"High Conflict"
Apr. 4th, 2023 10:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fiefoeSome people are more susceptible to high conflict than others. They are what therapists call “high conflict personalities.” These people are quick to blame, certain they are right, always on guard. Most of us know someone like this. Someone for whom the fault lines are clear and always lead away from themselves.
Regardless of the facts, both sides are convinced they are reacting defensively—somehow. They find themselves returning to the feud over and over, itemizing the indignities, tending to it like a fire.
By some estimates, 38 million Americans stopped talking to a family member or friend because of that (2016) election.
In Argentina, nine out of ten people said their country was very or fairly divided. In Norway and Denmark, there was a major schism over how to handle wild wolves. In New Zealand, it was cats (yes, cats!).
Good conflict is vital. Life would be much worse without it. It’s a lot like fire. We need some heat to survive—to illuminate what we’ve gotten wrong and protect ourselves from predators.
High conflicts are magnetic. Until we understand this, our differences will feel bigger and more inevitable than they are.
“Rivalries and hatreds between groups are nothing new,” the psychologist Gordon Allport wrote in the 1954 preface to his classic book The Nature of Prejudice. “What is new is the fact that technology has brought these groups too close together for comfort.… We have not yet learned how to adjust to our new mental and moral proximity.”
He’d been railing against “the law” for years now. His profession was excessively adversarial, as he’d told everyone who would listen, including these same friends.
This is the first paradox of conflict: we are animated by conflict, and also haunted by it. We want it to end, and we want it to continue.
But scientists have found more than three million bones trapped in the depths of these pits, including well-preserved, nearly complete skeletons of massive mammals. They’ve found mammoths, sloths, and more than two thousand saber-toothed tigers... A single carcass could remain visible for up to five months, attracting more unwitting victims, before finally sinking out of sight, into the murky, underwater crypt. To date, scientists have pulled the bones of four thousand dire wolves out of the Tar Pits.
In his mediation work, Gary refers to conflict as a “trap.” That’s a good description. Because conflict, once it escalates past a certain point, operates just like the La Brea Tar Pits. It draws us in, appealing to all kinds of normal and understandable needs and desires. But once we enter, we find we can’t get out. The more we flail about, braying for help, the worse the situation gets.
But healthy conflict leads somewhere. It feels more interesting to get to the other side than to stay in it. In high conflict, the conflict is the destination. There’s nowhere else to go.
Even the U.S. Supreme Court has recognized the limits of adversarialism. “For many claims, trials by adversarial contests must in time go the way of the ancient trial by battle and blood,” Chief Justice Warren Earl Burger said in his State of the Judiciary speech in 1984... Couldn’t the same be said about politics today? It is too costly, painful, destructive, and ineffective for a truly civilized people.
Like cable TV news and many social media platforms, the law is designed mostly to perpetuate itself. Stock market millions have been made by inciting high conflict systematically, creating a vast conflict-industrial complex.
they tend to own the most expensive houses, the ones with the scorchingly modern architecture, high up on the cliffs.
“Overcategorization is perhaps the commonest trick of the human mind.” —Gordon Allport, The Nature of Prejudice
But the referendums forced them to choose a side, to see the world in two dimensions. <> After all these referendums finished, splicing Britain from the European Union, adopting a newly restrictive constitution in Thailand, and rejecting a peace deal in Colombia, The New York Times asked political scientist Michael Marsh whether referendums were ever a good idea. “The simple answer is almost never,” he said. “They really range from the pointless to the dangerous.”
Out of 120 tapped-out songs, the listeners guessed just under 3 percent correctly. <> This is the illusion of communication. We consistently overestimate our ability to communicate.
Gary felt cornered. Just two years ago, in this very same space, Gary had talked about bringing the magic back to Muir Beach. His family had beamed back at him from the audience. He and Joel had been friendly. He’d even mediated a conflict for Joel’s son once, years before. Yet here he was, presiding over a parody of a town council meeting, on the verge of being thrown out of volunteer office in a tiny town no one had ever heard of. How had it come to this?
Alexander Hamilton called political parties the “most fatal disease” of popular governments. In his farewell address, George Washington warned that “they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government.”
The woman handed her a gift bag containing some scented lotion and said, “You were elected.”... She was expected to serve for one year, whether she wanted to or not. This is part of the deal when you become a Bahá’í, Lawson knew.
