Transcript for “Countering Culture Wars and Political Conflict" with Amanda Ripley
Political violence and threats of political attacks, from the national to community level, have soared in recent years. Political conflict and culture wars dominate headlines, causing Americans a sense of dread and despair, leading 42% to actively avoid the news. How can we turn the heat down while we choose our next leaders? In this interview, investigative reporter and conflict mediator Amanda Ripley explains her research to understand better the political conflicts that turn into violent threats and attacks. Her insights teach us to focus on “good” conflict to lessen our perception gaps of each other and provide conflict hacks that can help us break free from the cycle of outrage and blame.
Amanda Ripley is a New York Times bestselling author and the co-founder of Good Conflict, a company that creates workshops and original content to help people get more thoughtful about how they fight. Amanda’s recent book is High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out. In her books and magazine writing, Amanda combines storytelling with data to help illuminate challenging problems—and solutions. She follows people who have been through some kind of a transformation—including the survivors of hurricanes and plane crashes, American teenagers who have experienced high school in other countries, and politicians and gang members who were bewitched by toxic conflicts and managed to break free.
Thank you to Starts with Us for their collaboration on this series. Starts with Us is an organization committed to overcoming extreme political and cultural division. Check them out at startswith.us.
Amanda Ripley: People end up fighting the wrong enemy, like they sort of don’t realize because they’re under the spell of the conflict, and we all do this. That they’re picking the wrong fight with the wrong group, which means they’re not actually having the fight they need to have.
Don MacPherson: That is Amanda Ripley. She is author of the book, High Conflict, and she joined 12 Geniuses to discuss the amplified political conflict we are experiencing in the United States, and, more importantly, how we can overcome it.
My name is Don MacPherson, your host of 12 Geniuses. Heading into any election season can be divisive, that’s why 12 Geniuses has partnered with Starts With Us on this series to help you navigate the overall 2024 election. Drawing from their life experiences and current work, each expert guest provides critical insight to help listeners practice better habits when confronted with the election season rhetoric and discourse. In this episode, Amanda Ripley helps us understand what high conflict is and how it differs from good conflict.
She goes on to discuss the dangers of conflict entrepreneurs, and Amanda shares methods we can all use to have more civil conflict, or even resolve it altogether.
Amanda Ripley is an investigative journalist for Slate, The Atlantic, and other outlets. She is author of the New York Times bestseller, The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way. Her most recent book is called High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out. Thank you to Starts With Us for their collaboration on this series. Starts With Us is an organization committed to overcoming extreme political and cultural division. Check them out at startswith.us.
Amanda, welcome to 12 Geniuses.
Amanda: Thanks for having me.
Don: Through your company, Good Conflict, you help people reimagine conflict. What does that mean? What does reimagining conflict mean?
Amanda: Well, it means when we are in a state of dysfunctional conflict, it means trying to find a way to be in good conflict, like the kind of conflict where we make each other better and stronger rather than worse off.
Don: What is high conflict? Because that’s the name of your book, High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out. What does high conflict mean? What’s the definition there? And then we’ll go to good conflict.
Amanda: Sure. So, high conflict actually is a phrase that comes from divorce law. In the 1980s, divorce attorneys started noticing that about a quarter of American divorces were stuck in like perpetual cycles of hostility and blame. And this could go on for years. It could cost millions of dollars. No one was winning, right? Not even the lawyers. Even the lawyers were miserable. So, they started calling that high conflict divorces and realized that they had to deal with them in a totally different way. Because what happens with high conflict is eventually you end up harming the thing you went into the fight to protect. So, in that case, it was often kids. Kids who paid the price of high conflict divorce.
But then researchers of high conflict and conflict in general and international conflict, all kinds of conflict, started noticing that there are, generally speaking, certain kinds of conflict that fall into this same pattern where it becomes like conflict for conflict’s sake, where the original facts that led to the dispute don’t really matter very much anymore. And everything becomes about us versus them and about destroying the other side.
Don: Okay. And what does good conflict look like?
Amanda: So, what we know is that the opposite, I mean, the cure to high conflict is not no conflict. I mean that doesn’t work for anyone. We need conflict to push each other to get pushed, to challenge each other to make each other better. I mean, there’s actually no better shortcut to transformation than conflict, right? But the kind of conflict really matters. So, we know that there are certain kinds of conflict, there’s actually a place at Columbia University called the Difficult Conversations Lab, where there’s a professor named Peter Coleman who studies conflict. And some of the conflict conversations they study between strangers who disagree on really important issues, some of them, like there’s a whole galaxy of emotions that people experience. So yes, they experience anger and frustration and blame and sadness, but then they also experience glimpses of curiosity or understanding, or even humor, God forbid.
