Years ago, I thought a lot about intractable problems and wrote a lot about it on the blog. The conclusion to most of the thinking is that very few intractable problems between human beings are solvable through negotiation. Additionally, I always try to find some room for hope. For reference Intractable problems1
There are fundamental disagreements between people that are literally almost or practically not solvable. I don’t want to say wholly unsolvable, but very difficult and complicated. I believe that we need to change our approach to dealing with each other when it comes to fundamental issues which impact the very basics of our lives and existence on this planet. I believe that destructive conflict which is also defined by the folks at Beyond Intractability and touched upon by Peter Coleman in his book is the one of the top three important topics in our time.
Some Basics “What da problem izz“?
There is enough room on our planet for all of us. Some people don’t believe this is true and some simply don’t want other people to be on the planet. Some people want to control or rule it all.
The basic problem is that nature itself gives humankind enough problems and challenges to overcome. Human beings as a body can’t seemingly work together. Instead of solving common problems and issues that we face as a whole, we have created, curated, maintained and cultivated consistent chaos to control, manipulate and take ownership of various domains. For the sole purpose of achieving some objective which all ends in the same result for every single human being. Death is the ultimate equalizer, but we are not born into equity, we are born into competition.
If we didn’t have religious differences or cultural differences, we would find something to separate us. Imagine for a moment that we were all the basically the same except that some of us were left-handed with even fewer of us being ambidextrous. When babies come of age and they go through the reach test, they’d be identified. Depending on their identity, they’d be part of a class of people. Even if everything else was the same as everyone else, we would find a way to identify the right vs left difference and we would find a way to separate ourselves.
The advanced version of this scenario would include rights for “rights” as left might be the ruling class. We would debate in our civil society why we should all get along and all of the very long list of things that come from the class of “the left.”
I realize that what I am saying is fairly obvious and a topic that has been discussed over and again across human history. The idea that we can live together in harmony with all of our differences is a great idea, but it hasn’t ever fully worked out. What social media and our new communication mechanisms have taught us is that as much as we believed we knew about each other; we only knew and know a very small sliver.
What does this all have to do with the title of the post? We can’t continue talking to each other the way that we are talking to each other and expect a good outcome.
We can’t live together the way that we are living together today and expect a good outcome.
We can’t always say what we want to say or say what we personally believe and expect a good outcome.
Not only are we hurting ourselves, but we are also on the edge of total destruction. Hate, greed, selfishness are not new. People doing things we call “evil” or “bad” is not new. The hard truth is that we all see the world through our own lens. We have agreed with each other to find common ground on some things which allow us mostly to live together in peace, but the terms of this agreement are the same as any marriage.
You see, the idea that we keep talking and that we communicate with each other in civil discourse may be the real flaw. From the perspective of people with great differences that are intractable, we should potentially be disconnected and agree on the terms of this disconnection. I grew up in an experiment of interconnection. For all that we had in common, we had vast differences, and these went unsolved. My answer was unrealized until recently. Although, I always wanted everyone to be together, live in peace and harmony, there was and still is a lot of violence and hate. Everyone is a victim. Everyone believes they are on the arguable side of some perspective which makes them right. Words matter and being on the other side of words that hurt can turn a human being into a weapon or a warrior.
What did we try to do? We tried to talk about it. This has always been the way. In some cases, it worked, in most cases, it didn’t work, and we came to understand that we will not agree. Reflecting on the truth, I wanted to escape from my home in Coop City. It was a box, it was a trap, for all that was good, there was more that was bad overall. Nostalgic memories are peppered with racism, conflict, beatings and economic disparity. Victory was leaving and getting away from that place as it sunk into the mud it was built on. Sure, there were good memories as well, but the experiment failed and many people who started there, left.
Lies and More Lies and Lies and Lies
Many of us don’t know history. Even the history that we are taught is not the truth. It is someone’s perspective about what happened. Of course you may argue, something factual happened and that fact is “THE” fact. Sure, a six can also be a nine. We have the ability to state what we see is fact and as some have truly come to understand more than one thing can be true at the same time about the same thing.
The things that are true, the things that are real are the things right in front of us, in our own world, in our own mental construct. These may include things that are not real to others. When we come to understand that what we choose and decide what is real under the condition that it may or may not be real to someone else until they experience it the same way, then we can realize what “our truth” means to us. The fact is that for a large variety of things we need common truth and common perception of reality to have large groups of people survive. If we didn’t have these common areas of truth and reality, many would die in a matter of weeks and months. Subjective, Objective, Normative, Complex Truths.234
I am not proposing for anyone to take an action. What I am saying is, the conversations that we believe we need to have and the idea that we should say what we think and share our thoughts may be just simply wrong.
