See also https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nSEaksSxN2j8RLGxC/enantiodromia
People have various pre-existing ideas of what is good and what is bad. If an idea implicitly says “here’s a theory of what’s good and bad”, a person may subconsciously assume something like “I know that X is good and Y is bad, and this is a theory about what is good and bad, so the theory must be saying that X is good and Y is bad” and come away with a very selective reading of the idea.
Feels related to https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uJ89ffXrKfDyuHBzg/the-charge-of-the-hobby-horse.
an important complication to what I’ve been saying above is that sometimes the vibe and the explicit message of an idea are in conflict, and the “corruption” may not be so much a literal corruption, but a correct reading of the underlying vibe.
See https://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2017/01/against-charity-in-history-of-philosophy.html and https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MdZyLnLHuaHrCskjy/itt-passing-and-civility-are-good-charity-is-bad
Also, one explanation of this is that the view of the author, as expressed in the book, may be somewhat incoherent. (I think Schwitzgebel has a post or article that it's good to leave some interpretational room for philosophy, because it's near-inevitable that philosophies are often incoherent or insufficiently fleshed out, in text, but also in the mind of the writer (somewhat Hegelian-antithetically to his post I linked above).)
Somewhat relatdly, recently I was writing a comment that was seeded by a clear and easily defensible (according to me) idea, but looking back at it, I now see that I strayed towards expressing a somewhat wrong but easier to transmit/grasp simplification of the idea. Humans who are not concentrating are not general intelligences and if you lose "practical intelligence" due to losing focus, you compress your past idea into a now more easily graspable format, which misses out on some important detail.
Interesting post, I think I have a lot of different thoughts on it.
Take Non-Violent Communication. It’s literally called “Non-Violent Communication”, implying that anyone who doesn’t communicate in that way is behaving violently.
I don't think that's necessarily a problem, because it can be descriptively true (and I'd argue that it basically is, though it's more precisely described as threats of violence). It's possible to hold this non-violently. Or to whole heartedly choose violence.
But, tying in with the point of your post, if you just label it as "violent" and leave it at that people are going to activate their "violence" circuits and do what they do in response to violence instead of noticing the potential application of NVC on the meta layer and the contradictions that might bring up.
I think you have to leave room to say "Yeah man, I'm choosing violence" and preferably have a framework to make sense of when to do this or else you're going to inevitably run into pressure to distort your perception when you're drawn to violence for valid reasons that your frameworks can't account for.
It reminds me of something I once wrote, that a reader said had an arrogant tone. I was surprised by that, because I thought I had gone to the effort of looking up the rationale behind views that disagreed with me and explaining what about those views was reasonable. And I did do that. But then I would also follow up the explanation of their rationale with something that amounted to “and here’s why that is wrong and misguided”, which the reader correctly responded to.
But were you honestly trying to understand their rationale? If you found something that seemed more correct than anticipated, would you have updated?
If no, then I can buy the arrogance claim. If yes though, and (so far as you could tell) you really did just see through all the problems with the alternatives, then I think we have to face the possibility that you really are intellectually superior. If that's the case, then the way you're "doing it now" is falling back to conflict aversion 🙂.
Kinda like the violence thing. Sometimes it's both true and important to mention. Even if there's a bit of emotional "It's important to understand that this is WRONG" energy, that can be true too and that's not the same thing as arrogance.
NVC’s simultaneous message of “don’t judge” and “people who don’t do this are violent” may be part of what makes it spread. The explicit philosophy appeals to people who value non-judgment, while the words about violent language may appeal to people who have difficulty dealing with that kind of language. Readers may then interpret it through the lens that they prefer, with the model getting a wider audience than if it only contained one message.
Damn. Hmm... I think I'm gonna have to chew on this one.
Hah! I did the thing.
It sounds like you're saying "you get acceptance among two separate groups"? On first read, I read it as applying to two different drives in the same person. "I like the idea of people being non-judgy, and also I judge".
I still have to chew on this alternative interpretation.
I feel like I often run into various other examples too, but these two are the ones for which is it’s the easiest to point to a “correct” form of the thing
Could you share some, to help isolate the thing they have in common?
