From the forthcoming book Force: Contested Autonomy
Copyright © 2026 by Jeth Randolph & James LaFond / All Rights Reserved.
No part of this work may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.
Force Alchemy
Entering Through The Physical Gateway
JR - 20/08/26
I was talking with a mate of mine recently. He texted to tell me he had jacked in his corporate sales job—the one that had been grinding him down—and was setting up his own business. This was good news. He had been troubled by the nature of that work for a while and was now striking out on his own, becoming his own boss running a residential and commercial moving company. He had sat on the idea for some time, but was finally going for it, and better yet, already had work lined up at the end of the month.
We met at the Modern Agonistics fight weekend out in Pennsylvania after having conversed online for some time. He had taken part despite limited fight experience. Others present could relate, having limitations of their own. Despite this he had found the guts to push through and impress everyone assembled with his tenacity and resilience.
He attributed the experience with giving him the confidence to make a big life change: changing careers and seizing more control over his own future and direction.
Seeking To Influence Passivity?
He sent me a link to a social-media post showing a new “influencer” craze (a more accurate term might be “effluencer”...). People travel to China, dress like Buddhist monks, adopt a praying or martial pose, and get beaten with sticks by real – and obviously bemused - monks as though undergoing intense Shaolin training.
Many of the videos featured Western women and a few lost-looking males collapsing in pain for the cameras to display their “next-levelness” to their followers. It is the equivalent of getting a spiritual tattoo on an exotic foreign holiday, the cost of which cannot be imagined by the local inking you as he shakes his head and wonders why you would want the word for “Twat” in the local dialect permanently on your skin.
He said he was surprised by the strength of his reaction to these images and wondered what it was about them that triggered it. He had fought with sticks at the weekend, yet these people had gone halfway round the world simply to be beaten with them. What was that about?
Going somewhere to fight takes balls, whoever you are. These videos, however, are empty performance: a purchasing of the illusion of transformative experience, mixed with the inverse racism of insisting that it must happen in the Far East and not closer to home in order to have meaning.
The core difference is far simpler. One involves queuing subserviently to be beaten. The other involves the blows you may receive while fighting. There is a huge gulf between the two in terms of mindset.
To expect force, yet to meet it with force of your own, and to experience the alchemy of inner change that comes from that, this is the real thing.
Stepping Forward
The single requirement of the weekend was that you must fight. You could select which fights you wanted to take part in to a greater or lesser degree, but when you arrived on Friday it was with the absolute certainty that over the weekend you would be in a fight and punched in the face, choked, submitted, beaten with sticks, stabbed, or some combination thereof.
This has a powerful weeding-out effect. It keeps away posers, cowards, and tourists (1). It is not a stand-around-watching-demos-for-two-days / pose-for-a-picture-with-the-name-guy / buy-a-T-shirt-and-go-straight-to-Instagram type of event. Understandably, not many average guys want to sign up for that, especially in the middle of nowhere with no phone coverage.
Full-contact, one-minute scraps with no weight classes, undertaken for honourable competition and self-discovery alone. No trophies, no rankings, no material stakes. An honest test of will, skill, and character. No one was perfect, but we showed up. Personally, I felt really afraid of getting injured so far from home. This was exacerbated by the health relapse I was having, which made my confidence take a nosedive around men who were younger and more physically capable than I, several of them with more direct fight experience. But the desire to take part outweighed the fear. The point is not victory or peak condition; it is the willingness to step forward anyway.
James and I had spent time going through ideas with our friend the day before fight day. As we were both dealing with our own problems and limitations from various physical ailments, we could understand what he felt to a certain degree. We appreciated how hard he was trying and gained a great deal of respect for him because of it.
A World Of Predation
The weekend experience was not special in itself, not just about fighting, this is important as I wish to make it clear that it was just a vehicle, a simple, direct means of reconnecting with a part of the self that has been suppressed in most of us: the impulse to fight back, to connect with and cultivate resistance.
What the weekend revealed in miniature is true on a larger scale: to submit oneself to fight training is to enter through a physical gateway. Your own and your opponent’s flesh, bone and weapons form the posts and the door. There will be the necessity of impact and discomfort to force that gate open and to internalise the lessons that lie beyond the threshold into the fabric of your thinking, being and awareness.
And here it ceases to be about mere physical fighting and becomes instead about the spirit of defiance against that which stands against you.
