Part 3: The Mouth

Part 3: The Mouth

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You'll need verbal tactical skills. These come in three forms: Small Talk, Smart Talk, and Smack Talk.

Small Talk comes in two modes — Friendly and Formal. Friendly Small Talk is about relationship building with coworkers, children's teachers, your niece or nephew visiting from college. Formal Small Talk is what you'd expect: getting along to get along, keeping the boss happy without accepting every piece of crap task they have to throw around, keeping the work wife happy while maintaining propriety.

Smart Talk has similar distinctions — Personal and Professional — but the learning and tactics are largely the same: to employ what we'll call ethically persuasive verbal jujitsu.

Smack Talk, also called Shit Talk sometimes, is the art of dominating a person in a very public and pugnacious manner. This is a skill of last resort because it is purely caustic, and caustic things are decidedly deleterious.

Let's put it to use.

You're in a dark-alley context. You see some not-suspiciously-profiled but actually-car-window-breaking, hootin'-and-hollerin', cat-callin', all-manner-of-having-no-manners group of young hooligans or miscreants. They're going to intercept you on this course. You casually divert to avoid convergence. Alarms still active, but imminent urgency de-escalated. They divert to intercept again.

We will work this out ahead of time so you can simply follow the rubric when the real thing happens.

You've attempted to use situational awareness and intuition to optimize your potentially deleterious encounter with forces of unknown intent. Their intent becomes somewhat known when they've displayed belligerent behavior and maintained course-intercept both before and after you took casually evasive maneuvers.

At intercept, you employ Small Talk. You use the art of getting along — rapport building — to attempt a Monopoly Earthquake. Remember the board game? When you were going to lose horribly, you'd claim an earthquake shook the board and ruined the game. You broke the rules to overcome the system. This is an important point in the encounter: until someone becomes agitated or aggressive, this can still come up heads, if you use your trick coins. Focus all your sincerity and wit into a compelling introduction. Carry yourself as if you have no expectation that anyone should think anything is out of order — but that maybe you've had a drink and you're always that smiley, friendly, fast-rapport-building guy or gal with a repartee that even those looking to start trouble might find endearing. Maybe you get a laugh and a high five and you're back on your plans without unpleasantness.

When Small Talk fails, you shift to Smart Talk. If you've acquired, workshopped, and practiced the craft of persuasive speech, then you will be fine. If you have not — if you haven't mastered the basics of Cialdini's Reciprocities, used the 48 Laws of Power to then go research all the historical references in the margins, if you have not read The Art of Small Talk — then you will fail at Smart Talking your way out of that avoidable, possibly survivable (if you've been doing your Boxing–Krav–Tai Chi work), eminently violent encounter.

Do you see how these paragraphs are getting shorter?

It is not causation-independent correlation. Entropy, once begun, accelerates and increases velocity — like an intergalactic snowball of black holes. That got dark. Entropy is fast and then faster. When the first falls, the second falls fast, and the third falls at once.

Smack Talk rarely de-escalates.

Then, you must fight. You could not walk your way out of the encounter, you could not run your way out, and ultimately, you could not talk your way out. You are justified and obligated to fight for survival. We can get into stacking tactics in depth later, but for now: a large group would require a run to divide the slower from the faster, then conquer the fastest in the most expeditious and gruesome manner allowable. Followed by another run to divide and conquer — and so on until evasion is successful or all aggressors are vanquished.