And they ask each other more questions. And they leave the lab feeling better off than they came in, right? So, that’s a sort of generative, healthy, useful conflict, which isn’t to say it’s always fun or pleasant, but there’s something happening there. There’s a movement of some kind. You understand yourself, the other person or the problem a little bit better than you did before. In the other kinds of conversations, they study the more high-conflict kind, people are just stuck in the same one or two negative emotions. They never ask each other questions. They don’t experience curiosity or wonder or humor or understanding, and they leave the lab worse off than they came.
And so I think what you’re seeing right now in traditional politics, traditional journalism, a lot of social media is people are stuck in that kind of conflict where you don’t emerge any stronger from it. You just emerge more and more frustrated and hopeless.
Don: Can you give some examples of high conflict from some of the work that you’ve done? Because your book actually does a really great job of giving a diverse set of high-conflict situations. But what are some examples that you can share? And then we’ll talk about politics specifically.
Amanda: Yeah. So what I did with the book was just follow people who were stuck in really awful high conflicts of different kinds and shifted to good conflict just to see, what did they do? How do they do it? And how could the rest of us learn from their experience? Just to give you an example, one of the people I followed is Gary Friedman, who was a conflict expert who had taught negotiation at Harvard and Stanford and mediated thousands of complicated, difficult disputes for companies and individuals. And he ran for local political office a few years back and immediately got sucked into high-conflict because that is what politics in America is designed to do. And so he ended up doing a lot of the things that he knew, rationally, would lead to high conflict, and then painstakingly realized what had happened and pulled himself back into good conflict.
That was a very brave thing for him to, not just do, but to actually share with the public because it’s hard to admit when you’ve fallen prey to high conflict as a conflict expert who’s been practicing in the field for 40 years. But he did do that, showing that it is possible. And what was the difference? Well, he didn’t give up his core values. He still believed and fought for the things he had always fought for in this local political office in California. But what he was doing was he was much more effective in good conflict, and he was sleeping better at night, and he wasn’t alienating his wife and his neighbors, right? So, he found a way to rehumanize his neighbors and his opponents and himself, and to see opportunity where he thought there was none because he was no longer bewitched by high conflict, which took years, by the way. It wasn’t like an easy process. But it was really useful to see how he did that.
Don: I think one of the other examples that really resonated with me because it, well, there were just so many elements of it that seemed like it should and could have been prevented was Curtis Toler. Can you talk a little bit about that particular instance or situation?
Amanda: Yeah, I mean, it is actually true in all kinds of high conflict. But like you say, it was particularly poignant in this one where people end up fighting the wrong enemy. They sort of don’t realize because they’re under the spell of the conflict, and we all do this. That they’re picking the wrong fight with the wrong group, which means they’re not actually having the fight they need to have. But in this case, so Curtis Toler was a pretty high-ranking gang leader in Chicago. He joined his first gang at age nine in order to belong and get protection, usual reasons. Rose through the ranks of the Black P. Stone gang, which was his organization. And as he grew up, he was idolizing this local high school basketball star who he would see playing at his local park, who was really ranked number one in the country and had big future in the NBA and so forth.
And when that young man was shot and killed out of nowhere, Curtis really got convinced that a rival gang was to blame, the Gangster Disciples. And he spent many years pursuing a vendetta against the Gangster Disciples. And he did this for lots of reasons, but most of us, including Curtis, we get into high conflict because we want our lives to matter. And when we experience pain and humiliation, we spread it around often particularly if we don’t have the resources or ability to do anything else with it. So, he had witnessed a lot of violence as a kid in Chicago, and he was spreading it around. And he had a story that he was telling himself, as were others, about why this hero had been killed and what he needed to do for him to see justice in the world.
But eventually, he was facing possible prison time, realizing, this is years later, that he wasn’t going to be there for his kids. He was either going to get killed or go to prison, and he hit what is called a saturation point in conflict where he realized that the conflict was not actually defensible. That the losses were too great to bear and that he’d been fighting the wrong enemy. So, he did a bunch of things, which we can talk about, but he managed to shift into good conflict, out of high conflict. And one day he ran into the man who had gone to prison for shooting his basketball hero, someone he had wanted to kill for many, many years. And they had a long conversation because they were able to at that point in their lives.
