Illumine America là một podcast do Văn phòng Công vụ Baha'i của Hoa Kỳ tạo ra . Nó khám phá một số vấn đề chính mà xã hội Mỹ đang phải đối mặt, chẳng hạn như bất bình đẳng kinh tế, công bằng chủng tộc và đoàn kết chủng tộc, sự phát triển bền vững của hành tinh chúng ta, v.v.

Cũng giống như chúng tôi gặp rắc rối với những thách thức vốn có của những vấn đề này, chúng tôi cũng được truyền cảm hứng bởi các phương pháp tiếp cận mang tính xây dựng đối với chúng mà chúng tôi thấy đang được thử nghiệm hàng ngày. Podcast của chúng tôi làm nổi bật hoặc làm sáng tỏ công việc của một số cá nhân, cộng đồng và tổ chức đang mang lại cái nhìn sâu sắc mới cho những cuộc trò chuyện khẩn cấp này.

Bảng điểm

Lưu ý: đã chỉnh sửa cho rõ ràng và ngắn gọn.

“Những gì tôi phát hiện ra là có một điểm nào đó mà xung đột thường xuyên có thể trở thành xung đột cao độ… Chúng ta ngừng nhìn thấy những cơ hội tồn tại và có xu hướng cảm thấy hoàn toàn hoang mang bởi sự điên rồ của bên kia hoặc của người kia.”

Xin chào mọi người, chào mừng các bạn đã quay trở lại chương trình. Chúng tôi đã có một chút thời gian nghỉ ngơi, vì vậy tôi rất vui khi tập đầu tiên trở lại của chúng tôi có một khách mời tuyệt vời như vậy. Hôm nay, chúng ta sẽ nói chuyện với Amanda Ripley, một nhà văn của The Atlantic và là tác giả của nhiều cuốn sách hay, bao gồm cả cuốn sách mới nhất của cô ấy, High Conflict , kể chi tiết cách mọi người tự đưa mình vào xung đột gây tổn hại và phân cực, và cách họ có thể tự thoát ra. .

Chúng ta đã đến rất nhiều nơi trong cuộc trò chuyện này, nhưng đây là một vài chủ đề xuất hiện. Điều gì làm cho xung đột không lành mạnh bùng nổ? Làm thế nào hệ thống truyền thông của chúng ta có thể góp phần thúc đẩy xung đột cao? Tại sao phương tiện truyền thông của chúng ta đôi khi 'làm phẳng' thế giới rất năng động của chúng ta để phục vụ cho việc kể một câu chuyện? Và đâu là giới hạn của chúng ta và họ trong tư duy giải quyết các vấn đề xã hội?

Hãy đi sâu vào.

James Samimi Farr: Amanda, cảm ơn bạn rất nhiều vì đã tham gia cùng chúng tôi ngày hôm nay. Chúng ta biết nhau một chút. Tôi biết bạn là một trong những nhà báo và nhà văn chu đáo hơn đang làm việc ngay bây giờ, và tôi hy vọng bạn sẽ chấp nhận lời khen ngợi đó. Bạn biết tôi là một người Baha'i, và người Baha'i có xu hướng suy nghĩ hơi khác về xung đột so với một số người hoặc nhóm khác, và tôi đưa ra xung đột vì tôi biết rằng đó là chủ đề mà công việc của bạn đã được quan tâm sâu sắc. vài năm gần đây. Vì vậy, như bạn có thể biết, Baha tin rằng xung đột và tranh chấp cần phải được tránh một cách triệt để, đồng thời, chúng tôi tin rằng chỉ có sự xung đột của các ý kiến ​​khác nhau thì sự thật mới có thể đạt được.

Theo một nghĩa nào đó, phương pháp của chúng tôi để suy nghĩ về sự thật, để bắc cầu hai cực này, là một nguyên tắc mà chúng tôi gọi là tham vấn, là một tiêu chuẩn hoặc phương tiện để tương tác với những người khác và cho rằng chúng ta phải thẳng thắn và yêu thương trong cuộc trò chuyện với mỗi người. khác.

