Society Builders pave the way to a

better world, to a better day.

A united approach to building a new society.

Join the conversation for social Transformation Society Builders,

Society Builders with your host, Duane Varan.

Welcome to Society Builders, and thanks for

joining the conversation for Social Transformation.

Now, I can't tell you how

excited I am about today's episode.

Today, we embark upon a new sequence of

episodes that dive straight to the heart of

our greatest ambitions in the discourse arena.

I gave you a little bit of a prelude to

this at the end of our last episode. As you

might recall from that conversation, our world is more polarized

than it's ever been, at least in my lifetime.

Polarized and paralyzed, as the

Universal House ofJustice says.

And we have a unique mission in helping address

this, because our supreme imperative is for unity.

And as the tempest around us continues to

escalate by this polarization disease, we face a

great imperative to respond now more than ever.

And this is part of the high calling that the

Universal House of justice summons us to in its message

of December 30, 2021, calling on us to bring previously

antagonistic groups together in unity in the discourse arena.

I think this is our greatest

challenge and our society's greatest need.

And this focus is important for other reasons as well.

It's not just that in its own

right, it's such a pressing issue.

But many of the other discourse issues we tackle

will require us to apply the skills associated with

depolarization that we're about to learn here.

So our exploration here lays a foundation for

the future issues we'll be tackling together.

And as we grow as communities, we'll increasingly need

to apply these same skills within our communities, working

to depolarize as previously antagonistic groups embrace the Faith

and need to learn to set aside their age-old

prejudices in pursuit of a common goal.

So here, too, we need these skills

to depolarize even within our communities.

So polarization, I believe, is a clear priority

for us - a priority in our society building

ambitions for the next 25 years.

But it's such a tall order, right?

I mean, just thinking about it is overwhelming.

How do you bring antagonistic groups together?

What a supreme challenge, right?

Well, as we discussed in our last episode,

the key to tackling new discourse arenas is

to first do our homework and familiarize ourselves

with the existing science, the accumulated store of

human knowledge generated through scientific inquiry, as the

Universal House of Justice says.

So across the next set of episodes,

we're going to do exactly that.

We're going to together explore this accumulated

store of knowledge and get ourselves deeply

acquainted with the depolarization literature.

So our journey here starts with exploring

what science can teach us about how

to best bring antagonistic groups together.

Now, over the past six months, I've been doing

just that, doing the background research here, reading through

the academic and popular literature, bringing myself up to

speed on it, so to speak.

And throughout that process, I made a list

and I checked it twice, identifying the leading

experts in this science of depolarization.

And I had a dream.

What if I could interview all of these leading

luminaries and bring them directly to you so you

could hear their findings in their own voices?

I'm pinching myself now because by some miracle,

through the grace of God, really, I've managed

to interview most of these leading luminaries.

Can you believe it?

So, over the course of the next few months,

you are going to hear from the leading authorities

in the science of bringing antagonistic groups together.

It's going to be an amazing accelerated

path to learning, hearing directly from these

leading luminaries of our age.

And we kickstart this all today with my

interview with award winning journalist Amanda Ripley.

So, as I mentioned earlier, I'm thrilled to

have as my special guest today Amanda Ripley.

Amanda is a New York Times bestselling author.

Her reporting appears in leading publications including the

New York Times, the Atlantic, the Wall Street

Journal, the Guardian, the Harvard Business Review, the

Times of London, the Washington Post.

I mean, the Who's Who of journalism.

She spent a decade writing for Time Magazine, where her

work led to not one, but two National Magazine awards.

She's also co-host of the 'How

To' podcast series on Slate and she's

author to three bestseller award winning books.

We're going to be talking to her today about her

latest work, a book exploring the science of depolarization.

Her book is called "High Conflict: Why We

Get Trapped and How We Get Out."

Now, High Conflict is an amazing award winning book and

by the end of today's episode, I hope you'll rush

out to buy your own copy because if you're interested

in depolarization, then you have to read High Conflict.

It's required reading.

It's where your journey, your

training, should first start.

So, Amanda Ripley,

welcome to Society Builders.

Thank you so much, Duane and thank

you for that very generous introduction.

Amanda, great job with the book.

It's such an amazing book.

It's deep, it's insightful and it's so readable.

It's absolutely riveting stuff.

What was it that got you started on this journey?

What was it that got you to decide

to write the book in the first place?

I think, like a lot of Americans, I

was just exhausted and dispirited by the kinds

of conflicts we kept falling into where they

just didn't seem to go anywhere interesting.

And it felt, as a journalist, anything I might do

was either going to make these conflicts worse or have

no effect at all, which is the most likely outcome.

And it just started to feel like, man,

there has got to be a better way.

So I went off in search of survivor stories,

stories of people who had been trapped in really

dysfunctional, toxic conflicts of all kinds and gotten out.

And what I learned pretty fast

was that was the wrong question.

