Conflicted Read online

  In the months after their first meeting, Mandela tried to convince Viljoen and his allies to give up their guns and participate in the democratic process. He made one particular gesture that went a long way towards convincing Viljoen to surrender his cause. South Africa’s national anthem was an Afrikaans song of conquest. Now that apartheid was being dismantled, most ANC leaders wanted it replaced with their own liberation anthem. Mandela disagreed. To stamp on such a symbol of Afrikaner pride, he said, would be a grave mistake.

  Mandela proposed an awkward but workable solution: both anthems would be sung at official occasions, one after the other. Was this a substantial political concession? No, it was a gesture – but a powerful one. It was another way for Mandela to reassure Viljoen that he would never have to give up who he was.

  * * *

  Elisa Sobo, a professor of anthropology at San Diego State University, has interviewed parents who refuse vaccines. Why were these people, many of them smart and highly educated, ignoring mainstream medical advice that was based on sound science? Sobo concluded that for these individuals opposition to vaccines is not just a belief, but an ‘act of identification’ – that is, it’s more about opting in to a group than opting out of a treatment, like ‘getting a gang tattoo, slipping on a wedding ring, or binge-watching a popular streamed TV show’. The refusal is ‘more about who one is and with whom one identifies than who one isn’t or whom one opposes’. Sobo points out that this is also true of those who opt in to vaccines: our desire to be associated with mainstream views on medicine is also a way of signalling who we are. That’s why arguments between the two sides quickly become clashes of identity.

  William Donohue, who has studied the topic for several decades, told me that what drags participants into destructive conflict is usually a struggle over who they are. ‘I’ve seen it in hostage situations, in politics, in marital arguments. You don’t know anything, you have problems, you’re insensitive. One person feels like the other is attacking who they are, so they defend themselves, or hit back. It escalates.’

  That our opinions come tangled up with our sense of ourselves is not necessarily a bad thing, as we saw earlier, but it is something we need to be aware of when trying to get someone to do something they do not want to do, whether that’s stop smoking, adapt to a new working practice, or vote for our candidate. Our goal should be to prise the disputed opinion or action away from the person’s sense of self – to lower the identity stakes. The skilful disagreer finds a way of helping their adversary conclude that they can say or do something different, and still be themselves.

  One way to do that is to have the disagreement away from an audience. In Boston in 1994, in the wake of a shooting at an abortion clinic, the philanthropist Laura Chasin reached out to six abortion activists, three of them pro-life, three pro-choice, and asked them to meet in secret to see if they could build some kind of understanding. Hard and even painful as it was, the six women met, clandestinely, over a period of years. At first, they found their positions hardening, and none of them ever changed their minds on the fundamental points. But over time, as they got to know each other, they felt able to think, communicate and negotiate in more unconstrained, less simplistic ways. Note, too, that at their first meeting, Mandela took Viljoen aside. The less that people feel compelled to maintain their face in front of allies, the more flexible they feel able to be.

  The same principle applies to workplace conflicts. In front of an audience of colleagues, people are more likely to focus on how they want to be seen, rather than on the right way to solve the problem. If it is important to me to be seen as competent, I might react angrily to any challenge to my work. If I want to be seen as nice and co-operative, I might refrain from expressing my strongly felt opposition to a proposal in terms strong enough for anyone to notice. That’s why, when a difficult work conversation arises, the participants often propose to ‘take it offline’. The phrase used to mean simply an in-person discussion, but it has gained the additional nuance of, ‘Let’s take this potentially tough conversation to a place where there is less at stake for our faces.’

  Taking a disagreement offline can work but it should only ever be seen as a second-best option. It means the problem at hand is exposed to the scrutiny of fewer minds, losing the benefits of open disagreements. The best way to lower the identity stakes is to create a workplace culture in which people do not feel much need to protect their face; a culture in which different opinions are explicitly encouraged, mistakes are expected, rules of conduct are understood, and everyone trusts that everyone else cares about the collective goal. Then you can really have it out.

  Still, in most disagreements, face is at stake in some way, and while getting out of sight of an audience is one way of lowering the identity stakes, another way is to give face – to affirm your adversary’s ideal sense of themselves, as Mandela did with Viljoen. When you show me that you believe in who I am and want to be seen as, you make it easier for me to reconsider my position. By being personally gracious, you can depersonalise the disagreement.

  Sometimes that can be as simple as offering a compliment at the very moment your adversary feels most vulnerable. Jonathan Wender, the ex-cop who co-founded Polis Solutions, has written a book about policing in which he notes that the act of arrest is a moment of potential humiliation for the suspect. Wender argues that when police officers are making an arrest they should do what they can to make the person being arrested feel better about themselves. He gives the example of arresting a man he calls Calvin, suspected of violent assault:

  The officer and I each took hold of one of Calvin’s arms and told him he was under arrest. He began to struggle and was clearly ready to fight. Given his large stature and history of violence, we wanted to avoid fighting with Calvin, which would inevitably leave him and officers injured. I . . . told Calvin, ‘Look, you’re just too big for us to fight with.’

