“For a peace which appears feasible.” Interview Part 2

The second part of the talk with Rüdiger Lenz – on the development of the “non-combat” principle and the discovery of de-escalation in martial arts. A glimpse into the community “humans” and the mechanisms and methods which can be used to divide and destroy them.

You taught Taekwondo for years, were head of a school, trained people in the field of combat, and were active in the security service. Always with great success. Nevertheless, you became a “non-fighter”.
How is it that you became a “non-combat therapist” through combat, even researching and developing a form of healing for violent criminals?

I did not come to the non-martial arts through the martial arts. A key experience was the separation from the mother of my child in 1998. The mother set in motion all she could to make contact with my child impossible. Very successfully. She made me ​​out to be the enemy to my son, and so contact with him was impossible. Parent-antagonizing syndrome is the term.

At that time, I began to think about how it could be possible to spoil the conflict for the person causing the conflict.

In the security service, I began to invent a special form of de-escalation with bullies, which I was really able to complete only when I started training social agents in anti-aggressiveness training (AAT) with Dr. Michael Heilemann. There, I developed a de-escalation concept with a group of pedagogues and educators at a home for very difficult children, which then led to non-combat.

I called this the “The doctrine of overcoming one-on-one-fights”. A Do-Philosophy. It is a philosophy within a martial art system, upon which the techniques are all based. I worked on this further with my martial arts students. Afterwards, I realized that what I had just founded was non-combat. And so I wrote my second book, “Das Nichtkampf-Prinzip” (“The non-combat principle”). Non-combat was thus born as a new social training. These were the beginnings from 2002 to 2005.

Today, non-combat is available as a global peace offer for all mankind. Its axioms are self-preservation and integrity.

And as such it is part of gaming theory and a cooperative means for a different financial and social system. But that leads too far for now.

Non-combat restores man to his equilibrium. Therefore it is the cure for all forms of imbalance which we ourselves have been producing for centuries. Diseases are the struggle of a system against itself. Man has not yet really understood that, which is probably the reason for the great interest in the non-combat principle. It has become part of the peace movement. For peace is nothing but the equilibrium of all the equilibria within a whole system. In biology, the non-combat principle is called homoeostasis.

Everything I did and recognized as a combat sportsman was a benefit to me. De-escalation has not really been achieved up to non-combat. It is only today that we have access to what de-escalation actually is and should be: an act that leads away from violence. Nobody before me had developed and refined this in such a way that it can be used in the perpetrator’s therapy. Until now, de-escalation was nothing more than scaled-down self-defense.

You go, among others, to prisons and work directly with violent criminals. Do you succeed in detaching these people from the spiral of violence?

Yes, with most of them I succeeded. However, my methods are completely unconventional. I developed them myself while working with offenders. Something like that is not taught. Without related prior knowledge or a degree, I simply acted. Into the deep end. That was how I was in 2003. The only thing I was good at, at that time, was martial arts. And so I began as a de-escalation trainer and ended up as a therapist for violent offenders.

It is what I call ‘the language of the one-on-one-fight’, which is why I have more success than most psychologists or social agents on site. This language is the language of the offenders. When mastered, it is the entrance ticket into their world and thus the first half of the success to working with them on their transformation.

Dr. Michael Heilemann, who developed the anti-aggressiveness training, AAT, in the JA Hameln, asked me to work with him in his practice, since he benefitted greatly from my method of working with violent offenders, and was convinced of it. I also trained anti-aggressiveness trainers with him in Frankfurt, without even having had such training. This is a rare event in such circles. Many trained social trainers and students came to my training sessions just to watch me. After the session, they would approach me and were very impressed with the non-combat principle. It was always like that when I worked with perpetrators and was invited to prisons. This was a very intense time. I worked 16 hours a day for three years continuously in order to become good for what lay ahead of me.

At that time, my motto was:

When others are on holiday, you learn; when others have weekends, you work; when others go to bed, you write, because you want to be really good at what you do – you have no training, so you have to do what women do if they want to succeed: you have to be twice as good as good trainers, as good psychologists and as good sociologists.

I thus became a specialist for violence phenomena and violence therapies. Even – and I am rather proud of this – Wilhelm Heitmeyer invited me to blend practical knowledge with the theoretical. The professors surrounded me, which is something I had never known before.

Today, I am an expert in dealing with perpetrators and violence theories, and I am often brought to cases that seem insoluble, and I solve them. But there are also perpetrators who are not treatable.

They are, however, already known in advance of a JVA and one does not do any therapy work with them. Today, I am also heavily booked as an advisor on violence. This has to do with the fact that perpetual work with perpetrators demands one’s entire psychology. The phenomenon of violence is a network that spans all of society and the entire being of man. This is quite exciting.

Are there criminals where you come to the conclusion: they cannot be treated?

Yes, there are. The more a criminal profits from his crime and is aware of his popularity in the peer group, the more difficult it is to convince him of another path.