That actually the goal is not to get

out of conflict because conflict is necessary. Right?

That's how we get stronger as

individuals, as communities, as families.

We need conflict.

But there's a kind of conflict which is the kind

we are in more often than not these days, which

is sometimes called intractable conflict or malignant conflict.

I like to call it high

conflict because it's slightly less terrifying.

But the kind of conflict you're in really matters.

And high conflict is the kind of conflict

where you end up burning down the whole

house, and it operates very differently than healthy

conflict or what you might call good conflict.

So it's really important and was very helpful

to me to learn to recognize the difference.

So then I really shifted from asking,

how do you get out of conflict?

To asking, how do you get out of high

conflict and into good conflict, and then found half

a dozen people who were themselves trapped in high

conflict environmental activists, politician, gang leader, even a member

of a guerrilla fighting force in colombia who then

shifted to good conflict over time.

So it's not like they stopped disagreeing, right?

Like they still had core values and principles and

missions, but they were just much, much more effective

in good conflict than in high conflict.

Now, people, I think, don't realize how

hard it was writing the book. First,

there was just so much material for you to master.

You got yourself trained, actually, in mediation.

You completed an 80 hours course with Gary

Friedman, who we interview in an upcoming episode.

You travel all over the world, literally going

into the jungles in Colombia, interviewing these FARC

guerrilla rebels and Colombian government officials.

It was a few years of your life, a good

chunk of your life going into writing this book.

Tell us about the journey, about the

process of actually writing the book.

Yeah, I'm so glad that you noticed that.

It was hard because it was

actually quite overwhelming at times.

I'd written two other books which were overwhelming in

their own ways, but conflict is such a big

subject, and if you could see around my office,

you would just see stacks and stacks of books.

There's just so much that's been done.

Often those books are or movies or

whatever are focused on one particular conflict. Right.

And what I was trying to do was

see the patterns across different kinds of conflict.

So I felt like I couldn't find that book that

I wanted to read, and yet I had to do

a huge amount of research and learning to get to

a place where I could even begin to identify patterns.

Right.

So that was challenging and also really eye opening,

because I had thought that I understood conflict pretty

well, like I was a little bit overconfident, maybe

we could say, because I spent 20 years covering

conflict as a journalist, but it turned out there

was a ton that I had not understood.

Getting that kind of training like you

described from Gary was just transformative.

It changed fundamentally how I interview people, how I

cover stories, and was really helpful to me personally

and professionally on this kind of long, slog journey.

In other ways.

You share so many amazing stories in high

conflict, stories of these amazing people who have

done so many amazing, incredible things

in this path of depolarization and following the contours

of your roadmap, we have episodes coming up with

many of the people that feature in your book.

I interview Gary Friedman, Rabbi Roly, Peter Coleman.

But what's so remarkable about your book is that

you weave together these human stories with the evidence

based literature around what leads to polarization and what

we can ultimately do about it.

It's that human dimension that

makes your writing so accessible.

But the thread you're weaving is really centered on

evidence, on solutions that have proven to be effective.

So I really want to start there.

Let's explore the evidencebased solutions that research

has demonstrated can really make a difference

in bringing antagonistic groups closer together.

Let's start with how it is that people

almost suddenly, and surprisingly for them, find themselves

trapped in polarized situation almost against their will.

How is it that happens?

First, let me just say I'm so excited that you

are talking to Gary and Peter and Rabbi Roly.

I can't wait to hear what they have to

say, because what you learn is that every time,

even though I've spent hours and hours interviewing these

people, they'll always say something new that I'm like,

why didn't you tell me that?

And I just love listening to all three of them and

they have just a huge amount of wisdom between them.

So that's awesome.

And to answer the question of how do we

get trapped in high conflict, there are about four

different reliable tripwires that you can pretty predictably identify

in every high conflict I've ever seen.

So just to go through those real quick, because

these are things to watch out for, right?

If you want to stay out of high conflict,

the first one is the presence of conflict entrepreneurs.

So these are people or companies that exploit and

delight in conflict for their own ends, right?

The next is humiliation, which is

probably the most underappreciated force driving

every high conflict I've ever seen.

Whether it's gang violence, domestic violence, or a

civil war, there's always humiliation driving it at

some level or being manipulated at some level.

Another tripwire is the presence

of corruption, perceived or real.

So when institutions or officials cannot be trusted

to do what they're supposed to do, you're

very vulnerable to high conflict because you will

of course take matters into your own hands,

right, when it comes to revenge or justice.

And that's where you get that kind of spiral into

violence, which then is very hard to get out of. Right.

So that we've got conflict,

entrepreneurs, humiliation and corruption.

And the fourth one is the presence of false binaries.

So these are like choices that appear to

be much more limited than they are.

So where we break the world into

two choices, Republicans, Democrats would be one.

Black, White.

There are millions of them.