The NVC example is interesting, but I wonder if there's something additional going on where "Here's a framework to look at" is just much easier to pick up than "Here's a framework to inhabit", which seems to explain the "You're not doing NVC!" phenomenon and I've seen it come up in other places too. Getting people to even notice that distinction seems tricky, and I don't get the sense that "Because then I'd have to actually be NonViolent!" explains it all.
Interesting post, I think I have a lot of different thoughts on it.
Cool!
I don't think that's necessarily a problem, because it can be descriptively true (and I'd argue that it basically is, though it's more precisely described as threats of violence)
There are certainly some frames and definitions of violence where you could consider it true. But you could also just say - for example - that it's language that "disconnects people from an awareness of their needs", or something similar. And that would have a more compassionate vibe than saying that people are behaving violently, and (I expect) would be less likely to get them to police other people's language.
This is getting slightly separate from the point in the post, but I don't really think that NVC is correct with regard to everything that it classes under violence. In particular, I think that it misses the way that trying to express everything in a "non-violent" form can also be a form of doing violence to yourself.
E.g. the way that it claims that interpersonal feelings like "I feel betrayed" aren't really feelings and that you should rephrase them as something like "I feel disappointed". And as a conflict-resolution technique that can be a useful move since it avoids the implicit accusation of "you betrayed me" and makes your conversational partner less likely to get defensive.
But feeling betrayed is actually a distinct feeling from just feeling disappointed and trying to rephrase it as an NVC-endorsed feeling is throwing away information. E.g. in some emotion processing frameworks like Bio-Emotive, you go through first expressing a basic feeling (afraid/angry/happy/sad) and then also an interpersonal feeling like abandoned/betrayed/trapped/etc., because that way you cover a larger part of what you're really feeling. Likewise, with some of my emotional coaching clients, a feeling like "I was betrayed" or "I was abandoned" comes up, and then resolving that feeling involves really feeling into the precise details of the way in which they felt betrayed or abandoned.
Stripping that away entirely is arguably being a little dishonest toward the other person. There are people who find it outright offensive if you "lowball" your feelings and say that you're feeling disappointed when you feel betrayed, because they take it to imply that you don't trust them to be able to handle it if you tell them what your actual experience is.
If someone close to me felt that I had betrayed them, then I might also prefer them to share that, because that way we can talk about what exactly made them feel betrayed and where that's coming from. (Though it's also true that this might be a little hard to hear at first and it could be easier to start down with the "watered-down" version.) Them getting to express their genuine experience probably also helps them feel better about it, when they can just say it directly and not try to sanitize it for my benefit. And of course, we can still talk about the needs behind that feeling in addition to that.
That wouldn't be a form of violence toward me. It would just be sharing information.
I think you have to leave room to say "Yeah man, I'm choosing violence" and preferably have a framework to make sense of when to do this or else you're going to inevitably run into pressure to distort your perception when you're drawn to violence for valid reasons that your frameworks can't account for.
Ah yeah, if NVC said that it's sometimes fine to choose violence (or "violent" language), then that'd make it a lot better.
But were you honestly trying to understand their rationale? If you found something that seemed more correct than anticipated, would you have updated?
Interesting question. I think no and yes. If I had found something that had seemed more correct than anticipated, I would have updated - and I probably did update a few times, into "this position is not as entirely crazy as it initially seemed". But I think I wasn't trying to understand their rationale very deeply. Like, I encountered a claim A that rested on premises B, C, and D, and then thought "well B and C make sense but D is wrong". And then I just decided that therefore A must be wrong, without investing any energy into checking whether I might be mistaken about D being wrong, or whether it might be meant in a different sense than what my first impression was.
It sounds like you're saying "you get acceptance among two separate groups"? On first read, I read it as applying to two different drives in the same person. "I like the idea of people being non-judgy, and also I judge".
I meant it as acceptance among two separate groups, but I do think it can also apply within the same person!
Just to make things tricky for you. ;)
Could you share some, to help isolate the thing they have in common?
