Submitted by Abbas Raza, Feb 15, 2008 03:37

I have been fascinated by the sudden outbreak of violence in many situations myself, not least because I used to be a hot-tempered young man and didn't back down in many situations when I should have. I made a couple of observations in my brawling days: 1) often the weaker man attacked first in a situation of escalating abusive language, presumably to try and gain the advantage of surprise (my own preferred technique when faced with a much larger man was to throw the first punch while in the middle of saying a complicated sentence to him--it works well), 2) Even in the middle of a violent fight, and even with tempers at maximum, most people (except the psychopathic) take care not to do lasting damage to their opponent. The idea is to knock the other person out quickly or at least gain dominance, so that the fight can end quickly without serious damage to either side. (Think of the decisive head-butt--a thing of beauty--delivered by Zidane to the Italian taunting him in the World Cup Final.) One wants to damage the other's pride and ego, not their body. Hence no one normally tries to gouge out another person's eye, or bite their nose off, or tear off their genitals, for example (except Mike Tyson, of course). 3) It is very hard, if not impossible, to continue to hit a man after he is obviously beaten, or lying in a foetal position on the ground, although sometimes I have seen people spit on their beaten opponent just to show their contempt, even if they are no longer willing to hit him. 4) Some men like to fight, and among these men there is no loss of honor even when they lose a fight, because at least they had the heart to jump in. 5) In my case, the surest (and really only) way to provoke me into a fight was to assume that I was scared to do so. This made me fight to prove that my opponent might beat me, but could not scare me. I don't know why this was so important to me. Probably some insecurity about my own courage. Oh, well... I'll leave the psychoanalysis to someone else.

Thanks for a very interesting review!

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