But that kind of us versus them thinking where

it feels like if they win, we lose.

You start to wash away all

the complexity within those groups. I know that I do.

It's very easy to start generalizing about large groups

of people, millions of people that you've never met.

And that is very dangerous and very slippery because

you end up eventually making a lot of mistakes

about your opponents, such as they are. Right.

Because you lump them all together,

you end up overestimating the threat,

in some cases underestimating other threats.

And there's just a lot of evidence that

right now, for example, Democrats dramatically misunderstand Republicans

and vice versa in the United States.

And that's driven by a lot of

factors, including those other three tripwires. Right.

But it is the kind of thing where the

human tendency to want to split the world into

good and evil is incredibly dangerous in a time

where we really do depend on each other. Yeah.

I guess the best way to solve the problem is not

to get yourself in the problem in the first place.

For sure.

If you can watch out for those tripwires, reduce

the effects of those forces, then your life is

going to be a lot better and you'll be

much more effective at whatever you're doing.

But sometimes you can't sometimes

you can't resist those.

Now, as you explain in the book, probably

the most important thing for people on both

sides of a polarized conflict is to feel

listened to and understood, really understood.

Tell us more about this business

of being heard and being understood. Yeah.

This one, again really just took me by surprise

because I had spent years interviewing people for work

and thought I was pretty good at it.

But it turns out that let me just ask you.

So Graham Bodie is a researcher who studied listening,

and he's found that people feel truly heard.

What percentage of the time would

you guess people feel heard?

I've read the book, so I have a little bit of a clue.

Yeah, you're a little bit ahead of the game, but

I want listeners in their heads to answer the question.

Great point. Great point. Yeah.

People feel heard. Do you feel heard?

What he found is it's about 5% of the time.

So that's not very much. Right.

And what we know from other research is that when

you don't feel heard, you get louder and more extreme.

Right.

Because you want to be heard.

So there's obvious implications for anyone who's interviewing anyone

that before people will listen, they have to feel

like you are trying to understand them.

The technique that Gary Friedman taught me

and that I now teach other journalists

is called 'looping for understanding',

where when I'm interviewing someone and they tell me something that

seems important to them, I will try to distill it into

my own words and play it back to them and then

check if I got it right with actual curiosity. Right.

And then see what they say.

And half the time people will add on or they'll correct

me and then I'll do it again and then I'll keep

doing it until they say exactly or something to that effect.

And when they say that, you can just see their

whole posture change because finally someone has heard them.

Often they will understand themselves in

a way they didn't before.

Because that process of looping back around helps them

articulate a feeling that is hard to explain anytime

there's emotion involved, it's hard to articulate it.

It is a way to build trust and to

try to get underneath the usual repetitive talking points

of a conflict and help people feel heard.

Even if I'm never going to agree with

them, that's one thing I can give them.

So looping is really about reciting back to

a person what they've said, what your understanding

is based on what they've said, to get

their kind of confirmation that yep.

And if it's not trying again and trying

again until a person feels that what we're

articulating is actually what they were expressing.

Excellent job, Duane. You got it.

That was great looping.

That is it.

Now, the fact that we think of this

problem as polarization, even that construct inherently reflects

a huge part of the problem, right,

that people seem compelled to reducing life's problems to

these binaries, to an us versus them dilemma.

How do we break that binary?

There's a term in psychology called 'splitting', which

is when the more anxious and afraid we

feel, the more likely we are to split

the world into two, into good and evil.

So one way is to reduce the

amount of fear and anxiety, right?

I think one of the things that some of

my colleagues in the news media are responsible for

is really dialing up the threat level.

So there are real threats, right?

And then there are exaggerated and imaginary threats that

get dialed up by various conflict entrepreneurs in social

media or on TV and other in politics.

And so the effect of that is it makes it

almost impossible to resist the urge to do splitting, right,

to sort the world into two false choices.

And that is where you get into

violence because people feel so threatened, right,

that they will take physical action.

So that's one thing you can do is to reduce the

threat level and make it more in line with reality.

That is hard to do, right.

When we've set up a bunch

of institutions to reward conflict entrepreneurship.

But that is probably the most long

term, most effective way to build resilience

and immunity against high conflict.

In chapter three, you talk

about these 'conflict entrepreneurs'.

You referred to them a couple of

times today as well, these 'fire starters'.

These are people who really fan the

flames of this kind of polarization.

They're people who feed our passions,

who excite and fan those passions.

I think it's interesting that you describe

these people as persuasive, as charismatic.

It's an interesting process where you're describing people who

you want to talk to when you have a

problem, who you feel compelled to talk to, but

actually approaching and talking to these people.

It sounds like it's the worst thing you can do.

It's the people who we're attracted to,

but they're going to fan the flames.

They're going to make the problem worse, not better.

We all have these kind of fire starters in our circle.

How do we marginalize the influence that

such people can have in these situations?

