John Danaher: BJJ Is Like a Knife - Morally Neutral. It’s Only as Good as its Owner

John Danaher: BJJ Is Like a Knife – Morally Neutral. It’s Only as Good as its Owner

Sep 28, 2020BJJEEArticles, Featured

Often times there’s discussion of so called rotten apples in bjj community.

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But with it comes a connotation that for some reason bjj is supposed to make people better. And sure enough it does improve the quality of one’s life along with some mental states. However it hardly imbues someone who never had a moral compass with one.

This is a point which legendary coach John Danaher relied on in one of his earlier interviews :

“A knife can be used to make a sandwich; a knife can be used to save somebody’s life—as you’re struggling to get out of a car, you can cut the seatbelt and escape—a knife can be used to serve justice, it can be used for murder. It can be used for the greatest things, the most mundane things, and the most terrible things. It’s morally neutral. It’s only as good as its owner. Jujitsu is exactly the same. Jujitsu doesn’t make you good, it doesn’t make you bad. It will just reinforce what you already are.

If you’re an a*%hole, it will make you a worse a&*hole. If you’re a good person, it will make you a better person.” He added, “I like to have my room arranged in such a way that the first and last thing I see every day—when I wake in the morning, when I go to sleep at night—are my blades next to me. They’re a daily reminder of what we do.” Finally, I dared to ask about his personal life, and he didn’t hesitate to answer: “When I try to get outside of jujitsu, it’s almost always done through sex, but I can’t really talk about that.”

The benefits of Jiu-Jitsu are numerous: self defense, increased fitness, health, social skills, self confidence, humility, ego killer, camaraderie etc…However, not everybody will understand this and see the benefits.

If you want to be un-submitable, you need to check out Tom DeBlass’ “Submission Escapes” BJJ 3 volume BJJ instructional from BJJFanatics.com . In this series, he shares multiple escapes from all of the hardest to escape positions. Soon your training partners and opponents will be calling you Houdini.