  Wender writes, ‘Officers can de-escalate a potential fight by . . . affirming his dignity, especially in public.’ As we’ve seen, it is in a cop’s interest to make the person they have arrested feel good, or at least less bad, about themselves, just as it was in Mandela’s interest to affirm Viljoen’s dignity. This is common sense – or at least it ought to be. It is amazing how often people commit what you might call the overdog’s mistake: when, having achieved a dominant position, they brutally ram their advantage home, wounding the other party’s sense of self. By doing so, they might gain some fleeting satisfaction, but they also create the adversary they do not want.

  Wounded people are dangerous. In Memphis, I watched as the Polis trainer Mike O’Neill told the class that when he was a cop, he had seen officers hit suspects after they had been cuffed, sometimes in front of the suspect’s friends or family. Not only was that wrong, he said, it was dumb: the act of humiliating someone in an arrest ‘can kill your colleagues’. There was a grave murmur of assent in the room. Suspects who have been humiliated do not forget it, and often look for ways to get their own back on a cop – any cop – years down the line. It is a pattern familiar to students of history. Humiliation hurts the humiliators and those associated with them. In a study of ten international diplomatic crises, political scientists William Zartman and Johannes Aurik described how, when stronger countries exert power over weaker countries, the weaker ones accede in the short term but look for ways to retaliate later on.

  Imagine if Mandela had entered that conversation with Viljoen the way that people argue with each other in public today. First of all, he would have attacked his identity: he would, in front of as many people as possible, have called Viljoen a white supremacist with blood on his hands. Then he would have explained to the former general, in an aggressive tone, why he needed to disarm and accept Mandela’s terms, since it was the only morally correct and practically viable course for him to take. Mandela would have been perfectly justified in doing all this; he would have been in the right on every count. But how do you think Viljoen would have reacted?
<
br />   The American politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has described how to have a conversation with someone with whom you strongly disagree. You don’t have to share her politics to see that it is good advice:

  I have this mentor. And one of the best pieces of advice that he gave me is ‘always give someone the golden gate of retreat’, which is: give someone enough rope, give someone enough compassion, enough opportunity in a conversation for them to look good changing their mind. And it’s a really important thing to be able to do, because if you’re just like, ‘Oh you said this thing! You’re racist!’ And now you’re forcing that person to say, ‘No I’m not.’ Et cetera. There’s no golden gate of retreat there. The only retreat there is to just barrel right through the opposing opinion.

  When we’re in an argument with someone, we should be thinking about how they can change their mind and look good – maintain or even enhance their face – at the same time. Often this is very hard to do in the moment of the dispute itself, when opinion and face are bound even more tightly together than they are before or after (writer Rachel Cusk defines an argument as ‘an emergency of self-definition’). However, by showing that we have listened to and respected our interlocutor’s point of view, we make it more likely that, like the vaccination convert we heard from earlier, they will come around at some later point. If and when they do, we should avoid scolding them for not agreeing with us all along. It’s amazing quite how often people in polarised debates do this; it hardly makes it more tempting to switch sides. Instead, we should remember that they have achieved something we have not: a change of mind.

  * * *

  Within six months of that first cup of tea with Mandela, Viljoen took what he described as the toughest decision of his life: he ordered his followers to lay down their arms. Shortly after that, he announced that not only would he not disrupt the upcoming democratic elections, he would take part in them. In return for no political concessions whatsoever, Viljoen had given his blessing to a political process that, ten months earlier, he vowed to fight to the death. Mandela had transformed his most formidable enemy into an opponent with whom he could peacefully disagree.

  It’s impossible not to admire Mandela’s shrewdness and skill in dealing with a dangerous enemy he needed to win round (part of his shrewdness was seeing that he needed to win him round). But his adversary deserves credit here as well. Viljoen made a deep, painful change to his mindset. He abandoned his original position in order to accept that black South Africans could be fellow citizens and Mandela his leader. He then had to sell that vision to his own side, taking enormous risks with his ‘face’. What Mandela did was help Viljoen realise that he did not have to surrender his identity. He could be part of the nation and still be proudly himself: an Afrikaner, a military veteran, a South African citizen.

  Nelson Mandela was inaugurated as president in May 1994, and a new parliament opened, one that reflected the racial diversity of South Africa: two-thirds of the new representatives were black. Viljoen himself had won a seat, after his party picked up nine seats in the election. John Carlin, who was there for the opening, watched Mandela walk into a chamber that had previously been all-white and overwhelmingly male and which now embodied the diversity of South Africa. Carlin noticed something in particular: Viljoen was staring at Mandela, entranced.

  Twelve years later, Carlin put it to Viljoen that what he had seen on his face that day was profound respect, and even affection. Viljoen, who was uncomfortable with sentiment, replied tersely: ‘Yes, that would be correct.’ Then he remembered something else. ‘Mandela came in and he saw me and he came across the floor to me, which he was not really supposed to do according to parliamentary protocol. He shook my hand and he had a big smile on his face and said how happy he was to see me there.’ A voice had called out from the gallery: ‘Give him a hug, General!’ ‘And did you?’ asked Carlin. ‘I am a military man and he was my president,’ said Viljoen. ‘I shook his hand and I stood to attention.’