First, give people more than two choices. It doesn’t fix everything, but it reduces the power of the binary. .. Globally, we can see the difference. People living in countries with proportional representation tend to have more trust in one another, researchers have found. They suffer from less polarization
It works outside of politics, too. In any situation where cooperation matters, keep the groups flexible. Avoid schemes that designate one winner and one loser, one group that’s on the inside and one that’s on the outs. Mix up the identities as often as possible... Want to open a branch office in Brussels or Detroit? Rotate your employees in and out on a regular basis. Don’t let the groups stagnate and take on their own meaning.
These are the accelerants to watch out for, in any conflict: * Group identities * Conflict entrepreneurs * Humiliation * Corruption
Basketball fans act differently after they watch their team win. They feel better about themselves, compared to fans who have just watched their team lose. They even predict they will perform better on puzzles and games. This is, in this context, a charming quirk of the human condition. We live by proxy. We overestimate our own abilities, riding high on a victory we had nothing to do with.
From the beginning, Fort understood how much boys and men in Chicago wanted to belong to something bigger than themselves. That’s what made him such a good fire starter; he intuitively understood the psychology of conflict. He made T-shirts for all the Stones to wear, and came up with a list of sacred Stones values: Love, Truth, Peace, Freedom, and Justice. There was a special Stones handshake, a special Stones way of wearing your hat and your belt buckle, a Stones way of being.
In this spasm of violence, people began to retreat to groups for safety, awakening old, latent identities. It was a way to survive, physically and mentally. People needed a compass with which to navigate the carnage, and many grabbed the one most readily available to them. <> Syria is run largely by Alawites, a sect of Islam whose members include Assad. But they represent only 12 percent of the population.
Fire starter leaders seize the opportunities embedded in conflict and turn them to their advantage. Assad’s regime needed Syrians and other global leaders to feel even more terrified of his opposition than of him, and so the regime intentionally helped the more radical elements among his opponents. They released extremist prisoners and even funneled weapons to protesters. <> It sounds crazy. Why would a dictator like Assad help the people trying to overthrow him? Because he understood fear. He knew that fear hardens group identities. He needed to make the conflict about fighting terrorists, rather than about his own crimes against his own people.
“the nuclear bomb of emotions” <> Conflict can explode when social pain becomes unbearable. When it becomes something worse than exclusion, when it becomes humiliation... Humiliation poses an existential threat that jeopardizes the deepest part of ourselves, our sense that we matter, that we are worth something.
the IRA agreed to destroy its weapons. The opposition asked that the IRA take photographs, proving they had done so. It was a matter of transparency, they said, that’s all. The IRA’s leaders refused. It was one step too far, this demand for photographs. The peace talks stalled. “One man’s transparency is another’s humiliation,” said Gerry Adams, president of the political wing of the IRA.
At the time, in his only available reality, Curtis instantly felt Benji’s death as a threat to the deepest part of himself, to his sense that he mattered. He felt a flood of emotion on Benji’s behalf, and he wasn’t alone. It was the flip side of collective pride he and his friends felt when they saw Benji play basketball.
In the 1960s, when the anthropologist Jean Briggs lived among the Utku, an Inuit group in the Arctic Circle, she noticed that they tended to reject anger. It just wasn’t allowed, culturally speaking. Small children were allowed to get angry and throw tantrums, but after about age six, people were expected to exhibit ihuma, a kind of deep self-control that produced outer calm or laughter, instead of rage.
Today, about eight of every ten violent deaths happen outside of recognized conflict zones, in places like Chicago. In 2015, more people were killed in Brazil, which was not “at war,” than in Syria, which was.
Each homicide costs the city of Chicago about $1.5 million. But most killings go unsolved. If you murder a White person in Chicago, you have about a 50 percent chance of getting away with it. If you murder a Black person, you have a 78 percent chance of getting away with it, Chicago public radio station WBEZ found in 2019.
“There is a sense of being in anger,” Toni Morrison wrote in The Bluest Eye, “A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.”
