Marshall Rosenberg started his career as a psychotherapist in the field of psychoanalysis or humanistic psychology. Once he acknowledged that he was having only limited success in solving people’s problems and changing their behaviour by way of psychotherapy, despite knowing through psychoanalysis what were the sources of their ills, he radically changed his orientation. Inspired by religion, philosophers and theologians, he developed the technique of Nonviolent Communication and took it to the road, sharing his discovery for free by holding workshops in more than 50 countries.
Rosenberg was little concerned with the implications of his technique on knowledge such as philosophy of law, ecology, cultural anthropology, sociology, theology and ethics. He makes affirmations here and there on some of these themes but does not systematically develop any of them. In fact, he wrote very little, practically only one book where he explains, in a very conversational way, the NVC technique. The only exception is the giraffe schools that he helped to create for children to be educated in this new language and philosophy of life, in the hope that it would spread to the rest of the world.
Those of us who have come in contact with Nonviolent Communication realize that it is more than a language or linguistic technique, it is a philosophy of life. We are then prompted to look into other areas of knowledge through the eyes of NVC, because we understand that this new philosophy of life requires a change of mentality in the way we have been studying some human sciences. Ethics is perhaps the thorniest subject of which Rosenberg makes loose statements here and there, never tackling it systematically.
We know that NVC is against all moralistic evaluations and the use of dualistic language such as right/wrong, good/bad, correct/incorrect, adequate/inadequate... As he says, “In life, instead of playing the game ‘How to make life wonderful’, we play the game called ‘Who’s right’. Do you know that game? It’s a game where everybody loses.” Could it be that Rosenberg is against ethics? That it should disappear because it has been an instrument of domination?
The origin of evil
I am the Lord, and there is no other; besides me there is no god. (...) I form light and create darkness, I make weal and create woe; I the Lord do all these things.
Isaiah 45:5,7
“You have told me, O God, to believe in hell. But you have forbidden me to think...of any man as damned” -
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
The French Jesuit priest Teilhard de Chardin, in order to reconcile the book of Genesis with the science of the evolution of species, begins by stating bluntly that Adam, as a historical figure who upon sinning brought evil, suffering and death into the world, never existed.
He then opposes Saint Paul, who in Romans chapter 8 says that suffering, evil and death are the consequences of sin of Adam and Eve, by saying that suffering, evil and death have always existed. For Teilhard de Chardin, and indeed as the text of Isaiah verse 45 suggests, if evil exits in the world it is because it has always existed, and that God is somehow responsible because, as the same verse states, there is no other God.
The Garden of Eden was created by God and the tree of knowledge of good and evil was placed there by Him; that is, God, in order to preserve Man’s freedom, created an alternative to Himself in opening the possibility of evil. He did not create evil itself, nor the individual and concrete evils, these are the sole responsibility of Man for the wrong use of his freedom.
God who exists in eternity beyond good and evil has created a creation that is in itself good, but perfectible, because God is good and has placed in this creation a free man with the ability to perfect it. An already perfect world would be a pure extension of God, not unlike God, and living in it man would have nothing to do, hence he would not be free.
However, something that can be made better can also be made worse. Soon in his first act upon the creation, Adam, instead of perfecting it, ruins it; as the proverbs say, “It has backfired” or “The addendum was worse than the sonnet.”
The original sin: the usurpation of the criterion of good and evil
The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to till it and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, ‘You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.’
Genesis 2:15-17
God created the human being and placed him in a garden to live life to the full; he had full liberty to do whatever he wished, but in the fine print of the contract, he could neither eat the fruit nor touch the tree of knowledge of good and evil that was in the middle of the garden.
What is the significance of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and why was it placed in the middle of the garden? If the garden means life to the full, happiness, and the realization of all our potentials, a refined discernment of good and evil, of what contributes or not contributes to that happiness, then the tree being in the middle of the garden represents the center of this life to the full.
