terry mcnally interviews marshall rosenberg

CNVC is grateful to Terry McNally and KPFK for permission to share the following interview.

Hello. I'm Terry McNally, and welcome to “Free Forum” and thank you for joining us.

Because my guest has such a busy travel and training schedule, we had to pre-record this interview; and it happens that the time we found to do so is the evening of October 7th—the day the United States and Great Britain have initiated a military response to the terrorist attack of September 11th. Following that attack, in the few days afterwards, tonight’s guest, Marshall Rosenberg—who has worked for thirty years to spread the practice of what he calls “Nonviolent Communication^sm,” wrote these words:

“If the goal becomes retaliation and punishment each action will be determined by the answer to this question: ‘Will this action take us closer to punishing those responsible for the pain we have suffered?’ On the other hand, if the goal is peace and safety for the world each action will be determined by answering a very different question: ‘Will this action bring us closer to lasting peace and safety for the world’.”

Months ago, when I began pursuing an interview with Marshall, I assumed it would be primarily about language and communication and focus at least a bit more on personal relationships than international crises. Once scheduled for this evening, I knew we would deal with possible responses to September's attack; but, as you can see, events have consistently conspired to change and heighten the context of our conversation and make it, I think, more and more relevant.

Here on “Free Forum” we explore the lives, the work, and the ideas of individuals that I suspect hold pieces of the puzzle of a world that just might work. We look at new and innovative and provocative models in business, environment, health, science, politics and media—all based on the fact that I believe we can do better, and I want to help you and myself find out how; and that's as true tonight as it ever is.

Marshall B. Rosenberg is the founder and director of educational services for the Center for Nonviolent Communication^sm, an international non-profit organization. In 1961 Dr. Rosenberg received his Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Wisconsin. Nonviolent Communication training evolved from his quest to find a way of rapidly disseminating much needed peace-making skills during the civil rights struggles of the early 1960s. Dr. Rosenberg provides Nonviolent Communication training in Sweden, Switzerland, Italy, Germany, Denmark, Belgium, Austria, Malaysia, India, the United Kingdom, Netherlands, France, Canada, as well as the United States. He and the Center are also active in war-torn areas and economically disadvantaged countries, offering Nonviolent Communication training to promote reconciliation and peaceful resolution of differences.

TM: Welcome Marshall Rosenberg to KPFK and “Free Forum.”

MBR: Thank you Terry, I'm glad to be here.

TM: Although we will certainly deal with today's events my first question, as it always is on “Free Forum,” Marshall is about your personal path to the work that you do today, and I invite you to go back as far as you want. Take as long as you wish—childhood dreams, mentors, models, turning points. We want listeners to get to know the person behind the ideas and the work that you're doing.

Terry, I trace the work I do back to 1943.

TM: Wow.

MBR: I was living in Detroit at the time. My family had just moved there—just in time for the race riots of 1943, and we were locked in the house for four days while the riots went on, and there were about 32 people killed in our neighborhood, and that was a very powerful learning experience for me as a young boy. It taught me that this is a world where things like your skin color or your name could be a stimulus for violence. And that put in my head a question that's been there ever since; which is: What happens to people that they enjoy other people's suffering? That they want to hurt people?

Now the theory that’s been around for many centuries is that that happens because people are innately evil, or selfish, or violent. But I saw that there were people that weren’t like that. I saw that there were many people that enjoyed contributing to one another’s well-being. So then I wondered how come some people do seem to enjoy other people’s suffering while other people are just the opposite? They enjoy contributing to people's well-being.

And it was those questions that led me to the kind of work that I’m doing now. When it came time to go to the University, I picked clinical psychology hoping I could find some information relevant to those questions of what leads some people to enjoy others' pain and others to want to contribute to their well-being. And in clinical psychology, I was exposed to the belief that people get mentally ill, and that's the cause of it. But, in the course of my studies I came to see that that was an overly-simplistic view of things—that it wasn’t that simple—that all there was was an illness that we could somehow cure.

I began to see that it had much more to do with the way people are educated and that some people are educated in a way that makes violence enjoyable. Then what scared me, I started to see that this was the systematic way that most people were being educated, and so I’ve made it my work ever since to show people what I believe are the ways that we are educating ourselves that is contributing to the violence, and showing ways that we can educate ourselves that will make people much more interested in contributing to one another’s well-being than to their pain.

TM: Um, so you're saying that you found it to be an education problem and so your approach has been an education solution.

MBR: That’s right. I see it as an educational problem, but that educational problem is part of a broader problem. Then we have to ask “why did we get educated in this way that creates the violence?” And my exploration into that question leads me to believe that we educate people this way to fit the kind of social structures that we have been creating for several centuries—what Walter Wink, the theologian, calls “domination structures” in which a few people dominate many. And when you have structures like that, it's necessary to educate people in a certain way to fit those structures; and a by-product of that is to make violence enjoyable.

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