reactive and analytic

REACTIVE AND ANALYTIC

Before, when we talked about my short lived law enforcement career, I mentioned that after a time I came to realize I was a danger to myself and others due to the fact that I was in no way reactive to situations.  My brain was wired to analyze, not react swiftly.  I’m sure many folks are.  The question is, does the military realize this?  They sure made no effort to distinguish in my case, merely matching warm bodies to paper quotas.  One imagines there is a slightly better vetting mechanism for infantry, but only because of the nature of the volunteer military and the fact that more purely physical types are attracted to this type of endeavor ( I’m certainly not claiming any kind of metal superiority here.  Today’s infantry are no Neanderthals carrying clubs looking for heads to bash in but by the nature of their equipment must have a good head on their own shoulders to use it.  I’m merely talking about brain wiring ).  One imagines, given the history of over two centuries of performance of the Army, the typical thinking is that the peasant cannon fodder is fed into the grinder and the correct type able to thrive in combat will emerge.  Superior social classes making up the military officer corps certainly can’t be bothered with such mundane matters as fitting the lower ranks into slots they would perform better in.

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As a survivalist, it does behoove you to realize what type you are.  In stressful situations, you don’t act as you’d wish to but rather as your brain chemistry instructs you ( please don’t open the can of worms AGAIN about how by virtue of your manliness and studliness you will be able to shrug off brain chemistry as a mere irritating girly-man inconvenience.   Just refer back to the article on it and reread it and don’t bother me in the comments about how you are special and immune ).  The only way to overcome this is through training and muscle memory and for those of you who can’t afford $50 a week in ammunition for training yourself to be super ninja plastic carbine commandoes, it is better to realize your limitations and plan accordingly.  Don’t buy into your own hype as to how great you are and hence are able to live in the middle of a ten million population metro-mega-urban area because at the end you shall jump into your armored RV and plow through all the masses and shoot them all up to escape to your condo on the mountain.  Realize how frightening it is to be surrounded by future cannibals, and friggin move prior to collapse.  But, sorry, off track slightly.  If you are a analytic and hence not a natural at fighting, you need to take some shortcuts to tilt the odds back in your favor.  The first was reducing the danger to yourself to increase the odds by having far fewer hostiles directed at you.  The second is to reduce as many future questions involved in conflict as you can.

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By being analytical by nature, you usually can’t turn off your brain.  You over think EVERYTHING, from procuring the coffee you drink in the morning to the many and varied ramifications involved in a potential attack from a criminal during your commute home, from the response of the law enforcement team responding to the sexual satisfaction of the prosecuting attorney if you are taken to trial for defending yourself ( was he laid last night?  Or will he be a prick and hang me out to dry because he has blue balls? ).  What you must do is short circuit that tendency in instances of future conflict.  By moving to a less crime ridden area, you can usually remove a great deal of stress as far as analyzing how you will handle an attack, and by reducing post-collapse conflict to black and white, yes/no situations you can help to reduce your tendency at hesitation for a few critical seconds.  Think about conflicts and decide, NOW, how they will be handled.  This is why I try to reduce future problems to brute simple answers.  Not because I can’t think out all the ramifications of different responses.  I can, and I do.  By taking a problem and making the solution easy, I am turning off the analysis machine.  Because being analytical is a great problem solving mechanism, but not in the heat of battle.  When should you flee the city?  Before things get worse.  When should I kill others?  Every time, regardless of gender or age, IF they don’t belong to your tribe.  How bad will things get?  You don’t know, so you always assume the worse and NEVER get your hopes up, such as those with small food reserves have done.  Simplistic answers don’t leave room for creeping doubts.  Creeping doubts are what freeze up an analytical mind.  If you don’t stop analyzing data, you never respond.  Simplistic answers aren’t necessarily the product of a simple mind.  They are a prod to action for the over thinker.

( a third trick might be post-apocalypse fiction.  By encountering new situations you hadn’t thought of already, you are not caught unawares when truth mirrors fiction in the future and can think on solutions now while you have the luxury of time ).

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