And Curtis realized that, yeah, he’d been fighting the wrong fight with the wrong enemy this whole time. It’s a very disturbing realization that I’ve had myself, I’ve seen other people have, you could definitely do this in politics, but also in personal family conflicts, where you just get so latched onto a story that you’re telling yourself that you miss the real opponent or the real problem.
Don: What are the benefits of being in high conflict? Because I can’t imagine that people would get into it without some sort of magnetic pull or some sort of… It’s almost a bit like, as I was reading your book, I could see some of the folks who are getting into it, just being a moth being attracted to a light, and not being able to help themselves. So, I’m just wondering like, what do we experience as humans as benefits?
Amanda: Yeah, I think you’re right, Don. I do think there is a benefit, and at least in the short term, and it’s important to just acknowledge that. So, it is magnetic, it is very hard to resist. And why is that? Well, I think one of the things that high conflict does is it gives us a sense of clarity and purpose. And that’s particularly powerful in a time of high anxiety, right? Where there’s a lot of uncertainty and fear. We crave as humans, we crave certainty, and we crave belonging, and we crave purpose. And so we want to kind of split the world into good and evil. And psychologists literally call this splitting. And you see it a lot with people who have borderline personality disorder. But now you see it a lot in all kinds of people, right? Because people are anxious and afraid and they feel threatened.
And sometimes they should feel threatened and sometimes they shouldn’t. They’ve been made to feel threatened. But nevertheless, when you’re in that state, you crave some kind of clarity, like a bright line between good and evil, and you want to be on the side of good — we all do, right? And so there is a real benefit in the sense that it feels protective to be in high conflict. It feels very energizing. I think it is energizing. It’s motivating, right? When you have contempt for your opponent or another group. It makes you feel like you are superior. So, there’s a way in which it does serve your short-term psychological interests. And then for some people who are conflict entrepreneurs who are actually benefiting from the conflict, it serves them in many ways — psychologically, socially, financially, professionally. There’s a way in which conflict can be very lucrative for certain people and companies, including a lot of journalists in my field, right? So, it does serve a purpose for many people, at least for a little while.
Don: This certainty and this clarity that is desired because I think about leaders like Viktor Orbán in Hungary, or Erdogan in Turkey, these really strong leaders who are promising clarity and certainty. It’s the promise of clarity. But in these uncertain times, there is no certainty. There just isn’t. With rapid technology advancements and social advancements that we’ve experienced over the last 10 or 15 or 20 years, these strong leaders actually can’t promise this certainty, but we still gravitate toward them. And why do you feel that is?
Amanda: Yeah, I mean, I think we are all longing for some leader to save us, right? And for some adult in the room to come in and lay down the law and make it clear and be on the side of right, and reassure you that you’re good and the other side is evil. And there’s a lot of comradery and solidarity that comes in that sense of superiority and having a shared enemy and all of those things. And I think, for much of human history, that kind of thing could work to some extent. But now what we’re seeing is we’ve really hit a ceiling with how far high conflict can take us, and it is actually destroying the things we hold most dear. So the things people go into the fight to protect, right? In the case of Curtis, it was his organization, his gang, his neighborhood, his family, right?
All of those things suffered because of the conflict in Chicago. In the case of politics, people typically go into politics for the country, for their values, for their family, right? Despite all the cynicism; that is usually what’s one of many factors, but those are some of the factors that drive people into politics. All of those things suffer in high conflict. Always it’s kids who suffer, and usually it’s the thing you went into the fight to protect. There is a diabolical game that we are playing here that just doesn’t serve us in a time where we’re experiencing rapid change, and we have this global interdependence, where we have a lot of information coming at us and we don’t know whom to trust. So, we’re really vulnerable to high conflict, I think, right now.
Don: Are we in high conflict politically in the U.S. right now?
Amanda: Yes, for sure. Absolutely.
Don: Have we improved over the last five or 10 years, or is it at the highest point?
Amanda: You know, it’s hard to know how to measure that. It’s a really good question. One way to measure it is by looking at political violence, which is the biggest consequence of high conflict. And by that measure, we’ve not improved, and things are getting worse. And the research on political violence shows that it tends to, in polarized countries like this, it tends to get worse in an election year, usually in the lead-up before and after an election. And because we keep framing everything as an existential crisis on the ballot, and because both sides are extremely threatened by each other at this point, that is a condition that is likely to lead to more violence. I wish I had a better answer. I do think things will probably get worse before they get better, but I do think they will eventually get better.
