{"id":1784,"date":"2016-05-19T02:32:44","date_gmt":"2016-05-19T09:32:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/?p=1784"},"modified":"2016-05-24T22:21:01","modified_gmt":"2016-05-25T05:21:01","slug":"two-types-of-situations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/2016\/05\/two-types-of-situations\/","title":{"rendered":"Scarcity vs. Mutual Benefit"},"content":{"rendered":"

A core thesis of\u00a0Nonviolent Communication<\/em><\/a>\u00a0(Rosenberg) is that there is no such thing as right and wrong or good and evil. Rather, everyone simply has\u00a0needs<\/em> which may\u00a0be met or\u00a0unmet. “Moralistic thinking” judges an action or person that meets your needs as “good” and one that does not meet your needs as “bad”. Rosenberg argues that all violence is caused by such judgements<\/a>\u00a0and offers techniques for interpreting the world more\u00a0compassionately.<\/p>\n

Robert Wright, in his book Nonzero<\/em><\/a>, chronicles the history of the world as the\u00a0progress of biological and then social organisms\u00a0to unleash new\u00a0ways of\u00a0collaborating in order to achieve mutual gains.\u00a0This includes everything\u00a0from the mutual advantage of organelles joining together inside a cell to the mutual advantages of paying taxes\u00a0for\u00a0shared services like roads and armies. It helps to explain\u00a0the evolutionary development of human brains able to cooperate with ever larger social groups, as well as\u00a0the emergence of human traits such as kindness and\u00a0altruism.<\/p>\n

Wright also makes it clear that\u00a0there have always been plenty of situations where collaboration does\u00a0not<\/em> lead to mutual gains. When there is a fixed scarcity of food, water, control, or some other resource, violence and war have been the logical strategy\u00a0to claim the limited spoils. (And the two situations are intertwined:\u00a0competition for limited resources created the evolutionary pressure that favored\u00a0human groups that were better at cooperating internally.)<\/p>\n

I believe these authors offer\u00a0two perspectives on\u00a0a single\u00a0phenomenon. Namely,\u00a0we humans are flexibly equipped to deal\u00a0with two distinct types of situations: those where\u00a0collaboration results in mutual gain; and those\u00a0where it does not.<\/p>\n

When we act out\u00a0of fear (including its\u00a0variants, guilt and shame), we are using the part of our psyche that is adapted to scarcity and competition for limited resources. Scarcity calls for violence, and so our action will necessarily be violent. Nonviolent\u00a0<\/em>Communication<\/em>\u00a0describes\u00a0a wide range of violent actions\u00a0\u2014 not just physical but also relational\u00a0and emotional violence, as well as\u00a0violence\u00a0to our own internal sense of worthiness.<\/p>\n

When we act from a feeling\u00a0of compassion\u00a0(i.e. caring and love), we are using an altogether different part of our psyche that is adapted to the possibility of\u00a0mutual gain. Such situations\u00a0call for empathy \u2014 an\u00a0understanding of others’ needs as well as our own \u2014 so that we can work together to ensure that everyone’s needs are met. Our action is likely to be creative, searching out\u00a0opportunities for\u00a0new forms of\u00a0mutual gain.<\/p>\n

Among other things, this\u00a0helps to explain why people\u00a0meet the expectations of their environment<\/a>. If you approach someone with violence or by wielding power, they are likely to assume they are in a scarcity situation and\u00a0will probably\u00a0respond using their fear\u00a0pathway. If you approach someone with compassion, they are likely to assume they are in a mutual gain situation and will probably\u00a0respond using their cooperation\u00a0pathway.<\/p>\n

Mindfulness meditation and other spiritual traditions (with their practices covering gratitude, compassion, patience, etc.) can be seen as a way to train the mind to react to as many situations as possible with the cooperation\u00a0pathway\u00a0rather than the scarcity pathway. This goal\u00a0follows\u00a0from the understanding that cooperation creates abundance, whereas violence only leads to more scarcity.<\/p>\n

It may be that when we talk about “angels and demons of our nature”, we are really referring to our compassion and fear pathways. However, calling one of these pathways “good” and the other “bad” is itself a judgement that inevitably leads to more violence. The Zen of Fear\u00a0is to nurture\u00a0compassion for\u00a0that part of us that is designed to\u00a0face\u00a0scarcity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A core thesis of\u00a0Nonviolent Communication\u00a0(Rosenberg) is that there is no such thing as right and wrong or good and evil. Rather, everyone simply has\u00a0needs which may\u00a0be met or\u00a0unmet. “Moralistic thinking” judges an action or person that meets your needs as “good” and one that does not meet your needs as “bad”. Rosenberg argues that all … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Scarcity vs. Mutual Benefit”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1784"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1784"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1784\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1812,"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1784\/revisions\/1812"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1784"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1784"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1784"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}