Suzanne Ghais: Welcome, everybody. Thank you all so much for coming. I'm really excited to hear from Heidi. Her bio was in the email, so I won't repeat it, other than to say that I think she's just doing some amazing work, along with her husband, Guy, on polarization and the impact on democracy, just tracking so much of what's going on throughout the country and beyond, because this is actually a problem in a lot of societies around the world as well. So, much of this material is relevant well beyond the United States. But it's also interesting to me that the fields of conflict resolution, peacebuilding, and so forth are looking at the United States as an example where peace is under threat. And I think we should. You know, we're not that exceptional, and we've had some significant problems.

At least one of the trackers of democracy, I think, is the Economist Intelligence Unit. They downgraded the US from a full democracy to a flawed democracy a year or two ago. And so, this stuff is real. Heidi, the floor is yours.

Heidi: Thanks! As Suzanne said, I have worked with my husband, Guy Burgess. And when I start my slideshow, you'll get to see a picture of him. But we have been running an organization that started out being called the Conflict Resolution Consortium. Now it's called the Conflict Information Consortium. I won't tell that story. But for the last 25, 30 years, we've been looking at intractable conflicts and have recently morphed that into a look at hyperpolarization and democracy. So, let me start the slideshow….

The only thing I really want to show about this slide is there's a picture of Guy at the lower left. That's my partner in everything. Sometimes I say that my strongest conflict resolution credential is that we have been married to each other and raised kids and ran a business, such that nonprofits are a business, for over 50 years. We got 50 people together, 25 practitioners, 25 scholars to talk about what caused intractability and what to do about it. And one of the result of that was a huge website called Beyond Intractability. The address is down there at the bottom, www.beyondintractability.org. It's been going for 30 or so years and is getting particularly active now.

So I might talk about that in a bit. We got into a dispute. I would call it an intractable conflict (with a smiley face) over whether or not there were such things as intractable conflicts. The practitioners tended to say that they didn't like that word. We had one person who said that she wouldn't participate with us if we kept that word, because they think that “intractable conflicts” mean that we're saying it's impossible and either mediators are failures or there's no job for mediators.

And that's not true. Intractable conflict, the word “intractable” just means “very difficult.” So we were starting out by looking at racial conflicts in the United States, environmental conflicts in the United States, and international conflicts. And over at the right, there's Israeli and Palestinian flags to simulate or to indicate a particularly intractable international conflict. And everybody was willing to agree that those things were certainly very difficult.

So we kept the name intractable conflict despite the conflict about it. We had three key questions. One, what makes conflicts intractable and how we can prevent them from becoming intractable? And if we didn't manage the prevention, how can we respond to intractable conflicts so they become less destructive? And we started out doing this.

And Guy and I were the only people who were going to all three working groups. And what was really interesting is we were talking about the same thing in all three groups. And we figured out that there were core elements of most intractable conflicts, and we decided that it was these three things that were at the core of all intractable conflicts. Either they were distributional conflicts over interests, normally things that you think could be divided up and negotiated, but if they're very high stakes, that gets to be a problem. So if they're over jobs or if they're over who's going to get into a school and who isn't, things that really matter to people, then that tends to make the conflict more difficult. If they're over moral or value issues, those tend to be very difficult to resolve because people don't want to compromise.

And what we called status conflicts or sometimes pecking order conflicts were things that were very, very hard to resolve because everybody wanted to be on top.

About the same time that we were doing this, John Burton and folks who called themselves “human needs theorists” were coming up with a human needs theory that said that identity, security, and recognition were fundamental human needs.

And if those were at play, people tended to get involved in what they called “deep-rooted conflicts”, which is basically the same thing. And they would continue to fight for their identity, security, and recognition until they obtain them. And other folks were looking at rights and other folks were looking at oppression and injustice. And all of these terms overlap, of course. But these are the kinds of things that we saw as the core elements of intractable conflict.

And I'm going through this because they're also the core elements of the conflict in the United States right now that's leading to polarization and more broadly to the threats to democracy. There's obviously really high stakes distributional conflicts going on over all sorts of things. There's heavy moral conflicts going on.

The whole issue about racism and structural racism and affirmative action that we're seeing now, of course, is about rights and oppression and injustice, and identity and security are running through all of this. So we see all of these elements as being crucial and having to be dealt with in terms of the United States political situation.

What makes these problems so intractable is that none of these things tend to be negotiated. John Burton pointed out early on that people don't negotiate about their needs. They have to have them and they'll fight until they get them. The interesting thing about needs, though, is they're not zero-sum. The more security one side has, the more security the other side has. So you can work with human needs and get them met without taking them away from the other side.  With values, it's not that easy. Rights, it should be, but it isn't necessarily that easy. But all of this tends to lead to intractability.

Then there's a whole bunch of other things that we have called over the years either “overlay” or “complicating” factors. And these are things that get laid on top of those core factors and make them even more difficult.

One big one is framing. There's all sorts of ways--and you guys know this--to frame a conflict, but the most problematic ones are when people frame them as zero-sum where one side thinks that it can't win unless the other side loses. And the extreme version of this is what we've named into-the-sea-framing. That was named after Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestinians a long time ago, who said that he was going to “drive the Israelis into the sea.” If you frame the conflict that way, it's a recipe for intractability because whoever you wanted to drive into the sea, or get rid of, or ignore, whatever you're going to do, they aren't going to be happy about that. So they're going to keep on fighting.

