Interesting post, I think I have a lot of different thoughts on it.
Take Non-Violent Communication. Itâs literally called âNon-Violent Communicationâ, implying that anyone who doesnât communicate in that way is behaving violently.
I donât think thatâs necessarily a problem, because it can be descriptively true (and Iâd argue that it basically is, though itâs more precisely described as threats of violence). Itâs 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 âviolentâ and leave it at that people are going to activate their âviolenceâ 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 âYeah man, Iâm choosing violenceâ and preferably have a framework to make sense of when to do this or else youâre going to inevitably run into pressure to distort your perception when youâre drawn to violence for valid reasons that your frameworks canât 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 âand hereâs why that is wrong and misguidedâ, 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 thatâs the case, then the way youâre âdoing it nowâ is falling back to conflict aversion đ.
Kinda like the violence thing. Sometimes itâs both true and important to mention. Even if thereâs a bit of emotional âItâs important to understand that this is WRONGâ energy, that can be true too and thatâs not the same thing as arrogance.
NVCâs simultaneous message of âdonât judgeâ and âpeople who donât do this are violentâ 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 Iâm gonna have to chew on this one.
Hah! I did the thing.
It sounds like youâre saying âyou get acceptance among two separate groupsâ? On first read, I read it as applying to two different drives in the same person. âI like the idea of people being non-judgy, and also I judgeâ.
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 itâs the easiest to point to a âcorrectâ 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 thereâs something additional going on where âHereâs a framework to look atâ is just much easier to pick up than âHereâs a framework to inhabitâ, which seems to explain the âYouâre not doing NVC!â phenomenon and Iâve seen it come up in other places too. Getting people to even notice that distinction seems tricky, and I donât get the sense that âBecause then Iâd have to actually be NonViolent!â explains it all.
Interesting post, I think I have a lot of different thoughts on it.
Cool!
I donât think thatâs necessarily a problem, because it can be descriptively true (and Iâd argue that it basically is, though itâs 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 sayâfor exampleâthat itâs language that âdisconnects people from an awareness of their needsâ, 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 peopleâs language.
This is getting slightly separate from the point in the post, but I donât 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 ânon-violentâ form can also be a form of doing violence to yourself.
E.g. the way that it claims that interpersonal feelings like âI feel betrayedâ arenât really feelings and that you should rephrase them as something like âI feel disappointedâ. And as a conflict-resolution technique that can be a useful move since it avoids the implicit accusation of âyou betrayed meâ 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/âangry/âhappy/âsad) and then also an interpersonal feeling like abandoned/âbetrayed/âtrapped/âetc., because that way you cover a larger part of what youâre really feeling. Likewise, with some of my emotional coaching clients, a feeling like âI was betrayedâ or âI was abandonedâ 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 âlowballâ your feelings and say that youâre feeling disappointed when you feel betrayed, because they take it to imply that you donât 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 thatâs coming from. (Though itâs also true that this might be a little hard to hear at first and it could be easier to start down with the âwatered-downâ 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 wouldnât be a form of violence toward me. It would just be sharing information.
I think you have to leave room to say âYeah man, Iâm choosing violenceâ and preferably have a framework to make sense of when to do this or else youâre going to inevitably run into pressure to distort your perception when youâre drawn to violence for valid reasons that your frameworks canât account for.
Ah yeah, if NVC said that itâs sometimes fine to choose violence (or âviolentâ language), then thatâd 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 updatedâand I probably did update a few times, into âthis position is not as entirely crazy as it initially seemedâ. But I think I wasnât trying to understand their rationale very deeply. Like, I encountered a claim A that rested on premises B, C, and D, and then thought âwell B and C make sense but D is wrongâ. 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 youâre saying âyou get acceptance among two separate groupsâ? On first read, I read it as applying to two different drives in the same person. âI like the idea of people being non-judgy, and also I judgeâ.
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 âidk which of these is the original version, actuallyâ problem:
Trauma theory. Ideas around âtraumaâ say that peopleâs behavior has roots in their past experiences, and that understanding this is important for healing it, understanding whatâs happening, and not demanding that people âjust shape upâ 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 oneâs behavior (at worst, âif I treat you badly, itâs only because you traumatized me, so that I have toâ), or that any discomfort the person doesnât want to deal with is inherently traumatizing.
Personal responsibility. Likewise, itâs important to take responsibility over oneâs life, to own oneâs 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 âI donât know whatâs the real versionâ issue, or because I wasnât familiar enough with the example to stand behind it and and didnât feel like doing research to verify it):
Stoicism as emotional suppression. Stoic philosophy is explicitly about processing emotions through rational examination â Marcus Aureliusâs 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. âIâm not emotionally shut down, Iâm practicing Stoic detachment.â
âBoundariesâ as control. The therapeutic concept of a boundary is something you set for yourself â âif you yell at me, I will leave the room.â But people who already want to control othersâ behavior adopt boundary language and use it to make demands: âMy boundary is that you donât talk to your ex.â The original concept was about managing your own responses; the corrupted version is about dictating someone elseâs 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 â âIâm not avoiding my anger, Iâm observing it with non-attachmentâ â where âobserving with non-attachmentâ functionally means the same thing they were already doing, which is refusing to feel it.