He even told Adams that he’d had a dream in which the two men were reunited after Adams had written to Jefferson. Was Rush telling the truth? We don’t know. But when he told Adams about his dream, he even shared the precise words Adams had used in the so-called letter he’d sent Jefferson in the dream, giving Adams a script to use in real life. He created a path out of high conflict with this dream story. And because he knew his friend so well, Rush made sure to compliment him when he did it. Only a man like Adams, who possessed “a magnanimity known only to great minds,” would be capable of such a gracious gesture.
Three months after making that comment, Beck had to lay off about 20 percent of his employees at Mercury Radio Arts and TheBlaze. His opposition to Trump had cost him many viewers, he knew. “Loyalty is very important to the conservative mindset.” <> The old fire starter kept coming back to life. Just three months after saying he wished he could be more “uniting” in his language, Beck called Obama a “full-fledged dictator” and a “sociopath.”
With Gary’s feuding clients, looping for understanding helps him buy time, slowing down the conversation and making sure people feel heard. <> One of the greatest dangers of social media is that it speeds conflict up. It holds us captive in the reactive mode of thinking, by design, robbing us of time and space. In that sense, it’s like an automatic weapon.
They introduced the members of Black September to a group of about a hundred Palestinian women, whom they’d recruited from all over the Middle East. They encouraged the commandos to get to know the women. If any of the men and women decided to get married, they were told, they’d get $3,000 and an apartment with appliances and a TV, along with a new, nonviolent job. If these married couples had a baby, they’d get another $5,000. It was like a giant singles cruise, with very high stakes. The scheme was designed to create new identities for the commandos, ones that crowded out their old ideas of themselves. <> To the surprise of everyone involved, the matchmaking worked.
“I started to understand that this whole thing is so much bigger than the limits I had put on it. This is not a Blackstone thing; it’s a Black people thing!” Recognizing systemic racism in Chicago and America did not demoralize Curtis. It seemed to energize him. He was, as he put it, “getting to the root cause.” <> There’s a word for this in psychology. It’s called “recategorization,” and it means swapping out a narrow identity for a broader one.
He sprinted past the row houses and the chain link fences, thinking all the time about the boy he’d shot. “He became the most important person to me,” Billy wrote later. “This unknown tall stranger I’d left struggling for his life.”
t made Curtis dizzy, thinking about it. This encounter with Billy unraveled his narrative about the Disciples and Benji Wilson. The story that had ordered his life for so long was not true. And it never had been. There was no hat to the left. No gang storyline at all. The more he thought about it, the more he began to question every other assumption he’d had about this feud. It even occurred to him, suddenly, to doubt the very fundamentals.
Contact theory seems to require a few conditions. First, everyone involved in an encounter should ideally have roughly equal status, if not in the world then at least in the room and subculture in which an encounter takes place. This was rarely the case for Catholics in Northern Ireland, who were marginalized in politics, housing, and the workforce
Contact theory works best when everyone has enough motivation, stability, and power to take risks and withstand discomfort. These are pretty major requirements.
These days, the opportunities for disrespect are infinite. Gang members spend two to three more hours a week online compared to nongang members. They trade threats, insults, and boasts, just like gang members have always done. But they do it on social media with extreme efficiency: broadcasting disrespect to thousands of people all at once.
To do this, he did something he calls “going to the balcony.” He imagined himself watching the scene from “a mental and emotional balcony, a place of calm, perspective, and self-control where you can stay focused on your interests, keep your eyes on the prize.”
Then they were asked to think about that person’s perspective during their next fight. Every four months, for a year, they repeated this writing exercise. <> The couples who did this marriage hack, reconsidering their conflicts from an imaginary third party’s point of view, reported feeling less upset about their disputes than couples who hadn’t done it.
they’ve found that the couples most capable of keeping conflict healthy were the ones whose everyday positive interactions exceeded the negative by a ratio of 5 to 1. This is the “magic ratio,” as they put it...
Jonathan Haidt described in his enlightening book The Righteous Mind. Those six foundations are care, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority, and sanctity. These are the keys that unlock most political behavior.
In the United States, liberals (and liberal members of the media) tend to be highly sensitive to three of these foundations: care, fairness, and liberty. But they can be oblivious when it comes to concerns about loyalty, authority, and sanctity. Conservatives and conservative media, generally speaking, seem to engage with all six, with a particular focus on loyalty, authority, liberty, and sanctity.
