“Always Trust Your Gut!”

© COPYRIGHT 2010 BY BRADLEY J. STEINER - ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Sword and Pen – February 2010 Issue

[Reprinted With Permission]

American Combato
Seattle Combatives


WHEN we were nineteen years of age we became enamored of Ayn Rand and her brilliant philosophy, Objectivism. We proceeded to acquire, read, reread and study just about everything she wrote, and to take a course titled The Basic Principles of Objectivism, given by her then top protégé, Nathaniel Branden. In the years following we came pretty far away from Rand‘s orthodoxy, retaining — as we do retain to this day — full agreement only with her political and economic thinking. We also appreciate and agree significantly and substantially — though not totally — with her esthetics, but we reject her atheism and we have come to see her "knowledge of human psychology" as being pretty one-dimensional, unsophisticated, and — frankly — inconsistent with what the medical discipline of psychiatry, and that which the field of psychology, have concluded and teach us about the mind, emotions, and behavior of man.

Make no mistake about this: We have enormous respect and admiration for Ayn Rand‘s achievements, and we regard her as one of the greatest defenders of man‘s rights, liberty, and the America that we knew and loved when we were growing up, in history. We recommend her books — which we once suggested to the late Dr. Mortimer J. Adler be included in his and in Dr. Robert M. Hutchins‘ list of The Great Books of Western Civilization — to every thinking individual. One does not need to agree completely with anyone, in order to see great value in their work, and — often — very specifically in elements of that work, which one finds that one can in fact agree with completely.

In any case, we were in our adolescence and young adulthood once pretty close to being a fairly consistent "Objectivist".

One of the most detrimental things that Objectivism taught us was to minimize the significance of our emotional reactions and our feelings. This, according to that which we understood from Rand, was necessary whenever one‘s "reason" and one‘s "feelings" were in conflict. “Emotions,” Rand pronounced, “are not tools of cognition.” And because of this, reason and only reason could possibly be man‘s proper guide to knowledge and to an accurate understanding of reality. As our deeper studies in psychiatry, psychology, philosophy, and especially hypnosis would teach us, one must be very, very careful in how one accepts, interprets, and uses Rand’s admonitions in this regard. Otherwise, one will be literally sabotaging one‘s ability to protect oneself (not just physically, but in all ways), and to live with genuine rationality and happiness.

What we learned in our years of studies since having been immersed in the works of Ayn Rand — most especially during our study of hypnosis — is that insofar as immediate perceptions and intuitive, short-term evaluations are concerned, there are times when our SUBCONSCIOUS assessment may be entirely accurate and correct, when in fact our “rational” and conscious perception and assessment may be entirely inaccurate! Thus, as far as trusting our “immediate gut reactions to persons and to events” is concerned, it is absolutely dangerous and self-sabotaging to dismiss “gut feelings” or intuitive “hunches”, etc.

Since this is not a dissertation on the nature of the subconscious, on hypnosis, on psychiatry or on anything save SELF-DEFENSE and CLOSE COMBAT, we shall now simply cut to the chase and tell our readers:

Your feelings, your intuition, your emotions, your GUT (or whatever anyone wishes to call it) is a critically important instrument of survival and personal defense. You must, regardless of what truth there may be to the premise that validating the ultimate truth or falsehood of anything is a responsibility that must be left, not to one’s feelings, but to one’s reason, take your “gut reactions” and your inner “sense” about anyone and about any potentially threatening situation with DEADLY SERIOUSNESS. Your gut may be wrong. But then again, IT MAY BE RIGHT.

When dealing with random encounters with strangers one does not have the time or (usually) the inclination to get to know anything at all about those strangers. In most cases, a stranger is not going to initiate violence or even behave poorly. His approach to you is almost always motivated by some reasonable, or at least harmless, purpose. But because he is a stranger, you cannot, and must never assume to be certain of his “innocent intentions”.

The lifesaving caution is: TRUST YOUR GUT! Whenever you are in any situation, whenever you encounter anyone you do not know personally, and whenever you feel — for whatever as yet undetermined reason — that “something is just not right”, TREAT THAT FEELING SERIOUSLY. RESPECT IT. AND, IN SITUATIONS WHERE THERE WILL BE NO LONG-TERM OPPORTUNITIES TO SAFELY RECONSIDER, EVALUATE, AND REASSESS YOUR INITIAL IMPRESSIONS AND CONCLUSIONS, GO WITH THAT “GUT FEELING” JUST IN CASE!

Could your "gut feeling" be wrong? Absolutely. So we would, insofar as self-defense and personal security is concerned, add this caveat: Do NOT trust your gut feeling about a stranger or unusual situation if that gut feeling is a POSITIVE feeling! Impose caution — serious caution — whenever you feel "trust", "respect", "safety", or "friendliness", etc. without apparent reason, but simply on the basis of some unknown subconscious assessment that may or may not be correct.

During the so-called "Cold War" American and British intelligence found that operating inside Moscow, Russia was just about the single most difficult arena in which to work. The then KGB (today, SVRR) had quite probably the single most effective counterintelligence and counterespionage capability of the world‘s secret services. In response to the daunting task that confronted operatives of the free world‘s intelligence services in penetrating/eluding/defeating Moscow security, a set of "Moscow Rules" was compiled. These rules were also employed in East Germany and in Cuba, but they were originally created and presented to those secret servants whose mission was working in that most denied of the earth‘s areas:
Moscow, Russia.

One of the “Moscow Rules” was: ALWAYS TRUST YOUR GUT.

Speaking personally we will say that during the last quarter century we learned without exception to "trust our gut". Whereas we once would have rejected any odd or suspicious feelings about persons with whom we dealt (in any context, not speaking now of work in any intelligence capacity, alone), we learned to USE THIS PRINCIPLE ACROSS THE BOARD. We are, putting it mildly, absolutely delighted that we made this decision!

Yes, indeed, we perhaps have dismissed from our life one or two individuals who we incorrectly assessed as being questionable. But we know this much for certain: We disengaged from and completely discarded a huge amount of human debris, as well: and by our rigorous attention to “WARINESS AS LIFESTYLE”, made our self quite difficult to con or to manipulate in any fashion.

Previously (as a youth) we "gave the benefit of the doubt". As a result, one individual in a hundred proved ultimately to justify our benevolence; while 99 proved that we should have paid attention to our original “feeling” when we first encountered or dealt with the person. We have no problem living with the present reversal of that statistic, which we enjoy, thanks to our dismissal of such infantile thinking as we had at one time been guided by! C’est la vie!

Whether our readers elect to accept that which is our personal philosophy and — as we put it — our “wariness lifestyle” — must remain their choice. But we certainly urge strongly that anyone wishing to improve his self-defense capabilities and his personal security accept our advice to always trust his gut in any encounter with unknown persons, and casual acquaintances — anywhere.

Such an attitude pays.

Bradley J. Steiner