A Paradigm Shift
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Albert Einstein
Every time I examine the design of a newly proposed method of teaching self-defense skills to the public, I realize that most developers are stuck in a particular paradigm. Since these developers come from a military, law enforcement and martial art background they utilize some form of existing martial discipline they studied or are familiar as a foundation for their “new way”. Being so trained their perspectives are stuck in that foundational paradigm. In order to think outside the box, outside the paradigm, it becomes imperative to divorce oneself from the old ways. This is a difficult task since, like myself, these developers have trained in the “old ways” for many years before coming to their individual epiphanies. The problem and limited success of development from prior knowledge or “present martial position” is that it is like being inside a maze in which, no matter how many times the maze is run, the path always leads to the same exit. It becomes difficult at best to envision a system, method, way of anything combative without preexisting skills from a earlier art developed over the millennium.
A quote from Bruce Lee, November 27th, 1940 – July 20, 1973 - “I personally do not believe in the word style. Why? Because, unless there are human beings with three arms and four legs, unless we have another group of human beings that are structurally different from us, there can be no different style of fighting.”
As a result of prior conditioning and prejudices, the defense methods these developers use will have a minimum bases in boxing, kick boxing, jujitsu, wrestling, and various kicks and strikes from thousands of martial arts styles. The developmental improvements in martial arts are analogous to the development of the wheel. Since people first discovered the physics and practical use of the wheel, it has been put to use ever since the wheel’s discovery. The wheel was not so much invented, as it was discovered much like fighting skills. A wheel is a wheel, is a wheel. But, while the concept of the wheel has not been improved upon for thousands of years, the steel belted radial is a far superior wheel for its purpose than a round log. Improvement upon a theme is always possible. Of course, as long as we are caught up in the paradigm of trying to improve the wheel it might not occur to one to float a vehicle on a bed of air – the purpose remains but, the paradigm has shifted. What catches my mind is both the improvements to be gained and the method used to improve the thing. Sometimes the thing to be improved is improved through the manufacturing process.
With the above in mind, let one suppose and ask the following questions. What if you were required to develop a self-defense method which can not use any “known formal skills” – skills with names already described and detailed to date? Let the skills be as they come, unorthodox by the trained observer. Suppose the new skills were lifted from this experiment and however unorthodox allowed because of there effectiveness rather than accepted form. What would the result be from this methodology, chaos or functional chaos? Might one learn rather, not a new way of self-defense but, a much better way of teaching self-defense? Would not improving upon the manufacturing process improve the thing itself? Suppose we were to reverse engineer the development process? Suppose instead of seeing what is accepted as correct we threw out everything and began with the problem of how to survive a violent criminal assault when at disadvantage? In this research, one would use one’s primordial reaction to the problem extracting what one did most effectively with adjustments so learned. Suppose then, we were to train according to the method used to solve the problems of violent criminal assault? What are your thoughts?
Pan-Technicon used this reverse engineering and primordial methodology since 1971. This method of experimentation succeeded in achieving better strategies, improved tactics and superior ways of teaching and training.
This material copyrighted, Haslam 2010
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