âGaslightingâ 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 âI remember that differentlyâ without being accused of psychological violence.
Cognitive behavioral therapyâs âthoughts arenât factsâ becoming âyour concerns arenât real.â CBT teaches individuals to examine their own catastrophic thinking. Filtered through someone who doesnât want to engage with a partnerâs complaints, it becomes a tool for dismissal: âYouâre catastrophizing. Your thoughts arenât facts.â The technique meant to help someone examine their own mind gets weaponized against someone elseâs 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 â 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 theyâre not wrong that the research says what they say it says â theyâve just treated the fieldâs own cautions about interpretation as the decorative aside rather than the essential companion to the findings.
Free speech as Mill conceived it. Millâs On Liberty is making a genuinely radical argument â not just that the state shouldnât 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 âno one can tell me to stop talkingâ and the entire Millian apparatus about the purpose of free expression â arriving at truth through rigorous mutual challenge â 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.
âMeritocracy.â This one has a particularly interesting history because Michael Young, who coined the term, meant it as a dystopian warning â 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 âand what happens to the people who lose in a meritocratic competition â do they deserve destitution?â 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 â 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 â theyâve genuinely learned something about constitutional interpretation. The distortion isnât that they donât understand originalism. Itâs 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 â Mill questioning social conformity, Young warning about meritocratic elites, evo psych insisting on the naturalistic fallacy â 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 sayâfor exampleâthat itâs language that âdisconnects people from an awareness of their needsâ, 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 peopleâs language.
You could, and it might have that effect. But I think thatâd be missing a lot of what is descriptively accurate about the âviolentâ descriptor.
The reason itâs accurate is that âAll laws are enforced at gunpoint, and social shame tooâ. Use âViolentâ 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 âPolitical power grows out of the barrel of a gun, and social power tooâ. The person who can successfully wield Violent language gains power. If we donât understand these dynamics, then weâre not going to understand the problem weâre trying to solve and will struggle to solve it.
I donât 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 âviolentâ and leave it at that, and people will notice the relevance. Theyâll 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 âDisconnects people from an awareness of their needsâ, 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. âI donât need to be âconnectedâ to my needs in some sort of gay soccer mom buddhist sort of way, I need people to actually treat me right dammit!â.
This is getting slightly separate from the point in the post, but I donât 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 âI feel betrayedâ arenât really feelings and that you should rephrase them as something like âI feel disappointedâ. And as a conflict-resolution technique that can be a useful move since it avoids the implicit accusation of âyou betrayed meâ and makes your conversational partner less likely to get defensive.
Yeah, Iâm with you here. I donât think I donât think policing what is a ârealâ feeling/ââtotally objective observationâ and what is a âtotally subjective judgementâ is the right way to do it.
The way I see it, theyâre 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 doesnât entirely work because no matter what you do there will be implications. âHow dare you call me a disappointment!â.
And we also donât need to avoid things, because often people can accept âKaj feels betrayedâ or even âI betrayed Kajâ. Like, âOkay, youâre 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?â
Iâd rather track âWhat ideas will threaten this personâ directly rather than conflating NVCs rubric with reality itself, and track what is actually meant/âlikely-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 itâs sometimes fine to choose violence (or âviolentâ language), then thatâd make it a lot better.
Iâm pretty sure youâve read a lot more NVC than me, so correct me if Iâm wrong, but the impression that I get is that it doesnât really say a whole lot either way? Like, it just says âthis is violentâ and âlook how much better things can go when not violentâ 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 âdoing NVCâ 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 itâs either insufficient or unnecessary (and potentially counterproductive).
But I think I wasnât trying to understand their rationale very deeply. Like, I encountered a claim A that rested on premises B, C, and D, and then thought âwell B and C make sense but D is wrongâ. 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) itâs only a quarter mile away and C) exercise is good for you and D) itâs not like there are any other reasons to drive.
Itâs not arrogant to notice that this is stupid because you need your car there to wash it.
Before tarring you as âarrogantâ Iâd want to see that you chose not to invest more energy because you were flinching from the truth rather than just because you knew whatâs there.
Maybe you were flinching a bit, I dunno. Arrogance happens. But Iâm generally more suspicious of arrogance on the part of the person who cries âarrogance!â without first distinguishing it from truth. Often accusations are more descriptive of the accuser than the accused (âYouâre trying to gaslight me!â).