The brain researcher, Manfred Spitzer, says that one can still save people up to the age of 26 years. After that one should refrain from trying.

The man knows what he is talking about! That is why I usually work with young grown-ups or juvenile violent offenders.

Age and peer group play a major role in the success of a therapy, which is why we have started to perform IQ tests with the graduates and mainly take offenders in the Alphastatus area. If we convince a boss, the alpha, then he will convince his peer group.

And at the next training, this ex-offender will be the tutor of a new training class with new participants. This convinces and calms the participants, and they engage faster and deeper in the training. A training therapy should thus always be able to address the problem as a whole in a self-optimized manner. But whoever believes that all perpetrators are treatable, has not seen any practice.

Please correct me if I am mistaken.
At the moment, we are witnessing growing extremism in our society. Regardless of what spectrum, whether left or right, religious or enlightened, people appear to becoming increasingly violent in their manner and openly show their frustration, their anger. A look at social media is enough to understand what I mean. At the same time, however, even the mainstream media are not afraid to participate in the hysteria. This seems to be an ideal breeding ground for great escalation.
How do you see these developments?

There has always been the same answer offered as the solution in such times: divide and conquer. We are experiencing this in a compressed form. Right or left are only facades for the same problem. The problem is the lack of change in consciousness for centuries. This still exists and simply cannot successfully be initiated in people by the billions.

Since the first big banking crisis, at the beginning of this century, the problem has, however, passed into an unmistakable stage. And this problem is an inner problem of people.

It is their inner victimhood, which they project into society in different facades and do not solve themselves. Many people are doing this more when access to prosperity and quality of life is restricted. This is the trigger for unrest.

Only the peace activists are frightened by something like the Ukraine crisis. Hunger and possible participation in poverty and unemployment are direct candidates which conquer the attention of the masses in the storm. War or peace, far less so. Both world wars, for example, were not overcome by any of the states involved. It was the Allies, chiefly the United States, whose involvment was at first marginal, and which contributed the major part to the end of the two wars. Extremism is only a symptom that takes hold when things get serious and only half a bread is served. Even the projections of enemy images, their genesis, are only symptoms.

The cause is the massive lack of independence of people, their attachment to the outside world, their leadership cult, their inner self-denial. In this way, people are in the habit of not taking themselves as role models but of adoring outside powers and following them.

This has led to a genesis of outside domination, in which education and training were established, which only forced humanity into systemic obedience. Heil Caesar, Heil Hitler, this is the absolutism of obedience exctasy and complete self-dissolution of man. A dream come true to the power hungry, for there is no more perfect outside control than that.

There were so-called hotspots of these developments in the history of mankind. They were declared heroes of history and in schools we had to memorize them. This obedience concerns the whole of humanity, its cult of belonging to the masses. Conversely, this tradition produces a very large amount of destructive behavior. In extreme societal situations, this destructiveness is skillfully channeled by the ruling classes.

We are currently experiencing the beginnings of this channelization of destructiveness. That is, it is just before 1933.

For example, I see today that much is reported about the current President of the USA. I see the live broadcasts of his speeches, and how many sit in front of him or stand and listen to him. I see how many activists concern themselves with him. They are constantly writing about him and the problems of this world in relation to the USA and Europe and Russia, etc. I always hover above these ongoings in an imaginary UFO and think: “What a kindergarten, the whole thing!” All this must be overcome.

That is why I do not listen to any peace activists when they are constantly going on about war, menace and end times. For this activist is not able to understand that he thereby manifests exactly that which he really wants to prevent.

On top of this, such an activist asks us co-activists to look into the – in my opinion – wrong direction. Towards solution or crises? Understanding the genesis of crisis is important! Once it is understood, however, the solution must be worked on. We no longer have much time for the solution.

How can one offer resistance?

Very difficult. The inertia of the masses cannot be overcome. Unfortunately. Whoever opposes this is declared an object of ostracism. One wants to free the masses and oneself, but then one is astonished to realize that the masses are building a cross upon which to nail someone.

Of course one can oppose on a large scale. Through a different education and labour system. A system of the development and unfolding of potential. However, if such a system were given priority, this would not only mean the dissolution of the existing system. It would completely dismantle the ruling pyramid. For each individual would quickly understand that the current outside rule causes totalitarian imbalances in all forms.

Imbalances cause diseases of the body, mind and society, such as financial cancer, etc. Almost all financial products or enterprises are substitutes for the certainty of being able to be enough for yourself.

All materialism is based on a great lie: the satisfaction of needs by simultaneous raising of life style. This lie is the biggest marketing trick of all time. For almost all have succumbed, even the most clever. Its prison is technocracy. The God above the Abrahamic God. A person who develops their potential and lives according to it no longer needs most of this.  The ruling class are completely aware of this danger and because of it, they pump a significant of money into the cover-up of this self-realization.

