Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?

Recent advances in the neurosciences have established an irrefutable fact: Human beings are emotional, not rational. Nevertheless, on the strength of Descartes’ rationalist philosophy, the Enlightenment opened the doors to modern empiricism and led humanity into the Scientific Revolution. No one doubted the power of rational thinking to solve problems and unravel the mysteries of the observable universe. From these observations came the belief that humans were distinguished from all other creatures because of their rationality. To be irrational was to be something less than human.

This belief deeply influenced English and American law, foreign policy, and economic theory. Legal standards were set by comparison to a prototypical rational person. Foreign policy was based on the assumption that rational beings could sit together and work through international disputes and conflicts. Economists built an entire field of study on the assumption that consumers acted “rationally” in maximizing their utility. People engaged in peacemaking, from the interpersonal to the international level, assumed that despite the emotions of conflict, people fundamentally were rational.

The truth is that we are 98 percent emotional and about two percent rational. Thus, the assumptions underlying many disciplines and practices, especially peacemaking, need significant revisions. Much remains unknown, but the implications of the research so far demonstrate that we must be far more aware of neuropsychological factors of human conflict. These factors explain much about conflict behaviors. They also provide insights about new interventions in serious and intractable conflicts.

To understand how our brain deals with conflict, consider a simple emotional model. In this model, conflict starts with some problem. The problem is serious enough to cause anxiety, reflected in a feeling of insecurity. When anxiety or insecurity is first experienced, we have a choice between reactivity and reflection. If we do not make a choice, our default mode is to be reactive.

By being reactive, we might reject the problem, give up, or feel inadequate to deal with the problem. If the problem is persistent, we might struggle or exit. As the conflict develops, we perceive it as a threat, and we may blame, attack or withdraw. These behaviors constitute our fear reaction system. I like to call it our self-protective system. The brain systems associated with fear reaction are very, very old, dating back to the earliest vertebrae animals. Although highly adaptive in the uncertain and dangerous environment of 20,000 years ago, the system is largely maladaptive in our modern, complex culture.

If the choice for reflection is made, we have learned to reflect, relate, and relax. The insecurity arising from a conflict situation is recognized as pointing to a pathway of growth towards greater peace and self-realization. We are led by our curiosity to discover something new, find what is lost, or complete unfinished business. Success leads us to wholeness, authenticity, power and wisdom.

The path, however, is not easy. From anxiety and insecurity, we experience inadequacy (we don’t know what to do) and a drop in self-esteem (we don’t feel good about self). We ride on a broad emotional river and often experience fear of death, a drowning sensation, being shaky, or cold. Along this journey, our fear reaction system could pull us off the path of peace.

At the end of this emotional drop, we end in a calm pool that represents the essential peace within us. In this state, we hold an unshakable foundation of belief in ourselves. We are authentic; we are present in the moment. We exhibit a full spectrum of self as robust, rainbow colored, and multi-faceted. From this place, we can be compassionate, tolerant, exhibit loving-kindness, and embrace peace. This is what I have observed many people experiencing as they engage in conflict resolution and achieve peace.

These behaviors come from our brains’ altruistic, cooperative social attachment systems. The social attachment system in the brain controls pair bonding, such as the mother-infant dyad, pair bonding, and the formation of families, extended families, and communities. It is the system that allowed us to become highly social and create complex, interdependent societies. However, our self-protective system will override our altruistic system unless we choose otherwise. Because it is not the default choice, mobilizing the social attachment systems in conflict situations is challenging. The last thing a person wants is to feel altruistic towards her conflict cohort. As has been said to me many times, “I don’t want to sit around a campfire and sing Kumbayah!” Yet lasting resolution of difficult conflicts can only occur when our brains altruistic systems are fully operational. Thus, one challenge for peacemaking is to recognize when and why a person’s fear response system is dominating them, then craft an intervention that will allow the altruistic brain systems to take over.