Tôi nghĩ đây là một ý tưởng gây được tiếng vang trực quan cho rất nhiều người, nhưng ở Mỹ ngày nay, ý tưởng này ngày càng khó hiểu hơn. Ngày càng khó hiểu làm thế nào các nguyên tắc thẳng thắn và yêu thương không phân đôi, làm thế nào chúng ta có thể đến với nhau và vượt qua xung đột. Công việc của bạn thực sự khiến tôi hứng thú và truyền cảm hứng, bởi vì tôi nghĩ nó tương tác với một số động lực sâu sắc hơn về ý nghĩa của xung đột, nơi xung đột có thể trở nên nguy hiểm và cách vượt qua những khác biệt về quan điểm. Vì vậy, sau phần giới thiệu ngắn gọn về nơi tôi đến, Amanda, bạn có vui lòng giới thiệu về bản thân và công việc của mình không?

Amanda Ripley : Tên tôi là Amanda Ripley, tôi viết về xung đột và những thứ khác, chủ yếu là cho Đại Tây Dương, nhưng cũng cho những nơi khác, và tôi viết sách về hành vi và chính sách của con người. Thông thường những cuốn sách tôi viết là nỗ lực tuyệt vọng của chính tôi để vượt qua một số vũng lầy mà báo cáo của tôi đã dẫn tôi đến. Như bạn đã đề cập, xung đột là vũng lầy mới nhất.

James : Đối với vũng lầy đó, tác phẩm của bạn phân biệt giữa xung đột cao độ và xung đột thường xuyên hoặc các loại xung đột khác. Bạn có thể nói rõ hơn về sự khác biệt này và cho tôi biết tại sao bạn thấy nó là một điểm hữu ích trong công việc của bạn không?

Amanda : Những gì tôi tìm thấy là có một điểm nhất định mà xung đột thường xuyên có thể trở thành xung đột cao. Đó thường là một loại tình huống “chúng ta đấu với họ”, nơi mọi thứ trở nên thực sự rõ ràng, như quá rõ ràng, đến mức các quy tắc tương tác thông thường không còn hoạt động nữa. Điều đó đúng khi nói đến báo chí về xung đột, hoặc các mối quan hệ giữa các cá nhân. Tất cả những thành kiến ​​tâm lý bình thường của chúng ta đều trở nên phóng đại. Chúng ta ngừng nhìn thấy những cơ hội đang tồn tại và có xu hướng cảm thấy hoàn toàn hoang mang bởi sự điên rồ của phía bên kia hoặc của người kia.

Đó là một tập hợp các lực lượng và động lực khác với cái mà tôi gọi là "xung đột tốt", là loại xung đột mà ở đó vẫn còn sự thất vọng và tức giận, nhưng sẽ có nhiều chuyển động hơn, nếu điều đó hợp lý. Bạn có thể di chuyển. Bạn chuyển từ thất vọng sang hiểu biết, tò mò, trở lại thất vọng, hài hước và trở lại tức giận. Tôi nghĩ rằng tất cả chúng ta đều cảm thấy rằng, giống như nếu bạn đang ở trong những khoảnh khắc đẹp đẽ khi bạn đang tham gia vào một cuộc xung đột tốt, có thể đó là tại một cuộc họp nhân viên, hoặc với vợ / chồng hoặc bạn bè của bạn, nơi bạn cảm thấy như bạn đang thực sự cố gắng hiểu những gì họ đang nói, ngay cả khi bạn hoàn toàn không đồng ý. Đó là một điều tuyệt vời, cảm giác được kéo dài, nhưng không nhượng bộ và không đầu hàng những gì bạn đang nắm giữ thân yêu. Đó là xung đột tốt so với xung đột cao.