An earlier draft also included these examples, that I then deleted because of the "idk which of these is the original version, actually" problem:
Trauma theory. Ideas around “trauma” say that people’s behavior has roots in their past experiences, and that understanding this is important for healing it, understanding what’s happening, and not demanding that people “just shape up” in situations where they genuinely have little control over their minds. This can then become corrupted e.g. as an excuse to avoid any responsibility over one’s behavior (at worst, “if I treat you badly, it’s only because you traumatized me, so that I have to”), or that any discomfort the person doesn’t want to deal with is inherently traumatizing.
Personal responsibility. Likewise, it’s important to take responsibility over one’s life, to own one’s mistakes, and seek to become a better person. The corrupted version of this idea is effectively elevating it into a form of the just world fallacy, holding that everyone is always 100% responsible for everything that happens to them, and that things like trauma, harsh circumstances, or structural barriers are just excuses.
Claude also generated a number of examples that all felt roughly like the thing I had in mind, but that I ended up not including in the final essay for one reason or another (either because of the "I don't know what's the real version" issue, or because I wasn't familiar enough with the example to stand behind it and and didn't feel like doing research to verify it):
Stoicism as emotional suppression. Stoic philosophy is explicitly about processing emotions through rational examination — Marcus Aurelius's Meditations is one of the most emotionally vulnerable texts in Western philosophy. But people who are already avoidant of their emotions encounter Stoicism and read it as permission and validation for what they were already doing: not feeling things. "I'm not emotionally shut down, I'm practicing Stoic detachment."
"Boundaries" as control. The therapeutic concept of a boundary is something you set for yourself — "if you yell at me, I will leave the room." But people who already want to control others' behavior adopt boundary language and use it to make demands: "My boundary is that you don't talk to your ex." The original concept was about managing your own responses; the corrupted version is about dictating someone else's behavior, but now it sounds clinical and healthy.
Mindfulness as spiritual bypass. Meditation traditions generally teach that you sit with difficult emotions and observe them fully. People who are already uncomfortable with negative emotions learn mindfulness and use it as a sophisticated dissociation technique — "I'm not avoiding my anger, I'm observing it with non-attachment" — where "observing with non-attachment" functionally means the same thing they were already doing, which is refusing to feel it.
"Gaslighting" as argument-winner. The term originally described a specific, severe pattern of deliberate psychological manipulation. Adopted by people who have difficulty tolerating disagreement, it becomes: any time someone challenges my account of events, they are gaslighting me. The concept was meant to name a real form of abuse; the corrupted version makes it impossible for anyone to ever say "I remember that differently" without being accused of psychological violence.
Cognitive behavioral therapy's "thoughts aren't facts" becoming "your concerns aren't real." CBT teaches individuals to examine their own catastrophic thinking. Filtered through someone who doesn't want to engage with a partner's complaints, it becomes a tool for dismissal: "You're catastrophizing. Your thoughts aren't facts." The technique meant to help someone examine their own mind gets weaponized against someone else's legitimate grievances.
I then noted that a lot of these were left-wing-coded and also asked for right-wing-coded examples as well:
Evolutionary psychology. The actual field is full of caveats — about the naturalistic fallacy, about the gap between ancestral adaptations and modern norms, about enormous within-group variation swamping between-group averages. Someone whose pre-existing emotional commitment is to the naturalness of current gender roles encounters evo psych and genuinely learns real things about mating strategies and sexual selection. But the caveats about is-vs-ought become peripheral, and the parts about average sex differences become the load-bearing core. They now have a scientifically cited framework for something they already felt, and they're not wrong that the research says what they say it says — they've just treated the field's own cautions about interpretation as the decorative aside rather than the essential companion to the findings.
Free speech as Mill conceived it. Mill's On Liberty is making a genuinely radical argument — not just that the state shouldn't censor, but that society has an obligation to foster conditions for genuine discourse, that the tyranny of prevailing opinion is as dangerous as state censorship, and that you should engage with opposing views at their strongest. Filtered through someone whose emotional need is to say provocative things without social pushback, the load-bearing part becomes "no one can tell me to stop talking" and the entire Millian apparatus about the purpose of free expression — arriving at truth through rigorous mutual challenge — falls away. The irony being that using Mill to shut down criticism of your speech is precisely the tyranny of opinion Mill warned about, just aimed in a different direction.
