than make us feel good about our relationship to violence—we feel prepared but we still get to wear the white hat—while doing almost nothing to solve the essential problem. They do nothing to shut down the attacker and degrade his ability to function. At best, such tactics delay the inevitable and ultimately give the other man free time and opportunity to carry out his work: injuring you and shutting you off.

To hammer this point home during my live training seminars, I will often bring two of my fellow instructors up on the mats and put them into a hypothetical knife-fight scenario. One instructor acts as the perpetrator with a rubber training knife. The other instructor is unarmed. We assume the person without the knife is facing an imminent threat, meaning the situation is asocial, he’s devoid of choice, and there’s no exit. He must act.

I tell the unarmed instructor to use a classic knife-defense maneuver—he’s supposed to redirect the attack, control the knife, counter-attack, and attempt to take the knife away.

Then I tell the other instructor, “Your goal is to stab him to death. Ready? Go!”

I’ve conducted this demonstration time and again. Each time, I can see in the students’ faces this sense of anticipatory relief like, “Okay great, finally I’m going to learn how the good guy—the guy without a weapon—can successfully escape a knife attack without getting hurt.” It never works that way. It always goes horribly wrong. When my instructors go after each other at full speed, the bad guy always wins. He wins because he’s acting, and the victim is only reacting. As the famous swordsman Miyamoto Musashi said, “You always grip the sword as if you want to kill a man.”

This result bears itself out repeatedly in real knife assaults that have been caught on tape. Any victim who tries to protect themselves gets one, maybe two, deflections at most, before multiple successful stabbings by the perpetrator. It’s a simple equation, really. On one side, we’ve given the good guy a stack of four things to execute. First, he has to redirect. Then he has to control. Then he has to counterattack. And finally, he has to take the knife away. That’s a laundry list of tasks. On the other side of the equation, the perpetrator has only one directive: stab. Which approach is easier to execute?

I’ll ask it a different way: do you know where doctors and police investigators find the most “defensive” wounds? On corpses. Simply put, executing violence is easier than defending against it.

Once the knife-wielding instructor finishes off the unarmed instructor (which usually happens very quickly) we run the demonstration back a second time except now we erase the list of defensive tasks for the unarmed instructor—the “good guy.” We give him a new directive: don’t defend, just injure. Inflict violence. End the other man.

When we run the demonstration this way, the results are drastically different. The good guy realizes he must inflict injury quickly, so he’s much more aggressive and direct with his actions. He’s not thinking anymore. His mind is clear. He’s not reacting, he’s moving with intent. Now, even though the bad guy has a knife, the two men are more evenly matched, since they’re each finally employing their greatest tactical advantage—a mindset with clarity and purpose. At that point, it’s simply a race to first injury and then incapacitation.

Here’s the truth: using real violence is binary. You’re either doing it, or you’re not. It’s either on, or it’s off. There is no middle ground, no halfway, no modulating levels of severity when it comes to protecting yourself in a life-or-death situation. You can’t tear out someone’s knee or stab them in the heart “just a little bit,” any more than you can be a little bit dead or a little bit pregnant. It’s all or nothing. Attempting to put degrees on violence by going easy or pulling punches only creates opportunities for your attacker to get to you first. Remember Diane and Sara from Chapter One? In the first scenario Diane learned the hard way that a minor laceration or contusion won’t even slow down a dedicated person intent on doing you harm. And ask Sara about dealing with her dorm-room rapist. She’ll tell you that you can’t tear out someone’s eye or crush their larynx with your forearm “just a little bit.” It’s all or nothing. Still, I can’t tell you how often my students resist this idea and persist on trying to find a middle ground built on the empathy and humanity they assume is shared with their attackers. This mindset is the ultimate self-inflicted wound. As the great American journalist Ambrose Bierce once said, “We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over.”

Several years ago, a Los Angeles gangbanger was buying groceries at a minimart in his neighborhood when a rival gang member walked in, spotted him, and pulled a gun. The man had just checked out at the cash register, which was at the end of an aisle on the opposite end of the store from the entrance. It was immediately clear to the gangbanger that there was no easy escape to be made. The only exit was through the aisles behind him and out the front door, where his armed rival now stood. Instinctively, the man understood that the only way he could tip things in his favor and survive the encounter was if he could close the distance, physically get his hands on his rival, and inflict an injury before the rival could zero in on him with his firearm. He was devoid of choice. He had to act. The only objects the gangbanger had at his disposal were the grocery bags in his hands, so he immediately threw them into the air and charged his rival, who began firing.

In the military, you learn that it’s much harder to shoot somebody when they’re charging at you. In battle, many casualties happen in overrun situations, when one side is running away and being pursued by the other, because the distance gives the pursuers more time to safely and accurately fire on the retreaters. It becomes a turkey shoot, in effect. The shopping gangbanger probably didn’t learn his tactics in the military, but he understood how asocial violence worked well enough to immediately recognize the life-or-death situation in which he’d just been placed. He knew that if he was going to have any chance at survival he would have to run toward his enemy and inflict major injury. If he tried to hide, retreat, run away, or defend, his chances of survival would have dropped significantly. He knew that the only way out was through.

