Taoism of Martial Arts and the Left (Patreon)

Looking at the growth of Southpaw this year, seems some people find the project of looking at martial arts through a Leftist lens AND Left politics through a martial arts lens interesting. There's a difference between a Leftist who happens to do martial arts and a Leftist martial artist.

That's what I'm trying to define. Much of what I've seen is compartmentalized. Call it dialectical or Taoistic, but Left politics should inform your martial arts, and martial arts should inform your Left politics. It should be bidirectional, then synthesized into something new.

The thing you don't just hear on your first day of practice, but every day is, "If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." If you have one rigid belief about politics, you will have the same solution for every situation and attack those who adapt.

A famous pioneer of MMA who came from a traditional Chinese art was asked why he didn't do trapping hands in MMA. He said, "You try that shit when someone is trying to knock your head off at full speed." Did he do it wrong? Or did he do it right by adapting?

Famed boxing trainer and socialist Cus D'Amato told a young Mike Tyson,

"Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth." 

This is Left theory that can ONLY come from the ring.

Understanding you have to improvise is a no-brainer in martial arts. Plans last until you get hit, then you gotta improvise. Yet this is why I differentiate Leftists who do martial arts from Leftist martial artists.

Because even Leftists who do martial arts can apply this logic in sparring but then leave it behind when they think about politics, tactics, and outcomes. The belief is, whatever outcome that happened, that must have been the plan. But in martial arts, you know outcomes and plans are different. You also recognize improvisation is typical, whereas that's a term I've never seen in Left political discourse. That SHOULD be a red flag.

Martial arts is much more interested in description. Show me how the move works. Predictions and rigid prescriptions can get your ass kicked. But Left discourse is nearly all prediction and prescription, and causal certainty of what has not yet happened. "This will lead to this."

You must also challenge your beliefs—at least in modern martial arts with emphasis on sparring and mixing and comparing different arts. "What if this sucks?" "What if this doesn't work?" "What if I'm wrong" This doubt, humility, and stress test is what causes improvement. When do you have an ardent follower of one strain of Left ideology ask, "What if I'm wrong? What if there's more than one answer? What if it's my responsibility to self-reflect and criticize my own strain of Left politics rather than constantly bashing others? Is understanding logic fallacies about seeing how others are wrong or recognizing my own biases?"

Compare that to all the declarative statements on the Left about each other. Active sentences. "This is why," "The reason why," or "This WILL do this." Martial arts and Eastern language are full of passive sentences. "Perhaps," "in the case of," "possibly," "observe," etc.

It's full of reflection. It wants to grow. Compare this to taking a personality test about your political beliefs, taking that as your core values, then stopping there. You don't take what you already know, like, or want to believe and create a martial art.

You can believe you know a lot while also believing you know nothing. This is the norm on the mats. I know how to throw, but I don't know how to kick and punch. I also know others who know how to throw better than me. I don't know how to combine punches and kicks with throws. I can win in a sprint but not a marathon.

When I apply the logic of martial arts to the Left, it might be: "I have this political belief that works well in a small group, but I don't know about large groups. I know about systems in peace but not during war. My Left politics works great in infinite time, but I don't know about Left politics under a survival time crunch. I don't know how to combine all these ideas together."

This is what I think about. To me, this makes all the sense in the world. Because on the mats, all you ever do is engage in objective reality.