"Meritocracy." This one has a particularly interesting history because Michael Young, who coined the term, meant it as a dystopian warning — a satire about a society that justified brutal inequality by claiming outcomes reflected ability. The concept was designed to be horrifying. Filtered through people whose emotional need is to believe that their success was earned and that existing hierarchies are basically fair, it became an aspirational ideal. They genuinely engage with the idea that talent and effort should matter more than birth, which is a real and defensible value. But the part of the framework that asks "and what happens to the people who lose in a meritocratic competition — do they deserve destitution?" gets treated as a secondary concern rather than the central question Young was posing.
Constitutional originalism. The intellectual framework is a serious argument about interpretive methodology — about constraining judicial discretion and maintaining democratic legitimacy. Legal scholars who developed it made sophisticated points about the rule of law. But filtered through someone whose prior commitment is to particular social outcomes, it gets applied asymmetrically in revealing ways: very strict textual originalism on provisions that constrain rights they want constrained, considerably more flexible interpretation on provisions related to executive power or state authority they want expanded. Again — they've genuinely learned something about constitutional interpretation. The distortion isn't that they don't understand originalism. It's that their emotional commitments determined where it feels urgent and where it feels negotiable.
One thing I notice across these: the right-wing examples tend to involve the corruption of frameworks that were originally critical of power — Mill questioning social conformity, Young warning about meritocratic elites, evo psych insisting on the naturalistic fallacy — into frameworks that defend existing arrangements. The left-wing examples tend to involve the corruption of frameworks for self-examination into tools for controlling others.
But you could also just say - for example - that it's language that "disconnects people from an awareness of their needs", or something similar. And that would have a more compassionate vibe than saying that people are behaving violently, and (I expect) would be less likely to get them to police other people's language.
You could, and it might have that effect. But I think that'd be missing a lot of what is descriptively accurate about the "violent" descriptor.
The reason it's accurate is that "All laws are enforced at gunpoint, and social shame too". Use "Violent" language enough, and someone is gonna stop getting invited to parties. If that person keeps showing up anyway, eventually so do men with guns.
The reason is matters is that "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, and social power too". The person who can successfully wield Violent language gains power. If we don't understand these dynamics, then we're not going to understand the problem we're trying to solve and will struggle to solve it.
I don't think we can avoid tackling the question of why we should care, unless we accept that people are going to fill in their own incomplete and distorted answers there.
Call it "violent" and leave it at that, and people will notice the relevance. They'll also be prone to relate to it the way they already relate to violence, which is often violent.
Try to strip away any reference to violence with language like "Disconnects people from an awareness of their needs", then you take away that failure mode, but you also disconnect it from a recognition of what it is and reason for people to care. "I don't need to be 'connected' to my needs in some sort of gay soccer mom buddhist sort of way, I need people to actually treat me right dammit!".
This is getting slightly separate from the point in the post, but I don't really think that NVC is correct with regard to everything that it classes under violence. [...]E.g. the way that it claims that interpersonal feelings like "I feel betrayed" aren't really feelings and that you should rephrase them as something like "I feel disappointed". And as a conflict-resolution technique that can be a useful move since it avoids the implicit accusation of "you betrayed me" and makes your conversational partner less likely to get defensive.
Yeah, I'm with you here. I don't think I don't think policing what is a "real" feeling/"totally objective observation" and what is a "totally subjective judgement" is the right way to do it.
The way I see it, they're trying to strip down to observables that cannot be disagreed on so that nothing that is said can be the focus of a (potentially hostile) disagreement. But this doesn't entirely work because no matter what you do there will be implications. "How dare you call me a disappointment!".
And we also don't need to avoid things, because often people can accept "Kaj feels betrayed" or even "I betrayed Kaj". Like, "Okay, you're upset because in your perspective I betrayed you like an evil jackass. I hear you. And yeah, that sucks to have your best friends betray you like an evil jack ass. What exactly did I do that you interpret in this way?"