James : Điều gì khiến bạn hứng thú khi viết về xung đột? Bởi vì bạn đang nói rằng thông qua công việc của mình, bạn khám phá những điều bắt đầu thôi thúc bạn theo một nghĩa nào đó. Tôi biết trước đây bạn đã nghiên cứu về giáo dục và những vấn đề khác tiếp tục khơi gợi trí tưởng tượng và sự tò mò của bạn, nhưng điều gì về xung đột đã lôi kéo bạn đến với nó và khiến bạn muốn hiểu rõ hơn về nó?

Amanda: Tôi ghét phải dự đoán như vậy, nhưng sau cuộc bầu cử năm 2016, tôi thực sự cảm thấy mình không hiểu đất nước mình đang sống và viết về nó đủ tốt để thực hiện công việc của mình. Tôi không thể hiểu nổi làm thế nào mà Đảng Dân chủ và Đảng Cộng hòa lại nhìn thế giới khác nhau đến vậy. Những người mà tôi tôn trọng, quan tâm và có thể tham gia vào nhiều việc, tôi không thể tham gia vào việc này. Chúng tôi đã nhìn thế giới quá khác biệt, và thật giống như sơ suất khi tiếp tục làm báo theo cách chúng tôi vẫn làm, và đó có vẻ giống như điều mà nhiều nơi đã làm sau cuộc bầu cử năm 2016. Họ chỉ nhân đôi trên rất nhiều địa điểm truyền thông báo chí chính thống mà tôi đã đọc và ngưỡng mộ cả đời. Họ bị kết tội nhiều hơn bao giờ hết về vai trò của mình, nhưng có vẻ như điều đó sẽ không hiệu quả, bởi vì một nửa đất nước không tin bạn nói sự thật. Điều này đẩy tôi vào một vòng xoáy toàn bộ cố gắng hiểu những gì tôi còn thiếu, cuối cùng dẫn tôi đến những người nghiên cứu về xung đột và những người làm việc về xung đột theo cách khác nhau.

“One of the mysteries of conflict is, what makes it explode? What are the conditions necessary to turn intense conflict into violent, endemic, all-consuming conflict?”

James: What were some of the central insights that you gleaned from this period of learning and exploration?

Amanda: I think the key lesson I learned from talking to people who have been through really toxic conflicts and come to a healthier kind of conflict, is, first of all, that it’s possible to make that shift, and there’s a pattern to it, whether it’s political conflict, or gang conflict, or family conflict, it’s the same dynamics that pull you in. Conflict is super magnetic at that level. It’s the same kind of patterns that help people get out, to a healthier kind of conflict. And then, ideally, what you want is to build conflict resilience in your community, or your office, or your neighborhood, or your faith organization, whatever, because conflict is necessary and inevitable. You need to have, like the Baha’is have tried to do, practices in place to manage through conflict so that it’s catalytic and constructive. You want to avoid high conflict, but if you do get in it, you can get out.

One of the mysteries of conflict is, what makes it explode? What are the conditions necessary to turn intense conflict into violent, endemic, all-consuming conflict? There’s lots of conditions, but there’s four that I think are particularly important. One of them is this idea of conflict profiteers or conflict entrepreneurs. These are people or platforms who exploit conflict for their own ends. Sometimes it’s for profit, sometimes it’s for power, and maybe most often it’s for the sense of belonging and status that it can bring. So you think about pundits or politicians who really play on division, and cultivate it, and keep the fire going. The flame can never go out. Those are conflict entrepreneurs, and we all have them in everyday life too. If you think about someone you’ve worked with in the past, who was very quick to come in and close the door and gossip, and whisper, and insinuate, and that’s how they connect and build intimacy with you. I’m not saying that I’ve never been guilty of this, by the way, but that’s exploiting conflict to connect with someone else. That’s a form of conflict entrepreneurialism.

For me, at least, it’s been important to name it, because then you can start to see it, and then you can decide if you want to distance yourself from conflict entrepreneurs, whether they’re on TV, or on your Twitter feed, or in your neighborhood, whatever, which can be really hard to do, because the best conflict entrepreneurs make themselves essential, they’re very charismatic.

