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On Keeping Hope Locked Up In Pandora's Box (Rory Miller)

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Fred Fuller

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Another thought-provoking entry over at Chiron this week. Give it a look at http://chirontraining.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-paralysis-of-hope.html

In part...

In a drawn-out violent episode, the threat wants to keep the victim from effectively fighting. In a true blitz, that's not much of a problem. Close distance, distract, flurry attack. The victim tends to freeze. In a longer, drawn out, ugly scenario (think secondary crime scene and all that implies) an unconscious victim doesn't supply the necessary 'fun' but a conscious victim might well fight. And so the threat has to get control of the brain.

Not always, and don't take anything I'm writing here as absolute. I'm trying to set up a specific type of event to examine here..

Teja described it best (and I think we captured her little talk in the "Logic of Violence" DVD coming out soon.) The threat does a mix of savagery and niceness, making the victim think her only hope is in being nice and keeping the threat nice...and so the victim doesn't fight.

Her hope keeps her from fighting.

And it makes me wonder how many people over the millennia died without fighting when they desperately needed to fight. How many waited for rescue or prayed for intervention, and let themselves die? And how many prevailed when they realized there was no hope and fought with everything they had?

Were the Greeks saying that hope is the one evil you must lock up in order to fight the others?
 
Good read. And thanks for sharing Rory Miller's work with us, a number of people I've recommended him to who were not all that big into guns have really related to his writing.
 
I'm not sure it's hope being a problem so much as people failing to recognize reality. We live in a society that has conditioned us to believe bad things happen to "someone else". Therefore, our situation will soon be resolved to our satisfaction because we are not "someone else". We will be at home eating dinner tonight, "someone else" will be dead in a ditch.

I can hope to win the lottery but still go to work every day. I can hope my attacker will stop. It's just my job to persuade him, violently, if needed.
 
Hope is a willingness to recognize barriers and a vow to build a way through.

You will not freeze. You will move into a direction that is legal, morally vetted, and justified, and quite possibility lethal.

It does not matter where you carry Pandora's box. What matters is understanding your own desire to open it.
 
Interesting read. I'll have to follow it some more.

Here's what I have learned and believed in my time walking thru the lion's den.

Hope is believing that no matter how dark or large an obstacle is in front of you, all you have to do is act. You know you have options, and you have faith there are other outcomes beyond that obstacle.

Panic is fear out of control. It's occurs when your logical side realizes, or believes you're out of options. It will usually happen when you reach the limits of your abilities. This leads to...

Resignation. That's what actually keeps you from acting. It's the acceptance (false or realized) that there is no more hope. You may as well be dead at that point.

An acceptance of death is not necessarily a loss of hope. It's simply an acceptance of the part of reality that you can't control. It's what frees you to decide to act in the first place.

That's my view anyway.
 
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I believe this reinforces the "don't think, act" philosophy. Which is why training is so critical to being able to respond to violent confrontation. When you lack the brain stem programming to respond to violent confrontation, you resort to slower less effective logic processing that can be clouded by emotional and stress induced coercion. Being decisive and acting immediately may make all the difference.
 
klyph said:
When you lack the brain stem programming to respond to violent confrontation, you resort to slower less effective logic processing that can be clouded by emotional and stress induced coercion. Being decisive and acting immediately may make all the difference.
Click to expand...

In "Meditations On Violence" he talks about this a little bit.

A common logic issue that people use to freeze up their OODA loop is "Why?" and then they spend time observing/trying to communicate with the attacker rather than acting because they're trying to rationalize why they're being attacked. But the attacker is either too busy to give them hints or an answer or is deliberately not answering them. So they stand there waiting for information to come in so they can make a decision on what to do while the attacker is going about their business with almost no resistance or interruptions.
 
Well said EG.

Tom Givens said - not sure if this is a figurative way of illustrating his point or was really observed - that the most common "last thoughts" going through the heads of people losing fights when surprise-attacked (sorry, can't provide more background than that, and I may be mangling the context as is) is

"Why is he hurting me?"

and

"I can't believe this is happening!"

So it can significantly accelerate the decision making process and OODA loop if we accept that some people want to hurt us and the reason doesn't really matter, and yes, it CAN happen - so believe it.
 
Lee (now Fred)
posted a link about a year ago to the BTK confession
the thing that struck me was that none of the victims fought back IMMEDIATELY, and few did before they faced certain death.
 
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