Yeah, I think it's important for me to first

acknowledge that we all can be conflict entrepreneurs.

And this is actually one of the things that Gary

reached out to me when the book first came out

and he heard me on the radio and he was

like, yeah, just be careful with that because you might

create a whole new us versus them.

And so I do try to remind myself that every day

I just wake up and try not to be a conflict

entrepreneur because especially on social media, but even just around the

office or in your neighborhood, it is easy to do that.

It's a way to bond with people

by complaining or blaming someone else.

One way to recognize sort of

serial conflict entrepreneurs is they describe

everything as a humiliation, right.

Whether it is or isn't.

And they're always casting blame.

They're always the victim, or they're telling

you that you're always the victim.

So we probably, like you said,

all know people like this.

We may have been like this.

Usually if someone has made a career out of

this, they have some kind of damage internally that

they have not been willing or able to deal

with, and they are literally spreading the pain around.

So if you see really seasoned, powerful

conflict entrepreneurs, you'll rarely see them laugh

in a genuine way or smile. Right.

They're just not that happy because they're

spreading a lot of pain around and

they haven't dealt with that internally.

So anyway, that's the kind of cosmic level.

But more to answer your question in a more

practical way with the people I followed, Curtis Toler.

He was a conflict entrepreneur, by his own admission,

for many years as a gang leader in Chicago,

and there were a lot of reasons for that.

He had witnessed a lot of violence as a

kid, and he was spreading that pain around.

As he told me, it felt good to feel powerful when

you weren't powerful, to see people be afraid of you.

He also, as he rose through the

ranks of his organization, he had financial

reasons to be a conflict entrepreneur.

So there were profits coming to him

through narcotic sales that had to do

with generating an us versus them narrative.

In this case, the Gangster Disciples were the other

side, were the evil side, in his view.

When he finally reached a kind of rock bottom

point and decided that he had enough of high

conflict, a lot of things had to happen.

But the first thing that happened is he literally

put some physical distance between himself and other conflict

entrepreneurs so that when people would come to him

and say, did you hear what happened?

Did you hear what the Gangster Disciples did to so-and-so?

And they literally couldn't find him.

He moved across town.

So it slowed down the reactivity of that cycle

that he was trying to get out of.

In other people's case, it was about changing who

you follow in the news or on social media.

But trying to put some distance between yourself and people

who incite and inflame conflict on purpose is probably the

most practical first step when I say that.

Some people say, what if you can't?

What if your spouse is the conflict entrepreneur?

But when possible, that seems to

be the first go to step. Yeah.

In both of the situations you're talking about

here, there's a self dimension to it.

Either a self dimension in becoming aware of

the presence and influence of the conflict entrepreneur

in your orb, but also, as you say,

making sure you're not the conflict entrepreneur.

Oftentimes people come to you with a problem and

the question is how do you respond in that?

Do you feed the flame of that passion?

Do you feed the conflict?

Or are you really working to pacify it?

And there is something that is

emotionally gratifying about being the hero.

Gary talks a lot about this in the interview

I do with him, about how sometimes even when

we approach the mediation process, we're doing it because

we want to feel like we're making a difference.

And in itself, that can be part of the problem.

Yes. That's so interesting.

And with journalists too, right.

There's a lot of ego involved. Right.

And you're trying to be the one who exposes

the corruption or the rot when there's a lot

of rhetoric about what you're doing and then there's

actually a lot of ego involvement in that.

It actually reminds me of have you

heard of this phrase, the drama triangle? No.

It sounds like a great phrase. What does it mean?

Don't you love it?

So it basically means how?

I think it comes from family therapy,

like a lot of these ideas.

And basically it's the idea that anyone can get pulled into

a conflict as the sort of third point on a triangle

or an HR person is a classic case right.

Or a boss, a manager.

So an employee comes into your office and is

truly upset about something that someone else, another employee

has done, and you want to be helpful. Right.

And that's good.

So you might then take on the role of

savior or hero and try to then meet out

punishment or hold someone accountable, which might be appropriate.

Right.

But what in a perfect world, assuming there's no extreme

abuse or violence, in a perfect world, what you want

to do is get both of those people in the

room talking to each other with some guardrails, right.

So that they can help work it out. Right.

So that you're not becoming this and I'm

sure this is true with mediators, right.

If you're just shuttling from one room to the

next and they're never speaking to each other, they're

going to be back in two years, probably, right? Yeah.

You want them to own the problem.

Not for you to own the problem,

but for them to own the problem. Yeah.

You want to step out of the triangle

and make it like just a line.

Just a line. Great point.

You tell this great story in one

of your interviews, retelling the story of

Nelson Mandela meeting with this Afrikaans general.

I love the story.

It's a story of humility.

But why don't you tell us that story and

how you think it applies in this context?

Yeah, I'm so glad you mentioned that, because tomorrow,

as it turns out, is Nelson Mandela day.