Whose is the prerogative of the discernment of good and evil? Of course, it is not ours, it belongs to God, the criterion is His; the Creator knows better how the creature should live than the creature himself. Therefore, if the prerogative or criterion of discernment of good and evil had remained with God, our lives would have been a bed of roses even to now.
By eating the forbidden fruit, in their mind, in their will and freedom, Adam and Eve became the criterion of good and evil, usurping the entitlement of God. They did what Prometheus did, who stole the fire from the gods, in the Greek mythology. From then on we are the ones who decide what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is evil. This was the fundamental error of Adam and Eve.
The serpent may have been right, they could indeed be “like gods” in supplanting the prerogative that belonged to God alone, but of course, in reality, they did not become gods, it was all an illusion as they had to pay the price of their usurpation. They thought they were doing the right thing; in fact, no one does evil in thinking that he is doing evil, not even Hitler who thought he was ridding the world of a plague by exterminating 5 million Jews.
For as long as God is God and the creature is the creature, all look to God to find inspiration and guidance for their lives, only one is the criterion; while God is the Father, we are then all brothers; the usurpation of the place of God, however, created division, rivalry and conflict because all want to occupy God’s place.
When I say that I am the criterion of good and evil and you say that you are also or when I want to occupy the center and you say you also want to then we enter into conflict, we are like two giant planets that want to occupy the same place -- the place of the Sun.
From the moment our parents ate of the fruit they felt naked, that is, insecure and vulnerable, because now everyone wants to be god, and violence, rivalry and competition settled in, so that they had to clothe, shield and protect themselves from each other; the gods do not get along with each other, such rivalry is already evident in the Babylonian mythology as well as in the Greek and Roman ones.
Paraphrasing Rosenberg in this regard, we could say that while we were in the Garden of Eden we used to play the game of “How to make life wonderful”; once we robbed God of the prerogative and criterion of good and evil, we started to play the game of “Who is right, who is wrong” instead, and we have been playing it ever since…
Jesus gives back to God the prerogative of good & evil
As He was setting out on a journey, a man ran up to Him and knelt before Him, and asked Him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone. Mark 10: 17-18
There seems to me an overlooked lesson to be learned here; if Jesus did not want to make a point he would have simply ignored being called “Good Teacher” and would have gone on to ask whether the young rich ruler had been keeping the commandments, as it comes next in the reading. Instead, Jesus is very adamant to confront the young man by asking, “Why do you call me good?”, that is to say, why are you taking for yourself the criterion of good and evil? “Only God is good”, that is, the prerogative of good and evil belongs to God and to God alone.
Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven.
Luke 6:37
Both in his teachings and in his behavior, Jesus seems to give back to God His prerogative or criterion of good and evil. He did not judge nor condemn Zacchaeus the tax collector for all his financial crimes (Luke 19:1-10), or the woman caught in adultery for her sexual sins (John 8: 1-11), and not even the Samaritan woman for her compulsive divorces (John 4: 1-42). Unlike the Pharisees, he did not consider himself just and all others as sinners. Since he never judged anyone he advised us not to judge others as well.
The parable of the wheat and the weeds makes this clear; the wheat grows with the weeds and one looks like the other in such a way that only God at the harvest time can separate the wheat from the weeds (Matthew 13:23-43). In our world, in our society, there are many wolves dressed as lambs and many lambs dressed as wolves; God alone truly knows the identity of each, for this reason we say “Deliver me God from my “friends”, since from my enemies I can deliver myself.” We judge by appearance while God sees the heart of each one.
And so, only in the realm of God or as in the parable, only at the harvest can good be differentiated from evil. Till then, and while we live on this earth, let us give back to God what belongs to Him alone and refrain from making judgments of our brothers and sisters like Jesus did in his lifetime and modeled it for us.
