I think men, growing up, you have to go through some form of hardship. You’ve got to harden the metal.

Ice T

The more capable you become in dealing out violence, the more important it is that you understand the potential consequences (guilt, hospital, prison, morgue).

There are two truths Ice T speaks in this video.

One, there are many men who are harder than me. Harder, stronger, faster, more vicious. Some men are killers. I am not a killer.

He said in his book, The Ice Opinion: Ice T “,I’m wasn’t a gangster — I was a thief.”

After he got out of the service, he went back to L.A. and hooked up with his friends from Crenshaw High and the Thirties (I think by Jackson Park) and got involved in bank robberies and jewelry store heists. But he managed to mature and get out of that life.

A big part of this sort of maturing process was to move away from the need to correct every bit of “disrespect” with “retribution.”

In my twenties especially, I had (and frequently encountered) this mindset. People who have “issues with their self-esteem” feel the need to address every imagined sleight with threatened or actual retribution.

For a while I was a roadie for a professional DJ and one of the gigs we did regularly was a restaurant which we turned into a nightclub. I can tell you this equation is true: girls + drunk frustrated guys = potential violence.

Since I was there every week I kept bumping into it. Guys with ruffled feathers. Guys with stuff to “prove.”

Its a mindset bred from fear, mostly based on the imagined consequences of being honest about their experience or capabilities. People with this mindset lie a lot about their fighting experience and their degree of hardness. They are afraid people will see them as weak or cowardly or unexperienced.

What are imagined consequences for most people in the developed world may be real in certain specific habitats (prison, some neighborhoods, some parts of some “second” or “third” world countries). In places where there are scarce resources, men will fight over nothing. People who have nothing to lose (they think) will fight over reputation. Reputation may be all they have.

This was what was happening in those clubs I worked in. In that bar on that night, the perceived scarce resource was women. Guys had frustration over feeling they didn’t have access to the women (so close, so far away!) combined with the fear that they “looked” weak or weren’t respected. Any slight had to be “dealt with.”

Booze magnified this problem.

In one of his books, ex-bouncer Geoff Thompson interviewed a “lad” whose idea of fun was to get drunk and then go to clubs and hang out in the front. He would look for guys with their girlfriends or wives yell out provocative things to them. “Hey, what you doin’ with him? Come and get with a real man!” That sort of thing. Insult her, insult him. The goal was to get the guy to respond in any way he could interpret as a challenge. Even as little as an angry look. This was way easier to provoke when the guy was with a girl. Then the “lad” would confront the guy for responding (“what you looking at, fucker?” and so on) and then sucker punch and savagely attack the guy.

I’m discussing these things not as someone who has completely cured myself but I’m partially cured.

I mostly don’t care what strangers think of me in this “respect” sort of way. If some random guy calls me a pussy, it doesn’t really affect me that much. He doesn’t know me! If it bothers me a little, I can talk myself off the ledge.

I’ve spoken before about road rage. This area is where I started my road to rehabilitation.

When I moved to California, I had to deal regularly with aggressive driving and bad behavior in California. I was from New Hampshire, where there was hardly any traffic to speak of (compared to the Bay Area).

I found myself getting worked up and doing stupid stuff (speeding up, blocking people from getting on the ramp, etc) as “payback” for bad behavior (disrespecting me). Then I realized that those people didn’t know me. They were having their drama with a random car with a some barely seen person inside. Really they were fighting with something in themselves – their attitudes toward the world. It was all mostly projection.

I used to think I couldn’t let people “get away with it.” I had to teach them. You can’t teach a stranger anything with your horn or curses.

I started making sure I always had plenty of time to get to my destinations and quit getting into “contests” with strangers.

I’m putting everything into quotes, because these are all labels you use to describe the interactions but these labels are false. These contests and the “respect” are all empty and meaningless.

Ice T can say “I’m a pussy” because he doesn’t care what you might think about that sentence (or him, if it comes to that). Your opinion doesn’t mean anything. He doesn’t need your respect. This is a healthy perspective.

This is what they call in psychology having healthy borders.

If you have a temper and you are developing violence skills like Wing Chun or some other type of fighting or you are carrying a weapon, there is a good chance something bad is eventually going to happen.

As Geoff Thompson said, the violence is in you. And your violence is a magnet for other people who have the same issues. You’ll stand there screaming into the mirror.

Luckily, in my opinion, people with self-esteem and ego issues cannot really develop a high level of skill in Wing Chun.

To develop a high level of Wing Chun skill, you must overcome your ego and learn how to lose and how to cooperate and not compete with your training partner and to learn not care about always “winning.”

Wing Chun has a built-in filter to clear out the people in whose hands the skill would be a danger to the public.