And I was just rereading one of his books, and

I was thinking a lot about his own arc. Right.

I'm simplifying here, but he like a lot

of young activists in the early part of

his journey, he felt like he tried all

the nonviolent measures and they just weren't working.

And he describes this scene where he was in front

of a big crowd of supporters, and he pointed to

a group of police who were standing nearby, and he

basically said, in so many words, there they are.

They are the evil ones.

And they looked at him like, oh, my gosh.

And at the time, he didn't feel any qualms about it.

And it got, of course,

got the crowd incredibly excited.

And that's the power of conflict entrepreneurship.

You're pointing to the target of blame.

And he's not wrong. Right.

But also, as he said, he has a great

quote that's something to the effect of there's no

moral victory in using an ineffective weapon.

And that's what that is, it's an ineffective weapon.

Maybe there'll be some violence

against the police, maybe not.

If there is, it's going to follow. Right.

There's going to be more, much more violence against

the protesters, and this cycle will just continue.

So over time, he learned to really resist those

impulses, and he in particular, got really good at

learning to never, ever humiliate your opponent to the

contrary, to actually speak to them in their language.

I think the anecdote you're referencing is after he got

out of prison, while he was in prison, he learned

Afrikaans, he learned how to speak the language of his

oppressor, which was hugely and is hugely controversial.

Right.

Among yeah.

So fascinating.

Yeah, because it's like, why should he have to

there's a million things you could say about that.

But anyway, he very purposefully

wanted to speak their language.

And he has another quote, which is basically, you can

speak to a man's head if you speak to him

in a language you understand, but if you speak to

him in his language, you can speak to his heart.

We're getting back to what is amazing, being

heard, being listened to, as you were saying,

and you can say that's manipulative.

And I would say, yes, it is.

And what's wrong with that?

Another synonym for manipulative is 'effective'. In this case,

the stakes are high.

But in any case, I think it had to be also

genuine on some level, or else it wouldn't have worked.

But when this high ranking official came to his

home, as is, after he's out of prison, and

they wanted to negotiate something, and this particular official

was a known overt racist, it was not implicit.

And Mandela had invited him into his home, and when

he got there, he started speaking to him in his

own language, which takes the official by surprise, of course.

And then he asked him if he'd like some tea.

He says, 'yes', and then he begins

to prepare the tea for him.

Now, Mandela had staff at this point, right.

There were people there who could do that sort

of thing, but he very intentionally did it himself.

And it was these small things he did in

order to interrupt the dance that they were in

of high conflict, to take him by surprise, so

that there was a little bit of humanity.

And when you see your opponent as a human

and vice versa, it is harder to dehumanize them. Right.

I've told the story to other groups and they

will say, but Mandela had a lot of power.

Not everybody has that power.

And that is true. Right.

This analogy is only going to go so

far, but I love the discipline and creativity

that he brought to these interactions. Right.

And they ended up negotiating successfully that

day, for many reasons, I'm sure.

But it's one example of how if you just do

the intuitive thing in these kinds of conflicts, it's just

going to go on forever, make it worse.

But if you can do the

counterintuitive thing, then it gets interesting.

It's just such a great example of the qualities

that you need to bring to the table.

And one of those qualities is that humility. Yeah.

And I guess some kind of genuine grace.

I don't think you can totally fake that.

Maybe you can for a little while, but

I don't know how he did it, honestly.

I can see another book for. You here.

Nelson Mandela on high conflict.

Yeah, he has a lot to teach us all, I tell you.

You talk in terms of buying time and making space.

Again, this is part of the

remedy here that we're talking about.

And in this context, you talk about

things like rhythmic breathing, things you wouldn't

normally associate with addressing high conflict.

Tell us a little bit more about how something

like rhythmic breathing fits into this art of depolarization.

Like you were saying earlier, most

of this starts internally, right?

And Gary probably talks about this.

One of the things that I often rub up against

is, look, there's a lot of people and factors that

I cannot control, right, in any given conflict.

But if I can fight to stay in good conflict in

my own head, then I will be guaranteed three things.

I will seize more opportunities when they arise, I will

make fewer mistakes, and I will sleep better at night.

That's like, step one, right, is how do

we get in the right headspace ourselves?

Regardless of what kind of

nonsense is happening around us?

And in stressful situations, always the breath is

the only good way to do that, right?

Whether you're a Navy Seal or a Buddhist monk or

a woman going into labor, it's always the same.

There is only one way to access the stress

response on purpose, and that's through the breath.

It is just one way.

Like, there are other ways, but that is

one way to get into a better headspace

so that you will make fewer mistakes.

It highlights how much of the problem is this

neurophysiological problem where our brain just starts to behave

differently when we get into that conflict scenario, and

how it's important to retrain our brain in that

context, if you will, to get it reoriented and

redirected towards a better task, if you will.

A higher task? Yeah.