One thing I notice across these: the right-wing examples tend to involve the corruption of frameworks that were originally critical of power â Mill questioning social conformity, Young warning about meritocratic elites, evo psych insisting on the naturalistic fallacy â 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 âEverything exists on one dimension. The opposite extreme has bad stuff in there, so donât do that extreme [do this extreme instead]â. Left and right just pick opposite extremes to notice/ânot-notice the horror of.
Another is âHereâs a thing You should doâ â âAh, great ideas for what You should do! I shall begin informing all the Yous of what they should do!â
But then some of them look like âIâm just gonna use this to justify what I already believeâ.
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 donât understand âhow a framework that dictates how I ought to behave can apply to me and not other peopleâ. That might be an interesting post to write.
Interesting post, I think I have a lot of different thoughts on it.
I donât think thatâs necessarily a problem, because it can be descriptively true (and Iâd argue that it basically is, though itâs more precisely described as threats of violence). Itâs 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 âviolentâ and leave it at that people are going to activate their âviolenceâ 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 âYeah man, Iâm choosing violenceâ and preferably have a framework to make sense of when to do this or else youâre going to inevitably run into pressure to distort your perception when youâre drawn to violence for valid reasons that your frameworks canât account for.
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 thatâs the case, then the way youâre âdoing it nowâ is falling back to conflict aversion đ.
Kinda like the violence thing. Sometimes itâs both true and important to mention. Even if thereâs a bit of emotional âItâs important to understand that this is WRONGâ energy, that can be true too and thatâs not the same thing as arrogance.
Damn. Hmm⌠I think Iâm gonna have to chew on this one.Hah! I did the thing.
It sounds like youâre saying âyou get acceptance among two separate groupsâ? On first read, I read it as applying to two different drives in the same person. âI like the idea of people being non-judgy, and also I judgeâ.
I still have to chew on this alternative interpretation.
Could you share some, to help isolate the thing they have in common?
The NVC example is interesting, but I wonder if thereâs something additional going on where âHereâs a framework to look atâ is just much easier to pick up than âHereâs a framework to inhabitâ, which seems to explain the âYouâre not doing NVC!â phenomenon and Iâve seen it come up in other places too. Getting people to even notice that distinction seems tricky, and I donât get the sense that âBecause then Iâd have to actually be NonViolent!â explains it all.
Cool!
There are certainly some frames and definitions of violence where you could consider it true. But you could also just sayâfor exampleâthat itâs language that âdisconnects people from an awareness of their needsâ, 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 peopleâs language.
This is getting slightly separate from the point in the post, but I donât 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 ânon-violentâ form can also be a form of doing violence to yourself.
E.g. the way that it claims that interpersonal feelings like âI feel betrayedâ arenât really feelings and that you should rephrase them as something like âI feel disappointedâ. And as a conflict-resolution technique that can be a useful move since it avoids the implicit accusation of âyou betrayed meâ 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/âangry/âhappy/âsad) and then also an interpersonal feeling like abandoned/âbetrayed/âtrapped/âetc., because that way you cover a larger part of what youâre really feeling. Likewise, with some of my emotional coaching clients, a feeling like âI was betrayedâ or âI was abandonedâ 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 âlowballâ your feelings and say that youâre feeling disappointed when you feel betrayed, because they take it to imply that you donât 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 thatâs coming from. (Though itâs also true that this might be a little hard to hear at first and it could be easier to start down with the âwatered-downâ 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 wouldnât be a form of violence toward me. It would just be sharing information.
Ah yeah, if NVC said that itâs sometimes fine to choose violence (or âviolentâ language), then thatâd make it a lot better.
Interesting question. I think no and yes. If I had found something that had seemed more correct than anticipated, I would have updatedâand I probably did update a few times, into âthis position is not as entirely crazy as it initially seemedâ. But I think I wasnât trying to understand their rationale very deeply. Like, I encountered a claim A that rested on premises B, C, and D, and then thought âwell B and C make sense but D is wrongâ. 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 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. ;)
An earlier draft also included these examples, that I then deleted because of the âidk which of these is the original version, actuallyâ problem:
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 âI donât know whatâs the real versionâ issue, or because I wasnât familiar enough with the example to stand behind it and and didnât feel like doing research to verify it):
Stoicism as emotional suppression. Stoic philosophy is explicitly about processing emotions through rational examination â Marcus Aureliusâs 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. âIâm not emotionally shut down, Iâm practicing Stoic detachment.â
âBoundariesâ as control. The therapeutic concept of a boundary is something you set for yourself â âif you yell at me, I will leave the room.â But people who already want to control othersâ behavior adopt boundary language and use it to make demands: âMy boundary is that you donât talk to your ex.â The original concept was about managing your own responses; the corrupted version is about dictating someone elseâs 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 â âIâm not avoiding my anger, Iâm observing it with non-attachmentâ â where âobserving with non-attachmentâ functionally means the same thing they were already doing, which is refusing to feel it.