The man with the groceries absorbed five shots before plowing into the gunman. By closing the distance quickly, none of the shots could put him down or injure him to such an extent that he could not beat his rival to death with his fists, which he did.

“Good guys” need to learn what that gang member knew instinctively. There are no half-measures in life-or-death asocial violence. There is no bargaining or communication of any kind. There is only effective action with intent to injure and incapacitate. Whenever we take the victim’s perspective, we’re hobbling our minds and putting ourselves at a disadvantage. If we adopt the mindset of the aggressor, we flip the script and gain the edge. It starts by pulling yourself out of the victim’s mindset, into the mindset of someone who, if necessary, is willing to fight—to really fight—to survive.

CAUSE STATE VS. EFFECT STATE: LANDING THE FIRST STRIKE

To change our mindset, we need to think about how we make decisions. I’ll break down the decision-making process the same way I do for my students. It’s also not a bad lesson for life in general: when you make a decision, you’re either creating a new situation or reacting to an existing one. If you’re creating a new situation, you’re in Cause State. If you’re reacting to an existing situation, you’re in Effect State. In a life-or-death situation, you have to operate in Cause State all the time.

Consider the following scenario: You’ve been struck in the face, knocked to the ground, and most of your teeth are in your hand. You’re on one knee and your assailant is standing over you preparing to kick you in the head to end it. There’s a brief window. What do you do next?

The answer I’m looking for involves aggressive action. It doesn’t involve retreating, or preparing to block, or figuring out what the perpetrator might do next. It doesn’t involve yelling, either—unless that yelling happens in conjunction with some other major, significant action. If I’ve begun to successfully hardwire the proper programming into your mind, your first thought should be, “Where’s my target? What can I do to inflict injury right now?” Like the gangbanger in the minimart, you need to go on offense. Whenever you find yourself in a situation of imminent danger, your thought process should always gravitate toward action, not reaction—toward cause, not effect.

This is not some novel concept. We understand the benefits of being proactive in every other aspect of our lives—in business, in relationships, in overcoming distractions—why shouldn’t it also apply to violence and self-protection?

How often have you been derailed from a task by the vibration of your phone or an incoming email? These distractions pull you out of Cause State into Effect State, putting you in a reactive mode and taking you out of control of your situation. You know that you can, with practice and discipline, keep yourself in a proactive mode for longer and longer periods of time. You know that, when you’re in Cause State, you act, get results, and reassess—you’re not paralyzed and waiting for someone else to call the shots and act first.

There’s only one way to get better at staying in Cause State: deliberately thinking about your decision-making process ahead of time. It allows you to react with speed and decisiveness. Speed and decisiveness aren’t inborn characteristics for most of us—we have to learn them. Anybody can train themselves to behave this way, but like all training, physical or mental, the behaviors you want to build have to be practiced slowly, deliberately, and repeatedly, so that they are ingrained in your brain and ready to activate in the heat of the moment. So that they will come as second nature when you must execute at full speed.

In a pro basketball game, players don’t react to forcing a turnover by stopping to think about what to do next. They automatically sprint to the other end of the court on a fast break, and if they act quickly enough, the sequence usually ends in an easy layup. No one is consciously processing information—everyone is operating at peak efficiency. They just act.

But how many times have they slowly and deliberately practiced that fast-break play? How many times have they prepared for the moment?

The very same principle—action, not reaction—applies in life-or-death situations. And the very same practice and discipline can help make it a part of our lives. In a life-or-death situation, a reactive response or lapse in focus can be fatal. Survival isn’t the exclusive province of the bigger and stronger—it goes to the person who approaches his or her circumstances with the proper mindset, takes control of the situation and acts to cause decisive injury instead of reacting to the effects of someone else’s choice.

Nowhere is the advantage of operating in Cause State clearer than in landing the first effective strike. When it comes to taking control of a violent situation, everything hinges on the initial injury. I’ve seen enough violent confrontations play out to know that the struggle is balanced on a knife edge until someone gets a debilitating injury, at which point the situation shifts strongly in the favor of the person who was successful. Everything after that is academic, because inflicting the initial injury is a way of permanently consigning your enemy to Effect State.

What does that mean in practice? It means that you want to be the first one to inflict debilitating injury, and you want to do it as quickly as possible. When you realize you’re in a fight for your life, don’t waste time making an elaborate strategy or waiting to see what your opponent is going to do, because whatever you worry about is the thing that is most likely to happen. If you’re worried he’ll hit you, he will. If you’re worried he’ll counterattack, he will. If you’re worried he’ll kill you—he’s a lot more likely to. The brain will do whatever you tell it to do. By worrying about the attacker, you’re telling it to focus in what is fundamentally an Effect State, rather than a Cause State, which requires much clearer direction: “Throat!”; “Eyes!”; “Knee!” If you focus on that, on action, you are more likely to be successful. And then things simplify all by themselves.