James: Why does that draw us in? Why is that cheap shot so attractive? I recognize that in myself too, and I don’t know how to describe it exactly, maybe it’s that there’s a certain drama to it that’s intriguing or enticing. I don’t know, what do you think? Why does that attract us?

Amanda: There’s an old myth in journalism that you need conflict for any great story. I think there’s some truth to that, that there’s drama, and there’s emotion that gets provoked when you do that. But something that gives me hope is that, increasingly, as there’s so much conflict in the news, a way to stand out is to disrupt that. In other words, at a certain point, I just don’t think people are quite as engaged and intrigued by stories that confirm their worst fears. There are some people who are highly activated, politically engaged readers. They are definitely going to keep clicking on that stuff. But the great majority of Americans are exhausted by it.

James: One word that’s been in a few of the sentences we’ve been saying is “story”. I wonder how much of this is just rooted in a sense of narrative expectations about how the world should look, and then trying to filter the world through that lens and make it fit you. Any kind of story or fairy tale, any way of narrativizing through which we understand the world tends to center around some kind of conflict as well, but we know that life is actually much more banal than that a lot of the time. When I go through my daily life, it’s not that interesting for the most part. I wake up, I have breakfast, I sit on my computer, I do my work.

It’s very rare that I find myself in that high intensity, highly charged scenario that we often find so represented by our news media, and by the way that we engage with things too. I don’t know if you’ve ever found yourself describing a situation where you’re putting a little more mustard on it than there actually was. It’s a situation in which I have found my self too. I wonder if this relates somewhat to the way journalism can be implicated in this, as stewards of story and national narrative, whether that pull is so strong that it tends to shape things that may not be as intractable and highly charged in reality, but they get filtered through this narrative process that mutates them in a certain sense.

Amanda: Totally, there’s a million ways this plays out, but one way is in political journalism. I remember when I first moved to DC from New York, I’d been in DC, I went to New York and came back, and I was working at Time magazine, and the first meeting I went to was a weekly story meeting at the Bureau there. These are people who cover politics, and the Pentagon, and Congress, whatever. They were really good, smart, hardworking journalists, but every conversation, every idea was seen with an adversarial lens. There was this assumption that anything a member of Congress was doing had a sort of strategy, like a political calculus behind it, and that it was never actually about the policy that the law was supposed to be about.

It’s tricky because I’m sure that some percentage of the time that’s true, I mean this is the system we built. It’s an adversarial system. These members of Congress are constantly fundraising and running for office, so of course they’re going to be strategic and calculated and cynical in many ways, but it was striking to me as an outsider who didn’t write about politics very often, how deeply cynical that was, to just take nothing at face value and just assume everything was a strategy. It fails us lots of times, and particularly with Trump, because how many times did I read or listen to journalists earnestly trying to make sense of his behavior as if it was a political strategy, as if he was some sort of, you know, ‘I wonder why he is pandering to dictators. Does he think that if he does that…’ and I’m like, ‘Guys, this isn’t going to fit into your normal narrative of how politics works.’ It’s not a House of Cards episode. This is a psychological story, more than anything else, but it’s not something that most political reporters were equipped to meet. They didn’t start calling psychologists, they kept calling foreign policy experts at Georgetown or whatever. It was so inadequate. Not to say that Trump never had strategy. He certainly does, he did. But that’s not all that’s going on here, and to just assume that that this is all part of some grand strategy is to miss the story, and is super unhelpful to the reader.

James: In the world that we represent through journalism and through writing, and this relates to something that you said just before, we tend to ascribe single motivations to actions and the things that people do. I find that so curious, because I think if we examine our inner world and our inner life, how often is it that we do or say something because of one thing that happened? Is there a single chain of causality ever in our actions? Maybe at very rare times, moments of real clarity where something happens and we respond for one reason or whatever. But if I think about the things that I’ve done in my life, and the way that I move throughout the world, I’m in a very complex web of relationships and causality with the world around me. It’s rarely that something just happens and I just respond to that. So, again, why do we flatten the world in this way, Amanda? What makes it so attractive?