Still, one might think that the ability to differentiate good and evil is not a punishment after all, but rather a reward since this faculty exists in all religions and ethical systems. Both the Maimonides, who were Jews from the kingdom of Granada that converted to Islam in the twelfth century, and St. Thomas Aquinas, who was inspired by Aristotle, answer this question by saying that in the definitive it was a punishment and not a reward.
Far from gaining a faculty, Adam and Eve lost one. When they stole the criterion from God to differentiate good and evil, treading on His dominion, they lost the real paradise of being in harmony with the natural order of things.
This brings us once again to the heart of NVC which consists of differentiating observations, or what is objectively observable, from personal and subjective interpretations and evaluations which lead to the field of arbitrariness, relativism and definitely, morals, in declaring this or that as good/bad right/wrong thus adding to observable reality something that is not present objectively.
The moment I evaluate my neighbor, and judge him as good or evil, I abandon the world of the directly and objectively observable, I am expelled from paradise to enter the field of subjectivity and arbitrariness. I abandon the natural field of seeing, feeling, needing and requesting to take the place of God who knows everything, to consider myself the standard and the right measure for everything.
We can never really know if something is truly good or bad as “there are no evil out of which good cannot come” and “God writes straight on crooked lines” as the people say. All we can know and care to know is whether or not something fulfills our needs and the needs of others.
Until the Fall, Adam and Eve were innocent like children and as such used to observe without judging; when they lost their innocence by the mistake they made, they now judge without seeing and judge wrongly, they will always judge wrongly because judgment belongs to God; only He can judge because only He knows it all.
"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you." (Nietzsche)
What happens when we put aside our skills and start handing out verdicts on what is right and what is wrong? We end up interfering with the possibility of human understanding, connection and collaboration, and we sow seeds of division, violence and war. This is precisely what we have been doing in the past 10,000 years, some trying to convince others of their individual or collective vision of what is good and what is evil.
The purpose of NVC is to return to the Garden of Eden by abdicating or transcending our proclivity or vice to judge, returning to the natural state of
observing, becoming aware of our
feelings and the
needs, both ours and others’, behind them, and collectively make
requests and seek the best strategy to meet them. In this way we will be able to return to the truly living state of St. Irenaeus, regaining the divine sonship that we had lost and finally have life and life in abundance as Jesus said he came to bring (John 10:10).
Be perfect or be merciful?
Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. Matthew 5:48
Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.
Luke 6:36
Saint Luke realized the fallacy of perfectionism and turned around the Judaizing verse of St. Matthew to tell us that we are not called to imitate the perfection of God because we can never be perfect like Him. Rather, we are called to imitate His mercy and compassion, words and concepts well known in the Bible which had inspired Rosenberg to create the technique and philosophy of Nonviolent Communication.
My perfection can be a reason for pride, as it was with the Pharisees in Jesus’ time, and certainly does not benefit anyone; on the contrary, it may be a reason to discriminate and judge others whom we find to be less perfect than ourselves.
Contrary to perfection which is an individual value that distances me from others, mercy is also an individual value, but it has a social reach, because one cannot be merciful without practicing mercy and one cannot practice mercy without doing acts of mercy for oneself and for others. The merciful is tolerant of his own faults and those of others, the perfectionist is intolerant of himself and of others.
The goal of this life isn’t to be perfect but to be progressively less stupid (M. Rosenberg) – Perfectionism is really not a value because objective perfection does not exist as it has no objective goal, a gauge for all. Perfectionism is unhealthy because it puts us in a state of permanent anguish, stress and anxiety. We are not, therefore, called to be perfect, but to grow and become better, and we are not called to give
the best, but rather
our best.
Rosenberg is therefore right to say that the objective of life is not to be perfect but to be progressively less stupid; that is, our objective is to conquer the ground of stupidity and in so doing, it has as the consequence of being more and more perfect, but this is not the goal but a by-product of growth. Using primary and secondary effects of a medication as an analogy, perfection is the secondary effect while being less stupid is the primary effect.
Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly (M. Rosenberg) – To gain ground on stupidity we must accept our mistakes as part of the progress, and never stop doing or trying for fear of not getting it right; it is always worth trying even when the result turns out very poorly because it is in erring that we learn.
“To sin” in Hebrew means to miss the target – The notion of sin, which is so central to Christianity, is seen as a horrendous act that makes us impure and sticks to our scrupulous conscience which never ceases to accuse, haunt and persecute us, and ultimately leads us to hell, or eternal damnation, is alien to Judaism. In Hebrew, sin is “chait” and it means nothing of what we have just said, it just means to miss the target, to fail or miss the mark.
The book of Judges (20:16) speaks of left-handed shooters who could sling a stone at a hair, and not miss the target. The word sin can be reconfigured outside the moral/evil/good paradigm of sin. In the book of 1 Kings 1:20-21, Bathsheba visits her dying husband David and tells him that if Solomon is not to succeed him as king when David dies then she and her son Solomon will be seen and treated as offenders. This concept of sin, moreover the original one, does not have moralistic connotations, and this is the reason why it fits in so perfectly well with NVC.
“
Errare humanum est”—To err is part of the human nature, Jesus also erred; in fact, he thought that the end of the world was very near, and so did Saint Paul, but both were mistaken. Saint Peter had to say in one of the last writings of the New Testament, that a thousand years to God are like one day and a day is like one thousand years and that Christ is taking his time to come to give everyone a chance to convert (2 Peter 3:8-9).
Fitting in perfectly with NVC, sin then means that we err or deceive ourselves in our attempts to meet our needs; or it is an error in strategy which means what we thought would meet our and other people’s needs, in fact, did not; or when we meet our needs at the expense of others, or when we meet the needs of others at our own expense, or even when we meet some of our needs at the expense of our other needs.
In defining sin in this way we move from a heteronomous morality to an autonomous morality; in other words, I do not have to measure myself up against any ideal of abstract perfection outside of myself, but I seek the best of myself. In this way I do not depend on an external authority to know what is good or bad, but only on my well-formed and informed moral conscience that tells me at every moment what I should or should not do.
The moral of the masters vs the moral of the slaves
One is punished most for one’s virtues. Nietzsche
In his books, The Genealogy of Morals and Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche demonstrates that morality is not innate nor immutable, nor is it deduced from human nature, but is the product of history. In prehistory when the line separating humans and animals was still not well defined by the law of the fittest and most capable, which prevailed among animals, some men overcame others by subjugating them. The victorious were the masters, and the defeated were the slaves.
The masters in their success judged reality, about themselves and their deeds, by virtue of the privileged position they enjoyed after their victory over the slaves. The strong were the creators of values so that for the masters “good” was the mode of how they were and acted; it was violence, war, adventure, risk, power, pleasure, cruelty, physical strength, freedom, autonomy and independence. These were the values that placed them in a privileged position in relation to others.
The masters, those who could, would and did, acted out all their instincts, that is, they could act upon them without any limitations. They could kill and steal, rape and have as many women as they wanted, feast and get drunk, and no one could call them to account for they were the aristocrats, those who ruled, and they were above the law since they were the ones who dictated it. For example, even today a boss has more freedom to express his instincts than an employee.
When warriors, lords and aristocrats fought each other for supremacy or absolute power, those who won were called noblemen of blue blood; as for the defeated although they were not from the mass or the slaves, were now also submitted to the masters of the highest rank. Because they were now denied the freedom to express their instincts, the freedom they themselves had once denied the slaves, they are then forced to repress and internalize those instincts, that is, to turn them against themselves.
The instincts, inhibited and repressed, dug a cave in the depths of man, thus giving rise to the man’s inner world, thought, intelligence, interior life, spirituality, God and of course, religion and the priestly order or caste. The instinct of cruelty, for example, turned against the individual himself, became the scrupulous moral conscience that pursued him and was never content with the performance because the ideal by its own definition is unattainable.
