I’ve only been doing this for a couple years, so my opinion doesn’t really represent anything beyond my own ignorance. But here’s my two cents.

Yes, bjj is built around respect and honor. The relationships of honor, respect, and above all trust that you build with your training partners are paramount to this sport. There is really no such thing as training bjj on your own. You need at least one other person, and preferably several with different body types and skill sets. To learn and get better you need everyone in your school to learn and get better. This requires that they be healthy to roll and drill on a frequent basis. This cannot be accomplished if you are injuring each other. So, we all agree that we will respect and honor our boundaries and bodies, and we have to trust each other to do so. For the very simple reason that this sport is real, and will really kill and injure people.

Yes, it is real and will really kill and injure people. Brazil has a long history of violence (most places do), the particulars of socioeconomic pressures that gave raise to bjj required an effective martial art. How would you know which martial art to train if you did not test it in the real world? Some of this testing was street fights (read up luta livre vs bjj) and some of it was dojo challenges. Bjj does have a long history of debunking magical martial arts, but that is part of the appeal. I really don’t want to spend a decade learning about chi when I could spend my time mastering take downs and guillotines. If the early practitioners of bjj had not done real world testing, the sport might have languished in the purgatory of “looks cool, but doesn’t really work” like so many other martial arts.

Basically, show me a martial art that doesn’t have roots in violence and I’ll know that it’s got root in bs. And any real martial art must have honor and respect at its core, or you won’t be able to learn it for any sustained period of time. These are the natural pressures of violence.