Category Archives: Social Commentary

The necessity of Tribe

At the last SBG camp, Oct 2016 in Berkeley California, we ended with a question and answer section for all the coaches on the roster. The last question we took was from a white belt that had signed up for camp after just a few weeks of training.

He asked, “what advice would you offer to people just starting their training?”

That’s a good question, and sitting up front were nine coaches, with a combined experience of about 185 years – who offered good answers.

“It’s a long journey. Don’t be in a rush.”

“Trust your coaches and trust the process.”

“Relax, and care about learning more than winning.”

“Don’t get to wrapped up in volume of hours too early – just don’t ever quit.”

“Be reflective, and understand that what we do makes humans better people.”

“Trust the technique, it isn’t whether you escaped, but whether you escaped technically that matters.”

“Don’t be a fighter, be a Martial Artist – or for a time, a Martial Artist who fights. One has a limited life span. The other is for life.

“Give 60% of your energy to making your training partner better and 40% to making yourself better, and you’ll always get more than if you focused on yourself.”

These were all answers as solid as steel. But one answer in particular hinted at something that takes many of us longer to realize – something we recognize with greater clarity as we mature. It came from Chris Conolley, head coach for SBG Alabama:

“Make relationships in your academy. Make friends. Be part of the community.”

We are social primates. We need contact. We need socialization. We need connection. Our growth, our happiness, our very wellbeing, is in so many ways connected to the communities we move within.

Occasionally you’ll run into someone who denies this very human requirement, but in nearly every case, a very gentle scratching of the surface reveals levels of hypocrisy, and or immaturity, that helps to explain that confusion. As my coach Chris Haueter has said, it’s always the guys who claim they don’t care about belts that want the belts the most. Likewise, the folks who deny the need for community tend to be those who need one the most.

Our long-standing institutions, religions, mutual aid societies, and clubs, have long understood this. Whether it was through conscious design, or more likely, enhanced replication due to the tribal feature, we as humans have always had communities.

Once this point is fully understood the question becomes, how do I find a healthy community?

There a few guidelines we can use:

#1 it provides mutual aid and benefit.

Do you benefit from belonging? Are there physical, emotional, or intellectual things you consistently get back from membership? Do you find yourself feeling compelled to give back? Does the tribe make you a better person?

#2 it fosters strength through challenge and individual responsibility through accountability.

Without accountability there are no standards. Without standards, there is nothing to strive for.

Occasionally you’ll get a high level competitor that switches teams. If the coach/athlete relationship is off, sometimes that’s the right thing. However, I rarely see anyone who jumps from school to school develop a really solid BJJ game. It takes long-term training partners and community for that. And the guys who jump ship because someone offers them an easier belt (lower standards) always do themselves a disservice. All truly valuable, long-term relationships, can be hard on occasion, and require tending and care. Including the long-term relationship between student and teacher, athlete and coach – which in BJJ, white to black, is usually at least a decade. But, there are also really meaningful benefits and lessons those relationships offer. Benefits the folks who hop from team to team will never know.

We become stronger through struggle. Struggle requires the willingness to be vulnerable. A healthy community will be a place where you are allowed to fail. Where you are tested. Where it is understood that losing is not just okay, it is an essential part of the process. Because there is no maturing, no thriving, absent worthy effort. And any task that’s made failure proof is at the same time made unworthy.

I am reminded of President Theodore Roosevelt’s famous quote.

#3 it is a meritocracy.

As I often remind students before an ironman, Jiu-Jitsu belts are only meaningful because they are symbolic of a testable, measurable, fake proof skill-set. Like playing the piano, speaking Mandarin, or being able to swim, you can’t pretend to be good at Jiu-Jitsu and get away with it.

That ability is hard earned. It requires failure after failure, tap after tap. If you don’t lose, a lot, you’ll never learn to win against better and better players. Jiu-Jitsu is a perfect meritocracy that way. And a great Jiu-Jitsu community will also be such a meritocracy. On the mat you’ll have men and women, rich and poor, student and teacher, construction worker and attorney, soldier and doctor, first responder and merchant, police officer and stay at home mom – everyone training together, learning together, growing together – rolling together.

The tribe’s hierarchy will also be a natural reflection of that.

Those men and women in positions of leadership won’t be there because they collect more certificates, shook the right hands, or paid the most money – they’ll be there because they earned it – through hard work in the arts and sciences the tribe practices.