âGaslightingâ 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 âI remember that differentlyâ without being accused of psychological violence.
Cognitive behavioral therapyâs âthoughts arenât factsâ becoming âyour concerns arenât real.â CBT teaches individuals to examine their own catastrophic thinking. Filtered through someone who doesnât want to engage with a partnerâs complaints, it becomes a tool for dismissal: âYouâre catastrophizing. Your thoughts arenât facts.â The technique meant to help someone examine their own mind gets weaponized against someone elseâs 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 â 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 theyâre not wrong that the research says what they say it says â theyâve just treated the fieldâs own cautions about interpretation as the decorative aside rather than the essential companion to the findings.
Free speech as Mill conceived it. Millâs On Liberty is making a genuinely radical argument â not just that the state shouldnât 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 âno one can tell me to stop talkingâ and the entire Millian apparatus about the purpose of free expression â arriving at truth through rigorous mutual challenge â 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.
âMeritocracy.â This one has a particularly interesting history because Michael Young, who coined the term, meant it as a dystopian warning â 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 âand what happens to the people who lose in a meritocratic competition â do they deserve destitution?â 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 â 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 â theyâve genuinely learned something about constitutional interpretation. The distortion isnât that they donât understand originalism. Itâs 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 â Mill questioning social conformity, Young warning about meritocratic elites, evo psych insisting on the naturalistic fallacy â 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.
You could, and it might have that effect. But I think thatâd be missing a lot of what is descriptively accurate about the âviolentâ descriptor.
The reason itâs accurate is that âAll laws are enforced at gunpoint, and social shame tooâ. Use âViolentâ 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 âPolitical power grows out of the barrel of a gun, and social power tooâ. The person who can successfully wield Violent language gains power. If we donât understand these dynamics, then weâre not going to understand the problem weâre trying to solve and will struggle to solve it.
I donât 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 âviolentâ and leave it at that, and people will notice the relevance. Theyâll 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 âDisconnects people from an awareness of their needsâ, 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. âI donât need to be âconnectedâ to my needs in some sort of gay soccer mom buddhist sort of way, I need people to actually treat me right dammit!â.
Yeah, Iâm with you here. I donât think I donât think policing what is a ârealâ feeling/ââtotally objective observationâ and what is a âtotally subjective judgementâ is the right way to do it.
The way I see it, theyâre 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 doesnât entirely work because no matter what you do there will be implications. âHow dare you call me a disappointment!â.
And we also donât need to avoid things, because often people can accept âKaj feels betrayedâ or even âI betrayed Kajâ. Like, âOkay, youâre 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?â
Iâd rather track âWhat ideas will threaten this personâ directly rather than conflating NVCs rubric with reality itself, and track what is actually meant/âlikely-to-be-taken as (threat of) violence. I could totally snarl through NVC patter if I wanted to :p
Iâm pretty sure youâve read a lot more NVC than me, so correct me if Iâm wrong, but the impression that I get is that it doesnât really say a whole lot either way? Like, it just says âthis is violentâ and âlook how much better things can go when not violentâ 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 âdoing NVCâ 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 itâs either insufficient or unnecessary (and potentially counterproductive).
I think that is also potentially completely reasonable though.
For example: A) You should walk to the car wash because B) itâs only a quarter mile away and C) exercise is good for you and D) itâs not like there are any other reasons to drive.
Itâs not arrogant to notice that this is stupid because you need your car there to wash it.
Before tarring you as âarrogantâ Iâd want to see that you chose not to invest more energy because you were flinching from the truth rather than just because you knew whatâs there.
Maybe you were flinching a bit, I dunno. Arrogance happens. But Iâm generally more suspicious of arrogance on the part of the person who cries âarrogance!â without first distinguishing it from truth. Often accusations are more descriptive of the accuser than the accused (âYouâre trying to gaslight me!â).
Hm, I think I see a few patterns.
One is âEverything exists on one dimension. The opposite extreme has bad stuff in there, so donât do that extreme [do this extreme instead]â. Left and right just pick opposite extremes to notice/ânot-notice the horror of.
Another is âHereâs a thing You should doâ â âAh, great ideas for what You should do! I shall begin informing all the Yous of what they should do!â
But then some of them look like âIâm just gonna use this to justify what I already believeâ.
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 donât understand âhow a framework that dictates how I ought to behave can apply to me and not other peopleâ. That might be an interesting post to write.
If you use language to project power while lacking the social status to justify your power claims you stop getting invited to parties.
That happens whether or not your communication is violent in the way NVC conceptualizes violence.