You can stop reading here if you’d like because the next part of what I am writing may upset you.
Words Just Words
We Jews talk about the Nazis and the holocaust as if we own all the pain. While I have had many experiences with close loved ones who were literally impacted by the holocaust, their pain and suffering were not exclusive. It is this point that brings many to have animosity. The Russian people are said to have lost 13 million during the same time frame. Many died in combat and many of the Germans who served in the war did what they were told, and they suffered. Growing up in NY, I didn’t hear or know about this at all. We should “never forget” but we were “never told” about so much. You see, the words are the drug and life blood of humanity. We throw around words, we lie, we cheat, we steal as a body and as a people. When I say this, I am speaking of the world.
The words may last generations or as time passes, they may be contorted to meet our own personal needs and perspective.
Think about the bible for a moment, if we were to follow the bible, whichever version we may choose to adopt, wouldn’t we be doing things in our society today that wouldn’t align with current values? If anyone is to argue or take a position in discussion and dialogue about the bible, they would be lending themselves to some form of acknowledgment. I didn’t say agreement but acknowledgment about it. While many debaters may disagree, they all acknowledge. In this sense and from my perspective, if we even entertain the idea of whatever it is that we seek to discredit or disagree, we still invite the idea to the table. This within itself has been a great part of the issue at hand. Why? Because if someone doesn’t know about something and they never discovered it, then it wouldn’t be a thing.
People wave their books and papers from ancient texts around as if it is the truth. It is their truth, it is their logic, it is but it may have never been if they weren’t introduced in some cases indoctrinated.
Would it be better not knowing? Today, I say “YES.”
How do I know?
Even if I was born with horns and tail, the evil chosen one from the ancient texts. Even if I was G-d’s chosen child and in my case a descendant with rich genetic clarity of kings and priests, even if all of this were the case, as a child in the sandbox with another child, I am just a boy to play with. Notice my inbred fear of writing out the name of G-d fully as it is so natural for me to have a feeling about the word.
Today, due to the words of others and the words shared with others, even my boyhood may be in question. Only until you learn to know of hate can you become a master of it.
If Star Trek were real, all of our world shared in abundance, we would still have the problems we have because we have the words. We have the history. Putin wants Ukraine for what reason? He wants back what he thought he had and what is rightfully his. If there was no idea of these things, he would be an old man with a stick. Instead, he is an old man with a button and an arsenal which may set the world a blaze.
Scott Jennings, an author, political figure and CNN contributor, is a very smart man. He is perched high above us, with the bible, high on his own words and those he carries in his sack of truth. It is hard to argue with the imaginary facts when one is so assured these are real. It is easy to fall into the trap of propaganda because humans need and want direction. The words of our ancestors provide direction until this direction conflicts with our personal desires, needs and wants.
Many political speakers today argue that they have free speech and that if we stop talking, if we don’t bring discourse to the table, we are doomed. I’ll argue that we should have a dialogue until it breaches the boundary of propaganda and / or we come to understand that we are raising an intractable problem to the surface that can’t be solved by debate. Charlie Kirk did not deserve to die. While it is too early to know the exact motive of the killer, we can surmise that his words and actions along with the perspective of the people against him drove a young man to action.
While I am not any smarter than an average person, I was born and raised to question everything. In order to ask a question, you may need to have some idea or knowledge. Within itself, this whole thing of questioning creates an issue or conflict.
I believed that questioning everything was the right thing to do but I am not sure now that it is.
There are things that we hold in common that we may not need to question. There are words that should not be forbidden but should be framed in the right context.
Here is an example for you. Most of you still reading may believe you live in a free country. We never did. It is a Republic and it is not free. There are things you may do within boundaries that are common and accepted to most not all.
If I want to drive without a seat belt, I can’t without violating a rule. Even if that rule only hurts me.
If I want to take medication, I need to get it approved by someone who has a piece of paper. Someone who is commonly acknowledged as knowledgeable in an area.
It is not legal to hurt myself under normal conditions, only when it is convenient. At the same time, we are allowed to be poisoned, we are allowed to consume, we are allowed to destroy, we are allowed to infringe, we are allowed to say mostly what we want until .. it is inconvenient.