I'd rather track "What ideas will threaten this person" directly rather than conflating NVCs rubric with reality itself, and track what is actually meant/likely-to-be-taken as (threat of) violence. I could totally snarl through NVC patter if I wanted to :p
Ah yeah, if NVC said that it's sometimes fine to choose violence (or "violent" language), then that'd make it a lot better.
I'm pretty sure you've read a lot more NVC than me, so correct me if I'm wrong, but the impression that I get is that it doesn't really say a whole lot either way? Like, it just says "this is violent" and "look how much better things can go when not violent" and leaves the is to ought conversion implicit?
I pulled on that thread and wrote about it here. The analogy I like is that an inclination towards "doing NVC" is like neutron dampers between fissile sources throwing off violent neutrons. There are some cases where a little bit of damping is absolutely critical, and also cases outside that band where it's either insufficient or unnecessary (and potentially counterproductive).
But I think I wasn't trying to understand their rationale very deeply. Like, I encountered a claim A that rested on premises B, C, and D, and then thought "well B and C make sense but D is wrong". And then I just decided that therefore A must be wrong, without investing any energy into checking whether I might be mistaken about D being wrong, or whether it might be meant in a different sense than what my first impression was.
I think that is also potentially completely reasonable though.
For example: A) You should walk to the car wash because B) it's only a quarter mile away and C) exercise is good for you and D) it's not like there are any other reasons to drive.
It's not arrogant to notice that this is stupid because you need your car there to wash it.
Before tarring you as "arrogant" I'd want to see that you chose not to invest more energy because you were flinching from the truth rather than just because you knew what's there.
Maybe you were flinching a bit, I dunno. Arrogance happens. But I'm generally more suspicious of arrogance on the part of the person who cries "arrogance!" without first distinguishing it from truth. Often accusations are more descriptive of the accuser than the accused ("You're trying to gaslight me!").
One thing I notice across these: the right-wing examples tend to involve the corruption of frameworks that were originally critical of power — Mill questioning social conformity, Young warning about meritocratic elites, evo psych insisting on the naturalistic fallacy — into frameworks that defend existing arrangements. The left-wing examples tend to involve the corruption of frameworks for self-examination into tools for controlling others.
Hm, I think I see a few patterns.
One is "Everything exists on one dimension. The opposite extreme has bad stuff in there, so don't do that extreme [do this extreme instead]". Left and right just pick opposite extremes to notice/not-notice the horror of.
Another is "Here's a thing You should do" -> "Ah, great ideas for what You should do! I shall begin informing all the Yous of what they should do!"
But then some of them look like "I'm just gonna use this to justify what I already believe".
The NVC example arguably hits all of these. Still thinking about what the best way is to minimize these failure modes. Some of it seems motivated, but a lot of it also seems downstream of simply not understanding. Like, I think people genuinely don't understand "how a framework that dictates how I ought to behave can apply to me and not other people". That might be an interesting post to write.
Here's a more cynical take: if a seemingly good "social idea" retains this status for a long time without making much progress beyond its most passionate proponents, it's strong evidence that the idea isn't good enough even in its "uncorrupted" form to be widely applicable.
It's similar to how everybody and their grandma know all about cognitive biases these days, and yet they mysteriously refuse to go away even so - they're there for a reason. Likewise, I'd imagine that there are good reasons for why people communicate "violently" by default, and unilaterally straying from this equilibrium puts one at a disadvantage.
This is not to say that nothing can ever be improved in the social realm, but IMO it's not the sort of domain where "twenty-dollar bills" are plentiful and low-hanging.
In studying the question of what alienates us from our natural state of compassion, I have identified specific forms of language and communication that I believe contribute to our behaving violently toward each other and ourselves. I use the term life-alienating communication to refer to these forms of communication.
Certain ways of communicating alienate us from our natural state of compassion.
The author, Marshall Rosenberg, literally starts the chapter on how to communicate empathetically by implying that anyone who doesn’t follow these principles is “behaving violently” and being “life-alienating”. The book has plenty of passages that read to me as morally loaded language that are basically saying “doing things my way is superior to anything else”... while at the same time saying that moralistic judgments are something to avoid.
