Conflict
Disagreement and conflict is inevitable. We live in a world that’s often hostile and inimical, bereft of love, filled with contempt and selfish desire, quick to shame and ridicule, and predisposed to hate, to polarize, and to antagonize. But there is nothing inherently wrong with the process of disagreement; in fact, it’s the only mechanism by which we progress human knowledge and culture. Rather, it’s the narratives that we assign to this dissension that precipitate and perpetuate nearly all the issues that pervade our modern day society.
We fabricate a narrative of us against them, when unity is actually the only long-term solution.
We make it a game of pride, of winners and losers, while in reality we all lose.
We assign motives of sabotage, of purposeful wrongdoing while there are no such motives.
We make it about revenge, justice, retaliation, and retribution, while we fail to realize that it becomes an perpetual, unending cycle of self-wrought destruction.
We seek to advance the world through business and politics, while all that these systems do is dehumanize our interactions by needlessly abstracting and thus corrupting them.
And the consequences of holding onto these narratives as the social norm are unequivocally clear; while I hope that the egregiousness and horror of the brutal wars throughout our history would be enough to convince us to change, it is our inability to unite—to truly work together to tackle the staggering amount of unaddressed and neglected social and public health issues—that is equally appalling. We have no reservation in continuing to conjure up an ever-increasing, intricate collection of excuses to justify our way of life and the narratives that we assign to it: I’m just trying to get by and be happy. My life already has so many of its own worries. We can’t change human nature; we will always be predisposed to conflict. Everything is hopeless, so we might as well live our lives selfishly and as how we see fit. Even when the world is falling apart around us, it’s all too easy to remain haughty and complacent when we’re not the ones in a grave, a trench, or a hospital bed. Our survivorship bias assures us: the world’s not all that bad. If the system isn’t broken, why fix it?
In an ideal world, we have disagreement, debate, a realization of common ground, then progress and change—not disagreement, debate, a realization of inexorable differences, then conflict as a means of last resort. Lest we forget, there is solely one purpose for a debate—the advancement of ideas. It is an opportunity for two individuals to learn from each other.
The fact that debates have become a spectator sport for some is an absolute travesty. In the age of social media and political polarization, it has become a mere caricature of intellectual discourse; from the absurd pantomime of the past presidential debates or the average high school debating competition, what was originally intended to be a means of advancing our collective intelligence as a society is instead now a means of degrading it. They have perverted the very process that allows us to obviate the game of us against them—of realizing the inexorable differences that inevitably lead to conflict.
In an intellectually honest debate, there are no winners or losers. There are no sides to take. There is no applause. There is no emotion.
There are facts and evidence. There is logic and reasoning.
Nothing else.
We can choose to end our disagreement then and there.
What we most need to recognize is that the debate is as much about what we disagree on as it is what we agree on. Any productive debate consists of participants that not only disagree on the topic of the debate, but agree on the purpose of the debate itself; it is only when we can agree about what it means to create a better world—when we can agree about the value of pursuing a greater truth—that we can actually practically make use of all this exchange of knowledge. If we can’t agree on what all this is even for, it merely devolves into raucous, senseless banter or, better yet, glorified intellectual masturbation.
Yes, none of us are without fault. None of us are without blame. None of us are truly qualified to talk about anything. But we have to remember that none of this actually matters when we want to reconcile our differences. What matters is that we have an idea, a thought, an opinion, and we are willing and generous enough to share that with the rest of the world that will not judge the person who said it, but will judge the idea itself. When we preoccupy ourselves with who said it, why they said it, and how they said it, we actually lose sight of what they’re saying. We lose sight of what we’re all actually trying to do.
I want to urge us all—don’t let the lizard brain win. Don’t merely let our human predisposition towards antagonism and division inhibit us from making a better world for all of us; it is singlehandedly the greatest threat toward our progress as humanity.
I am far from being an optimist, so I’d likely be the first to tell you that it doesn’t seem likely that any one of us could realistically upend the current status quo and win the battle against our antagonistic instincts. But I cannot simply ignore the malleability of the human spirit; in the same way that the leaders of our nations and the captain of industry have meticulously shaped the predominant culture in the past two centuries of the industrial age, there is no reason to believe that it is unfeasible to reverse this process. As humans, we will certainly never reach a point where our perspectives of the world completely align, but look how far the industrialists got. We believe it isn’t possible because, for generations, we’ve been told a different story—a story of the value of compliance and conformity, where insolence and refusal to adhere to the status quo will harm our ability to live a prosperous, stable life. We’ve been told that story so that we wouldn’t come to the dangerous realization that all this conflict and strife was merely a means for the wealthy and powerful to hold onto their wealth and power. When from birth we’ve been so intimately cajoled by the glamor of consumerism and the lulling comfort of modern life, it becomes almost impossible for us to imagine losing these luxuries for such a distant and quixotic cause.
Yes—it will be difficult, but we have to start somewhere, and it begins with deciding what narrative to assign to our inexorable tendency towards disagreement and thus conflict. We can decide to promulgate a culture where the norm of a debate isn’t about vehemently defending our own worldview, but is rather about an opportunity to learn from one another’s unique perspectives. We can create an environment where we don’t have to make crude assumptions about one another’s motives. We can build a narrative that—instead of fixating on our irreconcilable differences—allows us to hone in on what unites us as humanity, to learn about why we’re all here in the first place, what each of us value, what gives us reason to live, and how we can best serve each other. The only true way forward, the only way we begin to change our world and the present narrative, is together.
