The Cure for Broken Body Language is Clearing Rooms

Purpose in life, close quarters combat, and making ourselves useful

Zero Dark Thirty

We are witnessing a plague of broken body language.

We see spastic steps to the right, or left, or suddenly coming to a stop, as if the body’s driver is uncertain about something as simple as which direction the next step ought to be. We see sloped shoulders, dropped chins, and glazed eyes death-scrolling TikTok long after the traffic light has gone from red to green. We see deeply troubled oh-my-god-why-me expressions and furtive, horror-stricken glances as if the world has condemned the sufferer to a grave injustice—namely, life.

But this wretched body language is merely a symptom—the disease is a lack of purpose; one singular, passionate, obsessive undertaking in life.

What sort of environment, then, demands purposeful body language? An ancestral environment. A dangerous environment. Open any ethnography with photos of hunter-gatherers in the thick of strenuous trials and behold: a calm and masterful bearing with bright eyes in camp, and a taut athletic muscularity while stalking heel-to-toe in sand or soil or snow with spear or bow.

With this primal perspective, why would the present plague not exist? Where are the hasty summons in the small hours of the night to keep kith and kin safe from lions and cannibals when they are so few, and when our protection is outsourced to governments?

It seems, then, we are left with a paradox: our modern environment removed these terrible burdens, only to leave so many with a more terrible burden—a lack of purpose. Does this mean we ought to wait for pre-state dangers to give us purpose, one that will surely cure the plague of broken body language? Or for the crooked-state dangers of the CCP? Or the non-state dangers of ISIS?

I think not.

I argue we can reverse engineer our ancient equation—that by manually mastering our body language, we can reveal what is perhaps the most existentially fulfilling purpose in our lives.

Let us pressure test this idea in a structure with the sinless sounding name of “kill house.”¹ A kill house is a building with modifiable rooms, walls, and furniture. It is where military and law enforcement learn to clear rooms, hallways, and stairwells of enemy combatants in a process called CQC, or Close Quarters Combat.

Enter the kill house: in this world, a PhD-level study is made of doors. How we approach a door, open a door, and then enter a door becomes a matter of profound professional interest. Why is this? Because signaling we own a door with our body language is signaling we choose to own what lies on the other side of a door. And what lies on the other side? Maybe nothing. Maybe a terrorist holding a pistol to a hostages’ head. Maybe life. Maybe death.

Now we have the approach to a door: a column of operators heel-to-toe up to a door, their upper backs flared over their rifles, each operators existence reduced to a singularity: pupils, operators moving in peripherals, red-dotted rifle sights, and the totality of the world sitting atop that tiny red dot. Then we have the opening of the door: the point man looks for the hinges of the door and does not see them which means the door opens inwards. He orients his rifle to the crack of the door to signal he assumes ownership of it. The other members see this un-worded action and instantly stack behind the point man. The last man squeezes the glute of the three man to communicate he is ready to roll, then the three man to the two man, and the two man to the point man. At last, we have the entering of the door: the point man three-steps into the room and goes right, the two man left, the three man right, the four man left, until all four have entered the room, every angle covered to the tenth degree and the enemies opportunity for a clean shot clinically minimized.

Now we have something to work with.

Let us examine a few laws of the kill house.

There are collective consequences for our individual failures. CQC instructors perch themselves on walkways on top of the kill house walls. Arms crossed and faces bearing the unmerciful Judgment of the Almighty, they observe where you place your feet, the movement of your trigger finger, your eyes, your posture. They ungently admonish you to “Move with a sense of purpose” until you move like you are in command whether you feel like it or not. But what is the source of such unkind attention? This: if we do not master ourselves, then everyone else will suffer. For what if we are jittery and turn left in the door when we should have turned right? Others will suffer. What if we are slope shouldered because “I really do not feel like it today?” Others will suffer. In sum, if we are tired, lazy, confused, arrogant, bored, or want to feel like a victim for a few minutes—an enemy bullet may find the back of the brother whose keeper you were. We must, therefore, unfuck our posture and purpose so that others may live.

Make yourself useful. We can riff an entire philosophy for life on this alone for it is bursting at the seams with purpose. Here begins the war of the margins: who can be most useful? Yes—who can attack that crack of the door with the most immaculate focus our primeval brains are capable of? Who can mobilize every synapse and cell and signal most clearly what they intend to do in the next cordite-scented second? Who can signal ownership of whatever hell exists in that room with flared muscles and iron eyes the most in this mortal game of angles? Who can add a tinge of terror to the voice the most, so that whatever unhappy fanatic is in that room will be scared so shitless he will hesitate one fraction of a second before squeezing the trigger? Who can be most calming to hostages, most terrifying to enemy, and most useful to tribe? Making ourselves useful is to make ourselves useful for something—suffering beautifully for others.

Know ahead of time what you will do. We must have already seen the worst-case scenario in our skull ahead of time. We must have already visualized a room of bearded guerillas. We must have already seen their string of muzzle flashes burning our retinas like frozen-fire, or blossoming satanic-flowers. We must have already heard the how-on-earth-can-it-be-that-loud metallic clank of a grenade in a corridor or the muffled grunt of a bit of steel finding a bit of flesh. We must have already walked through that door, owned that room, and accepted that outcome with all our being. It takes seeing in silence and solitude to signal command no matter what may come; to signal dominance and aggression to the enemy; to signal restraint and care to the captives; to signal confidence and calm to the tribe. In knowing ourselves, we know the room; in knowing the room, we know how to be useful.

So much for our kill house.

In a sense, ridding our lives of threats led to the present plague of broken body language and lack of purpose. But it also led to the noble fight of earning our purpose on this earth without threats to force us.

There is no one and nothing to blame.

Purpose is now a matter of choice.

I believe in my bones we are our best selves when prepared to face deadly odds for those we give a damn about; that as we manually cultivate masterful body language without an immediate threat in the kill house, we may do the same in every other facet of our lives—and with it will come the same hardcore sense of purpose.

What then?

Every door we approach, open, and enter, is a reminder to see, walk, stand, and speak as if ready for a good fight…

…for the good of the whole.

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1. For another excellent essay on the kill house, check out

Adam Karaoguz