The tetrahedronal model--
I'll try a brief description of the tetrahedronal model of nonviolent
interaction.
Take a pair of pipe cleaners. Fold each into an equilateral triangle.
Hold one down and pull up the left leg from where the ends of the pipe
cleaner meet up until the distance between the ends of the pipe cleaner
equals the length of one of the sides. Do the same with the right leg of
the other triangle. Lay one of the open triangles over the other, and
you'll see that they form a tetrahedron. In Buckminster Fuller's
economics, since two lines never meet, all triangles in nature are open;
the tetrahedron is a case where one triangle plus one equals four (the
four sides of the tetrahedron).
The going-to-bed example of tetrahedronal interaction I use is as follows:
I want my young daughter to go to bed, she wants to stay up and play. If
we persist in those motives, it would be like going in a straight line
along the pipe cleaners. Each leg of each of the triangles represents a
vector which is a motive of one of us. When you get to a bend in the
triangle, that represents a shift in motives. Thus if I started along the
edge of one triangle wanting her to go to bed and she started wanting to
stay up to play with her toys, we might assume tetrahedronality if she
replied to my demand that she go to bed by demanding hot chocolate ("I'm
hungry!"), and I responded that I'd fix the hot chocolate if she cleaned
up her toys (my new motive). As tetrahedronality persisted, I'd turn to
fixing the hot chocolate as she turned her attention to cleaning up the
toys. In the longer course of interaction, she might take longer getting
to bed than I had planned and less than she had. Meanwhile, we would be
attending to one another in a pleasure-producing interaction with a life
of its own.
I see no way to define a central tendency between tetrahedronality and
moving along straight pipe cleaners (which if lined up side-by-side are
like soldiers marching in formation), and hence can infer no formula for
quantifying variance from tetrahedronality. But I can observe how people
describe one another's motives and see whether the approximate the
tetrahedronal or straight-line pattern.
Tetrahedronality corresponds to what in Norwegian is called "ansvar"--
literally "responsiveness," variously translated as responsibility,
liability and accountability. I map how responsiveness/tetrahedronality
or violence crosses system levels from dyadic interpersonal interactions
to triadic interpersonal interactions in one direction and to group-
individual or group-group interactions in another.
In violent interaction, voltage in the interaction circuits mounts as in
a thundercloud, discharging toward human points of least resistance.
Tetrahedronal interaction dampens the voltage.
I postulate that the reason tetrahedronal interaction cools us off is that
we sense it mirrors homeostatic processes and (as Fuller describes) the
form of DNA, hence affirming that social interaction takes living,
synergetic form. Violent interaction on the other hand mirrors entropic
processes--death--raising alarm/anxiety in us whenever we see ourselves or
others moving in straight lines.
There's a lot of elaboration in the book and more detailed explanation and
illustration, but basically, that's the model I work from.
Sorry I haven't said it straight out before, Bill P. Does this help? l&p
hal