How Renzo Gracie and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Can Solve Most Of America’s Problems

Growing up, there was a kid at my elementary school who spent years doing karate. He walked around like he was the toughest kid on the planet. Then one day, another kid decided fkkk it, and took a swing at him. Karate kid fell and had no response but to stammer away and tell the other kid that his dad was a lawyer and he would sue him.  

As Mike Tyson once said, “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.”

Karate didn’t seem to offer much of a plan (but I guess having a lawyer dad did).

That experience formed the prevailing view I had of martial arts for much of my life – martial arts confers something along the lines of delusional confidence and not much else.

Fights are not some beautifully sequenced affairs a la the movie The Matrix but sloppy and awkward and won by whoever is bigger, more aggressive and doesn’t understand the legal ramifications of a physical assault charge.

It wouldn’t be until years later that that view would change decisively.

I was living abroad and alone and needed to take out my existential angst.

I tried boxing at first.

But there is a problem with boxing – you can’t practice the sport at full force. If you spar with someone, you get hit repeatedly in the head and that in the end leads to CTE issues. So sure, if you want to be a professional boxer then take that risk but otherwise it is not worth it.

It was then that a friend suggested I try Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. He promised me that a skilled BJJ practitioner could take a boxer in a real fight and showed me the video of the first UFC fight to prove it. In that fight, a tiny spec of a human named Royce Gracie destroys all his competitors, submitting his final opponent, the giant Ken Shamrock, in less than a minute (see here).

When I returned to New York, I enrolled at Renzo Gracie in midtown.

When you first roll with someone who is experienced, it is as Sam Harris describes, like stepping into the deep end of a pool and drowning. Your opponent can effortlessly control you and submit you. It doesn’t matter how hard you work or relative size difference – you tap in seconds.

Unlike boxing, you can go as hard as you want in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and not suffer any concussive damage – you just have to tap before you pass out or break your arm.

You start out tapping constantly but then overtime you get better and learn to tap others.

It becomes this exhilarating affair of being killed and killing.

More importantly though, you feel something different after this work out – an almost primal satisfaction. It’s the same feeling that our ancestors probably felt when they killed an animal or defended their turf. It’s a feeling that men today who shop at Whole Foods and are generations removed from the realities of war rarely encounter.

To be clear, I’m not yearning for the day when we sent young men to the front lines so they could get mowed down by mortar shells. It is wonderful that humanity has moved past those types of large-scale conflicts.  

That said, Tyler Durden is still right – there is something about the world of placid consumerism that just doesn’t sit quite right with the male psyche.

Extremist movements and mass shootings and general angst are all an outgrowth of that unsettled feeling that men have about this new reality – a reality that doesn’t really need them to do the thing they were bred to do – to hunt and to fight. 

Brazilian Jiu Jitsu offers an elegant solution to that.

Here is a means by which someone can learn how to actually fight without causing brain damage. They can quell whatever existential angst is bubbling up inside themselves and gain self-confidence.

But more than endowing self-confidence, Brazilian jiu jitsu offers a form of leveling and community that this country needs more than ever right now.

The only way a multi-ethnic democracy like the United State can survive is if everyone commits to the idea of being American. The identity politics that has consumed this country shatters that idea and has turned America into a firmament of competing tribal groups that live in various online echo chambers who are growing increasingly at odds with one another. 

The only place on the planet right now (that I have discovered at least) that is not consumed by those tribal politics is the blue basement of Renzo Gracie.

A Brazilian Jiu Jitsu class is the one place where your income, your race, where you went to school – none of that matters. What matters is can you choke the other guy out.  

But beyond this leveling, there is a deeper form of human-to-human respect that gets created by these experiences. During those six minutes that you roll, you both are transported back in time to some Neolithic reality when we struggled for existence every day with one another. You’re back to being a hunter again and you can’t help but respect your fellow hunters and the general fragility of existence.

We’ve forgotten all of that.

We have done such a good job of solving basic survival problems that we have turned into a nation of fat diabetics who spend all day on the internet getting offended and attacking one another over silly things.   

Brazilian jiu jitsu is our way out.

Go take a class at Renzo Gracie and get choked out and you’ll get it.