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m	11/06/07
wasn't King who said it. It was the truck driver,Reginald Denny, beaten half to death by King supporers for doing nothing. I think King was quoteoed as sayin "whay can't we all just get high, speed, and resist arrest, get released to try to kill more people" Add New Comment

John ,   Berkeley CA	05/21/07
Conservative stability?
I think you're giving conservatives marks for stability that are unrealistically high. I'm curious what these other three values are, and how they contribute to stability and survival, especially in the Middle East, to which you refer. Even with all its problems, the Middle East was a lot more stable, and far fewer people were dying, and there were far fewer organized terrorist Muslim attacks worldwide, before the first US invasion of Iraq. Bush Sr., and his Ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, did a pretty mediocre job of mediation between Iraq and Kuwait by giving Saddam mixed messages about what the US would do if Saddam invaded Kuwait (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Glaspie). Bush and Glaspie could have made it clearer that the US would come down hard on him, but they decided to pussyfoot around the issue, in a fashion that many have interpreted as either deliberate or stupid. That led Saddam to think he could invade Kuwait without too many consequences, which led to the first Iraq war. This amped up the Muslim Brotherhood, etc. into higher gear. But that wasn't enough for the conservatives, who really wanted to get their foot in the door in the Middle East and try to do some "nation-building" (efforts that were easy to see as false, or just wrong, at creating stability), so they made up some lies, went in again, and this time instead of just sticking their hand into and then yanking it out of the hornet's nest, they yanked the nest off the tree, tore it open, and swung it around in the air. I don't know about you, but I find a hornet's nest is easier to deal with if you leave it in place, and let it either live or die out on its own, and just pick off the hornets that come after you one by one, or just close it up in a bag and suffocate it. The US under Clinton tried to suffocate Iraq, and though that worked only partially, nothing along these lines is perfect, but at least it wasn't as bad as swinging the nest around and slinging the hornets in all directions. Analogies fail somewhere around here, so I'll stop with the analogies there. It's true that nobody can "just get along" with, or mediate with, absolute no-compromise ideologues, but I'm not yet convinced that all of the jihadist Muslims fit into that category, as much as they'd like us to believe it. I don't yet think they're all beyond reach of some clever approach that might largely defuse their vehemence (even if it means, horror of horrors, that the US stop trying to remake the Middle East through military means, or subterfuge that inevitably gets discovered and leads to outrage). Certainly, many or most of the methods now used just make them stronger and multiply. That's obvious. More thinking needs to be applied to how to deal with them, and though some people think that such thinking is "wishy-washy" compared to the beautiful simplicity, and action-hero satisfaction, of blasting them back to the stone age, it just don't work. The proof is right in front of our faces. We have to figure out other ways to defuse them. Though Saddam was a monster, about whom something might have needed to be done, Bush Jr's "conservative" approach of ripping out Saddam, after lying that he was involved in the attacks on the Word Trade Center and the Pentagon, etc., shouldn't be given high marks for increasing stability, or anyone's chances for survival. Some say Bush Jr. isn't a "true conservative", and maybe that's right. But one thing is certain: he's a pretty good example of what poor mediation can result in, though worse yet, many argue that mediation wasn't his intent. Add New Comment

Brian ,   Vancouver BC	05/20/07
Answer the question
The "Why" is indeed the reactive response. Can it be switched off for both parties? The dream that it can persists, and the functional version of the King-question is thus the plea, "Can't we all just get along? Please?" Sometimes the answer is "No!". The elephant in the living room behind this discussion is the existence of a huge group of emotionally driven believers in an Islamic Umma which is ordained to become a Global Caliphate, for which any sacrifice or atrocity may and must be permitted or promoted. "Mediate" means locate the middle acceptable to both sides. AND THERE IS NO SUCH MIDDLE WITH THIS GROUP. ½ ∞ = ∞ . One cannot mediate or compromise with the Hitlers, Saddams, or Khomenis of the world. An ongoing study of the emotional roots of liberal and conservative orientations indicates that liberals give exclusive sway to empathy and avoidance of harm or pain to others. Conservatives add varying degrees of three other values to this mix, amounting to maintenance of enough stability and order to ensure survival. Sometimes rolling over and baring your throat loses you your throat. Add New Comment

John ,   Berkeley CA	09/19/06
Quote correction
Not that it really matters, but because the issue has been raised, Rodney King apparently actually said, according to Wikipedia: "People, I just want to say, you know, can we all get along?" I wanted to hunt down the video clip in which he says this, to be sure, but then I decided I'd spent too much time on this minor detail already. It's even possible King was interviewed on another occasion too, in which his exact wording was different, and that might be what a lot of us remember. Doug's article is very insightful. I'm sure he's not proposing that just words alone can do the job, but words and action. Add New Comment

M. Griffy,   Denver CO	07/10/06
Rodney King Plea
Larry King's sources didn't check their work. Look up "Rodney King" in the national archives, or nexus lexus search it. "Why can't we just get along," would be accurate. Add New Comment

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