If you understand the moral understory, you can make what you say hearable. So, for example, if liberals want to convince American conservatives to take action on climate change, they’d get more traction talking about the need to protect the purity of nature, as social psychologists Robb Willer and Matthew Feinberg have found. But liberal politicians almost always talk about caring for the planet. Like everyone, they automatically default to their own moral language, rendering much of what they say unhearable to large swaths of the country.
About another neighbor he said, “I don’t trust him, but I like him.” There was a new complexity in his language. He was “holding the tension,” as he put it. Not collapsing into good versus evil, us versus them. He’d carved out enough space for complexity in his own mind. And this meant he was seeing the world more accurately, in full.
Adversarialism depends on total, complete, and permanent separation. In the real world, no such thing exists, most of the time. There is no “Old Guard” and “New Guard.” “Using those tactics is like asking, ‘Who’s winning this marriage?,’ ”
What he found astonished him. A soccer game played at dusk, with no rain interference, led to twenty extra guerrilla members demobilizing the day after a game. That was ten times the daily average for desertions. Demobilizations stayed up in these areas even a week after the game was played.
“It seems like the most effective campaigns are the ones that appeal to a family relationship,” Juan Pablo said. It was a theme I heard again and again, in all kinds of conflict. Reviving latent family identities can help propel people out of high conflict
The smartest way to help people stay out of high conflict is keep the new identity alive... In Colombia, it helped to literally give people identity cards, the official government-issued documents that most ex-combatants did not have when they left the jungle. “The identity card was a very powerful tool,” Kraus said, “in showing them, ‘Here, this is you. Your picture, your name, your thumbprint. This is the citizen who has rights, who can demand things from the state in a legal way.’ ”
We went to a park in Jackson, Michigan, where, in 1854, over a thousand people had gathered to protest against the expansion of slavery. The event marked the beginning of the Republican Party in America.
“Everything is magnified.” In Sweden, a wolf-conservation advocate compared the anti-wolf sentiment to racism in an interview with The New York Times: “The hate against an animal, against a species such as the wolf, is like racism in people—it is absolutely the same process in the mind.” In France, farmers brought 250 sheep to the Eiffel Tower in a show of protest. One farmer described the threat of wolf attacks as “omnipresent and oppressive.”
how to prevent high conflict:
1. investigate the understory
2. reduce the binary
3. marginalize the fire starters
4. buy time and make space
5. complicate the narrative
Regardless of the facts, both sides are convinced they are reacting defensively—somehow. They find themselves returning to the feud over and over, itemizing the indignities, tending to it like a fire.
By some estimates, 38 million Americans stopped talking to a family member or friend because of that (2016) election.
In Argentina, nine out of ten people said their country was very or fairly divided. In Norway and Denmark, there was a major schism over how to handle wild wolves. In New Zealand, it was cats (yes, cats!).
Good conflict is vital. Life would be much worse without it. It’s a lot like fire. We need some heat to survive—to illuminate what we’ve gotten wrong and protect ourselves from predators.
High conflicts are magnetic. Until we understand this, our differences will feel bigger and more inevitable than they are.
“Rivalries and hatreds between groups are nothing new,” the psychologist Gordon Allport wrote in the 1954 preface to his classic book The Nature of Prejudice. “What is new is the fact that technology has brought these groups too close together for comfort.… We have not yet learned how to adjust to our new mental and moral proximity.”
He’d been railing against “the law” for years now. His profession was excessively adversarial, as he’d told everyone who would listen, including these same friends.
This is the first paradox of conflict: we are animated by conflict, and also haunted by it. We want it to end, and we want it to continue.
But scientists have found more than three million bones trapped in the depths of these pits, including well-preserved, nearly complete skeletons of massive mammals. They’ve found mammoths, sloths, and more than two thousand saber-toothed tigers... A single carcass could remain visible for up to five months, attracting more unwitting victims, before finally sinking out of sight, into the murky, underwater crypt. To date, scientists have pulled the bones of four thousand dire wolves out of the Tar Pits.
In his mediation work, Gary refers to conflict as a “trap.” That’s a good description. Because conflict, once it escalates past a certain point, operates just like the La Brea Tar Pits. It draws us in, appealing to all kinds of normal and understandable needs and desires. But once we enter, we find we can’t get out. The more we flail about, braying for help, the worse the situation gets.