There's misunderstanding and bad communication, and I laugh, because we came up with this list a long time ago, this wasn’t nearly as big a deal as it is now.  Now we call it disinformation and misinformation and intentional misleading about what's going on. It's not just an honest misunderstanding, although there are plenty of honest misunderstandings going on too.

Another overlay factor is unfair and unclear procedures.  The whole fight about structural racism is, at least in part, about unfair procedures where whites are treated differently from people of color.

Disputed facts is another overlay that's gotten incredibly more relevant now than it was when we made this list because of all the disinformation going around.

Runaway escalation and polarization is huge, and I'll talk a little bit about that in a minute with the next slide.

Past treatment is obviously a big issue, and you can't get rid of it, but you've got to deal with it. And same thing with future fears. People are very afraid of what's going to happen in the future, particularly if the other side wins. So this complicates the conflict further. Bad Leaders is another one that's super relevant now, although we wrote that list a long time ago.

And siege mentality, which is a term that Dan Bartal came up with, is another overlay factor. This is the notion of thinking that everybody's out to get you. And victim mentality is the notion that somebody else's is at fault for all of your problems. You're a victim, so it's the responsibility of somebody else to fix it. All of these things are overlaying the core and making them more difficult to deal with.

Now, this is a slide that we created a long time ago about escalation, drawn from a starting slide that was put together by Pruitt and Ruben and Kim. And then we've added a bunch of stuff on this. And now we use it for polarization too.

I thought about making another slide, but I ran out of time of having two intertwined arrows between escalation and polarization because it's really hard to separate those two.  They tend to co-vary and co-cause each other and all go up at the same time. But there's lots of things that drive both escalation and polarization, starting at the very beginning with out-group identity, worst-case bias, victim bias, grievances. That's the very beginning. And then you get all this stuff going up to the right.

Enmity reinforcement, and Guy made up the term a long time ago: “recreational complaint effect.” We all like to sit around and complain about the other guy, and it makes us feel good because we're so good and they're so bad. And of course, that just drives the polarization cycle further. We make tactical choices where we think we're invincible. So no matter what we do, we can't be hurt, but we'll win. And tactical escalation.

I'll talk on a little bit about the folks who we've been, I could say, arguing with, discussing with for quite a while now about whether it's good to escalate a conflict to get more attention paid to it. I mean, this was certainly the thought after the George Floyd murder that everybody went to the street and the notion was, "We're going to escalate this conflict. We're going to make a much bigger deal about it so that everybody will notice, it because nobody's noticed that minorities are getting unfairly treated. So if we escalate this, we can finally get attention paid to it." Well, yeah, attention was paid to it, but a lot of that was negative attention. A lot of that was pushback that in some cases, certainly, and you could argue, in many cases, made things worse rather than better.

We can talk about it more when I get done with the slideshow because this is an interesting question as whether you should escalate or whether you shouldn't, whether you should polarize, whether you shouldn't. Up at the top, you go from the goal of doing well, to winning, and eventually the goal is primarily hurting the other. And I think that's where we are with the US political situation right now.

The whole goal for many, most, I think I would say, Democrats, is to get rid of Trump. It isn't even focusing so much on our issues anymore. We've just got to get rid of Trump. We've got to get rid of MAGA. We've got to hurt the other. Certainly, that's the goal of many progressive Democrats. So once you get up to the top, you are really in deep, and it's very hard to get out.

And everything I've talked about is going on in the United States. You have all the core issues. You have all the overlay issues. But the interesting thing is dispute resolution professionals know a lot about handling all the stuff on the right side. And peacebuilders know a lot, and conflict resolution types, too, know a lot about dealing with all the stuff on the left side.  So, it strikes us that the conflict resolution and peacebuilding community is in a unique position to help Americans address the polarization conflict. And the whole threat to democracy. And we don't think that our field is doing nearly as much as it could to try to help America get out of the fix that it's in.

So we started right before COVID, we started something that we called the Constructive Conflict Initiative, which called for a dramatically expanded long-term effort to improve society's ability to constructively address the full scale and complexity of challenges posed by destructive conflicts. So, we were still framing as it bigger than polarization, but polarization was certainly one of the big things that we were looking at.

And we were hoping to get together a group of people and start a movement that was a lot like what we did with Beyond Intractability. We're going to start with about 50 people and see what they thought we could do and then move on from there. But COVID struck and the whole thing stopped. So what we did in the meantime was that we started thinking and writing about what we would do if we would be able to get this group together.

And we came up with a notion that we have called in different audiences “massively parallel peacebuilding,” or “massively parallel democracy building,-- basically a massively parallel strategy for doing big things.

Now, the word massively parallel comes from computing. Computers try to deal with or people try to use computers to deal with really complex problems like climate change. They get lots and lots of computers working together, roughly in parallel, and they reinforce each other and do things that individual computers can't do. So we came up with the notion of applying the same idea to peacebuilding. And the key is to get lots of people to do different relatively small things that add up to something that can take on all of the different things that I showed around the map because one person, one organization, can't possibly take on everything, but we've got to take on everything.

So we've come up with this notion of working massively parallelly together, and we really think that this is the best approach that we can think of for dealing with the threats to democracy at the scale that they actually exist.

