Conflicted Read online

  * * *

  The Waco siege instantly became a national crisis and an international event. The world’s news media feasted on an irresistible story: a brainwashed religious cult with a charismatic leader defying the might of the US government. Lurid rumours abounded. It was said that David Koresh had over a hundred wives who did his every bidding and that he exercised mind control over his followers. To the outside world, Koresh was a transparent charlatan who had somehow hypnotised a group of naive people into pandering to his lust for power, sex and glory. Privately, the FBI negotiators shared the public’s view. One of them later wrote that Koresh was ‘as close to pure evil as any human being I had ever heard of – devious, calculating, self-absorbed, charming, and completely sadistic’.

  The FBI’s goals were clear: get everyone out of the compound, and avoid further violence. The Branch Davidians – well, nobody was quite sure what they wanted. Some speculated that they were preparing for the End of Days, and that they had been planning to invade the local town and kill everyone in sight, or that they were about to blow themselves up.

  At first, a quick resolution had seemed possible. Davidian leaders agreed to the handover of nineteen young children from Mount Carmel. But after this initial breakthrough the negotiation entered a tortured stalemate. Ninety-eight people remained in the building, twenty-three of them children (including Koresh’s own). One stumbling block was that the FBI treated this as a hostage situation, while Koresh and the other Davidians insisted that everyone inside was staying of their own free will.

  FBI: What I’m saying is that if you could make an agreement with your people that they’re walking out of there and you could –

  Koresh: I am not going to tell them what to do. I never have and never will. I show them out of a book what God teaches. Then it’s for them to decide.

  At one point, the FBI asked the Davidians to make videotapes of people inside the building so that they could see everyone was OK. The Davidians happily complied. The videos included Davidian women explaining, with apparent authenticity, that they lived at Mount Carmel because they liked it there. Koresh himself appeared, asking why the ATF couldn’t have just arrested him ‘at the side of the road’ one day, instead of pointing guns at the women and children of Mount Carmel. The FBI did not release the tapes to the public.

  The FBI continued to believe they were dealing with dupes being controlled by a psychopath. The Davidians thought of themselves as intelligent, spiritual people who had freely chosen to live in a community that did not conform to society’s norms. The two sides also had radically different ideas about what kind of conversation they were having. The FBI negotiators approached it as an exercise in pragmatism. Their aim was to drain the conversation of emotion in order to engage in a bargaining process: You give me this, I’ll give you that. The Davidians were not interested in bargaining. Like Schneider in that opening exchange, they wanted to talk about what was happening in the context of God, scripture and the meaning of existence. But whenever Koresh or the other Davidians offered a religious interpretation of events, they were dismissed or ignored. The FBI kept trying to bring the conversation back to what they took to be the real issues; to the Davidians, God was the real issue.

  Early on, the FBI and Koresh came to an agreement that the Davidians would leave the compound if a message, recorded by Koresh, was broadcast on national radio. The broadcast was made, but the agreement dissolved when Koresh told negotiators that God had ordered him to wait. The negotiators began pressing him on what they perceived as a personal commitment:

  FBI: Okay. I need to know, are you going to live up to your promise? What are you planning to do?

  Koresh: Let me explain. See, in verse two –

  FBI: Yes, I know. Please tell me what you’re going to do.

  Koresh: I am trying. Please look at verse two of Nahum.

  FBI: Let’s not talk in those terms, please.

  Koresh: No. Then you don’t understand my doctrine.

  The conversations often had the flavour of a parent–teenager row. The negotiators took a paternalistic tone, only pretending to take the Davidian talk of God seriously. The Davidians sensed their condescension and became more resistant. A common reason that negotiations and disagreements of any kind go bad is that one side, or both, has not made an effort to see things from the other’s perspective. That can require not just the effort to consider another opinion, but to consider a whole other cultural worldview, which, however bizarre it seems to you, is just as rich and real as your own.

