MMA Is Fake, Pro Wrestling Is Real

When nothing is sacred, rituals get dumb.

Old school Martial Artists were not into bro-science or TRT, but subtler things like Chi.

“Chi” and things like it don’t cut muster to be “real” by our reckoning, and so they are, at best, interesting artifacts of early pattern recognition that could potentially be imagined into a more “real” force like in a Marvel movie or something. Beyond that, they are only of mild anthropological interest, if not just laughable ignorance.

The all-seeing eye of the iphone camera has proven this again and again. The results go viral: Some Kung-Fu master from some small village is shown to be able to defeat enemies with only the wave of his hand or his students go flying backward with an effortless push. He is invited to “prove” his powers by some Western fighter, who turns out to be quite immune to his Chi. The poor village master is beaten and humiliated, and we laugh at justice against silly superstition.

What we actually have here is a monstrous mismatch of Chi, just not in the obvious way: The Western fighter is the unwitting beneficiary of unprecedented levels of hyper-Chi.

For one, the global village that backs him is so powerful that he would never have to fear the retribution of the village master’s local government or students. Further, the Westerner, thanks to 500 years of specialization, is allowed to focus on which chemicals will increase the pounds-per-square-inch-per-second-per-second of his right hook by half-degrees. All of these advantages (and many more too subtle to be listed) mean that he senses total epistemic dominance in his balls. The villager might as well be trying to kickbox a medieval knight.

However, in order for the Western fighter’s power to manifest in any meaningful way in his own society, it can only be expressed in an enclosed octagon at highly standardized times and places, artificially (read: fake) frantically semi-sealed off from the social and charismatic forces that still play into the outcome of the fight nonetheless - fighters with a powerful “x-factor” (read: Chi) are still at an advantage. Conner McGregor made an entire career out of winning fights with swagger. Of course, in a place like this, you still need plenty of pure materialist pounds-per-square-inch on your side, but Chi still, uh, finds a way.

In the village, by contrast, the boundary between physics and psychology is much blurrier. If a try-hard does some jiu jitsu he saw online, he will be shunned by his classmates for being, among other things, inelegant. In this way - and in many subtle others including poise, gravitas, wisdom, popularity, age, and attractiveness - he does not have enough Chi to even come close to winning.

In the West, we still implicitly know that it is necessary to keep the fight beautiful. Poking someone in the eye, even in the octagon, is against the rules on account of a lack of gracefulness. You won’t be able to practice much if you’re no fun to play with, either. Chi, as a concept, better takes into account the fact that in order to be someone who is good enough to win many games in the long run, you have to be fun to play with in the short term, therefore it is actually irrational to win one particular game at any cost. This also explains the public’s visceral disgust to the brutality of the UFC when it first emerged in the late 90’s. They didn’t necessarily have the words for it, but they just knew something was off about guys knocking each other bloody.

By contrast, Bruce Lee mesmerized as an archetype of the old village martial artist; He would not have done well in the UFC. Our unconscious collective judgment of his Chi - and we are extremely well-attuned to do this - is more a reason for his dominance than his mass or musculature.

If you think I’m putting a lot of words to make something esoteric sound practical, I would ask you to imagine who would win in a fight, you or Hillary Clinton. Not in the artificial situation of an octagon, but on the streets, as they say. How many people would attack and restrain you if she jumped you unprovoked on a park bench? Dozens of extremely well-trained people would assume you had done something wrong and incapacitate you before you even understood what was happening. Even if for some reason you could get a punch in, would you have the nerve? Paraphrasing Mike Tyson, “Everybody’s got a plan until they gotta punch an old lady in the face.”

As I find myself doing grotesque comedy to try to make a point, I’ve stumbled on a perfect segue into professional wrestling, which is your one-stop-shop for grotesque comedy and all sorts of similarly bizarre antics.

My feeling about it, maybe predictably, is sort of hipster-ish. I admire it second hand, for seeming blue-collar authentic, but I’m not going to actually watch it because, for one, there is too much lore to learn, and two I don’t like commercials. In my experience the sort of person who watches professional wrestling looks a lot like that midwit bellcurve meme: both rubes and sensitive geniuses love it, midwits like me are in the middle, crying, “you know it’s actually fake!”

My working class uncle and his son loved it, I remember, and my more middle-class father told me that they just didn’t realize it was fake. My cousin cried when I told him it was all a lie one Christmas at Grandma’s when I was seven. On the drive home, I was chided for breaking the comforting illusions of rubes.

Later, my midwit superiority was challenged when I met Tom Kenny, voice of SpongeBob Squarepants. He told me that he was about to make a trip down to Mexico to see some live pro wrestling. Not for the first time, someone who felt superior to me in pattern recognition and artistic sensitivity expressed liking something I felt was beneath me.

What dawned on me then is that my cousin, even with his tears, was right. The dramas expressed in the wrestling ring, although ballooned into cartoon-like legibility, are more real than if they were sterilized.

Actually, what the octagon tries to achieve is itself an illusion. It is the “what if” of a nerd’s imagination: what if you removed all the social and spiritual factors (which, incidentally, he has difficulty accounting for) and isolated what was “real.” Who would really win in a fight?