But healthy conflict leads somewhere. It feels more interesting to get to the other side than to stay in it. In high conflict, the conflict is the destination. There’s nowhere else to go.
Even the U.S. Supreme Court has recognized the limits of adversarialism. “For many claims, trials by adversarial contests must in time go the way of the ancient trial by battle and blood,” Chief Justice Warren Earl Burger said in his State of the Judiciary speech in 1984... Couldn’t the same be said about politics today? It is too costly, painful, destructive, and ineffective for a truly civilized people.
Like cable TV news and many social media platforms, the law is designed mostly to perpetuate itself. Stock market millions have been made by inciting high conflict systematically, creating a vast conflict-industrial complex.
they tend to own the most expensive houses, the ones with the scorchingly modern architecture, high up on the cliffs.
“Overcategorization is perhaps the commonest trick of the human mind.” —Gordon Allport, The Nature of Prejudice
But the referendums forced them to choose a side, to see the world in two dimensions. <> After all these referendums finished, splicing Britain from the European Union, adopting a newly restrictive constitution in Thailand, and rejecting a peace deal in Colombia, The New York Times asked political scientist Michael Marsh whether referendums were ever a good idea. “The simple answer is almost never,” he said. “They really range from the pointless to the dangerous.”
Out of 120 tapped-out songs, the listeners guessed just under 3 percent correctly. <> This is the illusion of communication. We consistently overestimate our ability to communicate.
Gary felt cornered. Just two years ago, in this very same space, Gary had talked about bringing the magic back to Muir Beach. His family had beamed back at him from the audience. He and Joel had been friendly. He’d even mediated a conflict for Joel’s son once, years before. Yet here he was, presiding over a parody of a town council meeting, on the verge of being thrown out of volunteer office in a tiny town no one had ever heard of. How had it come to this?
Alexander Hamilton called political parties the “most fatal disease” of popular governments. In his farewell address, George Washington warned that “they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government.”
The woman handed her a gift bag containing some scented lotion and said, “You were elected.”... She was expected to serve for one year, whether she wanted to or not. This is part of the deal when you become a Bahá’í, Lawson knew.
First, give people more than two choices. It doesn’t fix everything, but it reduces the power of the binary. .. Globally, we can see the difference. People living in countries with proportional representation tend to have more trust in one another, researchers have found. They suffer from less polarization
It works outside of politics, too. In any situation where cooperation matters, keep the groups flexible. Avoid schemes that designate one winner and one loser, one group that’s on the inside and one that’s on the outs. Mix up the identities as often as possible... Want to open a branch office in Brussels or Detroit? Rotate your employees in and out on a regular basis. Don’t let the groups stagnate and take on their own meaning.
These are the accelerants to watch out for, in any conflict: * Group identities * Conflict entrepreneurs * Humiliation * Corruption
Basketball fans act differently after they watch their team win. They feel better about themselves, compared to fans who have just watched their team lose. They even predict they will perform better on puzzles and games. This is, in this context, a charming quirk of the human condition. We live by proxy. We overestimate our own abilities, riding high on a victory we had nothing to do with.
From the beginning, Fort understood how much boys and men in Chicago wanted to belong to something bigger than themselves. That’s what made him such a good fire starter; he intuitively understood the psychology of conflict. He made T-shirts for all the Stones to wear, and came up with a list of sacred Stones values: Love, Truth, Peace, Freedom, and Justice. There was a special Stones handshake, a special Stones way of wearing your hat and your belt buckle, a Stones way of being.
In this spasm of violence, people began to retreat to groups for safety, awakening old, latent identities. It was a way to survive, physically and mentally. People needed a compass with which to navigate the carnage, and many grabbed the one most readily available to them. <> Syria is run largely by Alawites, a sect of Islam whose members include Assad. But they represent only 12 percent of the population.
Fire starter leaders seize the opportunities embedded in conflict and turn them to their advantage. Assad’s regime needed Syrians and other global leaders to feel even more terrified of his opposition than of him, and so the regime intentionally helped the more radical elements among his opponents. They released extremist prisoners and even funneled weapons to protesters. <> It sounds crazy. Why would a dictator like Assad help the people trying to overthrow him? Because he understood fear. He knew that fear hardens group identities. He needed to make the conflict about fighting terrorists, rather than about his own crimes against his own people.