There were now three classes: the nobility, the clergy and the people. As defeated warriors, the clergy by not being able to externalize their instincts as they once did, inverted the morality of the masters, and the thinkers, the order of the inner habits, scientists, philosophers and mathematicians, arose. Just as the priests now sought to dominate by mind where they did not succeed by physical strength and weapons, they were for this reason pacifists, against war or any form of violence, they were contemplatives instead of active, thinkers instead of doers.
Priests, resentful of the defeat and with great desire to take revenge for not being able to confront and defeat the nobles physically, devised a plan to beat them mentally in a crafty and deceitful way. Just like the fox, who not being able to reach the grapes that were too high for it, declares them unripe, so did the priests to the morality of the masters.
This is how the morality of the slaves was born, in not being able to impose themselves in the real world they invented the ideal ascetic world, the spirit, God. They took refuge in monasteries and denied the real life claiming it to be “a vale of tears”, to affirm the life in the hereafter where they would return to be happy; they denied earth to affirm heaven; that is, they transferred the value of life out of life, the real into the abstract.
In the name of God and the afterlife, they abdicated from this life, from their sexual instincts, from power, from pleasure, from everything that they once possessed when they were masters. Values became pacifism, humility, obedience, poverty, prudence, fasting, abstinence, equality, fraternity, justice…
Socrates and Plato, all of Greek philosophy and science, fit into the framework of the morality of the slaves, as they get their strength not from their arms but from their brains. The Jewish people as a whole reflects this concept; in fact, they began their history by being slaves in Egypt and defeated their masters afterwards not by the force of arms, but by intelligence.
This is how they themselves interpreted their saga by the way they tell the story of Jacob who through his cunning, with the help of his mother, fools his father Isaac and defeats his elder brother Esau who was physically much stronger, robbing him of his birthright. Jacob who also goes by the name of Israel begets 12 sons who are the heads of the 12 tribes of Israel.
Nietzsche calls the Jews a priestly people and the morality of the slaves is in fact of the Jews, and of the Christians who had the morality of the slaves gradually imposed on them; in fact, both Judaism and Christianity were born in slavery, the Jews were slaves in Egypt, and the Christians were for five centuries the poorest class, persecuted by the Roman Empire but later prevailed over it.
The morality of the masters is autonomous, the values are defined from the experience of the individual; the morality of the slaves is heteronomous, the values are norms that surge from outside of the individual, is ideological “God says, the Bible commands…”
The morality of the masters is vital, based on the body and its appetites and needs; the morality of the slaves is abstract, based on values that deny and sacrifice the real life.
The morality of the masters is naturist, it evaluates the performance as to whether or not it satisfies the instincts and needs; the morality of the slaves denies the need, and puts a label of sinful, ugly, impure, and labels and criminalizes in name of an ideology and unattainable ideals.
Naturalist ethics or return to the Garden of Eden
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.
Revelation 21:1
“
Somewhere beyond right and wrong, there is a garden. I will meet you there.” Jalaluddin Mevlana Rumi
Rumi was a thirteenth century Persian poet and Sufi mystic; for him, the universal love is the cornerstone of spiritual life and the solution of good/evil duality. What is done for love is always beyond good and evil, because love overcomes the dichotomy of good and evil.
It doesn’t matter who is right or wrong. It only matters that you are not hurt. And that we both can benefit. All true benefits are mutual.” Donald Walsh
The dichotomy of good and evil does not exist among animals and we see that they are not violent, they only seek to meet their needs. There are only two differences between humans and animals: humans have more needs than animals and they have the use of reason which gives them more resources to meet the needs of everyone, while avoiding those that are met at the expense of others. The function of the good/evil dichotomy can only be effective to some, those who are designated as good dominate those whom they designate as evil.
