Don't ever have someone you can't stand next to in the line of march

Or what high conflict is and why I'm quitting it

It is one of my sincerest goals for this phase of my life to spend as little time as possible engaged in imaginary arguments with people in my head. Do you know what I’m talking about? Have you been there with me? Have you lie in bed at night formulating the perfect cutting response to that shitty e-mail you got from someone at work? Have you been so distracted in the shower by the whispered half of the conversation you’d like to have with that person on the other side of the political spectrum that you forget whether or not you’ve washed your hair? You know what I’m talking about—the kind of conflict that keeps you up at night. The one that you ruminate on for days and weeks and months. I don’t want to do that anymore.

Which is why I was so intrigued when I heard an interview with Amanda Ripley on the On Being podcast. Ripley is a journalist who in 2018, had an epiphany—journalism wasn’t making the world better. It wasn’t making the political situation in the United States any better. Journalists, Ripley realized, can summon outrage in five words or less. And they did. Regularly. Not just on FOX News, either. Summoning outrage had become part of the basic functioning of journalism. Journalism had become a place where conflict thrived and complexity perished.

Ripley pivoted and went on a quest to figure out if there was a better way to do journalism. And more importantly, was there a way out of those conflicts that journalism had become complicit in. After hours of conflict training and spending time with experts in all varieties of conflicts, she wrote a book to summarize what she learned—High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How to Get Out. If I had such power, I would make this book assigned reading for everyone in the U.S. Maybe the world.

The first thing to know about conflict is that not all conflict is bad. Most conflict is good. As sociologist Georg Simmel said ages ago, conflict is part of how you figure out what you believe and who you are. This used to also be what part of a liberal arts education was about—testing your beliefs out through the good conflict that happens in classroom discussion. Good conflict, as Ripley discovers in her journeys, can be exhilarating. Frustrating, too. But with good conflict, you come out the other end feeling better. Most importantly, you come out the other end. Good conflict ends. High conflict does not.

High conflict is self-perpetuating, a raging fire that is constantly fed. High conflict, once you’re in it, is very hard to escape. In high conflict, people don’t really want the conflict to end. They don’t want to find a solution. The conflict becomes an end in itself. If good conflict is characterized by humility, complexity, and curiosity, high conflict is certainty, rigidity, simplicity and assumption. You know you’re in high conflict when you feel a little jolt of happiness when something bad happens to the people on the other side. Sound familiar?

Perhaps the simplest way to understand high conflict is this—in high conflict, we begin to lean dangerously close to dehumanization. We experience disgust for our opponents. Disdain. We cannot understand how they could possibly believe what they do. More than that, we don’t really want to understand. And in the space that lack of understanding opens, we begin to suspect that there’s something fundamentally wrong with those other people. They are not like us. Not at all. They are not deserving of the consideration we’d give to other human beings because, well, maybe they’re not human beings. Hence, our happiness when bad things happen to them.

In her book, Ripley takes us on a worldwide tour of high conflict. Small town politics in northern California. Gang violence in Chicago. A Jewish synagogue in New York. Yes, even the Hatfields and the McCoys.

She finds that high conflict can be surprisingly seductive. I’ve felt that disgust and disdain for people. I don’t understand how anyone could truly believe that it’s a good idea to ban books or prevent teachers and students from talking about LGBTQ+ issues in schools. I don’t want to understand how they could think that. I’m happy to gather in other groups of people who think like me as we shake our heads in disbelief. That feels much better than the prospect of having a conversation with someone who believes those things.

I’ve also been in high conflict in my work life. Faculty versus administrators is a perfect setup for an us vs. them dynamic. We compassionate, hard-working faculty only want the best for our students and the institution as a whole. The callous administrators care only about the bottom line. They’re holed up in their admin building, out of touch with the day-to-day world of faculty, who are slogging it out on the front lines.

Even as I write these lines, it’s difficult not to believe them. The us vs. them sounds so satisfying. So righteous. The binary, an essential ingredient in high conflict, is so appealing. The administration is evil! They are not like us, even when some of them used to be us. It doesn’t matter. There’s no room for that kind of complexity. Once they cross the line, they change.