Amanda: That is such a good point. I love that, and to apply that to the political example, from the people I know who’ve worked in Congress as staffers or whatever, my sense is that it’s many motivations, just like you said, all at once, intertwined, almost in ways that are hard to separate. If I introduce a bill in Congress to do something, there are political motivations, there are moral motivations, like I feel like it’s the right thing to do. There are practical, utilitarian motivations that might get me attention from this interest group or another. So, you’re right, it’s not just one thing, and why do we flatten it? I love Tina Rosenberg, who co-founded the Solutions Journalism Network, and writes an occasional column for the New York Times. She did this great piece maybe a year ago, about how interesting it was that TV, like fictionalized TV shows, are now portraying human beings as vastly more complex, multi-dimensional individuals than the news is portraying real people. Do you know what I mean? There’s some kind of convention in journalism that does flatten things out, and does assume that the audience can’t handle too much complexity, whereas at the very same time, we’re seeing this golden age of TV, where there’s a lot of complexity. These shows have these characters who are definitely not just one thing or another. That wasn’t true in the 80s, but it’s weird that nonfiction journalism should look more like a sitcom in the 80s than fictionalized cereals, so it is interesting. How do we stop relying on those conventions in a systematic way?

“People are just exhausted by the constant bad news, the conflict.”

James: I want to touch on that a little bit, because it’s clear that media and particularly mainstream media outlets have been quite complicit in upholding high conflict and shepherding some of it through into the wider public discourse. But I wanted to ask you, have you seen examples, and they can be not just from mainstream media but from any corners, of how media outlets can help get us out? Because I know that you’ve articulated this almost as an aspiration for media to help — well, shepherd is the wrong word — but move the public through high conflict and mediate it in a certain sense. I know that you’ve learned a lot from conflict mediators in that regard. Have you found examples of journalists doing the work that you’d like to see?

Amanda: Absolutely. I think there are pockets of deep innovation on this stuff right now, that wasn’t true five or ten years ago, so that’s exciting. Most of it I think is happening on the local level. In some ways, the least innovative places are the most well-funded. Maybe that’s how that goes. I mean, part of the reason there’s innovation happening at the local level in the news media is because they have no choice. They have to change, whereas the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, Fox, are going to keep their business models working for them, as it is. Hearken, a company we both have learned from, is a place that helps newsrooms and other organizations do a better job listening to its audience in ways that I think really brilliantly provoke curiosity.

When you turn over some control of a newsroom to the audience, it’s a little scary, and that’s what Hearken and other places are helping newsrooms do, is to say, “Hey, we’re going to stop telling you from up on high what the news is, and we’re going to start asking you what you care about, and what you want us to help you understand better.” But you have to do it in such a way that does provoke curiosity and humility, and Hearken is good at that. There’s other organizations like that, there’s even some local TV news stations that are doing really cool things. And the reason they’re doing it, honestly, is because they get more viewers. This is what’s really interesting, it’s not just pie in the sky. What they’re finding, and we talked about this a little bit before, is there’s this fatigue, there’s a news burnout at this point. People are so, just, exhausted by the constant bad news, the conflict.

When you give people something different, they watch, and they watch it to the end. They’ll watch seven minutes, which on local TV news is an eternity. The average story is a minute and a half. They will watch these longer stories, these more complicated stories. There’s a Denver TV station that I’ve been reporting a little bit about recently that does this thing where they try to look at a controversy in Denver from many different points of view. It’s done great for them, it’s a huge franchise, and nobody would have thought that would have worked, because it’s the opposite of clickbait.

James: Right, which is a significant business strategy for news media.

Amanda: Yeah. And I guess I’m not sure it’s true anymore. I think there’s this assumption that if it bleeds, it leads, etc. But that may not be as true anymore as we thought.