We just have to draw conclusions and paraphrase what has already been said. We understand that NVC has no ethics insofar as it refrains from judging people and their acts; it is situated in this sense beyond good and evil insofar as its objective is not to evaluate who is good and who is bad, who has done well and who has done poorly, but to verify whether the human needs have been met or not.
In other words, it is naturist because it is earthly, grounded in the likeness of the morality of the masters; it is not an abstract and artificial and unattainable construct of values, at the service of a religion or of an ideology, and it does not judge people, or put a label on them. Unlike the morality of the slaves whose values come from outside of life, being therefore a heteronomous moral.
The morality of NVC is autonomous because it gives value to our needs from the most basic and physical to the highest and spiritual. It is moral what meets my needs and the needs of others and immoral what does not meet my or others’ needs, or only meets some of those needs.
The ethics of NVC differ, however, from the morality of the masters and is closer to the morality of slaves in considering the fulfillment of the needs of others as important as the fulfillment of my own; what’s more, the needs of others are also my needs. NVC understands that everyone wins when one wins and everyone loses when one loses; no one can be happy at the expense of the unhappiness of others.
Resembling the masters’ morality, the
ethics of NVC is autonomous, natural and naturist, because its values spring from the nature of Man:
- GOOD – is the strategy or the action that meets my needs as well as the needs of others.
- BAD – is the strategy or the action that only meets my needs in detriment to the needs of others or vice versa meets the needs of others in detriment to mine.
Resembling the morality of the slaves, the
actual ethics, the ethics of the domination system is heteronomous, artificial and arbitrary because its values spring from an ideology that largely disregards human nature:
- GOOD – is the strategy or the action that mirrors and is subservient to the ruling ideology and whatever the instituted powers command, even if it goes against human nature, disregards the person’s freedom, his needs and values.
- BAD – is the strategy or the action that rebels against the dominant ideology and its imposed artificial values. The one who tries to be faithful to himself, and seeks emancipation is seen as a black sheep and is labeled selfish by the powers that be. Should his actions go as far as to threaten the instituted powers, he would then be declared as “persona non grata” and afterwards either ostracised or eliminated.
This may sound very simplistic and indeed it is, the simplification is done on purpose for a better understanding. As for how things really are, we know that the ethics that rule our modern world does not correspond 100% to the morals of the slaves, the one the domination system has adopted, but is a combination of both: the masters and the slaves. This makes our modern ethics not entirely against human nature but still very much ideological.
NVC is a return to the Garden of Eden, to the primordial innocence, to nature before the appearance of moral evaluation of acts, at a time when our only concern was to meet our needs and the needs of others. Jesus said that if we are not like children we will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven; a child observes and does not judge, he places himself beyond good and evil or outside of this duality; he is aware of his needs and naturally seeks to fulfill them. Ethics in NVC is therefore a naturalistic ethics, its only concern is that everyone’s needs are fulfilled.
The morality of NVC is based on whether or not the needs and values of all are met. Because it is radically based on the commandment of love of neighbour as oneself, and since no one can be happy alone or at expense of others, in NVC, the needs of others are also one’s own; there are no victorious nor defeated; there are no winners nor losers; either we all win or we all lose.
Contrary to the morality of the slaves, because it is an artificial construct, and more similar to the morality of the masters because it is based on human needs and values that are universal, the morality of Nonviolent Communication is a natural, naturalistic or ecological morality. It is therefore good only what meets my and others’ needs and bad whatever does not meet these needs or what only satisfies mine, or what only satisfies those of others.
The fabricated myth of the good/evil dichotomy
As he was setting out on a journey, a man ran up to Him and knelt before him, and asked him, “Good Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” And Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone.
Mark 10, 17-18
When we come to think of the moral or ethical practical implications of good and evil from within the actual ethics, which is still to a great extent the ethics of the domination system, we come to the conclusion that such dichotomy is fictitious, artificial, ideological and arbitrary. If it still exists then it is because it serves somebody’s interests; it serves within the domination system those who with a Pharisaical attitude regard themselves as good and all others as bad.