So the main idea, and we've used two metaphors here, one were all the arrows going roughly in the same direction.  Our new graphic shows them not quite parallel because we're not always running exactly in the same direction. And the other metaphor is puzzle pieces that fit together. You could use both metaphors. But the notion is that we can't do everything, but we really should do what we can. We should look for things that need doing that aren't being done and try to work there. We should scale up wherever possible.

I had a slide, and I took it out, about how most of us are used to working around a table with just a few people. And it's not just a matter of working around more and more tables because the numbers just don't add up. There's 10 orders of magnitude between two people and a mediator around a table and the number of people in the United States. So you can't just work around tables--you'll never get enough tables. We've got to develop ways of addressing this problem and bringing in more people that go beyond the table.

We also need to think long-term as well as short-term. There's a big tendency to just think about the next election. And if we can just win the next election, then everything will be fine. Well, we've been shown pretty clearly that winning the next election does not make everything fine. So we've got to think much longer term beyond the next election about how we're going to work to overcome these problems long term.

And our assertion is that it will never be possible to eliminate all destructive conflict dynamics. It's never going to be possible to solve all parts of the core and live happily ever after. But we can sure make things better. We can certainly make these conflicts less destructive.

So that's what we're really trying to do, and we're trying to get as many other people as we can to start thinking in that way. What can we do to make this conflict less destructive?

So we did what all good scholars do when they're locked up inside for two years. We wrote a paper, and we published it in the Conflict Resolution Quarterly. It came out last, well, June of 2022, or maybe July.

It's got an impossible name: “Applying Conflict Resolution Insights to the Hyperpolarized Society-wide Conflicts Threatening Liberal Democracies. And the main point that it made was that people in the conflict resolution field have both the opportunity and the obligation to try to get involved in this conflict and do what we can to make it more constructive.

And we talked about how we needed to scale up, and we talked about massively parallel peacebuilding and all that kind of stuff. And we also talked about whether or not we should be neutral or partisan. And we didn't realize when we wrote these sentences that it would create the brouhaha that it did, but it has.

We said that we need to set aside personal political preferences and on behalf of all citizens, try to help bridge our many differences in an atmosphere of mutual respect, tolerance, coexistence, constructive moral debate, and collective learning. This effort will have to clearly distinguish itself from the highly partisan progressive advocacy, which much of the conflict field has embraced. We thought that was reasonable and reasonably non-controversial, and we found out we were really wrong.

One of the things that we did that was pre-planned before this paper was published we set up a discussion board on Beyond Intractability. This was planned with CRQ. The editor of CRQ wanted to publish articles that were controversial. So we purposely made this controversial, but we didn't know how much it was going to be.

So we have been hosting a discussion about all the different things in the paper and lots of other things on Beyond Intractability ever since it came out. So it's been going for over a year now. And we've now moved it on to a Substack newsletter. So if you're interested, the address of the Substack Newsletter is at the bottom here. It is just https://beyond intractability.substack.com. But there's no www. With BI, there is a www, and with Substack, there is not.

Anyway, right at the beginning, I wrote a note to Bernie Mayer, who's been a friend and a colleague for many, many years because he had recently come out with his book, The Neutrality Trap. And he was really taking what I saw to be a very partisan view in The Neutrality Trap.

And here we're saying that we have to clearly distinguish ourselves from the partisan progressive advocacy. And we wrote Bertie and Jackie, his co-author, and said, "Would you be willing to discuss this in our online discussion?" And we had a private discussion for quite a while, and I said, "Bernie, this is great, but we really wanted to make this public. Can we make this public?" And he agreed, "Yeah, we could make it public."

So here are three slides on the discussion from three posts where Bernie and Jackie say that what we we’re doing was “flying the false flag of polarization.”

And we came back and tried to defend ourselves saying that this wasn't a false flag, that it was a very essential thing to look at. And I had a slide that had the links to those, but in interest of time, I took it out.

But if anybody's interested, the link to our introductory post is: https://www.beyondintractability.org/crq-bi-hyper-polarization-discussion/mayer-font-discussion-intro

And the link to Bernie and Jackie’s response is: https://www.beyondintractability.org/crq-bi-hyper-polarization-discussion/font-mayer-post1

And our response to that is: https://www.beyondintractability.org/crq-bi-hyper-polarization-discussion/burgess-elephant

The key question that we got into was, which came first, and which should be tackled first, and which causes which? So does hyperpolarization cause oppression? Does oppression cause hyperpolarization? That was Bernie and Jackie's assertion. They thought that you should deal with oppression first. And if you dealt with oppression, hyperpolarization would go away. We argued at the time that you had to deal with hyperpolarization first because if you didn't get a handle on that, you couldn't deal with oppression. And in a third article that we wrote in this series, we made the assertion that it's a both-and.

Everything in our field is a both-and. They both cause each other. And in reality, there's lots of other things going on too. So, in that third article, we made this slide or this diagram that shows hyperpolarization and oppression are interacting, but they're also interacting with dehumanization and a power-over approach to democracy and to interpersonal relations and everything in between.

There's hatred, there's fear, there's distrust, there's disinformation, there's bad faith actors. It's all roiling together. And we have to look at all of this, and we have to look at it at the same time, which is why we think that the only way to do it is with a massively parallel strategy. Because none of us can take on all of this, but all of us can take on a part of it. And mediators, especially, can take on parts of this because, this is what we do all the time.  It's our bread and butter.

I want to finish up pretty quickly. Our thought is if we use massively parallel strategies to tackle this, we can get to what we show here is a purple United States, which is a United States in which everyone wants to live and which we work together collaboratively.

Will we all agree on everything? Certainly not. We're never going to agree on everything. But we can get to what we're calling now a “power-with democracy,” as opposed to a “power-over democracy,” where the goal is not just winning the next election, but the goal is working together effectively with the other side to make good decisions to solve our mutual problems.

And very quickly, what we need, we think, to do this, is we need an image of the future in which we'd all want to live, not just an image of the future in which progressives would want to live or an image in which conservatives would want to live. We need an image of the future in which all Americans want to live that's focused on shared goals and shared values. We need to respect differences and build longer, wider bridges. We need to alter our us-versus-them into-the-aea framing and consider how our side is contributing to the problem,-- and we are contributing no matter which side you're talking about.

Progressives tend to think that it's all the Republicans' fault. And Republicans, of course, think it's all progressive's fault. And you can argue about who's more at fault or who's less, but that doesn't get you out of the problem. It just polarizes us further. We're all contributing. So we need to look at the way we're contributing and change our own behavior to be less destructive and more constructive.

We also need to help and encourage other people to do the same and seek areas of common ground and try to work constructively with the other. And the last side just says, we all can be and need to be, and I hope you will be--part of this puzzle. And that's the end of the slideshow.

Suzanne: Thank you so much, Heidi. I think I'm going to take the moderator's prerogative and pose the first question, but you all are free to then raise your hand or put a question in the chat, and I'll try to keep an eye on that. And yeah, let's turn this into a discussion. But I guess my first question is the link between polarization and democratic erosion. Can you say a little bit more about that?

Heidi: Yes. It relates to that diagram that I showed going up and up and up. As we get more polarized, we are just thinking in terms of “it's all their fault. They're the bad guys. My goal is to get the bad guys”, and you lose sight of all the other things that are going on.

One of the really destructive things that we see happening now is that it gets so important to “get the bad guys” and win the next election that if you have to do things that aren't technically democratically legit, well, it's okay. The means is a way to get to the end.

So if we have to gerrymander to make sure that our votes count more than their votes, if we want to campaign for their most extreme candidates so that we could get a weak candidate to run against, thereby beat him, that's okay. Democrats did that with great success last midterm. And while I was happy with the result, I was very dismayed with the means because it was very anti-democratic. It was very hypocritical. And I thought it was extremely dangerous, because some of those really extreme people might have gotten in. So I just thought that was a terrible strategy. And the Republicans, of course, are, I think, doing even more funny things, trying to undercut democracy in all sorts of ways.

I was just reading about what's happening in Wisconsin with their Supreme Court. The Wisconsin Supreme Court has been conservative for a very long time, but they just had an election this summer, I think, and they voted in a progressive judge who would change the balance. I guess it had been pretty evenly divided, but the progressive judge changed the balance. So it was going to start issuing likely progressive decisions. And now the Wisconsin legislature is trying to impeach the judge before she's even put into office. And the way their law works is that they can impeach her, but then there has to be a trial. But there's no date requirement for the trial. So apparently, the plan is, or at least the New York Times says the plan is, maybe their coverage isn't fair. But the plan is to impeach her, but then never have a trial. So she can't ever be seated. So they'll maintain their conservative majority.  That's the sort of thing they're doing this because they think maintaining the conservative hold on the state is more important than supporting democracy. This is really a threat to the democratic process, but it was seen as okay.

January 6th was obviously a threat to democracy, but it was amazing how many people did, at the time and still do, think that that was a legitimate protest action. So, the more polarized you get, the more it's okay to do whatever it takes to win. And if that means subverting democracy, well, the ends are worth the means.

Suzanne: Okay. Thank you. That was very helpful.  All right. Well, the floor is open, friends.

Larry Cerillo: One of the things you mentioned is starting where we can. One of the problems that I see that occurs in all of our lives, I think, both in family arrangements and in other organizations you belong to, you cannot seem to get a conversation with the other side no matter how hard you try. It just seems to be that neither party wants to listen to what the other has to say. So how do you get over that first hump of getting people to listen? You know when I was teaching cadets, I was saying if you just treat everybody with respect and dignity and listen to what they say and not have to agree, but at least listen so you know where they're coming from, that would be helpful. But at least in my daily life with meeting different people, you can't get over that bridge of “I don't want to hear what you have to say.” If you bring up a subject that's a little touchy, if you will, they either shut down or walk away. And this is family members as well as friends and acquaintances. So how do you get over that bridge?

Heidi: I have two answers to that, One is that it always helps if you do the listening first. So if you meet somebody that you think is probably different from you on the other side, ask them what they feel about something and express real curiosity about why they feel the way they do and how they see things and really active listen so that you model the active listening before you're asking them to do it.

And if you have modeled it and they really feel heard, they're more likely to then respond in kind. Now, that said, I had a friend who came to me the other day when she heard what I was up to and said, "Well, I've got a sister who is just super conservative, and I just can't even talk to her. So we just don't talk about this stuff. And should we?" And my reaction is maybe not. If you have relationships that are really important to you, like family relationships, and you know it's likely to blow up and you're pretty sure that you can't even say, "Well, tell me more about what you think," then it probably is best to follow the rule of staying away from it, like we all were told to do at Thanksgiving and Christmas. Don't talk politics. And it occurred to me if we could get to that same point at the societal level where we didn't constantly talk politics, and we didn't sit around and complain about the other guys. And when we were with people who we knew were different than us, we didn't immediately zero in on the difference and start attacking them, but actually trying to get the job done, If we're there trying to work on some problem, if we have a joint problem, let's work on it. Let's ignore the politics. We'd be a heck of a lot better off. So sometimes ignoring it and just trying to get the work done, I think, is way better. But if you need to or want to get into it, I think you need to to, we need to do the listening first.