Don: I think it’s also important to point out that this is not the most divisive we’ve ever been as a country. I think in the 1960s, it was way worse, and in the 1860s, probably way worse than it is right now. And so we have gotten out of this in the past. Just because we are in this high-conflict situation, it doesn’t mean we’ll be here forever, to your point. But maybe you could just comment on those two periods of time, the 1960s and the 1860s, and how that compares to where we are today.
Amanda: Yeah, I mean, I think there are lots of big differences, but obviously we did have a civil war. That doesn’t offer us a lot of solace, that particular moment. But in the 1960s, you had a different dynamic where it was the left that was much more violent than the right. And so now we’re seeing more violence on the right. And I mention this because this can change, and it’s important to look at where we’re at. I think I saw a recent polling that a third of Republicans were saying that sometimes force is necessary to protect democracy. And I think it was about half that for Democrats. But again, that can change very quickly. And the more overheated the rhetoric is from pundits and podcasters and politicians and so forth, the more likely you get kind of lone wolf, what is sometimes called stochastic terrorism.
Rachel Kleinfeld, who writes and speaks very compellingly about political violence and studies it, she talks about stochastic terrorism, which means basically where we’re at in the U.S., is like you don’t know when violence is going to happen or where exactly, but it is going to happen. And these individuals who are struggling for other reasons and they are given an excuse and a storyline and permission by the rhetoric of contempt and fear that we’re awash in right now. So yes, we have been in very divisive moments before. We will not be in this kind of moment forever, but it is definitely going to be a difficult year, unfortunately.
Don: You mentioned this term, conflict entrepreneurs, and I had never heard that before, but it really identifies a group of people who benefit from high conflict. Who are these conflict entrepreneurs? Are they individuals, institutions? And then I have a follow-up question on that as well.
Amanda: Yeah, I mean, I think right now the incentives are really strong for anyone, any of us, to be conflict entrepreneurs. And we can all do it on social media, with our families, with our neighbors, in school board meetings. There’s just a lot of rewards right now for conflict entrepreneurship. And so conflict entrepreneurs are, yeah, people or institutions that exploit conflict that really… I mean, we all know someone like this. We’ve all maybe been like this for moments in our lives where we really seem to delight in every twist and turn the conflict takes, and we are getting something out of it that maybe is profit in some cases, and just as often and just as powerfully is a sense of power of importance of getting attention, right? There’s all kinds of reasons we do this. Usually, people who make a career out of being a conflict entrepreneur, who do it over and over again, who are just perpetually miserable and spreading it around, have some kind of internal damage that they haven’t been able or willing to deal with.
And so they’re just spreading that pain around. And that is what Curtis will say now, right? Looking back at his own leadership of that gang is that he was… his mom was killed by his stepdad when he was 17, and he found the body. And no social worker knocked on his door. And that kind of thing doesn’t go away, but one thing you can do with pain is spread it around, right? And so oftentimes that’s what we’re seeing is like really unhappy people who have a lot of trauma or pain, for whatever reason, rightly or wrongly, and they’re spreading it around.
Don: One of the things you talk about in the book is the origin story behind conflict. And I’m curious if there’s an origin story between our political parties right now, the Democrats and the Republicans. Because even among our leaders, it’s very rare when a leader from one party is going to say something positive about somebody from another party. And that isn’t always the way it’s been. I can think about when I was a kid in the 1980s, one of the first people to pray by President Reagan’s bedside was Tip O’Neill, who was from the other party. He was speaker of the House. So, we had some sort of collegial behavior politically in our country. But it’s very rare today. And I’m just curious if there’s an origin story behind our current conflict.
Amanda: Yeah, it’s a good question. I mean, different historians and researchers start the timing at a different place, right? Some will point towards Newt Gingrich who encouraged his fellow Republicans not to spend too much time in D.C., not to bring their families here, right? So they lost that kind of connective tissue where your kids were under the same school and you had to talk to each other, and you saw that the other person wasn’t actually trying to kill you all the time. And that kind of thing is, we know, really helpful from all the research. But then other people say, “Well, it actually started before him, or it got worse after.” I mean, it’s really hard to locate the exact moment, but we do know that like all wicked problems, it’s the outcome of a bunch of different forces.