Put the idea of an assessment phase out of your mind. There is no dropping into a fighting stance. There is no waiting to block or counter. Those are parts of the Effect State—the defensive mindset—and that will get you killed. If you can “put your dukes up” in defense, waiting to see what your attacker does first, you can use the same motion to be proactive once you see your first, best opportunity and put your fingers into your enemy’s eyes or your forearm through his neck (like Sara did, and she never had a chance to put her dukes up). Don’t waste that motion by going halfway. Like the gangbanger in the minimart or Jorge Orozco, take that motion and put it through your attacker and break something inside of him. Violence isn’t chess at ninety miles per hour. It’s demolition derby. And just like demolition derby, it’s the driver with the most forward momentum who usually wins.

CONTROLLING YOUR INTENT

There is no substitute for inflicting debilitating injury. It turns a life-or-death situation in your favor. It transforms an awful, scary man into an injured man, helpless to keep you from escaping to safety or causing further harm to fully neutralize him.

What kind of person can inflict a debilitating injury in self-defense? Let me describe them for you: they’re not timid, they don’t dance around, they don’t worry about being countered or even killed—they just plow in with clear intent, like the result is a foregone conclusion, focused above all on causing that injury and not stopping until it’s achieved. They are you, with an action-first mindset and a clear understanding of the tool of violence.

Some people just call this attitude “confidence,” while others call it an “offensive mindest” or “aggression.” I call it intent. As in, “intent to cause harm,” because that is the cleanest, simplest way to describe the actions of the winners in every knife fight, prison yard fight, convenience store hold-up, and bar fight I have analyzed over the last twenty-five years. It’s precisely what my fellow instructors and I try to instill in our clients when we train: we get out on the mats and look for targets to smash with no hesitation or reactivity. When we get out on the mats, we simulate hurting one another, not blocking or warding off attacks. When it’s your turn to go, my goal is for that action-first, injury-first, Cause State mindset to trigger and for you to plow through the vulnerable target we’ve exposed for you.^* The first thing that hops out of you should be an attempt to cause an injury that produces debilitating trauma and breakage that shuts down your enemy’s command center before he can shut down yours.

What exactly do you need to practice to be confident in delivering incapacitating injuries? There is no magic series of “moves” or “techniques”—later, I’ll explain why those concepts are exactly the wrong way to think about self-protection. What you need to practice, most of all, is intent. You need to appreciate the value of intent to cause debilitating injury, you need to control it, and you need to activate it at the right moment, when you’re in a fight for your life.

Intent is the filter through which mindset turns into action. For most people who find themselves in a life-or-death confrontation, their intent will be to flee, or worse, to try and weather the storm until help magically arrives. Even after going through training, some of my students will feel their intent slip into flight, instead of fight, when given scenarios to game out. They’ll channel their adrenaline rush into a burst of energy that gets them as far away from a dangerous situation as possible—a good response in scenarios of social aggression, but a disastrous one in precisely the kind of situations we’re training for, the asocial ones in which flight is impossible.

How can that be, after so much focus on mindset training? Weren’t they paying attention? Of course they were. The problem is, you can’t fake intent. You can know the intent you’re supposed to have, and I can lecture to you until I’m blue in the face and you’re bored to tears, but if you don’t have it, then you will end up going through the motions of violence, and they will be half-hearted, limp, and all but useless. Fully committing to and controlling the intent to inflict injury is essential to decisively shutting down the body of an aggressor trying to take your life—even one who is many times bigger, stronger, and scarier than you.

You can have years of “training,” but if you lack the intent, you’ll lose every time. Intent is what makes people scary: it’s what you fear in a criminal, and it’s what a criminal must fear in you. And you develop your intent by practicing the kinds of attacks to the kinds of targets that, in real life, result in debilitating injury. It’s not the real thing—no simulation is—but it’s as close as you can get, and we will cover that in depth in Part 2.

EMBRACE THE UGLY

In the end, this is why there’s no such thing as “self-defense”—there’s no protecting yourself in a life-or-death fight without being willing to use the very same tool of violence that your adversary wants to use against you. People who survive such encounters do so because they have the mindset and the intent it takes to do real harm to another human being when real harm is what’s required—either because that mindset was ingrained in them all along, or, more realistically, because they deliberately cultivated it through training.

I know that this is an unsentimental, unromantic, even brutal lesson about violence. I am asking you to embrace the ugly, to think about violence in this pragmatic way, because that is precisely how your enemy thinks. To defeat him, you need to think like he does. Make no mistake, for the purposes of saving your life—or someone else’s life—I am asking you to mentally prepare yourself to think like a criminal when the situation calls for it. That doesn’t mean I’m teaching you to become a criminal. I am just depriving the criminal of their asymmetric mental edge over you. These mental tools don’t turn off an empathy switch when they are in the hands of good people like you. Learning how to use the tool of violence doesn’t just make you a violent criminal, just as learning to use a hammer for carpentry doesn’t make you use it for assault, or learning to drive a truck doesn’t make you steer it into a bunch of tourists on the streets of Nice.

But learning how to use the tool of violence does mean using criminals’ own techniques against them, to debilitate and neutralize them, when the choice to de-escalate has been removed and there is no exit in sight. That means that, whether we like it or not, we have a lot to learn from the bad guys.