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The heart of Hawai’i is famously captured in a single word – Aloha. It means to respect and to love one another, and live in harmony with everything around you. It has to be experienced to be understood.
And simultaneously, there is no US state with broader martial arts and combat sports experience than Hawai’i, or even one remotely close. The average guy on the mainland thinks he can fight, and can’t. The average guy in Hawai’i knows he can scrap. Maybe they have trained in jiu-jitsu, or boxing, or kickboxing, or folkstyle wrestling, or maybe they just scrap. But they are good.
These two qualities, the ability to scrap and the ability to love and respect are seemingly incompatible. But they aren’t, because love and friendship are born from aggression and fighting, and would not exist without them. Sam Sheridan explains in his best-selling biography A Fighter’s Heart, based on research from Conrad Lorenz, winner of the 1973 Nobel Prize in Medicine.
“Those that fight each other harder do better,” writes Sheridan. “Lorenz takes interspecies aggression several steps further. He talks about geese and says that two furiously aggressive animals must bond and live together in a small space, all without weakening intra-species aggression. They have evolved inhibitors, behavior-changing devices, that turns the aggression they normally feel toward others of their species into something else when they mate. The same thing, although in a more complex way takes place among men and women of the same tribe of family, bound together for increased success against the outside world. Lorenz writes that friendship is found only in animals with ‘highly developed intra-species aggression,’ and goes on to say that the more aggressive the animal, the deeper the friendship. The ability to love and form bonds has evolved as a way to temper aggression, to turn it into something more powerful when defending hearth and home. Friendship and love are essentially evolutionary by-products of aggression. Men and women who form these deep bonds – who evolved ways to mitigate interspecies aggression – have great success in passing along their genes.
“That’s the secret, it’s all about love.”
With that said, please enjoy this street fight from Hawai’i. It’s just two minutes long, and showcases a lot of good.
The pair evidently had an issue. They settled it, following unwritten rules to a T. Skins (Sheysten Joseph, a second generation kickboxer) got the better of it, and they hugged it out. Problem solved.
Aloha.
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