Sapere Aude: A New Year’s Resolution.

As 2009 comes to an end and takes the first decade of a new century with it, I must say that it has been a great time! In 2000, I was working as a patrol officer and teaching occasionally. I knew I wanted to teach and learn much more. If I had set a timeline or a goal for 2010, there is no way that I could’ve predicted I’d be getting to do anywhere near as much as I do today in the training world. I owe a great debt to those who have supported, encouraged, assisted, corrected and, occasionally, chastised me since I left full time law enforcement in 2001 to start teaching full time. The biggest thanks has got to the men and women who have, whether under Valhalla or I.C.E., taken the time, effort and energy to become certified Combat Focus Shooting Instructors and help me evolve and spread the program to more students. My staff and outside instructors, and everyone who has worked in the background with us, are the key motivators to making changes, developing new drills and their work with students often provides me the time and opportunity to work on improving the program. Of course, without the students and others interested in our work, it would all be for nothing… so Much Thanks to everyone who has attended a course, read an article or book, watched a DVD or TV Segment or sent an email with a training question!

Last year, I offered the policy of Respectful Irreverence as a New Year’s Resolution. This year, the theme will be Sapere Aude, “Dare to Know”. Originally, this Latin phrase was used to advise people to “trust their own reason”. Don’t take someone else’s word for it and don’t automatically doubt your own logic or impression of a situation. If something doesn’t make sense to you, figure it out. In this way, Sapere Aude ties in very well with the concept of Respectful Irreverence.

Immanuel Kant

In the late 18^th Century, Imannuel Kant used the phrase in his famous essay “What is Enlightenment?”. This essay has become widely regarded as the defining statement of what that period of time in the western world was all about. His advice at the opening of the article expresses the policy of  Sapere Aude.

It is this concept of daring to know that I have tried to live by for several years and that I am redoubling my effort to concentrate on in the coming decade. I offer it to you as advice as well. Don’t rest on your laurels, don’t blindly trust the “experts”, don’t accept tradition as the best choice. Age and Repetition does not always equal Wisdom… education, research and experience are what lead to understanding. It is understand that then allows us to explain something. I always warn new instructors in any of my programs never to use “Rob says…” as an explanation for a concept or as an answer to a student question. Everything that we teach has much better justifications than my opinion! It is vital that people understand information and explanations without solely relying on the opinion of others. Until you have “dared to know” through questioning, experiencing and learning, you shouldn’t trust a piece of information arbitrarily. Sometimes, that’s an easy process. If a friend tells you a restaurant is great and you recommend it to someone else based on a third party, you open yourself up to not being able to explain why it is great or why it wasn’t. Go to the restaurant yourself, get the experience and then decide whether or not you will recommend it. Sometimes, it’s not that easy. You might not be able to experience weightlessness, for example. That said, understanding “weightlessness” through learning about physics, gravity and mass combined with researching the experiences and experiments of others can allow to you to know “weightlessness” very well and be capable of explaining it to someone else.

The personal defense and tactical training worlds are full of examples of what Kant describes as “The officer says, “Do not argue, drill!””… few things are more frustrating to me than an instructor who won’t or can’t explain why his drill is important. Students who don’t think that they should be asking why, or have been conditioned not to, are almost as frustrating.

We are in a political moment in the United States where many people are concerned about exactly the same things that were bothering Kant and his Enlightenment period peers. The Nanny State and other forces are aligned all around us to convince us that they know better and we don’t need to take responsibility, accountability or initiative for ourselves. I say that they are wrong.

As we move forward into the second decade of this century, let’s all Dare to Know as much as we can. To do that, we need to recognize that there are things we don’t know and that much of what we do “know” might not give us a complete or even accurate picture. Through this process of challenging existing information and searching for new data and then sharing our information, we can move closer to knowing what is best.

Good Luck in the coming Year. Sapere Aude!

-RJP