We do workshops at Good Conflict with newsrooms and other organizations, and one of the things we like to do is to map the conflict because high conflicts get so complicated that it gets really hard to hold it all in your head. And what you end up doing, because of the psychological forces at work, is really reducing everything to one enemy or one group, right? That is to blame for everything. But it’s actually usually a constellation of forces, right? And so some of those forces would include things like hyper-partisanship, right? But also things like having cameras watching members of Congress all the time, right? Having cameras, having C-SPAN cameras watching the floor of the Senate and the House. For example, I was talking to a congressional staffer, and she was saying how one night, late at night, her boss hugged another senator on the floor from the other party.
And it was something they’d been working on, and they got past it, and it’s just a friendly hug, whatever. And the phones just lit up with people, voters, highly partisan voters who, happened to be watching C-SPAN for no good reason calling to freak out and complain that this had happened, right? So, not just social media, but also CNN and Fox and all of these things that are business models built on the conflict. And also print media and the kind of places I write for too. I think that took a little longer for them to get quite as captured by the conflict, but they’re definitely part of it as well. So, it’s a messy answer, but I think it’s the interaction of many different forces.
Don: It seems like we had this great reset after 9/11 too, with a common enemy being terrorism. And then it just all fell apart. I’m just very curious about how that happened, how we squandered this incredible opportunity to unite and stay united.
Amanda: I think every country that experiences a disaster, including a massive terrorist attack, has what they call a golden hour where people come together. Every city that experiences a hurricane or even a mass shooting, there is a moment where people really come together. My first book was about human behavior and disasters. And I remember being really struck by this when I would cover disasters for Time Magazine. It’s like you will see the best of human nature right after you see the worst. The thing is that doesn’t last forever, and it requires really strong leadership and institutions that can be trusted for that to continue. And we saw with the pandemic that there is a limit. There’s a half-life to that, right? It can’t go on for too long or people will not… that kind of camaraderie, which we did see in the first months of the pandemic, I mean, it’s easy to forget, right?
But I just updated that book and it had me back and looking at all of those news clips and research, and it was wild how united we were for about four or five months. And we saw sweeping, unanimous action by Congress. We saw people really going to great extents to protect each other and care for each other. So, there is that moment. Now, in other countries, that moment lasted longer than it did in the U.S. because we had this preexisting condition, right? We had deep distrust, we had a conflict, industrial complex that we’ve built up that makes it really hard to interrupt those dynamics. And so, very quickly, we were back to blame and distrust. I think it’s true that we had a moment of great solidarity after 9/11 at the expense of many other things, right?
I mean, we lost a lot of people in Iraq and Afghanistan. And Iraq and Afghanistan lost many, many, many more. So, you make a lot of mistakes when you sort the world into good and evil. And that is what George W. Bush did. In fact, I was just reading about how he referenced evil 319 times in his first two years in office when he was giving speeches. And there’s, again, something really reassuring about that, right? At a time that was really frightening. I mean, I lived in New York at the time, I was covering terrorism. It was wild and scary. There was something magnetic about that. But you make a lot of mistakes when you do that. I mean, that is classic splitting, right? So, even though there was that comradery, that was a high conflict — it just was with someone else.
Don: I’m just wondering if you could talk more about the power of binary and how that does get us into conflict.
Amanda: Yeah. So, this idea of splitting, of splitting the world into good and evil is very seductive, particularly at times of great change and uncertainty. And so now you could set up institutions to make the binary less easy to fall into, right? So we know that countries that have more than two political parties tend, on average, to be less politically polarized. You can have ranked choice voting, you can have proportional representation. There’s a bunch of boring policy stuff that you could do, right? To make it a little-
Don: Powerful, though. Powerful. Very powerful.
Amanda: Yeah. Powerful, right. These little nudges make it a lot harder to think that you know what’s in the hearts and minds of 70 million people who voted a certain way in the last election. You don’t know. I don’t know. They don’t know. No one knows. You can’t do that. 70 million people — too many people to generalize about. This is true with other things too, like climate change. I mean, so often it gets framed as the believers versus the deniers, right? That has never been the case. The research on Americans at least has shown that there’s at least six different groups when it comes to beliefs on climate change, and they change over time in size depending on what’s going on. And so this kind of you’re either with us or against us, you’re either racist or anti-racist, you’re either Republican or Democrat, you’re good or evil — this kind of thinking does not serve us in the modern world. It’s understandable. I get it. I can fall prey to it, for sure, but you make huge mistakes when you fall into that trap.