A bit of perspective for you. The average age of the 39 men who wrote the US Constitution was 42 with the youngest being 26 and the oldest being old Ben Franklin at 81. The great brilliant minds were mostly younger men, not middle aged. They at least knew that this body of work needed to evolve but it wasn’t enough and frankly, the people who keep this book on their bedside with the bible are victims just the same as the boy in the sandbox. Our Constitution does not protect us from what we are experiencing today.
Important to note, because we all don’t want a king, but seemingly with our history, our knowledge and our evolution, we all lean in as a body to make or create kings and queens.
If you asked me what would create the greatest opportunity for success for human kind, I wouldn’t be able to provide a clear answer to you today. What I do know is that problems that show themselves to be intractable are more than likely not solvable in the world we live in today. The net result will be war, death, destruction and control.
We can write, but we don’t have “consequence free” speech.
We can speak to each other but when we disagree to the level of fundamental ideology, we will as a body land on one side or another of the position. What I mean is, you will either accept a woman’s right to choose and the laws will support this or you will accept the idea that a woman does not have this right and she will be bound by those laws.
A man and a woman are the only way that people can be married or man and man, woman and woman, man and many women, woman and many men. It is intractable and it is only wrong because someone made it wrong in some writing long ago.
Some people are willing to die for these words. Some people will die because of other’s willingness.
If the President today decided to create a draft to fight for his perspective, he would say that “we the people” chose him for his task and those who will die for this cause are dying for the right reason. Those who reject it, will be held in treason.
Regardless of how you and I feel about these things, our ancestors created these systems which are greatly flawed in consideration of human growth, peace and a society which places life and the betterment of the world as the primary objective.
Even the people of my heritage have proven that they don’t know any other answers other than violence to solve these complicated problems.
If you may consider there is no right and wrong. There is only “what it is” and the outcome will be “whatever happens.”
For the hard part, we are in the hands of ..
The river flows from the mountain, in between the mountain and the village there is a small tribe of nomads who live and walk the river up through the mountain. The tribe washes themselves in the river and places their waste in the river. Downstream, the villagers use the water. Over the years, the villagers realized something in the water was making them sick. They decided to go up towards the mountain to see what was going on. They traveled up the river and found the tribe. They didn’t speak the same language, and they tried to find ways to communicate. After some time, they realized they needed to learn each others language and culture in order to better communicate. They each sent one of their own to stay and learn from the other.
After a few months of living with each other, the villager who stayed with the tribe, realized what was happening and shared with the tribe leader his learning and understanding. The tribesman who went to the village took ill not long after arriving and died.
The tribe leader wanted to understand more how they could possibly be harming the village. He said, “We live a simple life, the land gives us all we need, and we give back all we have and all we take from the mother.” The villager living with the tribe was not an expert in medicine or sophisticated technology. He shared “It is understood in our village that if one eats in the same place, they relieve themselves, we may all come to be ill.” The tribal leader was suspicious but open to understanding and possibly learning. A few more weeks had passed, and the tribesman never came back. The villagers didn’t know what to do because they didn’t know customs or anything and they were confused, so they did nothing.
The villager with the tribe thought to go home and he expressed to the leader that he would find his person, bring word of his discovery and bring him back to a known place for the Nomads.
Upon his arrival, he found out the tribesman died. He went back to find the tribe; they headed a bit higher into the mountain thinking that maybe this would help the villagers. It was a bit colder the further they pushed but since learning from the villager, they thought to make some effort. The villager headed up the mountain and found indication and markers for him to follow. When he arrived, he told the leader what had happened. The leader instantly killed him. Blood seeped into the water and flowed down the river until it dissipated. The villagers had no idea what had happened until the Nomad tribe showed up one night and worked to kill the whole village.
As death and destruction were overtaking the village, the village leader tried to communicate with the tribal leader. The tribal leader learned enough village language to answer simply. The village leader pleaded with the tribal leader to stop. The tribal leaders answer was “mother takes what mother gives, my hands are mothers love.” Everyone in the village died. The interaction with the villagers and the illness that they had some immunity overtook the tribe not long after they headed up the mountain they started to die off.
As the last of the children died, they asked the leader, why this is happening. His answer “mother takes what mother gives and, in her hands, we go back to where we came from.”
We are all part of this natural world. The dangers of our world are by themselves enough to harm us all. The exacerbation of this danger by our inability to communicate with each other and our inability to let go of what we believe as individuals may very well be the death of us all.
Our words matter, our actions matter and our beliefs matter.