You can only do something about it by changing yourself. Standing there, calling on the masses so that they begin to change is not the path to success.

What is achieved with this is that a few are attracted and will carry out this change over decades. But most abandon it after two or four years. It is after all a work which requires much discipline, to change. Changing oneself demands everything from you! It is a longing which Frederick Schiller, in his “Ode to Joy”, wrapped in poetry as follows: “Your magic binds again / What fashion has strictly divided: / All men become brethren, Where your gentle wing dwells.”

To understand what we can do about it, I quote the psychoanalyst, Arno Gruen, from his book ‘The Madness of Normality’: ‘For a self not founded in autonomy does not revolt, because its nature has changed fundamentally. It only changes the direction of its violence. Revolutions may change something about the forms of slavery, or not – but the servitude itself will never change, as long as authority is not overcome. Thus evil is defended as the good, and there is no real liberation of the self. Only this would lead back to our true needs of love, thus breaking the downward spiral of destruction. ‘

This view of the solution to the problem of human destructiveness, however, does not arise if one deals mainly with geostrategy, conspiracies and secret societies. Whoever does this – and that is what the overwhelming majority of peace activists do every day – circumvents the solution in a maladaptive style. Dr. Daniele Ganser does this for professional reasons and not because of a maladaptive circumvention of the problem. What I’m saying here can too easily be misunderstood. Ken Jebsen also does this for professional reasons. Many do it for professional reasons and with full zeal. This is the good thing about the peace movement.

When you look out into the world, Mr. Lenz: What would you wish for people?

I wish people would understand that all the problems that we produce in the outer world are problems of our inward misunderstanding about ourselves. They are problems of the self, consciousness aberrances.

Jiddu Krishnamurti has often expressed and explained this very radically, but also very aptly.

Let us take the banking crisis: it is not a crisis of the banks, but rather a part of our aberration of consciousness and thus a distortion of perception. Let us take the currency crises: they too are crises of the people who are trading wrongly. For the banks, as well as the entire financial economy, are products of humanity. All of them are consciousness crises, because man has left the right path to care for people, to celebrate our empathy and to live and promote his humanity.

Let’s take my favorite problem, the environmental problem. In reality, the environment has no problems. It is rather the opposite. We create problems in our environment, where the environment then abandons its adaptation to us. That’s the way it is! We are alienating ourselves from our world of life. We treat Gaia like a dirty rubbish heap.

Our environment, however, is a fellow-world that directly and indirectly influences us, with which we are deeply connected, from which we are born and with whom we are a creature among many creatures! We cut this bond, this connection, which we have with the whole. It’s not the environment which is doing this.

The environment does what it has always done for millions of years: it is simply here and offers itself as complete supply. This is its mission and it is absolutely top-notch at it.

But we think about it in very primitive terms and treat it as our toxic waste dump. That is why we have enameled it with civilization. To subdue it is the purpose and importance of civilization. The civilized man is always part of this circumstance. Nature has been too unpredictable in the past, because we, the homo sapiens sapiens, multiplied everywhere and settled everywhere. A cosmopolitan with the mission of snatching nature from the earth and throwing it away, careless, disrespectful and failing to think about further generations to whom this ball will remain home.

Our deep fears of the questions: “Where do we come from, why are we here, where are we going?”, have positioned us against it, and in its stead we have created a God constructed on our image, who supposedly told us: make this whole big lump your property. This was the green light for the colonialization of the entire planet under the aegis of a belligerent God, which also created the green light for racism, for the right to say: “Those over there do not want our way of living. They hate our prosperity and our trade. ”

What a blasphemy! God is the greatest of all the great illusory solutions for a problem from which we run and which we are not prepared to really solve.

What I want for people is that they recognize this and turn around. If we do not, then this planet will be quite happy to manage without us. The other animals will not be crying, wearing black at our mass graves when it comes to our own extermination. I believe the whole planet won’t bother at all. If we humans continue to be brought up and educated to abandon our love of life, we will continue to feel uncomfortable in our skin.

We will then continue to make the others our projection screen and think of them as the evil that has befallen us. We will continue to  create bogeymen on the assembly line, and destroy everything that bursts and burrows, devour uselessly, crush, make homeless, or even completely exterminate. Only so that we can continue to run away from ourselves and to put all blame on another. This is more convenient. All on behalf of a God of love.

Is this really strange  to only a few people? I wish that more and more people would stand up and say, “I do not want this anymore! For if I continue to do so, I will destroy my children, our children.”And that is the greatest crime of which human beings are capable. For almost twenty years of more I have not played along, because I value myself enough to lead my life as I want to. No one leads me through life, only my inner desire does that. I cannot imagine a way back. That would be torture to myself.

Credits

Image	Title	Author	License
	Rüdiger Lenz	Rüdiger Lenz	CC BY-SA 4.0
	Rüdiger Lenz (speech)	Rüdiger Lenz	CC BY-SA 4.0