Don: I mentioned to you that I’m in Minneapolis here, obviously George Floyd was killed here in 2020 — May of 2020. And so this power of binary really hits home because at that time it was Black Lives Matter. No, blue Lives Matter. And it was binary like, what? Are you kidding me?
Amanda: You had to choose, right. Yeah.
Don: These are not the only choices you have. Why can’t both of these… And it’s just ridiculous, and then how entrenched into our identity one camp became over the other. And that’s one of the questions I have for you is, have we become too reliant on our identity, on our race, on our gender, on our geography or nation state? Because one of the things that you point out in the book is we haven’t always lived under nation states. That’s a newer phenomenon or generation. Like, who are these things serving? That was an incredibly powerful question you asked in the book is, who are these things serving? And they are serving some people, but they’re not serving all of us.
Amanda: Yeah, I know. I mean, I remember that feeling in the summer that George Floyd was murdered. It feels like you’re in a room and the walls are getting closer and closer. And I can only imagine that in Minneapolis it felt much more so, like you’re in it, you’re literally in a trap. And there’s so much pain and there’s nowhere to put it. And so people find a way to create that clarity that we’re craving. I remember there were protests in D.C., where I live, and there was some incident where protestors were screaming at people who were trying to eat dinner at a restaurant outside, not a fancy restaurant, just a regular restaurant. And they were trying to eat dinner, and they wanted everyone to hold their fist up in solidarity for the protesters.
And this one woman didn’t hold her fist up, and this activist just got in her face and was just like screaming. And it was like, you’re either with us or against us — the same kind of thing. And it was so heartbreaking to watch. Later, there was all kinds of, of course, commentary and videos and blah, blah, blah. But later, it comes out this woman who didn’t raise her fist was actually had done a lot in her life to fight for justice and equity, and she didn’t think you should be forced into these kind of performative gestures in this way. So, all of that gets lost in these moments. And it is so hard to see because life is hard. And now we make it so much harder, right? When we do this, when we say you have to decide that you’re either blue lives or you’re Black Lives Matter, it’s like this kind of sorting is just really tragic. I can’t think of a better word for it.
Don: Well, you, you have a quote in your book, “Sorting almost guarantees conflict.” And sorting is by gender or race or geography, any of these different ways in which we can create an us versus them — almost always creates conflict. That’s powerful.
Amanda: Yeah. And it’s tricky because humans are wired to sort, to join groups, to, like you said, have identities and affiliations. And that’s a way you make sense of the world. That’s a way you feel like you belong. And it’s not inherently bad. I think what the research shows is the problem is when, where, as Curtis puts it, anytime there’s a better than and a less than, there’s always room for war. So, it’s when you think your group as morally superior or physically superior or mentally whatever, any kind of ranking of superior versus inferior. That’s where we get into real trouble, and when we don’t see any fluidity between the groups, right? When we have contempt for the other group.
So, we can have groups. And we have a lot of sports fans who don’t go to war with each other, right? We have some who do. But in general, most do not. And that is mostly for the good. But it’s important not to fall into the dance of high conflict where we start to feel so threatened by the other side and so convinced of our own moral purity.
Don: We spent a lot of time talking about how we get into conflict and the elements of conflict, but how do we get out of conflict?
Amanda: I spent a lot of time with divorce lawyers and conflict mediators, and one of the things they found is that there’s usually someone just outside of your lens who’s fueling a high conflict divorce. Sometimes it’s a lawyer, right? But sometimes it’s a sister or a friend or a boyfriend, right? Or somebody is adding fuel to the fire, and they’re whispering in your ear, and they’re framing everything that your ex is doing as a humiliation. And so if you can figure out who that is, and ideally get them in the room and try to figure out — so that’s a conflict entrepreneur in that case — try to figure out is there a way to distance them from the conflict? If there’s not, is there a way to speak to the part of them? So, if they’re 85% conflict entrepreneur, can you speak to the 15%?
What else do they care about? That’s one way to get a workaround a conflict entrepreneur. It’s not always easy to do. But for me, I’ll just say, personally with our political conflict, I’ve tried to turn down the volume on every conflict entrepreneur in my newsfeed, in social media, in my personal life. It’s not for me. I don’t want to be a conflict entrepreneur, and I don’t want to be exposed to that more than I have to because I know it warps my thinking and it warps other people’s thinking. So, I don’t engage in cold burns on Twitter. I don’t find it fun anymore. I don’t enjoy it. I don’t watch comedy sketches that humiliate my opponents. I don’t find them funny anymore. All that kind of stuff, I think once you see it as a conflict entrepreneur, once you know what that is, it loses some of its power over you.