 #4 it’s leadership will understand that leadership means service.

If the top echelon of the tribe is demanding you give over your cars, sex, dignity, or critical thinking skills, that’s not a healthy community – it’s a cult. The late Bhagvan Shri Rashnesh, also known by his hippie-dippy pen name, “Osho” (whose works are sold everywhere that the trite and banal is pedaled to the soft and credulous), was the perfect example of what not to be.

Every true leader, unlike “Osho”, knows that leadership is service and service is leadership. The teachers and coaches are there to serve the students – not the other way around.

In Jiu-Jitsu decades are spent learning the craft. And after much effort and struggle, the coach ends up spending their energy trying to make every student they have better than they themselves were. That is what it means to be a good leader. A strong parent wants their child to go farther than they did. A strong teacher wants their students to do the same.

#5 A healthy Tribe is a family orientated Tribe.

Look around the room. Do you see entire families present? Do the husbands, wives, and children all join in? Is everyone welcome?

Or rather – is it a room full of men?

When I started teaching I had a room full of men. Not just any men, but rather, tough men; men who could survive the training process, or better stated, put up with it.

As time went by more women signed up. The kids needed a place to train. The wives were curious what their husbands were spending so many hours doing, and over years, we developed a Tribe that was in every sense of the word – family orientated.Watch movie online The Transporter Refueled (2015)

Not only do I think that is good thing, I actually think that, if what you’re doing is healthy, it is an inevitable thing.

It may not start that way. Every community starts with a core group. But if the tribe meets all the criteria listed above, if it provides benefit to all its members, if it fosters strength through challenge and personal responsibility through accountability, if it is a meritocracy, and if it’s membership understands that leadership means service – then by definition, it’s natural trajectory will be towards something family orientated. Why? Because as more individual members spend more time with the community, and find more value in being involved with the community, they will want those they love most to also be involved, and those they love most will want to belong too.

A mature male teacher can help teach young students how to be polite, how to shake hands, how to look someone in the eyes and say “yes, sir”, or “no, ma’am” – and other appropriate response knowledge that can be priceless in terms of future success in life; especially when some of the kids come from homes where no strong and positive male role model exists. And study after study has confirmed just how important that influence is. Few things disgust, or anger me more, than the mocking of the vital “male” influence in a young person’s life.

Likewise, if the room is filled with only men, a massive gap will be left within the Tribe. There is a level of attention to detail, intelligence, and relationship, that requires the influence of strong women.

The hubris required to mistakenly believe that either gender is unnecessary within a healthy community of humans is large enough to be considered grotesque – and a mature association wont make that error.

Just as children need community, so too with adults; a healthy Tribe contains stable, mature, intelligent, strong men and women who hold each other to a certain standard of behavior. That grows character.

You can learn a lot about a lot of things, when you’ve spent decades working on any art form. But if you don’t have a community to share it with, a Tribe to pass it on to, then you will miss half the beauty involved in the process.

When we were thinking about how to launch our new SBG video podcast series, we had dozens of first episode ideas. But it was clear to me from the start that the natural place to begin, was with the topic that’s most important of all – the topic coach Conolley nailed at the 2016 Fall Camp – Tribe.

This is ours:

When there are no Walter Cronkites left

CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite reports that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite reports that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

Watching Bill Maher last night was both frustrating, and consoling. Frustrating because David Frum’s consistent attempts to get an important point across to Maher seemed to fall on deaf ears. And consoling because it’s often cathartic to hear someone articulating an important truth that you believe needs saying. And last night, that someone was Frum.

They could hack the voting machines. I wouldn’t put it past them,” said Maher, as he passionately made the case that Donald Trump is something different, something un-American, something authoritarian, something dangerous, a something we haven’t seen before. A something that past Republicans like George W Bush, Mitt Romney, and John McCain shouldn’t be compared to. A notion that, given Trump’s own behavior and words, is hard to disagree with.

Frum tried reminding Maher, in a way that may have been too polite, that such rhetoric, ‘the system is fucked’ populist theme song, is in part, exactly why Trump has risen to become the nominee.