James: I do hope that’s true, what you just said. You’re talking about Hearken, which is run by our friend, Jennifer Brandel. Cultivating that curiosity and moving towards a desire to understand seems at once at odds with the current program of news media, yet it’s such a natural thing for it to aspire toward. It made me think of this quote from a Baha’i letter from the Universal House of Justice, which is the central governing body of the Baha’i Faith, where they write, “The perpetuation of ignorance is the most grievous form of oppression.” Ignorance and to perpetuate it is a form of oppression, but to cultivate understanding, to cultivate that curiosity seems like such a noble goal for the media to pursue. If it can become more widespread, I think that’d be incredible.

I wanted to switch gears just a little bit here. In a lot of your written work, you present a hopeful view of how “we” as Americans and “we” as a society can transcend conflict, and you talk about how there’s two poles of the most polarized people who are often represented in our public imagination and our public discourse, but you have a sense that the vast majority of us lie in between those two extreme poles, or sets of extreme poles. Maybe it’s no longer only bifurcated, but you know what I mean. Would you say that this is true, that the majority of us are not radicalized in that certain sense? The other question I have is, as this perpetuation of this narrative of polarized people continues to assert itself in the public imagination, does that group of people who are moderate, reasonable, willing to hear from other people, does it shrink? Does it have this effect of drawing more and more people out toward the fringes? In that sense, are we running out of time?

Amanda: I think two things happen. The organization that has done the best research on this is called More in Common. They came up with that label, “the exhausted majority”, and looked at American adults and saw that there's really these extremists on the tails, on the left and the right, who are really disproportionately represented in the news media and certainly on Twitter, which is totally unrepresentative of the country, and yet, journalists are constantly on Twitter. So that right there is distorting our perception. So you have these tails, and then, what most of us do in really unpleasant conflict, most of the time—like what do you do when you're suddenly exposed to conflict like that?

“You can have some pretty radical policy ideas, and be the kind of person who describes “us” as everyone.”

James: Fight or flight.

Amanda: You try to get the hell out of there. Most of us avoid unpleasant conflict. That's what happens as it gets worse. Most of us go to avoidance, we tune out on the news, we may or may not vote, we don't talk about it with our neighbors and friends, we try to really just keep some boundaries and stay out of it, and that's totally understandable, and the net effect is that the extremists take over. When everyone else flees the scene, you leave it to the extremists. That's one problem, and then the other problem that you mentioned is that those extremists, as they get louder and louder and more compelling, get more air time, and get recruits potentially, they get bigger. Now I still think that they're a minority, we're talking about maybe 15% of the country is super politically engaged and inflexible. But I think part of the challenge is we don't even have the words really, and maybe you can help me. You're good at words, maybe there are the words and I just haven't found them, but what I'm interested in increasingly, are politicians and voters who are not necessarily centrist on policy, but they're not conflict entrepreneurs. They're not divisive, and “us versus them” in their thinking, and adversarial on every topic. What is that? That's not moderate, necessarily. You can have some pretty radical policy ideas, and be the kind of person who describes “us” as everyone.

James: I think that's so true and it dovetails beautifully into another question that I had and it's something that I just want to talk about with you further. I think there would be a really easy way to misread your work, and, quite carelessly, I would say, mischaracterize it. Ironically, an idea on how to mitigate conflict might be very controversial and conflict-oriented, because people might see a conversation like this, about trying to mitigate high conflict and transcend it and transform it, as a sort of ineffectual or dangerous centrism, just like you've said, playing into this empty bland rhetoric of, we all need to come together and ultimately, we do nothing, or we advance only the most bland and uninspiring and unhelpful of policies and thoughts and ideas. But I think you're quite right, that this is not what we're trying to describe right now, and it's not what your work is getting at. There can still be a very defined sense of an idea that one wants to advance without seeing those who are not on board or those who oppose it as a sort of irascible enemy.

Amanda: Yeah, right.

James: But that that idea is becoming more and more rare, and those two elements that I think are actually quite good friends with each other, are becoming seen as dichotomous, impossible to bring together.

