Self-Defense vs. Fighting Part 3: Knowns and Unknowns

Let’s look at one more difference between self-defense and fighting:

In self-defense, there are no “knowns.” 

What do we mean? It means that you don’t know anything about your situation. You don’t know anything about your attacker, you don’t know if they have friends, you don’t know what they want, you don’t know what they know, etc. 

If you enter a kickboxing competition, you are for sure in a fight. You’re going into a ring against someone who wants to - at minimum - hurt you more than you hurt them. In that scenario, you also know what the rules are, what techniques they will use, you know that they’re the same sex and approximate size as you, and you know what the win-lose conditions are. You know you might get hurt or knocked out, and also that it probably won’t be worse than that. You know they aren’t concealing a knife somewhere, and you know that their friends won’t jump in the ring and gang up on you. 

In self-defense, you might not know anything about the person - or people - who are attacking you. You don’t know their motivations, you don’t know their limits, you don’t know if they have weapons, etc. Someone might put a gun in your face and have no intention of ever pulling the trigger. They might not even have ammo in the gun. Don’t count on it of course! Meanwhile someone else could have no weapons, and absolutely no problem choking you to death with their bare hands. 

There is definitely a Venn diagram here with fighting, because fighting is a very expansive world as well. If you get into it with someone at a bar, and decide to take it outside with them, you probably don’t know much about them. As per the previous entry in this series, you made the choice to engage in this fight, but you don’t know much about this opponent. You don’t know how skilled and strong they are, you don’t know how violent they are capable of being, and you don’t know if they have friends who are going to jump in against “the rules.” 

The more information you have, and the more prepared you are, the more we move from self-defense to fighting. Bringing it all together: In a fight, you have made a choice and prepared to enter a violent competition with someone else, with the objective of hurting them more than they hurt you. The less choice, the less preparation, and the less knowledge you have; the less you’re trying to win and just survive; the more you know it’s self-defense