And it is really helpful to start by turning down the volume on the conflict entrepreneurs in your life, and trying not to be one.
Don: What else do we need to do besides just identify these conflict entrepreneurs.
Amanda: Other things you can do, so reducing the binary, like we talked about. You want to try to have more than two groups. You want to try to mix up the groups and really notice the people who don’t fit. When we train journalists, we spend a lot of time on trying to find sources that are not easily pigeonholed, right? In one camp or another on a controversial topic. And there’s a lot of people, most people are in this category. To take an example, if you look at the polling on abortion before Roe v. Wade was overturned, for years, the polling showed that Americans were deeply conflicted about abortion. That most of them would literally change their answer to the poll, if you like, slightly change the question.
And what you saw is that people didn’t know exactly what to think, and there was no simple answer. And they weren’t comfortable with extremes of abortion on demand or full out bans of all kinds of abortions. That complexity didn’t get reflected in the coverage or in the way activists talked about it. But that is, in fact, the way it should have been covered, I think, and the way we can help each other see the complexity. That there are people who have changed their mind about QAnon. There are people who used to be this and are now this. Those are interesting stories. 20 percent of Israeli citizens are Palestinian, like they don’t fit. And that’s interesting, right? And in surveys right after October 7th, they felt more part of Israel than they ever had in years. So, the this is interesting-
Don: The Palestinians?
Amanda: Yeah, the Palestinian-Israelis.
Don: Wow. That’s amazing.
Amanda: Yeah. Like 70% said they felt part of the country compared to 48% just six months earlier. There is really important, useful, interesting material here that doesn’t get surfaced because we’re collapsing into this binary splitting, right? So, the more, at least for me, when I find stories like that, I literally will print them out and share them with 10 friends or put them on my wall. I do all kinds of things to try to remind my brain that not everybody fits into these categories that we get sorted into.
Don: The very first episode I did of 12 Geniuses was around the brain and managing change. And it’s a good friend of mine, he is in his eighties now, a mentor of mine, Dr. Robert Eichinger, and he talked about why we confirm our biases. And he said it requires less brainpower. When you introduce something new, something that you’re not familiar with, it requires just more processing, and our brain takes a lot of our energy, and so we just go with what we know. And that’s really something important to keep in mind is, in this very fast-changing world, our brain is not designed to take every bit of information with non-bias and consider it.
Amanda: Right. That’s a good point.
Don: It makes what we’re talking about are very difficult. It’s very powerful.
Amanda: Yeah. You don’t want to ask people to have to do more cognitive work, right? That is not a winning strategy. On the other hand, I think there is built-in dissonance around this, like we all have people in our family with whom we really disagree on political issues or people we know who have stopped speaking to each other. And that creates a real pain point that is also labor intensive, that is also draining. I don’t know, it’s tricky, but I’m glad you brought up the way that we are wired to react to this because the last little piece of advice I’ve picked up that I wanted to share is to never humiliate your enemy, whoever that might be.one of the things that is most underappreciated that leads to high conflict is humiliation.
When people feel disrespected, especially if there’s an audience, right? So, if they feel publicly disrespected, whether they should or not — Nelson Mandela has this great quote, which is, “There’s no one more dangerous than one who’s been humiliated.” Even when you humiliate him rightly, the rejection is debilitating to us, and we will do things we regret and we will do things that don’t seem to make sense when we feel humiliated or rejected. So, that’s just important to keep in mind, and it’s been helpful to me at least to explain why people are acting the way they’re acting.
Don: There is something I want to read to you and get your reaction to it. One of the people I interviewed on this show three years ago, so it was November of 2020, just after Thanksgiving, was Harry Samit, he’s a retired special agent for the FBI. He arrested Zacarias Moussaoui, August of 2001. and Zacarias Moussaoui was labeled the 20th hijacker. This is just three, four weeks before 9/11 happens. But Harry and I were talking about the future of counterterrorism, and this is one of the things that he said, “Having sat with a few white supremacists and a whole lot of Islamic extremists, it doesn’t matter what their ethnic background or their racial background, or even what their grievance is, it crosses racial-ethnic lines. When a person has a grievance, it’s hard for the layperson to understand that this becomes their everything.”