And in other cases, it might be

you need to take a break, right?

It might be you need to have a sandwich.

Those all sound really small.

But we know that the brain is

radically changed depending on these variables, right?

And so we just cannot see what's happening clearly

unless we're coming from a place of some calm,

which is easier said than done, right?

Do you ever find yourself caught in a

moment where your heart it's a great point.

I think that, as you've been saying throughout

this podcast, it's the awareness that is the

starting point of it, if you can become

aware of what you must be going through.

A friend of mine, Chris Chabris, writes this book about

the 'Invisible Gorilla', and he talks a lot about police

who arrive at the scene and become a different person.

They don't mean to be, but it's just a

different part of their brain kicks in, and it's

this need to become conscious and aware of that.

And that happens at minor levels all the

time in how we interact with other people.

That calling to a higher level.

That calling to our higher self.

Peter talks a lot about just going for a walk, just

breaking that cycle that you get in recognizing that your brain

is going to kick in here and you're going to get

these instincts that are probably going to be wrong.

As you were saying earlier today, you

also talked about complicating the narrative, creating

and amplifying contradictions for people.

How does that factor into the solution?

Yeah, for me, as a reporter, this is

probably the most useful bit of advice I've

gotten, which is basically through Peter Coleman's work

at Columbia at the Difficult Conversations Lab.

What they found is that and I'm radically

simplifying here, but basically when people are primed

for complexity, when they are reminded that actually

hard problems are complicated and there are usually

not just two answers right or wrong, they

tend to open up and become more curious.

When you're trying to communicate, whether you're a reporter or

just a human on this planet, when you're trying to

communicate in times of conflict, it is really helpful to

first recognize the narrative that your audience has in their

head and that you have in your head, and where

the facts do not support that narrative.

Be very aware and vigilant for counterexamples. Right.

And then try to amplify and

shine a light on those examples.

So let me think of an example

just off the top of my head.

If I think about right now, I was

just reading about this conflict in the Senate

over the military paying for female service members

to travel to get an abortion, right?

And if I actually look at

the different groups here, right?

It's not two.

It feels like there's two.

The Democrats and the Republicans

are fighting again over abortion.

But if I look at it, I was an alien visiting

from another planet, which I try to do all the time.

I see there's one senator that's essentially filibustering on

this who feels very strongly that this is worth

holding up a huge number of confirmations for and

really creating a log jam in the military command.

Then you have some of his

Republican colleagues who support him.

Then you have a bunch of

Republican colleagues who do not.

Then you have some Republican colleagues who

aren't really sure and haven't said anything

or afraid to say anything. Right.

That's always a significant number.

Then you have, on the Democratic side, a bunch

of people who are very upset by this.

Some are upset, truly because

they're worried about military readiness.

Some are much more upset because it feels like

a violation of sacred norms for women's rights. Right.

These are all different groups. Right.

And it's hard to hold that all in your head.

I probably lost to ten listeners

just trying to explain that. Right.

It's like a lot.

But you see what I'm saying as

a journalist, can I tell that story?

Can I interview the people who are unsure?

Can I literally look to quote people

who have changed their mind about something?

Those are stories that are important to tell,

to break the binary in times of high.

And it goes against our natural instinct, because our

natural instinct is to simplify that's what we're trying

to do in everything in our life is simplify.

And this really goes against that grain, if you will.

Yeah, absolutely.

It's such a bummer. It's. Oh, gosh. Really? This again?

I can't just hate these people or think

my side is 100% moral all the time.

Great point.

It is just another way to try to

get things right and make good decisions in

a time where there's a lot of uncertainty.

In your book, you talk about the saturation point that

people reach this point where the losses are greater than

the gains, and people really are open to change.

And in that context, you talk about how people often

have to find a new purpose, a higher purpose.

You tell the story a very interesting story about

the Palestinian group Black September, the terrorist group that

was responsible for the '72 Munich Olympics crisis, about

how the path to resolving and pacifying them involved

Arafat, finding them potential brides, becoming a little bit

of a matchmaker to help them get a new start in life.

You talk about the Peace League in Chicago

to help combat gang violence, creating something different

through basketball, greater than the conflict for them,

or at least different to the conflict.

You talk about this process of the rehumanization,

the recategorization that happens among these guerrilla rebels

in Colombia, getting them to swap their identities

and start these new lives.

Talk to us about how important it is to

find a higher purpose in this business of depolarization.

Yeah.

So we all have all different

identities that we carry around, right?

Not just one, but typically, the

conflict becomes all consuming, right?

And it becomes our main identity.

But those other identities are still in there.

And probably the most effective way to pull

people out of high conflict is to light

up their latent identities, especially their identity as

a parent or a son or daughter.

So that family identity is very powerful.

It is the reason that Curtis

Toller left the high conflict.

He was in Chicago gangs.