Jesus refused to be called good by the rich young ruler. In his lifetime and in all cases that were presented to him, he always utterly refused to write off or condemn those deemed sinners or evil by the domination system. In this regard, it is very iconic also his opposition to uproot the so-called weeds that grow side by side with the wheat (Matthew 13:24-30), also here as in the previous text, He transfers to God the prerogative of good and evil as only God can tell one from the other; any attempts by humans to do so is ideological and serves an ulterior purpose that is an ideology.
On the other hand, thinking of evil, nobody has ever done anything evil for the evil´s sake; all those that have done bad things thought they were doing good. All those who, in our perspective did evil things, in their own perspective were doing a good thing.
No Islamic suicide bomber thinks that he is giving up his life for a bad thing. At the time of this writing, a husband and a wife used their four children in a string of deadly suicide attacks on three churches in the Indonesian city of Surabaya. In sacrificing their lives for a higher good, in their minds, the whole family gave up their lives thinking that they were doing good not evil.
The ethics of needs
The originality of NVC is that it has promoted the concept of needs by raising it to the status of value. The domination system regards needs as a negative thing. One should not have needs and one should most certainly not give in to needs, is laudable the one who manages to overcome and sacrifice them at the altar of the domination system's high values and ideals.
For the domination system, needs is what we have in common with the animals, so being governed by needs is like giving in to our animal nature, it goes against evolution. They are probably saddened by the fact that despite all the years of evolution we still have needs and we haven’t come up with a less animal-like way of meeting them…
A German farmer in the city of Schilda had a very good horse working in the fields, his only grudge against the animal was that he consumed too much oats; gradually he cut the ration in the hope that one day the horse would work without eating; indeed that day came he worked without eating but the following day drop dead.
Humans have learned to repress or sublimize needs to transform them into high values that serve the domination system, the culture, the civilization. Freud understood this and even praised the idea of sublimation but warned us, using the German folk tale of the horse of Schilda as a parable, that one cannot sublimize a need entirely.
There was a time when the sexual act was regarded as evil, dirty, ugly and sinful, and a little less evil when it was performed by a married couple and intended solely for procreation, but even there, Christian married couples were not to indulge in the pleasure of sex and were called to abstain entirely from it during Lent. For the rest, it was seen as a “remedium concupiscencia” a palliative for lust, never an act of love.
In NVC, needs and values are used interchangeably as synonyms; needs are values and values are needs. For the domination system, satisfying one’s own needs is being selfish; for NVC, it is simply being true to oneself. In NVC, only needs are values, and the values that are not referable to a need are not values at all, they are ideological instruments of the domination system downplaying and going against human nature.
The morals of love
We need to keep in mind that in NVC love is not a feeling but a need, although there are feelings attached to it; all needs have feelings connected to them since feelings are what alert us to whether a need is met or not. Love as a need doesn’t seem to be connected to morals and yet it is…
When we love we do not judge, when we judge we do not love; universal love, especially the love for our enemies, surpasses the dualistic thinking of good and evil, taking us far beyond it into the eternity that is God and the One who makes rain fall on the righteous and the unrighteous and who loves all unconditionally. We are all called to be like Him.
It is said also that love is blind; that lovers tend to be blind to each other’s faults and shortcomings, and naturally refrain from judging each other. Seemingly, once the love is gone all there is left are faults and shortcomings. From this reality we are to conclude that only love can deliver us from being judgmental thus leading us back to the Garden of Eden.
When lovers are together they lose the notion of time and space, and virtually experience eternity, proving that it exists. Because God is love, only love can lead us to true eternity. Only love can bring heaven to earth and take us back to the Garden of Eden. Even Nietzsche himself has said, “That which is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.”
Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC
