4. Three Principles: Purpose, Honesty, Nonviolence

4. Three Principles: Purpose, Honesty, Nonviolence

The Minimum Sufficient for a Living System

When you read a description of FSF for the first time, it can seem to have either too many rules or too few. Too many — because we usually want to “do it the right way,” and each rule lands as one more demand. Too few — because, set beside the elaborate technique of some traditional school of psychotherapy, it can look as if there are “not enough techniques” here.

Both impressions miss the point. FSF is built on a different principle. It is not a body of instructions but a minimal set of conditions under which a living system can begin to work on its own. Living tissue, on this view, needs only three things — that its cells keep their internal coherence, hold open the gap junctions with their neighbors, and stay oriented toward a target morphology — and in much the same way a social living system needs only three: a clear shared purpose, precision of communication, and the preservation of bonds.

These three conditions are the three principles of FSF: purpose, honesty, nonviolence.

The First Principle: A Clear Shared Purpose

“Health” is a state of optimal vital functioning (the best possible) with a positive emotional tone and creative fulfillment. (working definition; cf. Sechenov University)

In the language of functional-systems theory, any system — from a single cell to a complex human community — organizes around a system-forming factor. For Anokhin this factor was the useful adaptive result; in a contemporary revision by Saltykov and Grachev it is the anticipatory reflection of the result. In everyday terms: a system assembles for the sake of something. Without that “for the sake of,” it falls apart. The author extends this principle from organisms to social communities.

FSF as a living system assembles for the sake of health — understood broadly, as a state of optimal vital functioning with a positive emotional tone and creative fulfillment. This is not “health” in the narrow medical sense of the “absence of disease.” It is health as multilevel well-being: physical, psychological, social, existential.

Why does it matter that the purpose be shared? Because one of the most common reasons that groups — families, teams, organizations — lose energy and fall apart is that their members have no shared purpose. Each person arrives with a private agenda, private expectations, private “secret plans,” and the group turns into an arena of hidden struggle. In such an environment sincere contact is impossible.

But once all the participants agree that they are here for the sake of health and quality contact, the group acquires a single axis. The remaining differences — experience, age, profession, life situation — stop being obstacles and become resources.

The Second Principle: Maximum Honesty

If purpose is the “for the sake of,” then honesty is “exactly how” a living system works. And here FSF draws on a principle of informational equivalence that Anokhin formulated:

*“The transmission of information in living and technical objects is governed by one important law: between the initial and the final link in that transmission there must be precise and adequate informational equivalence — the transmission of information without loss of informational meaning.”*¹

To put it in everyday language: in a living system there is no such thing as a ‘small lie.’ Every distortion in communication — even the smallest, even from the kindest motives (“I don’t want to upset him,” “he won’t understand anyway,” “I’ll explain later”) — disrupts the exchange of information. And once that exchange is disrupted, the system stops receiving reliable signals about its own state. Without reliable signals, no healthy regulation is possible.

Something like this was suggested experimentally in 2012 by Anita Kelly’s small study at the University of Notre Dame, which we discussed in Part I: ten weeks of consciously abstaining from everyday lies was associated with markedly fewer self-reported psychological and physical complaints (roughly 4.3-fold and 2.7-fold). Sustained honesty, in other words, may have measurable benefits for psychological and physical well-being.

It is important to understand that in FSF, honesty is not “telling the whole truth to everyone about everything.” It is accurately expressing your experience of the present moment, without embellishing it and without suppressing it. You may be silent. You may say that you do not want to speak. You may say that you are afraid. All of these are honest. But “I’m doing fine” at a moment when you are not is already a distortion — and one that may cost your health more than it seems.

The Third Principle: Nonviolence

The third principle — nonviolence — sounds at first like an ethical requirement. It is closer to a neurophysiological condition.

When a person is subjected to pressure — evaluation, criticism, advice, attempts to “fix” or “cure” them — the nervous system tends to mount defensive reactions. Cortisol can rise, amygdala activity increases, and prefrontal (executive) function tends to decline. In such a state the encoding of new patterns is impaired: resources shift toward defense rather than learning.

This is why FSF works within conscious constraints:

• we do not criticize one another — criticism activates the threat system;

• we do not evaluate — evaluation places the speaker in the position of an object rather than a subject;

• we do not give advice — advice imposes someone else’s solution and blocks one’s own search;

• we do not “cure” or “teach” — the attempt to fix another person almost always masks a refusal to accept one’s own experience;

• we do not impose our point of view — this undermines the other participant’s autonomy;

• we do not use shoulds — “must,” “have to,” “ought” are violence directed at oneself.

The last point matters most. In FSF, the principle of nonviolence extends not only to one’s relationships with others but also to one’s relationship with oneself. Self-criticism, self-condemnation, the effort to “force oneself” — these too are violations. And, paradoxically, this is exactly what many people encounter for the first time here: that the chief violence they have endured all their lives is the violence they inflict on themselves, day after day.

When I write about the principle of nonviolence in my book, I emphasize that the hardest thing in this practice is to remember, each time, that I am dealing with myself — that I came to practice in order to learn to be healthy².

Why Exactly Three

One might reasonably ask: why exactly these three principles and not others? Not “respect for boundaries,” not “empathy,” not “nonjudgment” — why precisely these?

The answer is that these three are the minimally necessary and at the same time sufficient set for a living system to be able to function at all. Each corresponds to one of the three basic requirements of a living system that we examined in Part I:

This is why no more principles are needed — and why one cannot make do with fewer.