The Way of Peace

There are several overlapping concepts regarding choice and virtue, that oddly, I first came across in the early days of the “manosphere”. That version was this: that a guy bragging about how he doesn’t sleep around with women, yet who cannot actually attract women, cannot claim it as a virtue because it’s not a choice.

Jordan Peterson’s lectures, I believe even his first podcast episode on suffering, also frequently make it clear – most of us have never had to face the choice to do evil, have never internalized and understood our capacity for it and faced our darkness and looked it in the eye, and thus cannot claim to actually be “good” in the sense of having made that moral choice. That we were vulnerable, like so many Germans in the 30’s, to being Nazis (or worse, communists).

It’s also been noted in more general conservative circles how it’s the pacifists who like to beat people up, the free speech advocates who want to shut people up (I’m not including the rare, but existing, sincere ones who put their livelihoods on the line for those they disagree with). People who’ve seen the cost of war, or at the least the risks imposed by nature and reality when one operates on the edge and deals with people who may be grateful, or not (and a mother nature that just doesn’t care), are both more willing to use violence when needed, but also more aware of the costs. They have a better ability to make an informed choice, and a greater awareness of how high that price can be without warning or fairness.

Women, who rarely physically fight, fuelled by pixie-fu fantasies and feminist cant, get themselves into fights they cannot win as shown over and over again on Youtube, and get knocked out with a single, half-hearted punch.

The old quote goes, if you want peace, prepare for war. As the Didact recently pointed out, or as noted in the excellent book, the Professor in the Cage, there are valuable lessons to be learned. Both about your limits, about discipline, about taking the blows of life in general.

So I wanted to show you this, because it points out that knowing how to fight actually gives you moral options, virtuous choices you would not have otherwise had.

Further, a man afraid of, or unskilled in violence, can never claim to be a pacifist.

Choosing peace implies you have other viable options open to you.

Only a man capable of and comfortable with violence can be a true pacifist. This is why combat arts are the way of peace.

— Simon Smart (@warriorprotocol) January 3, 2018