I think it is very much about control. Control of yourself, and... control over others. How we exert that control comes down to how we process our thoughts and how we use the language, and that comes out in almost all aspects of our communication.
I have this habit of being defensive and dismissive and snippy, as if what the other person is saying, even if it’s a resonable statement, doesn’t deserve my attention while I’m mentally processing something that has gone wrong. That’s part of my own stuff that I need to deal with., and it is most often brought to it’s forefront when I already have a history of dismissing or being defensive with a particular someone. Apart from anger management (or frustration management), better listening skills is what I think most people need. Many pay lip service to listening, but are already priming themselves for what they are going to say next, or are stewing and fuming on what has happened or what someone else has said. And also by ‘listening’ I don’t mean just listening to the other person. I mean listening deeply into the entire situation. What is it really telling you about the world, and how can you make it speak something better to you? Arrange a better place for the
milk. Also, what is it that you, yourself, are thinking? What is rattling around in your head that is full of past wrongs and personal affronts, assumptions and preconceived notions? What emotions does it bring up? What are the deeper feelings that are effecting your emotional state. I know myself well enough to know that in the past I would come into a situation fully loaded and ready to shoot that it’s surprising that I have as many friends and aquaintences willing to keep talking to me as I do. I’ve mellowed, considerably over the years, but I still have much work to do.
I personally don’t think it’s a language issue, per se, so much as ‘English’ is to blame. The Non Violent Communication poster shows ways that the English language can be very effective, and dissarming, and promoting of effective correspondence of thoughts without emotional baggage. So apart from listening, it is also very much about thought processes, and emotional processes, and separating them and analyzing them and processing them, and coming properly to terms with the situation within yourself, before responding to the situation. There is a big difference between responding to a situation and reacting to it. Non violent communication is all about response. It is a process: A thought process, an emotional process, and then a check in, and then a formulation, and then a response. It is not a reaction, a ‘shoot from the hip’ thing that makes a decision on the impulse and acts on it. Those kinds of decisions are sometimes necessary, like when you grab someone that is about to step out infront of a rushing car, but I think we as a society tend to use that as our default program. A reaction is much more often too tied up in the situation to be helpful emotionally or socially.
Apart from listening to yourself and others, it is also about finding that place in your heart that reaches out to the other with empathy, compassion, and perhaps the higher form of love that is known as Agape. But that takes a lot of conscious effort, as does the general Non Violent Communication patterns, until they become engrained in your personal language culture. As such, I believe this problem with the way we communicate is a symptom, it is a cultural issue, it’s a part of the dominance culture, that we must consciously root out of ourselves and carefully steer others away from. I understand these are deeply seated socio-psychological/emotional wounds that have been embedded culturally for millenia, in this culture which was built upon colonial imperial dominance. The wounded become the wounder. It’s cyclical abuse, but what we are talking about is on the small scale, it’s the microcosm of that. It’s a language issue, for sure, but it’s a personal language issue. I think any language will develop negative patterns if it is oppressed to the point that it is forced to express itself that way. And then it just becomes the new norm... The new base line of communication, and then it becomes the common spoken tongue, the new form that the language takes and, as such, the common way the language is used in a self-perpetuting cycle. Even though better words and better ways of using those words exist, those ways have fallen out of disservice, or were never common in the first place.
The reason it may be, or seem, that this is a problem of English, is partly due to the fact that the language arises from an invading culture. The Angles, Saxons, and Jutes were invaders to Britain, and the Celtic tribes that preceded them (on which some of the language has roots) were also invaders to those Islands. The Romans, Vikings, and the French, from whose tongues other aspects of the language have roots, were also invaders. This invasive pattern, this war like nature, is rooted deeply in the culture and it’s language. On top of this, the English, for their part, have invaded more of the planet than any other Nation, and then the Unitied States, also being English speaking, has taken over from Britain in becoming globally dominant with it's economy and military and it's covert operations. Because of all this, the English language has become the lingua franca of the global economy as well as, oddly enough considering the topic of our current discussion, global diplomacy. There is much work to be done to fix the way we do the business of language.
Being nice, as part of Permies, is one small way that we can make this change happen.
So to bring this back around to R Ranson's original post.
We seem to be conditioned as a society to 1) feel that everything bad must be blamed on a person and 2) get scared that that blame will fall on us so we need to be aggressive before this happens in hopes this will deflect the blame.
I think you are quite right, the blame thing is part of the culture. It is kind of like in present day China (the last place where English is unlikely to become dominant any time soon) where you can be rewarded for turning someone else in, or accusing someone. That's the extreme version of it, but it exists in our culture too. I'm sure that that has been present in other cultures on the planet at other times... East Germany comes to mind in relatively recent years... Not English, but English has a Germanic base!-ha, maybe it's a german thing... the Nazi's were German, Right? But then Stalinist Russia comes to mind. It is generally a dictator's thing... methinks. A warlord thing. A thing based, as mentioned, on conquest, on dominance. By taking this way of communicating, we gain some reward, however sick and twisted it is, by putting the blame on someone else, or something else, but not accepting the blame or responisibility ourselves, by getting the eyes off of us. I think there is something deeply inherent in this culture that brings that out of us, and we hold onto this part of ourselves as somehow important, however small and on many levels. By placing blame, we make someone own it, but not us. It's a cruel world in this way, and we do need to consider it, and we do need to act better based on better thinking, deeper thinking, so that this can be removed in any form that seems like it's going to be harmful in our interpersonal relationship and to us as a society.
Great topic R
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