Larry: Agree with that. Yeah, no problem there.  I think it's good advice. I think that's what we try to strive for. As you say, as mediators and conflict resolution, why we always try to be the listener and understand and give respect and all those things. But I think the bottom line is what you said: if you get those that you just can't possibly do anything with, it is just better to go away. A lot of times what I'll do is just start with asking people to talk about things we can agree on. I've used this in other higher positions where two sides were in conflict and saying, let's start out with what things we can agree on, things that we have in common, and then go from there. And then on another flip chart, let's talk about our differences.  So that works. Thank you. I totally agree.

Heidi: That's the way I do it too.

Suzanne:  I'll fill in the pause here while others are thinking of their questions and comments and go back to this issue of escalation. Escalation as a means towards addressing an injustice. And I think you might help me remember the name, Heidi, of the Quaker who wrote about this tension.

Heidi: Adam Curle.

Suzanne: Yes. He did this diagram of how if there is oppression, you know the first stage is to raise awareness, and that involves activism and advocacy and a kind of escalation. I'm sure as a Quaker, he would advocate nonviolent escalation. And only then because that addresses the power differential, right?

So by raising awareness and building coalitions and all of those good things, you reduce the power differential so that there can then be negotiation or other sort of engagement as more or less equals and the conflict resolution type stuff. So that's how he envisioned the nexus between escalation and then de-escalation.

And you know how you described the differences between you and Guy on the one hand, Bernie and Jackie on the other was very interesting. So I don't know. I guess maybe the question in my mind is about escalation how is escalation done in a way that leaves the door potentially open for constructive conflict resolution once the power differentials are somewhat reduced?  Is that the right question even? I don't know.

Heidi: Depending on where in the timeline I'm thinking, as you ask that, I would have different answers. In terms of the racial conflict that we're looking at now, which was the one that Bernie really addressed in his book and was in the back of my mind as I was talking to Bernie, I would say that we don't need to escalate it, that it's quite visible, that everybody's aware of it. There isn't further need for further escalation. We should be moving farther down or up on Adam Curl's chart. Wish I could pull that thing up, but I can't see anything at the moment.

On the other hand, if you aren't to the point where everybody's aware of the problem or most people are aware of the problem, I really turn to Gandhi's approach to advocacy, which he called well, I'm not sure he was writing in English, but it's got translated into stepwise escalation so that Gandhi would lead a march or a protest, and then they would stop and step back and wait to see if the British would be willing to negotiate with them.

And he would try to initiate negotiations. And if that didn't work, then he would go through a period of reflection, and then they'd have another escalation. So it's going flat, up, flat, up, flat, up. But it's not a constant upward movement. It's not a continuous escalation, not a continuous polarization, but always trying to loop back to negotiation with the other side.

And that keeps the escalation and the polarization under control. And it always gives the option to start working with the other side. And both Gandhi and King were adamant that the other side should be treated with respect.

Another thing that Gandhi preached was Satygraha. I'm not sure I pronounced that right, which was truth force, which was the notion that there was truth on both sides, and the two sides had to come together to find the truth. So he was open to the notion that there was some truth in what the British were saying. And Martin Luther King was open to the notion that there was some truth in what whites were saying.

Certainly not everything, but they were willing to negotiate. If you look at the slide that I showed earlier, I said these are non-negotiable issues, but they were willing to negotiate. They were willing to treat their opponents with respect, which got them way farther, I think, than if they had just been incredibly hostile, framing the other side as the enemy that had to be driven into the sea. I think we would have been in much more trouble had they done that.

Joe McMahon: Heidi, I've got the Curle diagram if you want to put it up.

Heidi: I would love to…

Joe: This is a modification of it, but the basics are there. . So it's Curl, but I added some Lederachian stuff to it. So you can disregard that. But I was thinking when you talked about, or Suzanne was talking about, the education awareness phase, and then confrontation, someone may feel like that's too strong of a word, but there are a lot of ways that which it could be done that would satisfy what you're talking about.

Suzanne: Yeah. I think I was using the word escalation, but that's the confrontation block here of this diagram. And then I think in the original, there is a diagonal line that goes from the lower left to the upper right that you're going. So that follows the numbering here. One, education awareness, two, confrontation, and three, negotiation, et cetera.

Heidi: And we have a big section where we write about “constructive confrontation.” So we certainly aren't saying, though I think Bernie thought we were, but we're not saying that you shouldn't confront the other side. But you have to do it in a constructive way. And if you do it in a destructive way, then you're going to get into more trouble.

And that's where we seem to continue to go. We in the United States in general have most of our interactions with folks on the other side as much more destructive than they are constructive because we're othering and we're us-versus-theming and we see the other side as the enemy and they're at fault. We're not at fault. And so the only answer is to beat the heck out of the other guys.

Suzanne: Other comments, questions? ….

Joe: Well, Heidi, what I find exciting about the concepts you explain is you're working both at the macro level and the micro level, and you're trying to build up energy at the micro level. I was looking at some of the articles on what does it take? What sort of buy-in do you need to cause real social change? And the number used to be used at 20%. I see now people are saying 25%, but you don't have to convince everyone.

