The Nature of Conflict

Conflicts… we all have them. And we mostly don’t like them. They are among the most difficult problems to deal with, and they have a shameless tendency for running out of hand and degenerating in seperations or violent clashes.
Some people make a nice living out of this degeneration. But for the victims, for those who undergo the conflict and its consequences, it is a different matter…
Conflicts are of all times and of all civilisations, of all continents and of all people. They seem to stick to mankind like the plaster to captain Haddock in one of Tintin’s albums.
Conflict starts in the Garden of Eden. Conflict is the main subject in the first great literary achievement of Western civilisation: the Ilias.
But what is a conflict? And why is it difficult to deal with?
Never have I read a satisfactory approach. Descriptions, too many. Models, all too limited to fit the vast variety of the real thing.
And the end of the day, no other option is left then do ones own thinking; pretty risky, and maybe ending into nothing, or just more unsolved or unsolvable questions.
It appears to me that conflicts are generally spoken breaches into a system. Something that worked, suddenly doesn’t work anymore. The conscience of the breach stirrs arguments and emotions that tend to defend positions that only aggravate the differences. The reason for this is fear. A system that breaks apart, threatens the very existence, not only of the relations that put the system together, but of the individuals themselves that compose the system.
But what is “a system”? A system is any set of relations and rules that governs a togetherness, a specific way of living together or doing things together with others, in dealing with those relations. The basic value of a togetherness is TRUST. A lack of trust provokes isolation, and in gradual isolation people drift apart from each other. Instead of emphasising what brings them together, what they commonly share, they start emphasising what seperates them. When a system threatens to fall apart, it often means that it is not adapted anymore to the external changing circumstances, or that it becomes unable to guarantee its inner cohesion, either because of external or because of internal pressure.
The advantage of a systemic approach to conflict is that it avoids the pitfall of the culprits, the black sheep, the goats to be slauthered on the altars of innocence. There is no guilt and the accompanying shame of humiliation in such an approach: there is only trust and distrust. Loss of trust and distrust to be overcome.
In such a view, there are no winners and no losers. The acceptance of this principle (all stand to lose in a degenerating conflict) is a powerful argument in favor of a mediative approach to conflicts: conflicts do either generate victims or people who take the responsibility for the solution in their own hands.
Just like the system, the breach in the system tends to have its own (downward) dynamics. Fear, the original emotion provoked by the breach, generates distrust, distrust generates more fear. At a certain point the mechanisms of self protection and defence take over, and fear transforms into aggression. When the aggression calls for destruction rather than for defence, the conflict has reached a point of no return. Red conflicts cannot be mediated, they can only be fought. In a civilized way before the courts. In a more primitive way with the violence of arms. Right versus wrong and strong versus weak becomes the norm of perception. The “versus” shows how deep the waters are between the foeding parties. The language of conflict has overtaken the language of the original system, and differences become oppositions.
Conflicts can degenerate into violence and a search for destruction amazingly rapidly. One of the fundamental reasons for this is a particularly venomous mechanism that starts to overtake regular communication when the gap between positions widens. When a trusted stream of information dries up, people tend to fill in the voids by suppositions. Suppositions that are fed by a growing distrust, are merely a projection of ones own fears, rather than a calm reflexion upon the fears of the others. Such suppositions tend to turn into actions that call for a stronger answer from the other side, whereby a spiral of doomed self fulfilling prophecies is set into a disruptive and finally destructive motion. The speed and the intensity of the “challenge and response” modus determines how quickly a conflict might degenerate into a straightforward eruption of violence.
But conflicts, with all their disruptive forces, carry also the seeds of renovation, creation, and real freedom: the freedom of choice, the freedom of imagination. The breach in the system, away from the safety of customized solutions, traditions and formalized exchange, means also the opportunity of rediscovering the meaning of what we want to do, and why. And how we can do it differently from the past.
Do we really have to undergo the winding down of conflicts until their destructive end, or can we pick up their creative forces along the way, and turn the tides of destruction into creation?
That is the question that will be handled in a second contribution.

February 18th, 2016.