For a lot of us who are not on the extremes, we don’t understand this idea of everything. And so I think about extremists on the left, I think about extremists on the right, and their identity being so wrapped up in whatever grievance it is, whether it’s political, whether it’s a gang or whatever. How do we bring these folks who have these deep-seated grievances back to our families or back to the middle or back to our communities? What ideas do you have there?
Amanda: Wow. That reminds me, Frank Bruni is working on a new book about grievances, and I’m reading an early copy of it now, and there is something so powerful about that, isn’t there? When we have someone to blame and we can really nurture that hatred. It reminds me a lot of, just to bring it full circle, to the work that Curtis Toler does now at Chicago CRED, which is a violence interruption program in Chicago that has been really out front in trying to think creatively and holistically about how to invite people out of high conflict, right? And typically, actually, one of the highlights of my career was having Curtis speak to a group of congressional staffers about how you would apply the gang violence interruption model to politics, right? Because the behavior’s really similar.
And he said that typically what you want to do is you want to invite people, even extremists. You want to invite people to do the conflict differently, to agree together to some basic ground rules. Like, not saying we’re going to give up our fight, but we are saying we’re not going to shoot anyone in this part of the city, right? Or we’re going to condemn violence from our side when it happens, whatever. And I said to him, “Well, why would you invite the extremists to that party, right? Like, they’re never going to come.” And he said, “Well, this is the challenge we always face.” And you don’t typically start with the biggest conflict entrepreneurs, but you want to issue the invitation, and you slowly bring more and more people, politicians in this case, to the table. And then if the extremist knows that this is happening and you keep inviting him maybe a hundred times, right?
And one day something’s going to happen where this extremist is going to hit his saturation point, right? Where he starts to question the conflict and to want a way out — if only he could find a way. Curtis says 85% of people in gang conflict want a way out. They would leave the conflict if they thought they could get out because it’s miserable. It’s miserable. And it’s miserable for a lot of politicians. Most politicians, right? It is miserable. And you’re afraid for your family’s safety. You’re afraid for your safety. It is not a good way to live. So, usually the way that he persuades people to come to the table who are quite radicalized and violent is through their kids, is to say, “Hey, do you want your kids to continue this cycle?” And the answer’s almost always no. Eventually if you issue that invitation and give people a place to go, that can be really disruptive to the conflict.
But just continuing to fight in the same way and to do what they did, but only louder doesn’t give people a place to go. So, it’s really difficult work to offer that path out of conflict. Whether it’s to neo-Nazis or Islamic terrorists, it’s the last thing you want to do. Your instinct is quite the opposite. But what I’ve found is that in high conflict, your intuition does not serve you. That you really have to do counterintuitive things or you just end up mimicking the behavior of your oppressors.
Don: Amanda, what fills you with a sense of optimism?
Amanda: Oh, interesting. I mean, I think one of the things that makes me hopeful is conversations like this to remind me. I mean, most Americans are sick and tired of the conflict we’re in. They’re exhausted by it. They want something different. They want different politics, they want different journalism, they want different kinds of social media options, right? They are craving, yearning for reconnection with their neighbors, with their relatives, right? They don’t want to live in fear. Nobody does. And so that demand is now really, really high. And it’s high in a way that it wasn’t 10 years ago. I think more and more people are starting to see through this conflict and see the ways in which we’re being manipulated. And so you see a lot of different reactions to that.
One is avoidance. So, we now have four in 10 Americans actively avoiding contact with the news, which is understandable, right? But another option is if you give them something else, like give them another way to be. And so it’s important to have conversations like this so that people know that they’re not alone and there are not only two choices, and it doesn’t have to be this way.
Don: That’s a great place to end. Amanda, thank you for your time, and thank you for being a genius.
Amanda: Thank you. Good to be with you.
Don: Thank you for listening to 12 Geniuses. In our next episode, I interviewed Dr. Geoffrey Baym, a professor of media studies in the Klein College of Media and Communication at Temple University. In our conversation, Dr. Baym and I discuss the changing nature of the media and political coverage, and he gives us advice for how we can practice better media literacy as we approach the 2024 election. If you are learning from and enjoying the podcast, please share it with others who might find value in it, and please consider rating the show on your favorite podcast app. Thanks for listening, and thank you for being a genius.