Amanda: You know how there's these rankings of politicians that media outlets do, to look at their voting records, and are they on the left or on the right? I think it'd be great to do a ranking. It's like a fantasy that I have, one of many, a ranking of politicians on a new metric. I don't know if maybe it would require doing a sort of sentiment analysis of their speeches and their tweets, or whatever, to look at who is using the kind of rhetoric that feeds into our worst instincts as humans, that dehumanizes and vilifies people with whom we disagree with, and who is not, but still disagreeing? Maybe that's not possible, but I think it could be. I think if you want to change something, you have to name it and you have to measure it, and we can't even do that yet, so you're right, it often gets confused for an argument for moderation or centrism and that's not what it is, and that's not what Americans want. The same More in Common research clearly found that a majority of Americans want significant change, like dramatic change from a policy point of view, but they don't want it to keep being this, “burn the house down,” “us versus them.”

“We’ve reached the upper limits of adversarial “us versus them” systems and design, and we can see that nowhere more obviously than the pandemic…”

James: Right. I think it works against something that's intuitive to us, which is that we like our neighbors, we have good people around us. We may disagree with them, but there's something to it. I think as a Baha'i, I would describe that as the principle of the oneness of humankind. There's a way to, in fact it should be obligatory to, distinguish that from the type of feckless moderate centrism. I think it's actually quite a radical principle in a way, of trying to totally break down that sense of “us versus them” and see that the destiny of each human being is inextricably bound up in that of the other, to the point where it just doesn't make sense to think of people as “others”.

So, how do we navigate through very difficult disagreements, and policy, outcomes that we want that are different from each other? We don't know the answer to that. We need to learn so much more about it, but I do think we need to equip ourselves with that understanding, because I think it's becoming more and more clear as the world continues to open up. I think this is another issue actually, that the United States is quite parochial about its conflict and very centered on its own issues and problems, as though it's the first time that any of these problems have ever existed in the history of the world, and that's another problem with a lot of different points to it. But all this to say, it seems increasingly self-evident that, if we don't overcome this tendency to “other” one another, there won't be much left to advance.

Amanda: I think for anyone who hasn't read it, Michael Karlberg's book, Beyond the Culture of Contest, really does a beautiful job in not that many pages, conveying this idea that you've articulated, and the limits of adversarial systems. We've reached the upper limits of adversarial “us versus them” systems and design, and we can see that nowhere more obviously than the pandemic, but you also see it in climate change. With the pandemic, it's like we cannot fix this using the blunt instruments of “us versus them” systems or journalism or politics. It is so obvious, we just can't do it. It can't be done, because we're literally all connected all over the world. The problems we face as a civilization cannot be solved this way. So, yeah, I really found that book to be incredibly helpful in naming it.

James: Michael's work is just wonderful. I think one of the things that he also identifies in his work, and I think this goes back to what we're describing, is that traditionally, people have seen conflict, or maybe to use your terminology, high conflict, as the central and maybe sole engine of social change, and I believe that's partially why people are so attached to it. You hear this sentiment expressed at a level that is almost like a meme, where nothing has ever changed without people being violent or having some sort of overthrow, having some kind of contention or high conflict, nothing has ever changed without these instruments. Firstly, I'm not sure that that's true. I think, again, we tend to remember those incidents where that has happened, to the exclusion of other more profound instances of cooperation that have actually been maybe more of the central engine of humanity's progress and evolution. But I think that's partially why that modality of relating to one another is so present, because we just believe that society won't change without those things.

Amanda: Even though we know from the research of Karin Chenoweth and other people that nonviolent movements are twice more effective than violent movements. So again and again, we can see that major social change is accomplished. Yes, there has to be pressure. Yeah, for sure. But, it's going to be much more lasting and effective if you're coming at it from many different angles. So, it's not going to be solved just through pressure. It has to come in the hearts of people.

James: There has to be a creative or constructive vision that's articulated.

Amanda: Yeah.

James: Amanda Ripley, thank you so much for joining us.

Amanda: Thanks for having me, James, I always enjoy talking to you.

James: Likewise.