I originally included this in my first blog post on Nonviolent Communication. But it was a significant detour which deserved more explanation, so I separated it into its own post.

1. The Strange Effectiveness of Nonviolent Communication (NVC)

One of the main goals of Nonviolent Communication (NVC) is for people to clearly communicate and understand each other's needs in a specific situation.  When this happens, a solution to the impasse between the parties usually becomes pretty obvious to all.  It's almost magical how reliably solutions are revealed in this process, and I wondered what might be underlying this.

Nonviolent Communication ultimately works because people are able to empathize over the same basic human needs to a considerable degree.

But why are all of these needs so reliably shared at all?  Sure, we’re all human, but we’re also all unique, so it might seem odd that we’re able to empathize with each other over such a broad range of needs.

And why does empathizing over commonly experienced needs so reliably reveal a solution to our impasses?  Why should we think a solution exists at all?  It may seem odd how all of these once intractable problems can so suddenly have solutions which easily fall into place.

2. Groundwork of Why It's Not So Strange After All

The answer to those questions lies in the fact that our basic needs are ultimately rooted in our shared common desire to (1) affirm our capacity for free will and to (2) have a set of consistent and universalizable moral principles.  In the system of deontological ethics, these are necessary preconditions for us to be free-willing beings at all.

To understand why this results in the NVC process working so well, I’ll have to quickly summarize some foundations of deontological ethics:

We generally consider “morality” to be a set of principles for how to act, which are (1) universalizable across all free-willing agents and (2) meaningful in the sense that they are not self-defeating when carried out in practice.

All moral principles must therefore—at bare minimum—protect people’s ability to act freely.  This is because people are only able to choose to act morally if they have the capacity to make free choices about how to act.  Moral principles must always protect everyone’s capacities for free will, if they are not to be self-defeating.  (This is a somewhat simplified presentation of this part of deontology, but captures the general argument.)

It is reasonable to believe that what we commonly refer to as our “basic human needs” are simply specific occurrences of our general moral desire to affirm our capacity for free will and to have a self-consistent moral system.  For example, consistent and universalizable moral principles famously imply the provision of that basic human need that: “Moral people ought to be able to rely on what other people say. (So people have a moral duty not to lie to moral people.)”

3. The Strangeness Unraveled

NVC’s main benefit is that it makes it much easier in practice for us to recognize our shared humanity.  NVC guides our conversations to focus on people's commonly-held basic human needs. By doing so, it gets people to think in terms of deontological ethics, with people's intuitive understanding of NVC-style “needs” filling in for philosophical jargon and long philosophical arguments.

A. Why are all of these needs so reliably shared at all?

As we have already stated, our basic human needs are commonly held by free-willing agents because they are rooted in basic presuppositions of what it means to be a free-willing agent at all.  This means that we are necessarily able to empathize with each other over these basic human needs.

That is the answer to the first strangeness of "Why are all of these needs so reliably shared at all?"  Yes, we're all unique, but we're also all compelled to act according to shared moral principles to affirm ourselves as free-willing agents.  Insofar as we are free-willing agents, we share a consistent set of needs.  This is because our needs are a reflection of our moral system, which is defined to be universalizable across free-willing agents. It's not surprising at all that we can empathize with each other over that which is by definition universalizable among free-willing agents.

This just so happens to also uncover why the injustices of social systems like capitalism and colonialism are essentially impossible to solve through Nonviolent Communication.  These structures maintain themselves because they are designed to materially constrain how people are able to act—they constrain human freedom. In addition, the capitalist mode of production is clearly not a free-willing agent who is going to empathize with people.

To make things more concrete, try to imagine an "ethical" capitalist who understands the needs of their workers.  This person would either turn their business over to the workers as a worker cooperative, or be competed out of existence by more ruthless capitalists.

Now imagine a worker who expresses their need for respect by means of material empowerment. Systematically, this kind of person will be ignored, reprimanded, or fired.

Capitalism is not a system which is responsive to the recommendations that emerge from the NVC process. The capitalist mode of production has built-in selection mechanisms to materially disempower both capitalists and workers who would try to meet everyone’s needs in the way that the NVC process would recommend.

Our only remaining option for the human race to get our needs met is to undermine and overthrow these systems with the abstract and concrete applications of the "protective use of force."

Abstractly, we might reject the harms of capitalism through the creation of unions, worker cooperatives, and other working class organizations which challenge the basic edicts of the capitalist mode of production.

Concretely, we might actively undermine the particular mechanisms that capitalism uses to restrict workers' freedom. This includes, but is not limited to: undermining the particular capitalist practices for surveillance, punishment, deprivation, the threats thereof, and the dissemination of pro-capitalist disinformation. These are all punitive and disingenuous methods to impose the capitalist class’s desired behaviors onto the working class.

B. Why does empathizing over commonly experienced needs so reliably reveal a solution to our impasses?  Why should we think a solution exists at all?

Once we empathize over each other's basic human needs, people naturally want to work together to discover the moral solutions to these interpersonal conflicts.  This is because, when we are in a truly reflective mindset, we want to act morally—that is, in ways which promote our shared, self-consistent human needs.

That is the answer to the second strangeness of: "Why does empathizing over commonly experienced needs so reliably reveal a solution to our impasses?  Why should we think a solution exists at all?"

A solution necessarily exists because our moral system is definitionally self-consistent.  Since all our needs are simply particular reflections of our moral system, and our moral system is self-consistent, this means that our needs must be able to exist together in a consistent manner.  This is why our common human needs do not interfere with each other—they're all different parts of the same self-consistent whole.