Conflict avoidance and how to avoid it

I’ve chosen to include the following essay as it shows how extreme egalitarianism (extreme equality) rots a society from within. In our quest to appease everyone we are destroying the principles, doctrines and cultures that made us exceptional in the first place. Our traditional rather cynical and Spartan values, which resulted in that Europe became the cradle of civilisation, have been allowed to develop into excessive decadence.

By Brett Stevens

The hardest thing about being a small hominid is that you run the risk, at any moment, of screwing up and getting killed — and unlike other monkeys, you’re aware of it any time a symbol of death or error comes up.

For this reason, most of human history has dealt with conflict resolution and ways to get people going in different directions to work together. It makes us feel good to think we’re banishing conflict because then we feel as if we’re safe from that conflict making us the one who screws up and gets killed.

But over the years, we go from “conflict resolution” to “conflict avoidance, ” meaning that we no longer seek working solutions, but to stop the fighting. We assume the fighting is the source of the disagreement, and not the other way around, as would be sane.

Nature, unlike humans, does not think in blocking single linear categories at a time, so when we suppress conflict, we don’t eliminate it — we just squeeeeze it into another realm. If we can’t fight with fists, we’ll fight in the courts, or in the ballot box, or just be snippy with each other.

Passive aggression, the mentality created, arises from a desire to avoid conflict while a need to fight still exists. If I’m seen doing something combative, I get in trouble; so I try to provoke, needle, backstab, corrupt, etc. in order that I can destroy without seeming to destroy, and get the other guy to be the one who lashes out and gets clobbered by the other monkeys who just want the fighting to end.

All of these ideas are taboo because they cut through our pleasant illusion about ourselves, which is that we’re not half-monkeys who rose a few sigma and now are able to use tools but not fully manage our affairs. We like to think of ourselves as gods who intend each of our actions as a benevolent gift to others; the reality is that we’re snarling feral animals who’ve found a way to cloak our aggression in politeness, bureaucracy and a pernicious herd morality.

Tom Wolfe and Mike Gazzaniga explore this passive aggression through a reasonable measurement, which is social status. Status is how you feel you rank relative to your neighbours, and it can be either material or moral. Material is whether their BMW is as cool as yours; moral is whether they’re educated, enlightened, progressive people who donate eyeglasses to the Bonobo like you:

TW: Every time we go into a room with other people, it’s as if we have a teleprompter in front of us and it’s telling us the history of ourselves versus these people. We can’t even think of thinking without this huge library of good information and bad information.

MG: When you get up in the morning, you do not think about triangles and squares and these similes that psychologists have been using for the past 100 years.

You think about status. You think about where you are in relation to your peers. You’re thinking about your spouse, about your kids, about your boss. Ninety-nine percent of your time is spent thinking about other people’s thoughts about you, their intentions, and all this kind of stuff.

Forum: Tom Wolfe and Michael Gazzaniga

For the last 2, 000 years our preferred method of neutralising conflict has been to insist on equality.

First, it was insisted that we were all equal in civic duty, so should get a vote.

Then, it was insisted that we were all equal in the eyes of God, as we all had souls.

A thousand years later, we upgraded that to the idea that we were all equal citizens in potential, so we should have no limits of role or money.

None of these have worked, because in reality — that physically-convergent world out there — we are not all equal, and in fact, nothing in life is. (Most parts of reality consist of unevenly distributed values in a type of “standard distribution, ” Poisson distribution or the easily recognised “Bell Curve” with a few at top, a few at the bottom, and most on a graceful convex in the middle.)

When we cannot recognise our inequality, and cannot accept conflict, we are ruled by our fears. In turn, we create a society that because it orients itself around avoiding these fears, sublimates its fear.

The result is the “crab mentality, ” after the tendency of crabs in a bucket to crawl to the top, in which we compete for social favor. This creates a pleasant surface notion of equality and an underlying truth of constant covert conflict.

In addition, in order to preserve our good social standing, we insist on equality in defiance of the facts, and by making equality such an assumption, we oblige ourselves to tolerate incompetence. That in turn puts us in a society that is forever dysfunctional and frustrating, but no one wants to be the first to admit they are un-polite and un-sociable and don’t believe in equality.

In turn that gets us this:

New research from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University explores why powerful people – many of whom take a moral high ground – don’t practice what they preach.

The research finds that power makes people stricter in moral judgment of others – while being less strict of their own behaviour.

“According to our research, power and influence can cause a severe disconnect between public judgment and private behaviour, and as a result, the powerful are stricter in their judgment of others while being more lenient toward their own actions, ” he continued.