High conflict feels good, until it doesn’t. It feels good until that over-simplification gets interrupted. For me, this happened over and over again the past few years when I realized that someone I knew had done good things in our community revealed themselves as a Trump voter. How could this be? It didn’t make sense. High conflict told me that their good behaviors didn’t matter. All their good behaviors were wiped out the moment they supported Trump. They became a ‘them’ to my ‘us,’ even if some part of me knew that couldn’t be right.

High conflict capitalizes on our need to belong, which as I’ve written about before, is one of the deepest needs we have. It can feel quite safe and cozy inside your own personal ‘us,’ whatever that may be. Pull up the drawbridge and shelter inside.

But high conflict also forces us to ignore our other real need to get along, a pretty big survival technique for human beings. It forces us to suppress our drive toward compassion. It takes effort to de-humanize a group of people. In still moments, if we listen to our deep inner voice, I think a lot of us can feel how wrong this is. How uncomfortable. I think a lot of us know that this isn’t who we want to be. High conflict can make us unrecognizable to ourselves.

Ripley provides several key insights about how to get out of high conflict once you’re stuck in it. The first is to examine the understory. Think about a divorce, often a classic case of high conflict. The two parties may be fighting over the house or the dog or custody or, in one case in the book, a crockpot, but it’s never really about any of those things. There’s always an understory. It’s always more than a crockpot. Figuring out the understory is one way to get out of high conflict.

Because the binary is an essential component of high conflict, it also provides a way out. There are never actually just two sides to any issue. People are so much more complex than that. In the United States, our two-party political system encourages binary thinking. But no two Democrats or Republicans are the same. This is also where journalism can help. Studies show that people are less likely to enter into high conflict when they read articles that present issues in their full, non-binary complexity, rather than following the classic journalism structure of presenting two opposing sides.

There are people (lots of them, actually) who benefit from high conflict, so we also have to be wary of conflict entrepreneurs, the people who keep pouring fuel on the fire of high conflict. Lawyers can be conflict entrepreneurs, as our legal system is grounded in conflict. But also sometimes activists who depend on an over-simplified us-them mentality. And, of course, politicians.

Another dynamic which can interrupt high conflict is the intersection of another identity and this is where living in a small town comes in handy. High conflict thrives on seeing the ‘them’ in one dimension and one dimension only. That person is only an administrator or a Trump voter. They are a caricature of a real person. A very badly drawn character is this were a novel. Everything else about who they are disappears.

It’s harder to see people that way when you live in an intimate setting with them, as you do in a small community. I know my neighbors as more than who they voted for in the last election. I can’t ignore that they’re also good parents or volunteers or people who feed all the stray cats on the block. If I have conversations with them, I might be forced to admit that there are some things we both agree on. They are more than their vote, just as I am.

I have to confess that saying this—sending this out into the world—is a little scary. It feels shaky. I have to stumble through my feelings about high conflict. I think I’ve gotten so used to the us vs. them that stepping outside it feels a little terrifying. I can hear the voices of friends or students or other people insisting that the other side does not deserve our compassion. That we should rejoice in their suffering. That this is a battle. A war. A fight. There’s no room to get all kumbaya with the enemy.

My husband and I have an expression, part of the inside language of a marriage—“Don’t ever have someone you can’t stand next to in the line of march.” The line of march is the formal order faculty follow to march into formal events like graduation. Every May, we have to spend twenty minutes or so hanging out in this line, sweating in our robes and waiting for the event to begin. This may be the only time you talk to some people on campus all year. But if there’s someone you’re in high conflict with next to you in the line of march, those twenty minutes become endless.

That’s not how I want to live, not even for twenty minutes. I don’t want to lose sleep to angry conversations in my head. I don’t want to rejoice in anyone’ suffering. I don’t want to ignore the full humanity and complexity of my neighbors anymore. There is another way, a world in which we still disagree about many core, fundamental things and that leads to curiosity rather than contempt. It’s not an easy road at all. But we’ve seen where the other one leads and it’s nowhere I want to go.