What the creator of NVC means by “violence” isn’t just physical violence, and it can apply to any behaviour. Funnily enough there’s even a chapter about when to use physical force if it’s necessary—it says: only preventative force; never punitive.
So what it does mean is anything that is for punishing others. The idea of the framework is that we can do better than that, and reach harmony without having to do an action that is mildly harmful to yourself and (typically) much more harmful to others, by getting them to care for your needs instead of using leverage to incentivize them to do that if they’re an entirely self-interested rational agent. The author doesn’t talk about game theory, those are parallels that I’m drawing to make it clearer to people reading Lesswrong, and the reason author is disagreeing with game theory is that game theory makes the core assumption that every participant doesn’t care whatsoever about every other participant, whereas the author of NVC says that if your needs are heard then you are much more likely to hear other people’s needs.
It’s possible that sometimes it means alienating language, for example if we call someone a word—even a compliment—thus making the generalization about them, instead of being connected to our observations about them—such generalizations kinda suck, they’re too inaccurate, and our brains do a really good job automatically without us doing them explicitly. Once I told someone, “you’re a great showman”, and then it felt weird, and I don’t think he liked hearing it either. What he would have liked hearing more was my observation that when he was presenting this writer’s meetup (I wish I could remember which specific moments of that), I could hear the people laugh and when I talked with people, I did not feel tense and people seemed easy-going because of this established context in my opinion, so I enjoyed myself at the event… okay that’s not that close to my original observations, but it’s still a lot more information and now he’ll know better what he did right. There’s no such thing as being a great showman anyway, there are many micro-skills.
What the creator of NVC means by “violence” isn’t just physical violence, and it can apply to any behaviour. Funnily enough there’s even a chapter about when to use physical force if it’s necessary—it says: only preventative force; never punitive.
So what it does mean is anything that is for punishing others. The idea of the framework is that we can do better than that, and reach harmony without having to do an action that is mildly harmful to yourself and (typically) much more harmful to others, by getting them to care for your needs instead of using leverage to incentivize them to do that if they’re an entirely self-interested rational agent. The author doesn’t talk about game theory, those are parallels that I’m drawing to make it clearer to people reading Lesswrong, and the reason author is disagreeing with game theory is that game theory makes the core assumption that every participant doesn’t care whatsoever about every other participant, whereas the author of NVC says that if your needs are heard then you are much more likely to hear other people’s needs.
It’s possible that sometimes it means alienating language, for example if we call someone a word—even a compliment—thus making the generalization about them, instead of being connected to our observations about them—such generalizations kinda suck, they’re too inaccurate, and our brains do a really good job automatically without us doing them explicitly. Once I told someone, “you’re a great showman”, and then it felt weird, and I don’t think he liked hearing it either. What he would have liked hearing more was my observation that when he was presenting this writer’s meetup (I wish I could remember which specific moments of that), I could hear the people laugh and when I talked with people, I did not feel tense and people seemed easy-going because of this established context in my opinion, so I enjoyed myself at the event… okay that’s not that close to my original observations, but it’s still a lot more information and now he’ll know better what he did right. There’s no such thing as being a great showman anyway, there are many micro-skills.