  8. Check Your Weirdness

  Behind many disagreements is a clash of cultures that seem strange to each other. Don’t assume that yours is the normal one.

  Schneider: Ever since I was a very small child – I’ve always like yourself looked up at the stars and wondered why is this – where are we going, how did we get there, what’s this vast expanse about?

  FBI: Yeah.

  Schneider: Why is this earth a cemetery, everything dies here, plants, people, animals, six thousand years of woe and human history. We get a little bit of pleasure but we’re never satisfied and fulfilled and relatives can be taken out of your life, friends, accidents. God, what’s going on?

  FBI: Yeah.

  Schneider: Who are you, God? But I’ve never really claimed to know God. I tried it, the Christian routine for the majority of my life and in honesty, I mean, I’ve never really known God but I’ve always wanted to know God.

  FBI: Um-hum.

  Schneider: I do see something about a book that’s very logical and clear and this man also has opened up very deep sciences, physics, astronomy, and these are the things that not many have gotten to hear recently . . .

  FBI: You know, I’ve just been handed a note that David did a radio interview and that’s been completed. How is he feeling with his injuries?

  On the morning of Sunday 28 February 1993, around eighty armed law-enforcement agents descended on a sprawling property near the town of Waco, Texas, known as the Mount Carmel complex. The agents were from the ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms), which investigates crimes involving unlawful firearms. They had a warrant for the arrest of Vernon Wayne Howell, also known as David Koresh, leader of the religious community that lived at Mount Carmel, known as the Branch Davidians. The agents had reason to believe that the group had amassed a large stockpile of illegal weapons.

  The ATF had been told that Koresh never left the compound and so resolved that the only way to arrest him was to spring a surprise. But the Branch Davidians were tipped off, and had prepared defensive positions. An intense gun battle ensued, in which six Mount Carmel residents were killed, along with four ATF agents. Koresh was wounded but survived. A local deputy sheriff, Larry Lynch, negotiated a ceasefire.

  The next day, the FBI took over, surrounding Mount Carmel, and demanded that the Davidians surrender peacefully and face justice. The Davidians refused. So began a barricaded siege. The FBI assembled what may have been the largest military force ever gathered against civilians on US soil. It parked ten Bradleys – armoured fighting vehicles – inside the compound. In addition to personnel from the US Army and local law-enforcement agencies, a total of 899 government officials were gathered at Mount Carmel. Meanwhile, the FBI’s tactical team made conditions as uncomfortable as possible for the Davidians. They cut the phone lines and electricity to the building. At night they flooded the compound with bright lights and blasted music through powerful speakers.

  A team of crack FBI negotiators, trained in precisely this kind of situation – a barricaded siege – were flown in from around the country. They set up shop in a nearby aircraft hangar, with access to the one remaining phone line into Mount Carmel. Their conversation with Davidian leaders was to last fifty-one days. The transcripts, later published in full, are a unique record of a painfully difficult negotiation. To read them is to witness two parties talking at great length while barely communicating at all. The exchange above features Steve Schneider, David Koresh’s closest friend and aide, talking to an unnamed FBI negotiator. While Schneider ruminates on the meaning of life, the negotiator seems uninterested, joining in only when he finds a reason to return to what he thinks of as the purpose of the conversation.

  The FBI negotiators were, for the most part, professional and thorough, following standard procedures: they tried to show respect for the Davidians, to give them reasonable options, to cultivate rapport. They even took advice from psychologists on how to handle different personality types. In short, they did everything by the book. But the book t
urned out to be missing a crucial chapter.

  * * *

  The linguist Richard Lewis was one of the first academics to grasp the importance to negotiation of cultural difference. When people from different countries meet to thrash out a business deal or a political agreement, using a common language is no guarantee that each side will understand the other. Cross-cultural negotiations that degenerate into confusion and personal acrimony can do so not because the parties are disagreeing on substance, but because each is engaged in different kind of conversation to the other. Lewis pointed out that before you negotiate with an Italian, you should make it your business to understand what an Italian thinks a negotiation is. He made diagrammatic representations of how different nationalities negotiate. Here’s a few of them:

  Lewis’s models are not based on quantitative empirical research; they are a mixture of his own observations and his expertise in the use of language. But his essential insight is an important one: unless you take time to understand the other party’s cultural worldview, you are liable to misunderstand what they are saying and misread their motivations. If the American doesn’t understand why the German she is talking to is not engaging in small talk, the American thinks he is haughty and rude – nearly as bad as that insufferably vague and flippant English person. The Chinese misinterpret the American’s impatience to get things done as aggression. The English under-estimate the German desire for due process and think they’re just being difficult. Everyone under-estimates how much the French love to argue.

  Culture shapes how people behave and what they say, which is why trying to have a tough conversation with someone without knowing where they’re coming from – culturally, as well as personally – is self-defeating. The FBI agents deployed to Waco were practiced in negotiating with Americans, not Chinese or Germans; the idea that they needed to take time to understand the cultural outlook of fellow countrymen would hardly have occurred to them. But culture is not just a matter of country.