Recently, three men have asked me about the utility of silence in their training and in their day-to-day negotiation of the crazy space we find ourselves living in. I have literally survived 38 years at night in the most dangerous city in America via silence in the presence of implicit enemy threat, menacing aggression and direct belligerent engagement.

First, we have to recognize that silence is not the only way, that vocalization is a deep and potent masculine toolkit.

-Even speaking facilitates alliances with other men, calms women and teaches children.

-Speaking in low tones is a way to get an enemy closer so that he might be dealt with.

-A shout, correctly placed, can startle your enemy and release your adrenaline for immediate use.

-Verbal engagement can be used to escalate hostility, intimidate, disarm, distract and otherwise compromise the object of your aggression.

These last two methods are those favored by the packs of ebon warriors who hunted me across Baltimore for decades, and they have proved useful in frustrating the use of the first two and cracking the minds of passive palefaces. However, all these methods have proven inferior to silence, in bad odds encounters. Verbal aggression is a tactic of the predatory group or the powerful control and domination personality. Once you get on the verbal scale, escalation nullifies the verbiage of concord with the din of discord.

There is also a reason why a postmodern warrior would not be loud and draw attention to himself, due to the apparatus of the surveillance state, which is not far from vocal and facial recognition. This, coupled with the dominance of firearms—distance weapons—makes the silence of the hunter all the more important, especially since every man committed to defending himself and his family is by definition in the crosshairs of the state.

The base reason I have used silence is that I was always outnumbered or under-sized or more poorly armed than my attackers and I had no desire to become agitated and muddy my state-of-mind. Also with ebon warriors, cohesion is built by a verbal feedback mechanism. This is apparent in their so often disastrous interactions with their allies the police. The police exist to disarm us so that we can be attacked by unarmed mobs of criminals. However, due to the hostile escalation and agitation cohesion rituals at the core of ebon American culture, the commanding nature of police brings both parties into the hostility feedback loop and causes a lot of friendly fire episodes. Note how cops always yell, just like hoodrats.

Another reason to limit vocalization is more prosaic and is well illustrated by the photo of Dennis the Menace, Sean and myself in the cage which is up at .

Dennis just fought three hard rounds with a much more experienced fighter and seems energized.

Look at how tired Sean looks. This state did not serve him well in his fight 45-minutes later. Sean had yelled instructions to Dennis in a clear commanding voice for 6 2-minute rounds and then talked to him for 40-50 seconds in between each. This was a superb job of coaching. But it represented a high energy outlay, what old time fight coaches called dissipation, a state that can also result from having sex before a fight. There was also the lack of internal focus. When Sean should have been visualizing his fight, calmly walking himself through the combative dreamland on the near horizon, he was attending to his fighter and placing all of his energy there. Not only was he drained, he was out of internal calibration. In my short 4 years as a general manager I was attacked without perception of the act, hit once and missed by a fool, because I devoted all of my energy to solving other people’s problems and had lost my edge. I was the only person in the building that could get hurt on my watch without bringing a law suit.

Beyond the specifics of ebon warrior abatement, the silence and stoicism of the hunter is a man’s natural combative state. Cops will clamor and yell like menstruating women, but snipers and SPEC Ops warriors are not likely to achieve success behind enemy lines acting like a hoodrat or a woman.

Silence—especially in the realm of violence—is truly golden.

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