Heidi: No. You'll never convince everyone. And I'm running with a bunch of people who think it's 12%, and I think that's kind of silly. I don't know what percent it is, but I just think that we need to get as many people on board as we can, and the more the better.  And I think, as I've said three or four times, the conflict resolution community is in a unique position to be able to do this.

Joe:  Heidi, one thing I was listening to I think it was Jennifer Rubin from the post was giving a talk. And it doesn't affect what you're doing, but she was refusing to use the word polarization in governmental issues because she felt that polarization suggested unevenness between the sides, which she didn't find. So she was calling it division, not polarization.

Heidi: There's one post on our discussion that talked about asymmetric polarization.  Because I run mostly in progressive circles, and there's a lot of progressives who think, well, yeah, there's polarization, but it's mostly caused by the Republicans. I can point to a lot of things that liberals have done to drive polarization. I personally think that Republicans have probably done more, but I also firmly believe that it doesn't do any good to argue about who's more at fault, who's done more bad things.I don't care.

Let's just recognize when we're doing bad things that are making it worse and stop doing them, and stop pointing fingers and trying to model better ways of engagement. And I think we can get farther that way than pointing fingers and saying, "Well, they're worse than we are, so it doesn't really matter if we do it because they're worse." That just keeps on driving it.

Suzanne: Heidi, I read an article a few days ago, and I meant to send it to you, and I think I got distracted and forgot. But it was in the Atlantic. And so I've now just emailed it to you. And it's called How Telling People to Die Became Normal.

Heidi: Oh, yeah. I've already seen it.

Suzanne:  Okay. And essentially, it's a story about I think, it was a chat group or some electronic forum or social media where progressives were sort of celebrating people who had died because they didn't get vaccinated for COVID because they were anti-vax and thought COVID was a hoax and all that. And then they got sick and died from COVID. And so you have progressives going, "Ah, well, they had it coming and, you know, this is natural selection and kind of, you know, celebrating it." I have to confess is I've had a tiny iota of that sentiment from time to time.

Heidi, Yeah, but you probably haven't posted it on the internet.

Suzanne: I most certainly have not.

To your point about this is definitely not just coming from the right.  If you keep your eyes open, you see it definitely on both ends of the political spectrum and maybe some in the middle. There was an article, and I'm not sure I could put my hands on it. It was more about why is our government doing so poorly. And the author was arguing, look, you all blame the right, but in fact, some of the positions taken by the liberal left and particularly lawyers were adding so many layers of things that had to be met, it stopped the government from moving.

And the example was there was some law in which there was an identification of something like 300 matters that should be considered in making proposals. It was meant to be just voluntary. You might look at these things. But government officials, because of actions of lawyers, felt like, "Boy, if it's mentioned, we better make it sort of mandatory." So the complaint was that government people were saying, "Better safe than sorry.  The liberals have raised something. Therefore, we better include it." So something that's meant to be permissive becomes a requirement, and that slows everything down. And there's a lot of things like that where there were good reasons to do it, but there were good reasons to object to it, too.

And both sides tend to look at what the other side does as malicious and intending to be evil or intending to be harmful.  And they're not. Things didn't work out the way they were expected to work out. So, let's work together to try to fix it instead of, "Let's try to clobber the other side."

So I guess another question in my mind is so each of us has our own areas of conflict resolution work. You know, is it each of our responsibility to address this polarization as part of our professional practice?  Or is it really just sort of examining our own behavior on social media or in our conversations in our social circles? You know I do wrestle with that a bit. You could look at US polarization as one area of practice or US democracy or US peacebuilding as an area of practice. And, hey, I do a different area of practice.

I do organizational conflict management, or I'm looking internationally, or you know, civil rights types of stuff like Amber's now doing. So yeah, that's great. Bravo to those who are doing that and lots of nonprofits are springing up. Mark Gerzon works with a lot of them, hosts a lot of them as a fiscal sponsor for these new startup nonprofits.

But, hey, you know so that's great. Glad they're being added to the field. But I've got my own area of work. What do you think?

Heidi:  I think all of those areas of work are pieces in that puzzle. This is a whole idea about massively parallel peacebuilding is that we're all dealing in different areas, but we can all be aware of these issues. And if you're dealing in civil rights or if you're dealing in organizational conflict, international conflict even, but that's kind of a different conversation. But these things are so embedded in what's happening in the United States now that organizational conflicts very often are going to have some of this stuff at the core. And you need to be aware of it, I think, and deal with it in a constructive, rather than a destructive, way.

Certainly, civil rights has a lot of this stuff at its core. So I think it would be very helpful if everybody were aware of the dynamics of polarization, how our behavior, as well as other people's behavior, is driving it, and what they can do to reduce it wherever they're working. And I think by doing that, the chances of success in whatever you're doing will go up anyway.

I don't think it's an extra cost, an extra time sink. I think it's going to increase your chances of success. Now, the international story is different, although I was really surprised, when we started to focus in on the United States, I said to Guy, I'm worried that we're going to lose our international audience because we do have about between 150,000 and 200,000 different users coming into Beyond Intractability every month. And a lot of them are international.

And I said, I think we're going to lose them if we start focusing in on the United States. And the answer is, no, we haven't lost them because, number one, people abroad are really interested in what's going on in the United States too. And two, as I think it was Suzanne who said, this stuff's going on in a lot of other places in the world besides the US. We're not unique. So these same issues, the same problems are coming up other places.