It is the reason that the FARC gorilla

that I wrote about Sandra left the violent

conflict that she was a member of voluntarily,

at great personal risk for her daughter.

So it is, again and again, the most effective

way to help people make that shift is to

remind them or support their identity that it's outside

of the high conflict on a personal level.

My greatest moment in reading your book

occurred towards the end of chapter two.

I I want you to see this scenario.

I'm sitting at home in my reading chair.

I have this chair that I love reading in and

I'm sitting there, I have a cup of tea, I'm

happily reading along, really enjoying your book, enjoying this tea.

And then suddenly I see these references that you start

making later in chapter two to the Baha'i community.

Now.

Of course I'm a Baha'i.

And so I read this.

I almost spilt my tea all over myself.

I was just stunned.

I was so excited.

And I'm sure that every Baha'i who reads

your book, if they don't know that's coming,

they would have a similar kind of reaction.

You didn't expect it, right?

I didn't expect it.

It caught me by surprise.

For the benefit of those who may not know

what I'm referring to here, maybe you can help

complete the picture and share the references that you

make in the book to the Baha'i community.

Share that with our audience.

Look, I'm no expert, right?

So I'll let you correct me where I

get things wrong, but I basically was casting

about asking everyone I interviewed, everyone I knew.

Can you think of an organization or an institution

or a country or a state, whatever, that has

managed to create on purpose a culture of good

conflict, where there are rituals and traditions and norms

that seem designed to keep us out of high

conflict by creating healthy conflict? Right.

And my friend Jen Brandel, who's the journalist

who has covered, has done stories about the

Baha'i in Chicago and elsewhere, she said, have

you ever heard of the Baha'i tradition?

And I said no.

And so I did a bunch of reading and

reached out to James Samimi-Farr, who was at

the time the head of communications in the Washington

office of the Baha'i, and realized there's this whole

religious faith I knew nothing about.

Totally fascinating, in which the overarching principle is

that we are all connected, so we can't

give up on each other, right?

If all the spiritual traditions and all of humanity

is connected and is one, and we have to

find ways to subvert the ego, right?

And the US versus them thinking and in day

to day business of Baha'i groups, it seemed like

there were some nice traditions around that right.

That I now try to steal and emulate in my own work.

For example, when Baha'is have to make decisions

because it's very sort of democratized, right, they

will have a meeting, and if someone has

an idea, it becomes everyone's idea.

So you stop saying, oh, Duane's idea to do

this makes a lot of sense to, right?

And because then you start having ownership

over these ideas and your ego gets

involved, but it becomes everyone's idea.

And then likewise with elections, you're

not allowed to campaign, right?

But if you get asked to serve, you got to serve.

And the ego is really subverted in that process.

It's literally the opposite of elections today in

the United States in every way, and yet

it's happening all around the world.

So it's very encouraging.

But did I get it right? What do you want to add?

No, it's great.

You talk about it so beautifully in the book, my

favorite reference that you make, and I hadn't thought about

it that way, but the minute you framed it that

way, I thought, yeah, that's so true, where you say

if social scientists created a religion, it would look like

the Baha'i Faith. I love that reference. Yeah, it's designed for humans.

Yeah, like, given everything we now know about what

humans need to live in a globalized, interdependent world

and not destroy each other and the planet.

Now, Amanda, this art of depolarization is going to

be a massive priority for Baha'i communities all over

the world for the next 25 years.

This is a relatively new

development within the community.

About 18 months ago, this really became this focus

on society building really became a priority for us.

And of course, we're not just talking

about Baha'is in big Western cities.

I want you to imagine Baha'i communities in small towns

and villages, in the Highlands in Papua New Guinea, in

the African Congo, in the jungles of Colombia.

And there's this ironclad commitment on the

community that for the next 25 years,

this is going to be our focus.

And we're in the early stages of this.

The community is now just starting the process of

developing and cultivating and building these new skills.

But it's something you're going to see

a lot of effort certainly marshalled around.

So knowing that, what advice would

you have for the Baha'i community?

I have heard this and I'm very excited about it.

It would be really the height of arrogance for me

to give advice to a community that has dealt with

a lot of persecution over the years and is quite

familiar with the challenges of high conflict.

And so I don't know, except that the more you

can tell these stories of what you are already doing,

the more you can show that the way we set

up institutions determines how we treat each other right.

That kind of thing is hugely hopeful and I think

maybe reassuring, at least to me, that there are Baha'is

all over the world operating not perfectly right?

There's plenty of - absolutely, of course, - but cultivating the

norms and traditions and vocabulary that help create healthy

conflict, as opposed to just avoiding conflict, which is

what a lot of religious faiths try to do,

or blowing up in dysfunctional conflict, which is what

we're seeing in a lot of churches and synagogues

and other places now.

I'm so glad that you made this reference to

hope, because fundamentally, your work, at the end of

the day, is a work of hope.

It's a work of the story of human triumph.