Turn on right wing talk radio or look up some far left websites, and the message is clear. It’s the same plot line on the Alt Right as it is the Social Justice Left. It’s the same memorandum contained in just about every movement that was known as ‘populist’. It’s the core belief shared by the most militant Jill Stein supporter, and Milo Yiannopoulos. Though I’m sure neither would want to acknowledge their kinship to the other. It’s the message that is delivered up in various packages by every cheap, and they’re all cheap, demagogue to ever walk the planet. What distinguishes the left from the right within the populist movements is never the reasoning or uniformed pessimism; all that ever differentiates them, are the scapegoats they choose.

The system is rigged. The whole thing is corrupt. They’re all just as bad. They’re keeping us down. They like us uniformed. Corporate media is in on it. Every one of them is rotten. The establishment is against us. Burn it all down.

We’ve heard it all so many times before.

But is it really true?

Does corruption exist? Of course it does. That’s not an interesting, or even, intelligent question. The more relevant question is, is it any worse than it’s been in time’s past? That’s a question that no serious person can pretend to know the answer to based on their own anecdotal experience, or as gleaned from the bits of information they allow themselves to take in from their hand picked news sources, which offer cherry picked, ideologically conforming, narrative building, easy to digest, bite sized story lines.

Let’s take a step back for a minute and look at the planet as whole, and our Nation, the United States, over the past century. Let’s begin by going back just 50 years in the USA:

Since the 1960’s, life expectancy has grown by almost a third.

Median income per person has risen 167%, and that’s adjusting for inflation and purchasing power.

The average length of education time per student has seen 115% increase.

Americans in 2016 compared to Americans in 1966, on average, live 30% longer, make more than twice as much money, and have double the years of schooling.

How about worldwide? How’s everyone else doing?

Pollution is less than half of what it was just 25 years ago, even with the growing economies of the East.

Within the last 30 years extreme poverty has been cut in half. Predications state that by 2030, such poverty will be non-existent.

Homicide, due to violent crime, war, and human atrocities, has been decreasing steadily, and is at an all time low. Even with the two World Wars of the 20th century, and the never-ending fertilizer factory that is the Middle East.

The list of amazing achievements and real progress, goes on and on. From hunger, to education, to quality of life, to safety, the long-term trends are clear – everything has been, and is, improving. There are of course, looming issues that need addressing. Nuclear proliferation and global climate change being two such examples. But taken as a whole, over time, life has been getting better for just about everyone – factually speaking. The old cliché is true, there are two things you can always count on. First, most things are getting better. Second, most people, most of the time, think most things are getting worse.

This reality should give us pause. Just how informed can those who rant hysterically about everything falling apart, really be? And second, what is it exactly that’s been driving this success story of human advancement?

Let me address the second question first. What has been driving this progress?

That answer admits to multiple factors, two of the largest being free market economics, and our long-standing institutions. And it is those institutions that Frum was speaking to on Maher’s show.

What was it about a tiny Island of English speaking people, which allowed them to become a dominant world power? What was it about the British Empire that made them so successful? If I were forced to sum it up in two words, the answer I would give is – their institutions. Their legal system, beginning with the Magna Carta. Their economic system, which was captured on paper by Adam Smith. Their system of government. Their military system, most especially, their Navy. Their education system, which, at its most elite levels, still remains premier. Institutions – organized structures that built upon the work of previous generations to advance the field. That is in large part, what made England great.

Those institutions gather together qualified individuals for a common purpose. Those professionals then reach consensus with the professionals of other fields, a process that is rarely pretty, and progress, slow as it may seem in a given moment, but impressive as it always is in its aggregate, is made.

That requires people devoted to law. Yes, we need attorneys. It also requires people devoted to trade, banking, education, science, agriculture, engineering, medicine, law enforcement, national security, journalism, and even, regulation. Yes, we need bureaucracies. Just as we need entrepreneurs.

Earlier in the show when Maher interviewed the President, he tried asking a slightly classier version of his ‘aren’t a lot of Americans just dumb’ hypothesis. The President’s answer was that most Americans are just busy working at their jobs, taking care of their families, and paying their bills. They don’t have time to get into the minutia on a subject like Syria, or the latest international Trade bill. And he’s right. That’s why, David Frum explained, we have to be able to trust our institutions. Institutions, which, for the most part, are filled with dedicated specialists who are authorities within their own field. When those institutions themselves are no longer respected, there is nowhere for that active and employed average American, who is busy dropping off the kids at football practice, paying the electric bill, and taking care of grandma, to turn to for counsel. And demagogues of all flavors, swoop in.

