In retrospect, they got me with The Karate Kid. I was 7 years old when that movie—about a not-particularly-athletic teen who studies martial arts, finds confidence, and then publicly kicks a better-looking teen in the face—hit theaters and solidified my growing sense that, if I was to live happily as the weird and slender person I was turning out to be, I should learn to fight. I became part of the 1980s tae kwon do boom and practiced a series of movements that could arguably debilitate another person, especially if they held still. I went on to formally train in kickboxing, freestyle wrestling, and Brazilian jiu-jitsu, picking up a general understanding of boxing and judo along the way.
Let me be clear: Although I could feint an uppercut and transition to a double-leg takedown pretty reliably, at no point was I good at any of it. Mostly, my experience of fighting trained opponents has been an experience of losing. The question of why someone not especially talented at combat sports would pay the costs of participating in them might be answered by armchair psychology; I am willing to consider that I am a masochist or reactively fixated on violence. What I believe, though, is that I love fighting not in spite of my athletic limitations but because of them. Fighting is hard. The defining aspect of combat sports is discovering that you are worse at fighting than you had assumed and that getting better will be a grueling process that will chew you up, physically and mentally, unless you spend a life-altering amount of time on it. Therein lies the appeal.
If you have not trained to fight in ways that involve live sparring against resisting opponents, you should know that it is the kind of activity you can rearrange everything else around. The demands, which are not just muscular and cardiovascular but also neurochemical, make the early months of training a totalizing experience. Grappling, in particular, means learning to consciously override your instinct to roll over, flail your legs, or do any of the other reflex-type behaviors that make you even easier for a practiced grappler to hold down. For adults, the training process tends to coincide with the realization that you have to eat cleaner and sleep better than you had before if you hope to enjoy this hobby. To paraphrase Fight Club, fighting becomes the reason to keep your nails short, to order salad instead of fries, and to stop drinking on weeknights.
Those people who make fighting the organizing principle of their life are participating in what is more and more referred to as “warrior culture.” This phrase is colloquial and imprecise; obviously, my ability to hit a scissor sweep from the guard position does not make me a warrior in the same sense as a Tokugawa samurai or a guy who did two years with the Navy SEALs. Yet we share certain values. Some of these values—such as a disciplined commitment to physical fitness—are good and, in my opinion, necessary correctives to the enervating distractions of 21st-century living. Others—such as an eagerness to engage someone in combat—work in the gym, ring, and battlefield but become counterproductive and even destructive outside of those contexts.
As a lifelong dilettante in warrior culture, I have watched it evolve and become more popular with a mixture of excitement and dread. When I started following mixed martial arts in the late 1990s, it was considered a niche interest or a pox on society, depending on whom you asked. Today, MMA is lapping at the White House lawn, and its rise speaks to a diffuse but growing appreciation for fighting at nearly every level of American life. Two decades of war in the Middle East conducted by an all-volunteer Army created a generation of veterans who understand their experiences as fundamentally different from those of most Americans—correctly, because they have put their lives at risk in ways the rest of us have not. At the opposite end of the warrior-culture spectrum, the market for T-shirts with skulls and guns on them—indicative of the wearer’s sense that combat is cool, even if he has not, strictly speaking, done it himself—has gotten too big to ignore.
A certain pop Bushido has taken hold in the United States: a warrior culture that is variously committed to actually fighting but united by its dismissal of compromise, self-doubt, and other qualities essential to a healthy republic. The attitudes this warrior culture has awakened are likely to persist for a long time, and we should try to understand them, if only to consider what a better warrior culture might look like.
I have seen good warrior culture firsthand. The best gyms maintain an atmosphere of enthusiasm that falls somewhere between fraternity and religious order, and this atmosphere, more than the promise of winning fights, kept me coming back. Renzo Gracie Academy, a world-renowned gym in New York City where I learned jiu-jitsu in the aughts, was a prime example of a place that valued new students as much as it did its most talented players. After my first day—which amounted to 90 minutes of tapping out to people of all ages, body types, and genders—a prizefighter I recognized from television stopped me on my way into the locker room. “What did you think?” he asked. “Was it for you?” I assured him it was, ignoring the grinding sensation in my middle thoracic spine as he shook my hand.
The thing people kept saying to me at Renzo Gracie Academy was that jiu-jitsu will change your life. Even though I found that many of the resulting changes were orthopedic, fighting did confer a particular wisdom. Hard sparring is a thrilling confrontation, not with your opponent so much as with yourself. You learn the limits of your abilities and how difficult it really is to expand them. In many areas of modern life, outcomes are determined by a series of subjective authorities: bosses, landlords, loan officers. If you convince these people that you are trying your best, they may sometimes give you what you want—or at least think about it. The sheer number of important outcomes that depend on these assessments creates the impression that you succeed in life by being the kind of person who deserves to.