“the nuclear bomb of emotions” <> Conflict can explode when social pain becomes unbearable. When it becomes something worse than exclusion, when it becomes humiliation... Humiliation poses an existential threat that jeopardizes the deepest part of ourselves, our sense that we matter, that we are worth something.
the IRA agreed to destroy its weapons. The opposition asked that the IRA take photographs, proving they had done so. It was a matter of transparency, they said, that’s all. The IRA’s leaders refused. It was one step too far, this demand for photographs. The peace talks stalled. “One man’s transparency is another’s humiliation,” said Gerry Adams, president of the political wing of the IRA.
At the time, in his only available reality, Curtis instantly felt Benji’s death as a threat to the deepest part of himself, to his sense that he mattered. He felt a flood of emotion on Benji’s behalf, and he wasn’t alone. It was the flip side of collective pride he and his friends felt when they saw Benji play basketball.
In the 1960s, when the anthropologist Jean Briggs lived among the Utku, an Inuit group in the Arctic Circle, she noticed that they tended to reject anger. It just wasn’t allowed, culturally speaking. Small children were allowed to get angry and throw tantrums, but after about age six, people were expected to exhibit ihuma, a kind of deep self-control that produced outer calm or laughter, instead of rage.
Today, about eight of every ten violent deaths happen outside of recognized conflict zones, in places like Chicago. In 2015, more people were killed in Brazil, which was not “at war,” than in Syria, which was.
Each homicide costs the city of Chicago about $1.5 million. But most killings go unsolved. If you murder a White person in Chicago, you have about a 50 percent chance of getting away with it. If you murder a Black person, you have a 78 percent chance of getting away with it, Chicago public radio station WBEZ found in 2019.
“There is a sense of being in anger,” Toni Morrison wrote in The Bluest Eye, “A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.”
He even told Adams that he’d had a dream in which the two men were reunited after Adams had written to Jefferson. Was Rush telling the truth? We don’t know. But when he told Adams about his dream, he even shared the precise words Adams had used in the so-called letter he’d sent Jefferson in the dream, giving Adams a script to use in real life. He created a path out of high conflict with this dream story. And because he knew his friend so well, Rush made sure to compliment him when he did it. Only a man like Adams, who possessed “a magnanimity known only to great minds,” would be capable of such a gracious gesture.
Three months after making that comment, Beck had to lay off about 20 percent of his employees at Mercury Radio Arts and TheBlaze. His opposition to Trump had cost him many viewers, he knew. “Loyalty is very important to the conservative mindset.” <> The old fire starter kept coming back to life. Just three months after saying he wished he could be more “uniting” in his language, Beck called Obama a “full-fledged dictator” and a “sociopath.”
With Gary’s feuding clients, looping for understanding helps him buy time, slowing down the conversation and making sure people feel heard. <> One of the greatest dangers of social media is that it speeds conflict up. It holds us captive in the reactive mode of thinking, by design, robbing us of time and space. In that sense, it’s like an automatic weapon.
They introduced the members of Black September to a group of about a hundred Palestinian women, whom they’d recruited from all over the Middle East. They encouraged the commandos to get to know the women. If any of the men and women decided to get married, they were told, they’d get $3,000 and an apartment with appliances and a TV, along with a new, nonviolent job. If these married couples had a baby, they’d get another $5,000. It was like a giant singles cruise, with very high stakes. The scheme was designed to create new identities for the commandos, ones that crowded out their old ideas of themselves. <> To the surprise of everyone involved, the matchmaking worked.
“I started to understand that this whole thing is so much bigger than the limits I had put on it. This is not a Blackstone thing; it’s a Black people thing!” Recognizing systemic racism in Chicago and America did not demoralize Curtis. It seemed to energize him. He was, as he put it, “getting to the root cause.” <> There’s a word for this in psychology. It’s called “recategorization,” and it means swapping out a narrow identity for a broader one.
He sprinted past the row houses and the chain link fences, thinking all the time about the boy he’d shot. “He became the most important person to me,” Billy wrote later. “This unknown tall stranger I’d left struggling for his life.”
t made Curtis dizzy, thinking about it. This encounter with Billy unraveled his narrative about the Disciples and Benji Wilson. The story that had ordered his life for so long was not true. And it never had been. There was no hat to the left. No gang storyline at all. The more he thought about it, the more he began to question every other assumption he’d had about this feud. It even occurred to him, suddenly, to doubt the very fundamentals.
