When we are baffled by the insanity of the "other side"--in our
politics, at work, or at home--it's because we aren't seeing how the
conflict itself has taken over.
That's what "high conflict" does. It's the invisible hand of our time.
And it's different from the useful friction of healthy conflict. That's
good conflict, and it's a necessary force that pushes us to be better
people.
High conflict is what happens when discord distills into a
good-versus-evil kind of feud, the kind with an us and a them. In
this state, the brain behaves differently. We feel increasingly certain
of our own superiority, and everything we do to try to end the conflict,
usually makes it worse. Eventually, we can start to mimic the behavior
of our adversaries, harming what we hold most dear.
In this "compulsively readable" (Evan Osnos, National Book Award-winning
author) book, New York Times bestselling author and award-winning
journalist Amanda Ripley investigates how good people get captured by
high conflict--and how they break free.
Our journey begins in California, where a world-renowned conflict expert
struggles to extract himself from a political feud. Then we meet a
Chicago gang leader who dedicates his life to a vendetta--only to
realize, years later, that the story he'd told himself about the
conflict was not quite true. Next, we travel to Colombia, to find out
whether thousands of people can be nudged out of high conflict at scale.
Finally, we return to America to see what happens when a group of
liberal Manhattan Jews and conservative Michigan corrections officers
choose to stay in each other's homes in order to understand one another
better, even as they continue to disagree.
All these people, in dramatically different situations, were drawn into
high conflict by similar forces, including conflict entrepreneurs,
humiliation, and false binaries. But ultimately, all of them found ways
to transform high conflict into good conflict, the kind that made them
better people. They rehumanized and recatego-rized their opponents, and
they revived curiosity and wonder, even as they continued to fight for
what they knew was right.
People do escape high conflict. Individuals--even entire
communities--can short-circuit the feedback loops of outrage and blame,
if they want to. This is an "insightful and enthralling" (The New York
Times Book Review) book--and a mind-opening new way to think about
conflict that will transform how we move through the world.