Your jiu-jitsu classmates, however, will not let you choke them unless you leave them no choice. It doesn’t matter how hard you’ve been working the drills. You think you’ve got it, and then you realize you don’t, until one day it works and you have concrete proof that you’re getting better. This repeated engagement with your limitations, which is frustrating right up until it becomes satisfying, instructs you not just in the techniques of fighting but also about your own character. You realize how easy it is to overestimate your abilities, and the humiliation of this realization is tempered, over time, by meaningful improvement. In this way, you stop basing your self-image on who you would like to be and develop a more reliable sense of what you can and cannot do. For those of us who vacillate between arrogance and deep-seated anxiety—just to name one personality type—training offers the wisdom that we’re terrible at fighting but not as terrible as before.
This wisdom is wonderful but also extremely specific. The problem is that the sheer amount of time and energy you invest in developing it makes it appear applicable to everything, the way that Neil Armstrong probably felt, deep down, that life is a lot like landing on the moon. Within martial-arts circles, the jiu-jitsu community seems particularly vulnerable to the illusion that it has discovered not just a better way to fight on the ground but also a better way to live. In April, for example, the former open-weight world champion Alexandre Ribeiro posted a video in which he praises grappling as a democratic activity that offers “the answer for all the problems in the world,” among which he lists “distancing” and “hate,” as well as “opinions.” Anyone familiar with the jiu-jitsu mindset will recognize, in his message, a common but misguided sentiment: Why can’t we all just grapple, an activity in which people from all walks of life are equal but that I happen to be especially good at?
The other problem is that you don’t have to belong to a gym to buy into warrior culture and start feeling superior to those who don’t. The number of guys walking around in American Fighter T-shirts who are not, shall we say, in fighting trim is a testament to the phenomenon of warrior-culture creep. Prizefighters, jiu-jitsu dads, gun nuts, grindset types with to-do lists on their mirrors, UFC fans, and manosphere podcasters have varying degrees of combat proficiency, but they are likely to agree that fighting rules—both in the sense that it is cool and in the sense that being good at it can make you better at life.
What unites these subscribers to America’s growing warrior culture is not their personal relationship to fighting but rather their perspective on what role the warrior, with the wisdom afforded by his abilities, should play in society. Representative Derrick Van Orden, a Republican from Wisconsin and retired Navy SEAL, expressed this perspective when he argued that Americans who didn’t enlist after 9/11 have no right to criticize Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth for his role in the “Signalgate” story. “Stand down,” he wrote on X, “the Warriors will take it from here.” (Hegseth has generally been preoccupied by what he calls the “warrior ethos,” including during his recent summoning of top military brass for a lecture about fitness and grooming.)
One of the central claims of warrior culture is that fighting is more authentic than ordinary life. This claim is arguably true. Success in combat is less subjective than success in many other activities and therefore leaves less room for favoritism, rent seeking, and old-fashioned sandbagging. It is hard to lie to yourself about your training, and that makes training an antidote to the illusion—common across American life—that who you are and whether you “know yourself” are more important than anything you actually do.
Although this insight from fighting is valuable, the accompanying claim that fighting confers a kind of universal expertise is not true at all. The traits that lead someone to make fighting their profession include determination and self-discipline, but they also tend to include other qualities that are not ideally suited to public life. The MMA journalist Ben Fowlkes has pointed out this phenomenon among professional fighters: In order to climb into a ring with a highly trained person who will try to knock you unconscious, you need a level of self-confidence that comes closer to delusion than wisdom. Many careers in prizefighting are defined by economic hardship, spoiled relationships, and brain damage. The champions of the world are men and women who saw these outcomes and likely thought, Sure, but I’ll be fine.
Most people participating in American warrior culture are not prizefighters, of course, and relatively few are veterans. I wonder if the excesses of our present warrior culture are driven not by martial-arts enthusiasts or by the relatively small number of men and women who have served in the U.S. military, but rather by the overwhelming majority who have never fought at all. So few Americans have fought seriously that the warrior can seem like a figure of legend, a real-life version of the kung fu master or old-West gunslinger.
Perhaps that is what Ribeiro meant when he said that everyone should do jiu-jitsu. Everyone could learn from the experience of being taken down and trying to escape, those moments when your freedom depends on your ability to overpower someone else. Through this ordeal, they can understand the joy of fighting, sure, but also its consequences—which are, in many cases, worse than the consequences of never fighting at all.
