Well, having followed her blog for a while, I think throwing out those provocative lines is her way of attempting to ‘engage in honest conversation’. Admittedly it doesn’t always make for a totally pleasant discussion, but I’ve found it helps me to tighten up my own thinking in the long run. Maybe that’s just me though… I agree with the general point about the health and well-being of the group taking precedence over the needs of individuals – the tribe feeds everyone after all. As long as it doesn’t devolve to the point where none of the members get their needs met (as in the current culture), only keeping the thing going through endless self-sacrifice…
Also, I see how this gets into a Jensen-style discussion of defensive rights outweighing offensive rights: what if the ‘need’ of one person’s self-expression comes at the expense of another person’s feelings? Yesterday our local conservation volunteer group played host to a man with some v. irritating, borderline antisocial habits. Opinion varies on whether there’s something ‘wrong’ with him in a medical or psychological sense, but he talks incessantly over everyone, listens poorly, imposes the topics he wants to talk about on every conversation, fails to respond to sometimes quite obvious negative body language in his listeners, and only seems to shut up after you’ve ignored or not responded to him for about five minutes. My experimental approach of listening and attempting to engage with him on his terms only resulted in my ‘taking one for the team’ as others took the opportunity to escape, while he went further & ever-more intensely down the rabbit hole of his own preoccupations and I slowly lost the will to live. Eventually I gave up and followed the others’ example of shutting down until he got bored and found somebody else to talk to. Not a very satisfying outcome from an NVC perspective, but I at least realised that my self-preservation came first!
Anyway, I guess that’s for a different topic. I’ll stop twisting and turning (‘like a twisty turny thing’) now…
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