Jack has posted a very enabling piece of writing that touches on what unarmed combat arts are to most men, a crucible where you forge a better self. Most coverage of the lives and methods of fighters throughout time have come in two varieties:

1. Academic, focusing on artifice and the social status of the athlete including the social function of the sport and it collective purpose.

2. Popular biographies focused on the ritual combatant as a celebrity, which, when applied to the ancients, is anachronistic and amounts to us grafting our degeneracy onto earlier, better men.

In today’s world of MMA celebrity douchebags and boxing cowards [each modern cadre representing the opposite of what the ancient version of the discipline was supposed to develop and select for], it is difficult to see that boxing was about developing courage and honor and MMA [pankration and its other parent art, wrestling] dedicated to developing strength and mastery, one providing examples of heroism and the other war leaders and diplomats. There are vestiges of this in today’s Army and Navy boxing programs, but these are housed within ossifying and morally decaying institutions.

Men such as Jack, and his friend Paul, who he quotes in the article, and many of the young men coming to this site for training advice, are engaged in a fundamentalist rebellion against the theft of their soul and the erasure of their masculine heritage every time they train in combat, every time they spar.

Take some time away from watching MMA and take up grapping or boxing and work towards the kind of “Fight Club High” Jack mentioned in his training journal, which is what I take this article to be.