But of course, there is no escaping the context of the crowd, the pressure of the bets, the eye of the world on the other side of that unblinking camera lens. It all factors in, and we know it, but we pretend we don’t.

Pro wrestling, on the other hand, makes no attempt around this illusion of objectivity. It allows all of it, so even celebrities can step into the violent dramas to test their Chi against the great big wrestlers. Here, you may hit Donald Trump with a folding chair, but only if you have greater charisma, if only on your home turf with your own roaring fans. Trump, in his turn, is allowed to show he is a good sport and maybe even get a whack in. This, my friends, is the real fight, if you know what you’re looking for.

Trump’s video of him professional wrestling is supposed to be humiliating. But of course, to the great consternation of midwits everywhere, it isn’t. Like it or not, Trump knows how to harness vast amounts of Chi, which is far stronger than your muscle’s ATP. Trump is like the professional wrestler of politics (yes, someone wrote that essay).

This is, of course, less than ideal in some ways. But what us midwits tend to miss is that pro wrestling is larger-than-life as a compensation for the loss of life, caused by our strange love of sterilized abstraction. We’ve over-indexed on “real” in the sense of a police forensic report or a security camera, and so we’re yearning for “real” in the sense of the highly subjective - i.e. “You had to be there,” “He is the real deal,” or “You can’t say you understand until you’ve experienced it.”

For the villagers getting knocked around by their master’s Chi, really, dude… you just had to be there. You can still mock, if you like, but you might be unable to explain how you act if you ever ran into someone with hyper-Chi from your own culture - for example, a celebrity. Strange forces make you unable to talk normally, and you might even involuntarily duck to a wave of their hand. If caught on video, you would look funny. “You just had to be there!”

Our discomfort with the fact of celebrity (and our celebrity president) explains our unwillingness to accept what is obvious. We live in a global village, where geography has been flattened and absorbed into a hyper-region. Our hyper-village masters of Chi, then, are granted incredible and unprecedented powers, unmatched by even Caesar or Alexander. To ease our mostly unconscious envy and fear, we resort to all sorts of ways of “explaining away” their incredible influence over us, one of them being that Joe Rogan-esque musing: “Yeah, but who would really win in a fight?”

This also helps explain the fascination with which martial art is most useful in the “real world,” which gave rise to the UFC. By “real world” we actually mean “The most artificial circumstances you could possibly imagine.”

When in your life, have you ever heard of or could even imagine a fight breaking out (it’s always a bar in the fantasy) that had nothing to do at all with status, charisma, psychology, circumstances? and only came down to which rock-’em-sock-’em robot had the most XP? Yes, in these imaginary worlds of all things being equal, BJJ is the most “useful” martial art. In real life, it’s actually probably something more like not accosting drunk strangers in bars, which is a subtle martial art indeed.

“You know a chimp could fuck you up, though!” they say. Yeah, well, if the realist deal is physical force, after all, why not just let the animals fight? Put a gorilla and a great white in the ring and we can really sell some pay-per-view, boy.

But, unfortunately, MMA is too brutish and dumb for an animal, even. Wolves don’t just outright attack each other, they circle each other in a subtle status dance, growling and raising hackles, judging the reactions of the pack, until it is clear who the alpha is, not a drop of blood spilled. The beta drops to his back to show his belly in a ritual display, and in a similarly ritual way, the alpha chooses to not kill the beta. This way, pecking orders are established and costly fights are avoided. This is primitive martial arts. MMA cutting out the ritual of it all does not make it “more pure,” but actually undoes its most fundamental reason for having developed.

To be fair, MMA does what all games do: it constrains real life variables in order to produce predictable play. But MMA’s problem is that it doesn’t recognize itself as a ritual and therefore can’t correct well for its excessive brutality. Thus, it tends toward revolting. I would guess this is also the “taboo” that makes it very exciting to some.

Pro wrestling is also ugly, but in the exact opposite direction: a gaudy overcorrection. However, it is, in the final analysis, more in the natural lineage of ancient dances, which organically evolved into complex dramas. Fighting should be visually striking and entertaining, hence martial “art.” Nobody here is allowed to overly brutalize each other, because, under the very “realest” of circumstances, the tribe wouldn’t allow that. In this way, also, pro wrestling is genuinely participatory with its fans.

Pro-wrestling is much more effective at producing high-charisma Chi masters of the global village like The Rock, too. The UFC also occasionally produces celebrities, despite trying to isolate itself from ritual, because you can’t escape ritual.

We’re going to produce hyper-Chi masters, so we might as well hope are wise and cool. So give up on the fantasy of measuring reality without context and go get drunk at a pro wrestling match in Mexico.

Besides the extraordinary technical mastery and sportsmanship required, I don’t love the MMA. It feels “fake” because, in real life, nobody would allow two healthy young males to brutalize each other like that. It activates some ancient part of my brain that makes me want to pull them apart and fight with some dignity and grace.

But I can’t, so I just look away.