You talk about these situations where people land

in conflict, but more important, you talk about

how they got out of the conflict, and

even in circumstances that seem just incredibly daunting.

And this really speaks to this whole focus that you

have now on what you're framing as solutions journalism.

Talk to us about that

aspiration for you. Yeah, there's a way to do

journalism that is really engaging and rigorous and serious,

that also investigates communities attempts to solve problems, as

opposed to just describing the problem. Right.

This is something that I started doing without knowing there

was a name for it, just for my own sanity.

Years ago when I would write about instead of writing

about all the places where schools are failing, let's write

about a place where schools have gotten much, much better.

That's interesting.

And then I found out there's this

nonprofit called the 'Solutions Journalism Network' that

is systematically training thousands of journalists to

go do this in a serious way.

And in many ways, it goes against the kind of

ego needs of a lot of journalists, especially ones who

came up in an era where Watergate was the defining

journalistic narrative, is we're going to go out and expose

corruption and then make the world better.

So one way to hold the powerful to account

is to cover rigorously attempts to solve problems.

And for example, the New York Times did a story about

the decline in homelessness in I think it was Houston.

And when you read that story, when you're

not living in Houston, you naturally wonder why

that's not happening in your city, right?

What the hell?

And so maybe you ask your city councilman or maybe you

reach out to your mayor or maybe if you still have

a newspaper or a local TV news channel, you reach out

to them and say, why aren't we doing this here?

But there is a way to hold the powerful to

account that is more generative than it is destructive.

And I think solutions journalism

is one example of that.

One final question for you, Amanda.

As you say in the book, 85% of

people are going to be experiencing conflict, maybe

even strong conflict, in their work environments.

You know, when you're reading the book, you're

getting the high level rebels in Colombia.

I mean, it's easy to look

at those really very dramatic examples.

But of course, everybody experiences these kind of

problems in their day-to-day lives.

Potentially, a lot of them will

experience it in their work environment.

What advice do you have about how you

apply these skills, really, in the work arena?

Yeah, it's really hard because there's so much

you feel like you can't say or won't

say or shouldn't say to professional colleagues.

And so then a lot goes unset, and

then it just ferments underground, doesn't it?

It doesn't go away.

But resentments build.

And this is especially true when we're working

remotely, as a lot of people have been.

It's just very hard to rebuild trust and

relationship, which is what you need in order

to have good conflict, healthy conflict. Right.

So one of the tricks and tips that

I try to use myself and share with

others is something called the magic ratio.

Peter Coleman has found this, but also John and

Julie Gottman, who study marital conflict, have found this,

that we all need to have significantly more positive

encounters with other humans for every negative, and that

ratio is about five to one.

So we need to have fleeting, genuine

positive encounters for every five of those

for every one conflict encounter.

And that's one way to think about am I running

my organization or my family, for that matter, or my

neighborhood in such a way that I am getting at

a five to one ratio or anything close to it. Right.

With my neighbors would be a good example.

There's a lot of neighbor conflict, and so one

of the ways to preempt destructive conflict is to

invest in that kind of and that doesn't mean

you have to have awkward contrived happy hours and

birthday parties every three days.

It's much more subtle. Right.

It's looking for the good in each other. Yeah.

And, like, remembering each other and noticing each

other and having moments of shared connection, doing

things together, like shared projects, is very powerful,

as Peter's work has found.

It should be genuine and authentic, but it

needs to be much, much higher than I

think most workplaces have right now.

What's next for you these days?

I'm spending a good chunk of my time

training other journalists and other organizations to try

to cultivate good conflict on purpose.

I started a company with a broadcast

journalist colleague of mine named Helene Biandudi

Hofer, and we do two things.

We experiment with new ways to cover

conflict ourselves, and then we also train

people to cultivate good conflict on.

We're just we're having a lot of fun with that.

And I've really enjoyed the chance to not just

write about other people's successes and failures, but also

to try to help people practice it.

Oh, fantastic.

Keep up the great work.

So, Amanda, thank you so much for your time and

for sharing your adventures with us on Society Builders.

Keep up the great work.

And don't forget to get a copy of Amanda's book, 'High

Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out'.

Honestly, I think everyone with any

aspiration starts helping bring antagonistic groups

together must first read Amanda's book.

It's truly mandatory reading.

It's a great starting point.

So thanks again for joining us today, Amanda.

Thank you so much for having me, and

I can't wait to hear the other episodes.

So thank you for doing a deep dive on this.

And thank you, the audience, for

joining us today on Society Builders.

Don't miss our next exciting

episode where I interview Dr. Peter Coleman.

We've talked about Peter in today's podcast.

He's truly one of the leading authorities

on conflict resolution, and we continue to

explore the art of depolarization.

Peter's going to share findings from a lot

of the research that he's been doing, highlighting

what works and what doesn't work.

So don't miss that exciting episode. That's

next time on Society Builders.

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