Contact theory seems to require a few conditions. First, everyone involved in an encounter should ideally have roughly equal status, if not in the world then at least in the room and subculture in which an encounter takes place. This was rarely the case for Catholics in Northern Ireland, who were marginalized in politics, housing, and the workforce
Contact theory works best when everyone has enough motivation, stability, and power to take risks and withstand discomfort. These are pretty major requirements.
These days, the opportunities for disrespect are infinite. Gang members spend two to three more hours a week online compared to nongang members. They trade threats, insults, and boasts, just like gang members have always done. But they do it on social media with extreme efficiency: broadcasting disrespect to thousands of people all at once.
To do this, he did something he calls “going to the balcony.” He imagined himself watching the scene from “a mental and emotional balcony, a place of calm, perspective, and self-control where you can stay focused on your interests, keep your eyes on the prize.”
Then they were asked to think about that person’s perspective during their next fight. Every four months, for a year, they repeated this writing exercise. <> The couples who did this marriage hack, reconsidering their conflicts from an imaginary third party’s point of view, reported feeling less upset about their disputes than couples who hadn’t done it.
they’ve found that the couples most capable of keeping conflict healthy were the ones whose everyday positive interactions exceeded the negative by a ratio of 5 to 1. This is the “magic ratio,” as they put it...
Jonathan Haidt described in his enlightening book The Righteous Mind. Those six foundations are care, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority, and sanctity. These are the keys that unlock most political behavior.
In the United States, liberals (and liberal members of the media) tend to be highly sensitive to three of these foundations: care, fairness, and liberty. But they can be oblivious when it comes to concerns about loyalty, authority, and sanctity. Conservatives and conservative media, generally speaking, seem to engage with all six, with a particular focus on loyalty, authority, liberty, and sanctity.
If you understand the moral understory, you can make what you say hearable. So, for example, if liberals want to convince American conservatives to take action on climate change, they’d get more traction talking about the need to protect the purity of nature, as social psychologists Robb Willer and Matthew Feinberg have found. But liberal politicians almost always talk about caring for the planet. Like everyone, they automatically default to their own moral language, rendering much of what they say unhearable to large swaths of the country.
About another neighbor he said, “I don’t trust him, but I like him.” There was a new complexity in his language. He was “holding the tension,” as he put it. Not collapsing into good versus evil, us versus them. He’d carved out enough space for complexity in his own mind. And this meant he was seeing the world more accurately, in full.
Adversarialism depends on total, complete, and permanent separation. In the real world, no such thing exists, most of the time. There is no “Old Guard” and “New Guard.” “Using those tactics is like asking, ‘Who’s winning this marriage?,’ ”
What he found astonished him. A soccer game played at dusk, with no rain interference, led to twenty extra guerrilla members demobilizing the day after a game. That was ten times the daily average for desertions. Demobilizations stayed up in these areas even a week after the game was played.
“It seems like the most effective campaigns are the ones that appeal to a family relationship,” Juan Pablo said. It was a theme I heard again and again, in all kinds of conflict. Reviving latent family identities can help propel people out of high conflict
The smartest way to help people stay out of high conflict is keep the new identity alive... In Colombia, it helped to literally give people identity cards, the official government-issued documents that most ex-combatants did not have when they left the jungle. “The identity card was a very powerful tool,” Kraus said, “in showing them, ‘Here, this is you. Your picture, your name, your thumbprint. This is the citizen who has rights, who can demand things from the state in a legal way.’ ”
We went to a park in Jackson, Michigan, where, in 1854, over a thousand people had gathered to protest against the expansion of slavery. The event marked the beginning of the Republican Party in America.
“Everything is magnified.” In Sweden, a wolf-conservation advocate compared the anti-wolf sentiment to racism in an interview with The New York Times: “The hate against an animal, against a species such as the wolf, is like racism in people—it is absolutely the same process in the mind.” In France, farmers brought 250 sheep to the Eiffel Tower in a show of protest. One farmer described the threat of wolf attacks as “omnipresent and oppressive.”
how to prevent high conflict:
1. investigate the understory
2. reduce the binary
3. marginalize the fire starters
4. buy time and make space
5. complicate the narrative
