Be Undefended, Not Defenseless

There are many Lessons from Aikido, two of which are near-opposites.

The experience of learning a martial art periodically illustrates just how much better more experienced practitioners are. Over time, you have a sense that your own skills are improving, but now and then you’ll be practicing with someone whose abilities are far superior to your own, and you realize that if you ended up in a real fight with them, you’d be disabled pretty quickly — or dead.

On the other hand, your practice will also teach you that you are far from defenseless. You get a sense of how quickly people move, how much they weigh, and what a safe distance is. You build some very automatic reflexes that can save you at important moments. You learn to break your fall or duck a blow. You likely even collect favorite ways of neutralizing an assailant.

What you then realize is the value of dropping your guard voluntarily. That’s what it means to be undefended, as opposed to merely defenseless.

Design from trust works well when its proponents are observant and undefended, not naive and defenseless.

This is one of the Principles of Design from Trust.

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