The Monkey Dance
Remember the saying: "When two tigers fight, one is killed and one is maimed"? That's a lie. Like other mammals, when tigers, bears, dogs, etc. battle their own species, they have a built-in ritual combat to prevent injury. Deer go antler-to-antler, not antler-to-ribs. Humans are apes. Like most animals we have a ritual to establish social dominance or defend territory. It is nearly always non-lethal.
The Monkey Dance is a ritual, with specific steps
The dance, I believe, is innate. The steps may be cultural. In my culture:
1) Eye contact, hard stare.
2) Verbal challenge: "What you lookin' at?"
3) Close distance. Sometimes there is chest bumping.
4) Finger poke or two-handed push to the chest.
5) Dominant hand roundhouse punch.
A Canadian friend informs me that step 4 in his neck of the woods is knocking the other person's hat off. Like I said, steps may be cultural.
Need to get something off your chest? A few points-
-The Monkey Dance is almost always a male thing. I honestly don't know the female equivalent either in humans or other animals.
-Most martial arts (and most adolescent combat fantasies) are based on this model. It is much easier to prevail in a scenario that is already genetically designed to be non-lethal.
-The Monkey Dance can almost always be circumvented by either lowering your eyes and apologizing or ignoring it entirely keeping extremely relaxed body language and treating the verbal challenge as a serious, thoughtful question.
-If you start the dance, you will probably not be able to stop. You have 50 million years of conditioning to overcome. I usually tell my students that you don't play the dance, the dance plays you.
-Most incidents are resolved by one of the parties backing down before violence starts. As Grossman pointed out in "On Killing" even major battles are far more often won by display than by combat.
-A professional can finish an encounter quickly by jumping steps. In other words, if the threat is on any step below four and you take physical, decisive action, he will be unprepared. His mind expects all of the steps to be done before things get physical.
That all goes out the window when attacked by a group. You're no longer a part of the contest to see who is the bigger monkey. The contest is between the members of the group and they will be competing on your body.
PREDATORY VIOLENCE
Though most martial arts train pretty well for the Monkey Dance, true predatory violence is another animal altogether. If a predator has targeted you, it is because he sees you as prey and he will stack everything in his favor. You will be smaller and weaker, injured or tired, distracted, unprepared. You will not see the first attack. You will not see the weapon. You will probably be injured before you are aware of being attacked. It will happen at a place and time of the predators choosing. Nothing will be in your favor. The initial assault will knock most people over the 175 BPM mark instantly, leaving only an uncontrolled, flailing berserk or a stumbling sprint as options.
This, in my opinion, is the basic presumption for true training in self-defense. Not one instructor in fifty understands that defending against the predatory attack is completely different than training for Monkey Dance violence.
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