My attitude on a lot of things related to public policy softened quite a few years ago when I realized that the easiest thing in the world to do is criticize longstanding institutions you are unqualified to participate in. Problems that have been with us for extended periods, are problems that are by definition, hard to solve. Those kinds of problems don’t admit to simplistic answers. Even if we find such answers comforting. They require study, focus, compromise, and time. They require scholars and veterans from within the field. Men and women who are willing to devote their careers to that particular sub-set of human endeavor. And those men and women require a certain authority, and deserve a certain amount of respect. That authority and respect, afforded to them by the population at large, let’s them get on with their work. The work that’s made all of our lives better – the reason we live longer, safer, healthier, wealthier lives.

When Jill Stein, Milo Yiannopoulos, Alex Jones, Naomi Wolf, Mark Levin, Donald Trump, the cashier at WholeFoods, and the former hippie and now neo-Marxist professor at your local community college start talking about “rigged systems” and the pernicious nature of the “establishment”, what they certainly don’t recognize is that the real threat to human progress isn’t the perpetually out of focus, like every photo of bigfoot you’ve ever seen, caricature of the thing labeled frequently as ‘Them’ – big-media, big-business, big-agriculture, big-pharma, and the rotary club; what’s truly dangerous is their attitude. An attitude that says rather than buckling down and learning, rather than doing the hard work required to pursue a real education in the field, rather than rendering myself qualified to become a peer within this subject and then entering into the arena and engaging in the conversation in a meaningful and important way – I’m going to declare the whole thing corrupt, and lobby to burn it all down to the ground. And while I disagree with Bill Maher on many things, I think he’s better than that.

I don’t ever want to see someone like Alex Jones sitting across the stage from someone like David Brooks. It is beneath Brooks, and it is beneath us – us being every thoughtful American. The tin foil hat crowd doesn’t get a seat at the adult table because they’re unqualified to offer anything that’s not impoverished by comparison with those educated in the topic. They dumb down the discourse. They confuse the already uninformed. They slow progress. They self-righteously lower the tone of the entire conversation, and in the process perform a great disservice to those people who lack the time to gain expertise in a subject because they’re busy taking care of their own lives and making this Nation run. I don’t ever want to see a man like Donald J Trump sitting behind the desk a man like George Herbert Walker Bush once occupied, for the same reason I don’t want to see a witchdoctor in my hospital room alongside my neurologist after I’ve had a stroke. And if you think I’m exaggerating the disparity in maturity and expertise between the two men with such a comparison, you don’t understand the complexity or gravity of that office.

We need to hold the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, the major network newscasts, our mainstream columnists and journalists, and our academic experts and scholars, to high standards. And we need to hold our politicians to the same scrutiny of character that we do our doctors, judges, teachers, and engineers. But, we also need to recognize that we would be fools to believe that having professionals who serve in these fields, who belong to bar associations, who mingle with each other at gatherings, and who’ve devoted their lives and careers to a complicated and nuanced specialties, yes, including the specialty known as politics – is anything other than good.

The massive improvements we human beings have made within the last several centuries hasn’t come about as a result of our purchasing callow utopian policies sprung forth from the mind of idealistic thinkers incapable of distinguishing the perfect from the better. We don’t live longer and have more because every few generations we set fire to our establishment and begin from scratch. Abject poverty and ignorance are our natural state – and we must never forget that it is the very institutions, so derided by the low-priced thinkers on both sides, that helped us climb out of it.

As to the questions I began this essay with – is it true that things have become more corrupt than before, that our system is failing us, that the Nation is in decline?

No, not by any measurable standard.

We lost 620,000 Americans in the civil war. We defeated the global threat of fascism. We faced down what was rightly called the Evil Empire in a cold war, and we survived a constitutional crises brought about by President Nixon. There will always be problems. And lots of people will always believe their generation has been dealt a worse hand than the one that came before. And they will, as they’ve always been, be wrong.

When America has lost all confidence in its longstanding institutions, when the professional establishments, which have produced the progress, are no longer afforded respect, when there are no Walter Cronkites left – that’s when we need to worry. But given the fact that the type of people, of every generation, who profit in conspiracy theories, pessimism, cynicism, anti-intellectualism, utopian idealism, black and white thinking, and uninformed opinion – rarely have the maturity, work ethic, or IQ required to reach positions of responsibility within relevant institutions – I wouldn’t lose too much sleep over it.

Let’s hope next Tuesday, November 8th, I’m not proven wrong.