What Is The True Price Of Fanaticism?
The following is an excerpt from my book, “The True Believers” which was recently re-released in a 2nd edition. It’s a story about the darker side of martial arts communities, and how great things became corrupted by codependency, fanaticism, and yes, money. Some of the highlights in the book are:
- An ever-evolving pseudo-religion within the art featuring power animals, holy places, magic numbers, and coded language.
- A business model that had students paying thousands of dollars to earn black belts in as little as six months.
- Failing spectacularly to film and produce their own reality show
- The constant rat race to get, and stay, in the “inner circle” of students.
In this excerpt, I talk about “The True Believer Takeover”, a period of time around 2011/2012 where a younger, more eager generation of students took over our martial art, Seibukan Jujutsu. This new breed of students was more willing to sacrifice for the art than ever before, and I was finally starting to see the price of fanaticism. . .
Note: I have added a few explanations of terms and subheading to break up the reading
The Takeover
The fact that not everyone was a True Believer made it harder for us to acknowledge our growing fanaticism. There were always just enough exceptions around that we could cite to refute the claim we were getting lost in fantasyland.
But the people who were deep in fantasyland, who couldn’t separate themselves from their role in Seibukan Jujutsu, were the influencers. They had a close relationship with Kancho [the Seibukan founder and leader]. He told them things he didn’t tell anyone else. Everyone saw them as True Believers and tried to model that.
And me? I was slowly getting mature enough to see all this. I was passing my True Believer phase. Maybe I was even entering my open skepticism phase. But I was still a kid. I wasn’t ready to be the guy who would burst the bubble. The guy who would ruin the party. I loved these people, and it wasn’t worth losing them or having them turn on me.
Part of me wishes someone in Seibukan, like Kancho, would have sat me down and said, “Look, kid, there’s more to life than martial arts and black belts. Have something else to show for all this when it’s over.”
Thank God I didn’t mess anything up that couldn’t be fixed. But others did, and they paid the price of fanaticism. The truth is, I watched a lot of friends make big sacrifices in the name of Seibukan Jujutsu.
The high price of fanaticism
I saw marriages end over martial arts. I knew a guy who was a True Believer in Seibukan. He nearly lost the mother of his child because, as he said, she didn’t respect his commitment to the art. Because he wanted to train four nights a week, and she had the nerve to request he pay a bit more attention to his newborn.
I knew another guy who quit his job and would commute down to Monterey for the week. He would only go home on weekends. This guy had two children, one of them a little girl. He gave us five days a week for a year; His family only got two.
I saw kids pass up or drop out of college, so they could train more. Guys dropped out of the military so they could come right back to Monterey and be uchideshi.
I found out about someone who destroyed their own car and used the insurance money to pay their uchideshi fees. To hear them tell it, they had manifested abundance through creativity.
All these people needed was for someone talk sense to them. To tell them that in ten years, they’d realize they should have stayed in school, called that girl back, or spent more time with their kids.
But it was the exact opposite. All people in Seibukan did was reaffirm these terrible choices. You committed insurance fraud? Separated from your family? Awesome, you made the right choice. No one was willing to challenge the notion that Seibukan was more important than anything else.
And in the background. . .
And in the background was always the money. Hundreds and hundreds of dollars a month if you wanted to be an uchideshi. That got you the opportunity to get promoted twice a year; each promotion would cost another couple hundred dollars depending on the rank. Yes, Kancho worked out some deals when people couldn’t afford to pay, and everyone would say that proved he didn’t care about the money.
But let’s be honest: Kancho was the reason they didn’t have money in the first place. They couldn’t afford it because they were already giving everything they had to him.
Towards the end of it all, I had a list of restaurants in town I couldn’t go to. I couldn’t go because one of the uchideshi would be serving me. Any money they made, or money I tipped them, would just go back to Kancho. I didn’t want to be a part of that.
At one point, many of the uchideshi in the dojo were so poor and unwilling to get jobs, they actually joined a pyramid scheme. For a couple months, I had people trying to sell me a miracle product made from Alaskan blackberries or whatever. They were posting flyers for it in the dojo. Kancho even got in on it, mentioning it in a couple of classes.
So what’s the real price of fanaticism? Of being a True Believer?
The deeper you get, the more it will ask of you. Your life outside of Seibukan? It’s a distraction, normalcy, being a follower. Seibukan is the solution, the only solution.
And it’s a jealous master.
The True Believers is on sale from now until the end of December. You can buy it on kindle for $2.99, or on paperback for $7.99
It was reviewed on this very site by Denise Vasel, and currently has a 100% five-star review rating on Amazon
He runs a site called HighPercentageMartialArts.com, dedicated exclusively to statistics in martial arts.
He wrote a book about fanaticism in martial arts, called The True Believers.
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- Why I Changed my Mind About Competition - October 22, 2018
Hey Louis, I’m not sure if you remember me but i beleive we may have met at a taikai. I used to train under a kyoshi (now hanshi) in the east bay. I was suprised to see this because it seems like you are one of the only other people in seibukan who notices this. I spent nearly 6 years in the art, was the 4th 12 year old shodan, and no matter how hard i trained or how many hours i put in it wasnt enough and i was always being pushed to dedicate more of my life to it. I lost a good chunk of my later childhood, people from the art tried to get involved in my private life, and i was pretty much being groomed to be an uchidechi and future dojo cho. The worst part is I didnt realize anything sketchy going on until after i got pushed out. While i don’t think the art itself is bad, many of the higher ranking shihan, especially the one i trained under seem to put a large focus on blind loyalty and the dedication. All i would ever hear is how “seibukan is a family”, but as soon an anyone left the art it’s like they were an outcast.