Rosenberg is very careful to judge speech-acts, here, and not people.
I’ve noticed that sometimes there is an idea or framework that seems great to me, and I also know plenty of people who use it in a great and sensible way.
Then I run into people online who say that “this idea is terrible and people use it in horrible ways”.
When I ask why, they point to people applying the idea in ways that do indeed seem terrible - and in fact, applying it in ways that seem to me like the opposite of what the idea is actually saying.
Of course, some people might think that I’m the one with the wrong and terrible version of the idea. I’m not making the claim that my interpretation is necessarily always the correct one.
But I do think that there’s a principle like “every ~social idea[1] acquires a corrupted version”, and that the corruption tends to serve specific purposes rather than being random.
Here are a couple of examples:
Attachment theory. People with insecure attachment read about attachment theory, and then what they imagine secure attachment looking like is actually an idealized version of their own insecure attachment pattern.
Someone with anxious attachment might think that a secure relationship looks like both partners always being together, missing the aspect where secure attachment is meant to provide a safe base for exploration away from the other. Someone with avoidant attachment might think that secure attachment looks like being self-sufficient and not needing others, missing the aspect where it also involves comfort with neediness and emotional closeness.
These misinterpretations also get reflected in popular discussions of how to do parenting that fosters secure attachment. E.g. sometimes I see people talk about “secure attachment” in a way feels quite anxious and is all about closeness with the parent, and forgets the bit about supporting exploration away from the parent.
So-called Non-Violent Communication (NVC). NVC is a practice and philosophy about communication, where the original book about it is very explicit about it being something that you do for yourself rather than demanding of others. If someone speaks to you aggressively, you are meant to listen to the feelings and needs behind it rather than taking it personally or blaming or judging them[2]. The whole chapter on “Receiving Empathetically” is on how to respond with empathy when you are the only one using NVC.
One of the pillars of NVC is also making requests rather than demands. The book says that a request is actually a demand if the other person then gets blamed, judged or punished for not granting the request[3], and that NVC is not about getting other people to change their behavior[4].
And then there are apparently some people who are into NVC and aggressively police the language that others use, saying that everyone has to talk to them in an NVC kind of format. Which goes against everything that I mentioned in the previous two paragraphs, as it’s a demand for others to use NVC.
I feel like I often run into various other examples too, but these two are the ones for which is it’s the easiest to point to a “correct” form of the thing. In many other cases, it’s not as straightforward to say that one is a correct version and the other is distorted, as opposed to there just being two genuinely different versions of it.
Emotionally selective reading
There are several different things going on with these. One is that it’s easier to transmit a simplified and distorted version of an idea than the whole package with all of its nuance intact. “NVC is this specific formula for how to express things” is quicker to explain that all the philosophy in the whole book.
Another is that, as you might notice from the anxious vs. avoidant example, is that often the corrupted ideas are pointing at opposite extremes. Each contains a grain of truth, but then exaggerates it to an extreme, or fails to include bits that would be required for a full picture.
I think that’s pointing to the third factor, which is that any new ideas will be filtered through a person’s existing needs and emotional beliefs.
People have various pre-existing ideas of what is good and what is bad. If an idea implicitly says “here’s a theory of what’s good and bad”, a person may subconsciously assume something like “I know that X is good and Y is bad, and this is a theory about what is good and bad, so the theory must be saying that X is good and Y is bad” and come away with a very selective reading of the idea.
On a more phenomenological level, one might say that there will be parts of the theory that resonate with the person and others that don’t. If someone is reading a book, some sentences will feel like the point and some will feel like less essential caveats. “Here’s a form of language that works better” might read as the actionable point, with the “NVC is something you do for yourself” bit being quietly forgotten or rationalized away.
Often, beliefs are adopted not because of their truth value but because they allow a person to do something they wanted to do. The stronger the person’s need to believe in something, the more likely it is that they’ll selectively read ideas like this.