So it's very useful to take this lens into a lot of international conflicts, too. All right. Other thoughts, questions, challenges?

Suzanne: I need to hear what Mike says. Mike hasn't said anything, and I need to hear what Mike thinks about this. And then Amber. Yeah. I'm happy to so this has been I did have to take that call, so I did miss a handful.

Mike Hughes: So I didn't want to start repeating things you are already said to each other. But you know the thing that comes to mind, actually, a couple of things. So you know Suzanne, you were asking about do we just have to work on ourselves and notice when we're about to send a tweet that escalates something or respond to tweets that we get. You know, having run for public office, you get lots of opportunity to see some really mean things.

And then you have to choose what you do about those things. And so that's a really interesting test for your choices to escalate or not. But the places I'm seeing some opportunity right now, and so I think we do have to inject these kinds of questions into our work. So I did my first public meeting in Butte, Montana. It's the latest round in a decades of mining contamination and efforts to clean up, and it's awful.

And the community feels deeply mistreated by EPA. And so I've spent lots of time coaching the EPA people to get past their desire to retaliate when people continue to say, "We think you suck. We think you're awful. We think you are poisoning us. We think you don't give a shit." I'm saying to them, “you know, you’ve got to swallow that and not retaliate. And what you really need to do is be kinder and more open and more communicative and invite the criticism and try to understand it, and then look for those opportunities when you really can bring the heat down.

And you know I did a public meeting where 40 people showed up. I shook 30 hands, and the EPA people shook zero. I mean, they suck at this. They just can't make a friend. They couldn't buy a friend if you gave them a pile of money. They just don't know how to be human beings who've invited someone to a meeting, and then they don't even welcome them when they show up. It's just shocking.

But anyway, so yes, you know I'm coaching them and saying, "Look, you know smile, shake hands, ask someone their name. Be a human being." The place where in organizations, I think we have real opportunity is the unresolved and in many places unspoken about, because people don't have the language for it, or don't think that they can discuss diversity, equity, and inclusion inside organizations.

And so you know I'm on a board of directors where we did a DEI training. I just wanted to throw up. And the guy next to me was like, "Can you just get me the hell out of here? This is awful." And I thought, " you know we have to say that out loud. We have to say, "Look, this isn't good. This isn't helpful. I don't know what to do with this mess that you were just foisting on me because you've got not do this. Try this. Be more like this." It was just awful. And that organization has not had a conversation about those things. We took the training. We smiled at each other. We all went on. And there's an underlying conflict about it that is completely unresolved. And then I've been facilitating in other places where I have had to say, "Look, you all don't have to be on the same page about this. You don't have to just make nice about these diversity questions.

You’ve get to wrestle with this stuff. So relax. Say what you think. Say the wrong thing. Give each other permission to say the wrong thing. Be nice when someone says the wrong thing, because you're going to say the wrong thing. And then figure out what you're going to do about the fact that you don't agree about what should happen. You don't agree that the next board of directors should be more women than men or that the next chair should be black or whatever it is.

And people are so afraid of it and so unwilling to talk about the conflict they cannot voice or can't find words for. And there's a lot of conflict in organizations now because the DEI stuff has been very superficial and weird, and there's no permission to say, "I think this is weird," or, "I don't know what to do with this," or, "This pisses me off." You're just not allowed to yet.

Suzanne: I think a key thing you said, Mike, was give yourself permission to say the wrong thing. And I'm sorry to say, our society does not give people permission to say the wrong thing. One false statement, and your career can be over, especially if you're in the public eye, a TV figure, you know whatever, prominent leader.

Mike: Yeah It's problematic. There's a board of directors I was helping. One dude came in. He'd just been selected for the board of directors. His first meeting, he just exploded about DEI, and they showed him the door. They're like, "Yeah, you're not really nice enough to be in our team. So how about if you move along?"

Suzanne: Yeah. It's tough. I'm thinking, in what Heidi was saying about the identity role in these things and Mike's situation in Butte. And that's a complicated area.

As Mike knows, a lot of times the community reps, their identity is I fight the evil EPA. So if I give in to them and I negotiate with them, I've lost my identity and my credibility in the community. It's very tough. Yeah. The good news is the people who are most annoying to EPA aren't those. Butte doesn't really have much of that.  What they have are people who show up to public meetings in dirty, sweaty clothes and have a high school diploma, maybe. And then they're looking at the Ivy League trained lawyer who works at EPA, who instead of talking to them, is sitting behind a laptop with their nose stuck in their computer and refusing to engage with them. They don't have too many professionals. It's a poor enough place that they don't really have sort people who make their living or prop up their organization or get revenue from membership by permanently opposing everything EPA does. So they're lucky. They don't quite have that kind of thing going on.

But they just have some identity stuff that is in the way because they don't live on the same planet. They didn't go to the same schools. They don't speak the same language. They don't dress the same way. They don't use the same words. They live on two different planets. And EPA is doing almost nothing to try to launch a vehicle to the other planet.

Amber, you're the only one who hasn't spoken. What's on your mind? 

Amber Hill Anderson: So I was thinking about what's my imperative as a conflict resolution professional. I actually think, in a sense, my job is the easy part. I think the hard part is living it out. And actually, frankly, that's probably the more important part. The direct example that I'm thinking of as I've been listening to this conversation, I have a brother-in-law whose politics makes my hair curl.