The world is a total contest of wills imposing on one another for resources and space—sometimes simply for a space to “be” and nothing more. No area of existence escapes challenge or boundary-testing as one progresses through life. There seem to be no end of novel and unexpected ways that humans attempt to prey on each other for temporary gain, whether material or otherwise.
The spirit of force seems the only reliable way to survive this experience: the attitude of creating space and taking it, of imposing rather than merely giving ground.
I spoke this week with a young woman who had expected a problem with one male, a disrespectful loser, and needed to call him out on it. She found the thought of it intimidating but stepped forward anyway, only to arrive at the meeting and find three men to face instead of one. Rather than back down, she did not give ground. She said her piece, defended her position, and prevailed. She had only minimal experience of fight training, and it wasn’t something she wished to pursue, but this was the same thing in another form: resistance activated in the face of an opposing will. This is exactly the attitude I am talking about. The price of admission to transcendence is no longer caring about the outcome, only refusing to quietly fade away.
The Lie that surrounds so many aspects of our lives deceives us into thinking that only safety and the acquisition of “More” is the answer to any feeling of meaninglessness. But this is a false solution. If one sees the way force actually plays out in the world, the deeper path becomes the ability to enjoy having less and to feel aliveness through the act of struggle itself.
The Malign Presence
Our friend replied in text that he believed the idea of taking pride in “how much I can take” is a con and a lie designed to keep a man down, I was reminded of those slapping contests where competitors passively absorb brain-damaging strikes to demonstrate supposed toughness.
James and I have talked about a type of presence in the world, a “malign” one that seeks to oppose the very instinct to fight back against personal negation, whatever form that takes in your life. It can be seen in odd encounters and events that seem sent specifically to hamper and crush your resistive spirit. But once you see these “sendings” for what they are, the presence’s grip on you weakens. Whether the Presence is external, psychological, spiritual, or simply the pattern we perceive in repeated encountered opposition is less important than recognising what it does: it conditions us to surrender before resistance has even been attempted, to negate the point of even trying.
The last thing this malign Presence, the adversary of your fighting impulse, wants is for you to realise you can hit back. That is the tipping point at which you cease to be malleable.
And so, there is a ring of truth to the idea that a con is being played by selling passive toughness. It is honourable to be beaten in combat. It is an absolute dishonour to be beaten in a posture of supplication.
Non-Friction in a Frictional World
The practical goal of a self-directed life I sometimes refer to as “Non-friction in a frictional world.” For the average person this means avoiding problems with both criminals and authority (2), slipping through the cracks, and preserving autonomy by minimising unnecessary collisions with either, or both.
And yet, without the prior acceptance of life as contest and struggle, and without the agency and will to impose oneself when required, that self-directed life remains impossible. Non-friction is the natural desired state that preserves you. Sometimes, however, friction is the only necessary means to reach and protect it.
Force training forges exactly the internal capacity that makes intelligent non-friction possible. Once one has internalised the willingness to generate force—to push back, to resist—only then can one choose when to apply it and when to slip through the cracks, rather than living in a permanent state of evasion or, worse, submission.
Entering Through The Physical Gateway
In training, as in life: everyone dies. I was stabbed to death several times by students last night (and every week) but not without considerable resistance. That is the spirit in a nutshell.
The attempt itself, refusing by whatever means the encroachment and the imposition of an outside will – whatever form it takes, despite every physical failing, limitation or adverse condition, is the true inner alchemy.
Connect with it.
Cultivate it.
In my friend’s life it is his refusal to submit to a career that kills his spirit, and the impulse to strike out on his own.
In the young woman’s life it is the refusal to take crap and the demand to be respected.
Everyone hopes they may move through the world and find that place of non-friction, as though it will arrive through wishful thinking.
Be smart, pick your battles… when you can, consider ahead of time what you’re willing to lose, but remember always that you weren’t put on this world to just take shit.
When the malign presence comes knocking, the gate opens only for those who understand force and are willing to walk through it fighting.
Notes;
1 - https://www.jamesrandersen.com/home/misc#h.ulsq1x2bmfb
2 - Perhaps one and the same, who knows?.
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"I was stabbed to death several times by students last night (and every week) but not without considerable resistance."
Time for limited-run t-shirt ... 'Death is my training partner"
Fantastic sorry I missed this year's man weekend. Will be there next year