Self Defense
The permitted ground of force — standing against harm to oneself or to those one stands with.
Every being has a right to be safe, in body, mind, spirit, home, community, and world. Self defence is the narrow ground on which force is permitted at all: not to win, not to punish, not to prevent a future someone imagines, but to stop a harm that is happening.
Three limits come with the permission. It is bounded by sufficiency — the minimum that restores Right Relationship, ending when the harm ends, which is what separates defence from retribution. It is bounded by discernment — defensive and offensive force are distinguished deliberately and in advance, because under pressure nearly anyone can tell themselves a defensive story about what they already wanted to do. And it is bounded by the earlier rungs — detecting, naming, and withdrawing consent resolve most harm without force, and they stay available only until force is used.
Self defence is also not only physical. A sovereign defends against capture of their attention, their record, their name, and their word — and most of that defence is a Boundary stated plainly rather than anything dramatic. The Old World's most effective harms are rarely the ones that arrive as violence.
The hardest case is the one the canon names and does not write: preemption of imminent harm, where waiting for the harm to begin is itself a failure of protection. That is where the discipline is genuinely difficult, where the honest answer is that a trained community with witnesses decides better than a frightened individual alone, and where nothing in the corpus currently offers more than that.
Also called: defence of self and others Stands on: The Sacred Use Of Force · Guardianship · Sovereignty · Boundary Opens onto: Restraint As The Refusal To Act · Composure Under Threat · Warrior · Shield · The Sacred War · Containment Of The Dangerous Sovereign In play: the table · beyond Sources: The LIØNSBERG Lexicon, The War section (draft) · Pillar X — Sacred Guardianship and Order, theses 4, 7, 8 (canon-grade) · The LIØNSBERG Pattern Language — Synthesized, The Sacred Warrior Domain (draft) · the seed's Part X (Fable synthesis, second draft). lionsberg.wiki: Self Defense. Open: The concept list cites a root page Self Defense; no file of that name exists in the wiki — the nearest holdings are the Lexicon's War section and the Warrior domain's force patterns, which is what is cited here instead. Protective Preemption Of Imminent Harm is named in that domain with no card.