This implies that the corruption is somewhat predictable. If you have a sense of someone’s psychological needs, you might have a sense of how they’ll distort any given framework. An anxious person’s misunderstanding of attachment theory isn’t random, but emerging from their personal psychology.
None of this is to say that the people wouldn’t get genuinely novel ideas from the frameworks. Someone who gets enthusiastic about NVC and starts using it in all their communication isn’t just taking their existing beliefs and rationalizing them. They are learning and doing something genuinely novel, and they have gained a lens for understanding the world that shows them at least some correct facts. But filters in their mind are also systematically hiding awareness of other truths.
The effects of vibe and my own corruption-complicity
I’m now going to flip this and show how I myself might have been doing the exact same thing that I’m criticizing others for.
Because an important complication to what I’ve been saying above is that sometimes the vibe and the explicit message of an idea are in conflict, and the “corruption” may not be so much a literal corruption, but a correct reading of the underlying vibe.
Take Non-Violent Communication. It’s literally called “Non-Violent Communication”, implying that anyone who doesn’t communicate in that way is behaving violently. Here’s how one of the chapters in the book begins:
The author, Marshall Rosenberg, literally starts the chapter on how to communicate empathetically by implying that anyone who doesn’t follow these principles is “behaving violently” and being “life-alienating”. The book has plenty of passages that read to me as morally loaded language that are basically saying “doing things my way is superior to anything else”... while at the same time saying that moralistic judgments are something to avoid.
If someone reads the book and comes away with the belief that anyone who doesn’t use NVC is “being violent” and “life-alienating”, while NVC practitioners are the ones connected to their “natural state of compassion”... then it’s not very surprising if they end up wanting to police other people’s language.
I was quite surprised, some time back, when I went back to re-read the NVC book and encountered this language and vibe. I hadn’t remembered it at all. Meaning that I myself had read the book selectively, filtering out some of the subtext in order to only focus on the explicit content. No doubt because I myself am uncomfortable with conflict and with judging others, so I focused on just the explicit “NVC is for yourself” message while ignoring the parts that conflicted with it.
And also, while I’ve generally found the principles of NVC to work spectacularly well, on one occasion they worked badly, because I myself forgot about the parts of it that didn’t resonate with my own schemas as much.
If a conflict-avoidant person like me reads NVC and other similar pieces of advice - like Stephen Covey’s “seek first to understand, then to be understood” - they might come away with a very specific emotional fantasy. It goes something like “if I just endlessly empathize and try to listen to people with whom I’m in conflict, then eventually they’ll empathize back and we can reach mutual understanding”.
This is a powerful fantasy in part because it does very often work! Trying to engage in constructive conversation and genuinely empathizing with the upset and needs of others first does often lead to mutual agreement.
However, an important part of NVC is also checking in with your own feelings and needs, and not giving in to demands that don’t align with your own needs. On at least one occasion, I ended up in a situation where I would empathize and empathize with someone who was making demands of me… but who then would never empathize with my needs or consider them valid. This effectively put me in a headspace where I felt pressured to give in to their demands, as their needs felt much more salient than my own.
I effectively skipped the part about checking in with my own needs, because that would then have required me to stand up for myself and refuse the demands, and this felt uncomfortable to me. So while some people end up reading NVC in a way that gets them to police the language of others - effectively reading it in a more conflict-y way than intended - some people also read it in a less conflict-y way than intended, and end up giving in to others too much.
I expect that someone who is using NVC to police the language of others might be - consciously or subconsciously - anticipating this failure mode. They might be afraid that they or people they care about won’t be capable of checking in with their needs if others don’t speak in an NVC kind of way, and will then be unduly pressured.
Conflicted authors
Let’s go back to the bit where the vibe and explicit content of a source seemed to conflict at times.
Why is that?
Now, I don’t want to speculate too much about Rosenberg in particular. Maybe I’m just misreading him. But NVC is hardly the only source where the vibe and explicit content seem to conflict. Without naming any more names, I have noted that there seems to be a more general strand of spiritual/self-development writing that seems to be saying something like “my practice will make you more loving, compassionate, and open-minded, and anyone who disagrees with my method is a complete idiot who doesn’t understand anything”.