And he's local. So I see him a lot. And so what's been actually helpful for me not to put myself on a pedestal, but what's been helpful for me is to attach my identity to a conflict-resolution professional when talking with him and I should say I love him. I like him and I love him and his politics makes my hair curl.

And so, when I'm encountering those challenging interpersonal conversations of thinking of myself as a conflict resolution professional first, a sister-in-law second, and then a progressive can be further on down the line. And that helps. I mean, we get in fights and debates. Unfortunately, he's the type of person where a fight's not going to be like a relationship breaker. I know that about him. But then that allows for us being like, "You know what? We're not going to see this one. Let's move on and talk about something else." But it's this ongoing challenge of not resulting back to what I think can be the instinct of, "Well, this isn't working. You know I got to sever something here. I just can't do it." And so then by reshuffling my identities in that way, you know I've encountered some at least helpful mental pathways to keep inviting them over. So it's not a perfect answer, and I'm not perfect at doing it. So you know if he were here, I'm sure he'd have his two cents on what his experience with me is.

But he's not giving up and I'm not giving up, and at least we can start there. So I don't know. What I'm hearing and maybe it's not true, but what I'm thinking is if you're identifying as a conflict resolution person, then you're probably listening to him. And you're probably treating him respectfully. And that means it's going to go better than if you had your progressive hat on with your claws out. I am not 100% in approaching him in those ways, but I try.

 Mike: Well, you know I think one of the things that all of this social media was supposed to do was to it was supposed to make the world smaller. Like I was supposed to be able to actually live out a connection with someone who is thousands of miles away because we care about the same thing, and so we're on the same listserv or in the same group or on the same Facebook page. And certainly, some of that is happening. You know I've met people that I don't know who post nice things, and I send them little hearts. And there you go. But I think one of the things that we do, because the world is smaller in that way, we actually have to think of other people as part of our human family.

And that can change, because then your wanting to preserve that family unit becomes more important than acting out of some identity that we sort of think requires that we yell at them or that we cut off communication if they're not this instead of that. And that you know I have some of those same family members. And we did a big reunion, and a bunch of my cousins who are Trump voters, we all hung out together. And we found lots of nice things to talk about, it turned out. And  I asked about how their kids you know are doing in baseball. And so if we are willing to sort of see that on some level we are part of a human family, then we can make so many different choices and let some things go that don't have to be the source of rancor or disagreement.

Suzanne: Mike's comments remind me of that Lederach triangle. We're at the bottom. It's the relationship. So we may disagree on a little something, but we're going to focus on the relationship.

Larry:  I was going to say that an answer, along what you're talking about, Michael, was situations I saw in Europe was that the regulators there sit down with those that are maybe contaminating, and they say, "Look, we've both got to exist here. We need your industry for our population and so on, but we can't allow all this contamination. Let us sit down and figure out how we can solve this problem for both of our needs." That approach is so much better than our EPA. All they do is if you're not going to comply, you're getting fined $10,000 a day or whatever. And the other problem I found on working on Superfund sites is that our government agencies don't speak to one another.

You might have the core of engineers, the Department of Forestry and Wildlife, whatever. One doesn't know what the other one's requiring. And when you're trying to solve some problem, they're all coming at it from a different direction. And they're all looking at their own bottom line. How can I increase my budget next year by what I'm doing? Instead of saying, "How can we get together and solve this problem?" That used to drive me crazy is that the different agencies don't speak to one another.

Mike: I can empathize with  what you're doing. But I think I should speak in defense of some of my old clients on your first point. I think there is a lot of collaboration with the regulated, and you have to be careful not to go too far with that, so that it becomes a dark, smoky room. And that's where the public interest advocates should come into the conversation. But I think there is a fair amount of collaboration, but you know it's varied.

And we have a massive federal government and then lots of other governments. And I fully agree with your point that they are not always coordinating the way they should. Well, I hope it's improving.

Suzanne: All right, friends. Heidi, do you want to offer any closing thoughts before we wrap this up? I thought this was a really interesting conversation.

Heidi: You didn't give me nearly as much pushback as I was expecting. But maybe it's because conflict resolution folks, by and large, are on this page. And I just hope that we can keep going and get more people interested in this sort of thing. And we'd be very happy if you guys were interested in joining our discussion.

If you go to Substack, you can see what we've had so far. We don't open it up to the public because everybody knows what happens when you open up a discussion to the public. But if people send us something that they'd like to add to the discussion, we post it, and we say that we'll post everything unless something comes in that's really malicious, and we've never gotten anything that's really malicious.

So if you read Bernie Mayer's post, you will see it was pretty hostile and it was very much against us. And we still did post it. So whatever you're thinking, some of the stuff that we've been talking about today would be really interesting to add to the discussion. We're hoping to keep it going as long as it seems like there's an interest. And right now, there's a lot of interest in this stuff. So I hope you'll join us.

Suzanne: That's great. Thanks for doing this, Heidi. And thanks for all the work that you're doing. You're not doing it to get rich and famous. We know that.

Heidi: We call it our retirement hobby, and I look at all my friends who are remodeling their houses and all that kind of thing. And I'm saying, "No, you know I'm just not really into this, and I am really into tennis and hiking, but my body can't stand doing very much of that. So might as well do this."

Suzanne: We're glad you are doing so. Thanks a lot.