Society must be Self-Defended: Violence, Wilful Ignorance, and the Embodied Habits of Fascism

This paper draws on Wittgenstein and Foucault to argue that self-defence functions as a technology of forgetting, sustaining an epistemology of ignorance that supports the imagined divide between civil society and the dangerous Other. Inflated ideas about martial arts, male aggression, and the legitimacy of self-defence obscure the structural violence needed to preserve social order through a dispositif that uses strategic forgetting to maintain power. But this also creates a paradox: civil society, opposed to animal violence, must deploy that very violence against the barbarian—who, by definition, is better at it. The result is a discursive spiral: to survive, society becomes fascist. Tracing this dynamic historically, this essay examines how Shotokan karate transformed under Showa fascism into more rigid forms that cultivated authoritarian ideals in physical practice. Self-defence, then, is not merely rhetorical but deeply embodied, shaping subjects whose bodies and beliefs are trained to forget, dominate, and conform.