My guess is that at least in some cases the reason is an instance of the same pattern that I’ve been discussing. Emotional schemas can subvert anything to serve their purpose, invisible to the person in question.
Someone might write a book on compassion and empathy and genuinely intellectually believe that you shouldn’t judge others, and even be genuinely compassionate and non-judgmental most of the time… while still having some need to feel better than others, or some desire for a clear framework that avoids uncertainty, or whatever.
And then that need will subtly leak into the text, with the author doing the same thing as their readers will - looking at what they’ve written and focusing on the aspects of it that they endorse and believe in (the explicit message), and filtering out aspects of it that conflict with that.
It reminds me of something I once wrote, that a reader said had an arrogant tone. I was surprised by that, because I thought I had gone to the effort of looking up the rationale behind views that disagreed with me and explaining what about those views was reasonable. And I did do that. But then I would also follow up the explanation of their rationale with something that amounted to “and here’s why that is wrong and misguided”, which the reader correctly responded to.
There had been a subconscious strategy active in the writing process, that performed just enough intellectual charity to let me feel that I was being charitable, all the while letting me feel intellectually superior.
Possibly I’m doing something like that right now! I don’t feel like I would be, but those kinds of impulses would have gotten good at hiding inside my mind by now.
So it is not just that ideas get corrupted in transmission. They get corrupted while being generated. People will always be looking at reality through the filter of their own needs and desires. They don’t just interpret reality through them, their process for generating and communicating new ideas is also one that’s trying to get their underlying needs met.
The internal conflict may also be functional. NVC’s simultaneous message of “don’t judge” and “people who don’t do this are violent” may be part of what makes it spread. The explicit philosophy appeals to people who value non-judgment, while the words about violent language may appeal to people who have difficulty dealing with that kind of language. Readers may then interpret it through the lens that they prefer, with the model getting a wider audience than if it only contained one message.
Of course, none of this means that we shouldn’t have new ideas. Even corrupted ideas still correctly describe some parts of reality. And many people do understand, and benefit from, the less corrupted versions of various ideas and frameworks. As I said, I’ve found the proper, explicit version of NVC is tremendously useful!
Even if a misapplication of it led me astray once.
“Social idea” may not be the most accurate term for this, but I couldn’t think of anything better.
"In NVC, no matter what words people use to express themselves, we listen for their observations, feelings, needs, and requests. Imagine you’ve loaned your car to a new neighbor who had a personal emergency, and when your family finds out, they react with intensity: “You are a fool for having trusted a total stranger!” You can use the components of NVC to tune in to the feelings and needs of those family members in contrast to either (1) blaming yourself by taking the message personally, or (2) blaming and judging them.”
– Marshall Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life: Life-Changing Tools for Healthy Relationships. Kindle Locations 1820-1824.
“To tell if it’s a demand or a request, observe what the speaker does if the request is not complied with.
Let’s look at two variations of a situation. Jack says to his friend Jane, “I’m lonely and would like you to spend the evening with me.” Is that a request or a demand? The answer is that we don’t know until we observe how Jack treats Jane if she doesn’t comply. Suppose she replies, “Jack, I’m really tired. If you’d like some company, how about finding someone else to be with you this evening?” If Jack then remarks, “How typical of you to be so selfish!” his request was in fact a demand. Instead of empathizing with her need to rest, he has blamed her.
It’s a demand if the speaker then criticizes or judges.”
-- Marshall Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life: Life-Changing Tools for Healthy Relationships. Kindle Locations 1593-1600.
“If our objective is only to change people and their behavior or to get our way, then NVC is not an appropriate tool. The process is designed for those of us who would like others to change and respond, but only if they choose to do so willingly and compassionately. The objective of NVC is to establish a relationship based on honesty and empathy. When others trust that our primary commitment is to the quality of the relationship, and that we expect this process to fulfill everyone’s needs, then they can trust that our requests are true requests and not camouflaged demands.”
– Marshall Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life: Life-Changing Tools for Healthy Relationships. Kindle Locations 1624-1628.