SWAPPING PUNCHES IS NEVER COUNTER-ATTACKING; THIS IS A MISTAKE OFTEN MADE.
COUNTER ATTACK, and the failure of language.
Here we are in the age of Artificial Intelligence, and the whole A.I. phenomenon is powered by L.L.Ms…
…LARGE LANGUAGE MODELS.
I feel like I am repeating myself, but words matter.
When we take exams, we answer with words, and when we get the words wrong, we get the question wrong, and we fail.
We do not fail because we do not know the subject; we fail because we used the wrong word.
This is not a failure of individuals; it is not your fault or my fault; it is the system that became language.
Or, more to the point, “Working Language”.
And it is a lazy system.
Using a wrong word that the whole world accepts might be looked upon as an acceptable choice, but it is a bad choice; it is not a deliberate mistake; yes, we could always do better, but that still does not make it our fault.
Studying anything, even Kung Fu, is really just about studying new words.
A new language model.
At the heart of Wing Chun’s Fist Logic sits the strategy of Counter-Attack.
What does that word mean?
What have you been told?
Does the word match the action you have been shown?
Or are you accepting the “close enough is good enough’ path, the lazy path?
The word Counter-Attack is not complicated; it means that we are being attacked and responding with a counter to that attack.
So far so good, but what is an attack?
In every walk of life, little mistakes at the beginning of something tend to turn into huge unfixable problems by the end; beginning badly typically ends badly.
On Thursday evening, I asked everyone to tell me what they thought an attack was; not as a gotcha moment, I made it clear we were looking at it through the lens of counter-attack, and to simply explain what the word represented to them at this point in time.
The answers varied, but, and this is totally to be expected, everyone answered from the position of being attacked, of how an attacker was carrying out the attack, which did not in any way get us any closer to knowing what an attack is.
This is how our Mind tries to double-guess us, how it sabotages our best intentions; it hears the question, “What is an attack”? …
…But then decides that what was really asked was “How are we being attacked?”
We do not even notice; why would we? The mind is supervising itself.
This is a bit like asking someone, “How do I get to your house from here?” And they answer us, “Take a Bus”.
Technically correct, but pretty useless.
To have any chance of understanding Counter-Attack, we must understand what an Attack is.
I posted a YouTube Kung Fu fighting vid on the WhatsApp page; if you have not seen it, check it out.
Could you see counter-attacking on that vid?
There were heaps of guys swapping punches- counter-punching.
But there was no counter-attacking.
Different words, different use of language, different actions, different outcomes.
Once people are swapping punches, the attack is over, and the conflict has entered the next phase.
Swapping punches is never counter-attacking; this is the mistake that is often made.
The attack is over once the punch lands on the target; what we have from here on in is either a fight or a beating, no matter who does what, or when.
Understanding this simple premise changes everything about interpersonal conflict, and by extension our training.
If you think that counter-attacking is about stopping punches from landing on us while punching the attacker at the same time, you are conflating the idea with counter-punching, which is just swapping punches, and to see where that goes, refer to the video on WhatsApp.
The strategy of counter-attacking is not a response to an incoming attack.
The strategy of counter-attacking begins with the move that makes the Bad Guy attack us.
If we wait until the attack is happening, we will be in trouble.
Clever Counter-Attacking, which I believe is what we work on, is setting things up so the Bad Guy makes stupid choices when he launches his attack.
An attack that once started cannot be changed, and we step into the middle of that thing and fuck them up.
But if you cannot see this, why would you look for it?
I will expand on this at training and explore it with future blogs; real life is always a work in progress.
