In the contemporary United States (and the Western world generally), misconceptions concerning manliness abound.  These misconceptions derive from a variety of sources that I identified in a previous article.  There the focus was specifically upon the confusion that prevails over the nature of a violent engagement of the type that occurs in a true self-defense situation.  Yet this is not unrelated to the broader topic of manliness.

Over the last few years, an industry of YouTube podcasts hosted by former mobsters and former criminals of every conceivable sort has emerged to advance the campaign to glorify scumbags that Hollywood launched decades ago.

That’s right: Glorify.  Those who continue to depict the thug’s life as anything other than the Godless, demonic, cowardly, and unmanly mode of existence that it is romanticize it.

Whether incorrigibly hypocritical Hollywood filmmakers who throw their support behind Democrat politicians who are eager to deprive law-abiding American citizens of their Second Amendment rights while glamorizing violent, gun-toting thugs on the big screen or podcasters who were one-time members of La Costra Nostra or tatted up ex-convicts who purport to have gone straight—these characters are all peddlers of crime porn who regal their audiences with thrilling tales of the Outlaw’s exploits in exchange for money. 

In the case of the criminals, or ex-criminals, it also gives them tireless opportunities to depict themselves as not just “tough guys,” but guys who are tougher than the vast majority of other human beings, and particularly those ever-growing numbers of average Joes who subscribe to their channels.

Of course, every merchant selling their wares in this genre swear that they do not mean to glorify anything, that, in fact, they are supplying a public service announcement insofar as they are trying to deter younger people from following in the footsteps of those who have lived the Thug Life.  Maybe there’s some truth to this, for some.  Yet there can also be no denying that the other considerations noted also figure prominently as motives.

At any rate, and as I said, if these guys really want to deter younger guys from pursuing a life of crime, then their messaging must be unambiguous.  Thus far, from what I’ve been able to gather (and, admittedly, not being in the least enamored with anything that these guys have to say, I am not a consumer of their product), their messaging is mixed, at best.

When they acknowledge that neither they nor anyone with whom they ever associated during their lives as criminals were men, i.e. males who were good, strong, true; when they concede that, as male members of the human species, they never mentally and emotionally advanced beyond being juvenile delinquents, that they pursued their own self-interests by way of the path of least resistance and at the cost of breaking the hearts of their wives, children, and parents—then their messaging will be clear.

So be it.  A virtue, though, of this genre of “true crime” is that it supplies those who are interested with constant reminders that dangerous two-legged creatures live among us.  And it is this knowledge, and this knowledge alone, that motivates some men and women to train in self-protection.

Yet it isn’t just their victims, but the dangerous criminals, and alleged former criminals, who style themselves “tough guys” because of their penchant for cruelty and their history of preying upon the weak, the outnumbered, and the intimidated who are also imperiled.  They’ve drank their own bathwater, swallowed their own shit, and forgotten, if they ever knew, a life-or-death lesson.  As USMC Lieutenant-Colonel Al Ridenhour, a combat veteran of four tours of duty and 100 combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and the founder of Warrior Flow Combatives, puts it: “There’s a place to which you can’t go” with either God or a certain kind of man, namely, the kind of person who is a student of his system.

Those who prey upon innocents are wicked.  And while the compromised, lukewarm Church of present times would have us forget it, the truth is that God despises the wicked.  This is established throughout the Bible.  Take Psalm 5:4-6, for example:

“[God is] not a God who delights in wickedness; evil may not dwell in you.  The boastful shall not stand before your eyes; you hate all evildoers.  You destroy those who speak lies; the LORD abhors the bloodthirsty and deceitful man.”

Then there’s Psalm 11:5:

“The wicked, those who love violence, he [God] hates with a passion.”

We could go on.  The point: God detests the evil and promises, from the book of Genesis through to that of Revelation, that He will insure that the evil receive their just desserts—death.

The bad guys—as well as far too many others who aren’t bad guys, including those who train in martial arts—forget, in other words, that the bad guys are mere mortals.  Because they are mortal, they can be injured.  They can be crippled, tortured, raped, and terrorized.

They can be killed.

In short, all of the unimaginably brutal things that they can and, in some instances, have done to others can be done to them—and not, necessarily, just by other career criminal vermin.

This last idea needs to be underscored, for most people, especially bad guys, apparently forget that one needn’t be a criminal—one can be thoroughly contemptuous toward criminals—to kill a person with only slightly more effort than is required to extend one’s hand and touch that person.

If a person can bleed from a paper cut, then he can bleed to death courtesy of another mortal.

As a human being, the most dangerous, violent low-life predator on the planet is, essentially (even if relatively speaking), as anatomically and physiologically restricted as is the most frail and timid of elderly women.  This brute fact means that the elderly woman could drop his miserable ass under the correct circumstances—particularly if she trains, as the predator, like all criminal predators, has trained all of his life, to become a killer when she needs to become one.

The criminals are mortals, like you and I.  They are bound by the same laws of physics and human physiology that bind the rest of us.  What fundamentally distinguishes the criminal predator from otherwise decent people is that the latter have scruples that the former lacks.  Predators have a ruthlessness that gives them an edge over those upon whom they would prey.

The good news, however, is that this ruthlessness is, overwhelmingly, learned. It wasn’t learned through any kind of formal training, true, but, by virtue of a lifetime’s worth of cultivating vicious habits, it was learned all of the same.  What this in turn means is that if criminals can learn how to be ruthless, so too can decent folks.  Only in the case of the decent who seek out competent instructors to teach them how to be ruthless, their ruthlessness will not be a vice but, rather, a virtue—a martial virtue.

It will be a character excellence, the excellence of a warrior, for unlike scumbags who are merciless toward unsuspecting, innocent people who they regard as nothing more or less than a resource, the decent who train to become ruthless train to become merciless only toward the wicked, toward those who imminently threaten them, their loved ones, or other innocents in their presence.

Warrior Flow Combatives is unique among combat systems inasmuch as it seeks to make good people by making them into dangerous people—dangerous for criminals who may have otherwise preyed upon them.  It aspires to do this by instilling in students “Ruthless Intention,” a mindset necessary to, as Mushashi, a 17^th century Japanese Samurai warrior memorably stated, “attack with a feeling of constantly crushing the enemy, from first to last.”

God has supplied all of us with everything we need to protect ourselves against the designs of the evil.  Musashi made this point as well:

“There is nothing outside of yourself that can ever enable you to get better, stronger, richer, quicker, or smarter.  Everything is within.  Everything exists. Seek nothing outside of yourself.”

The training modality of Warrior Flow is predicated upon this truth.  Jordan Peterson shared a brilliant insight during an exchange with former Navy SEAL Jocko Willink when he said that a “good man must be a dangerous man” (emphases added).

To be good, a person must become dangerous, for the world is full of those who are dangerous but evil.

Learn to become good and dangerous by training in Warrior Flow Combatives.