  * * *

  In 1934, Victor Houteff, a Bulgarian immigrant, and a disillusioned Seventh Day Adventist, formed a commune outside Waco to await the Second Coming of Christ. The group, which later became known as the Branch Davidians, built themselves a compound called Mount Carmel. The Davidians were part of American Christianity’s millennialist tradition, which also spawned Mormonism and the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Millennialists believe that a close reading of the Bible offers specific clues to when and how the Second Coming, and the end of the world, will arrive, and often rely on certain individuals, privileged to be God’s messengers, to interpret those clues. The Davidians paid particular attention to passages from the Book of Revelation which suggest that a mysterious figure known as the Lamb of God will one day open the Seven Seals, a book held in the right hand of God, heralding the return of the Messiah and the end of time.

  In 1981, a long-haired 23-year-old high-school dropout and rock guitarist named Vernon Howell pulled up to Mount Carmel in a yellow Buick and asked to join the community. Howell was charismatic in an unconventional way, softly spoken but intense, with a sharp sense of humour, and an extraordinarily detailed knowledge of scripture, which he could recite by heart for hours. When Howell opened a Bible, people gathered expectantly. Scruffily dressed in T-shirt and sneakers and streaked with grease from the garage where he loved to tinker with cars, he embarked on marathon storytelling sessions that could last for twelve hours at a stretch. He would start off chatty and low-key, gradually building towards peaks of intensity. As an observer put it, ‘When he read scripture it was as if he were actually there taking part in the events.’

  Howell soon assumed spiritual leadership of the group, and changed his name to David Koresh – David after the biblical king, Koresh for Cyrus, the ancient Persian king. Koresh convinced the Mount Carmel community that he was the Lamb of God – the one chosen by God to open the way for the Messiah. He told the group that God’s chosen would soon fight a terrible battle against the forces of Satan, represented by the United Nations and led by the United States government. Despite this, the Davidians were not hostile to the outside world. They were often seen in Waco, where they were regarded as eccentric but harmless. One of them ran a legal practice there. Koresh himself sometimes ventured into town and even made trips to other countries, including the UK, where he successfully recruited new members from black churches. One Davidian who joined around this time remembered Mount Carmel as an ‘open and friendly’ place.

  The community’s hundred or so members included people from Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines and Canada. Some were poor, some rich, and some highly educated – the lawyer, an African American called Wayne Martin, was a Harvard graduate.

  The Davidians were at once more ‘normal’ than the FBI imagined, and stranger. The point of the commune was to live by different rules to the rest of society. Koresh, who was married to a fellow Davidian, took numerous ‘spiritual wives’ from among the Mount Carmel community, and fathered over a dozen children, purportedly in order to create a dynasty that would rule the world after the return of Christ. These ‘wives’ included the partners of his male followers, and at least one underage girl (the younger sister of his legal wife). Most of us would find all of this morally repellent. Within the community Koresh’s sexual conduct was understood as ordained by biblical teachings (although it was the group’s main source of friction). The Davidians didn’t worship Koresh or believe him t
o be a deity. He was simply the one through whom God had chosen to speak. When Koresh and the Davidians said they were waiting to discover what they should do next, they meant it.

  The FBI understood that the Davidians had their own very particular belief system. What they could not quite bring themselves to accept was that the Davidians really believed in it. That failure of imagination was linked to another one, even more fundamental: the FBI couldn’t see its own culture.

  At Mount Carmel, the two sides spoke across a cultural divide. One regarded itself as rational and analytical, while the other believed it was living a biblically ordained narrative. But the Davidians showed more understanding of the FBI than the FBI did of the Davidians. You get a sense of that in this brief exchange between an FBI negotiator and Koresh’s lieutenant, Steve Schneider:

  FBI: But that [waiting for God’s word] was not our agreement, Steve.

  Schneider: I understand. I know in this world you don’t believe that there is a supernatural power that speaks audibly to a person.

  FBI: No.

  The FBI’s transactional tone is typical of professional bureaucracies and would have been normal to them, but it was very different to how the Davidians thought or spoke. The result was an endlessly frustrating back-and-forth in which neither side could even agree on what the conversation was about or how to conduct it. In the following exchange, Koresh notes that the FBI have their own gods, and that unless both sides can acknowledge that they have a particular worldview, neither will really hear the other:

  FBI: The bottom line is you’re the one that’s going to hear God, right?

  Koresh: Yes, I’m the one listening to God and you’re the one listening to the law, your system.

  FBI: And I’m listening to you.

  Koresh: That’s not true. You’re listening at me and I’m listening at you.

  When negotiation guides cover cultural differences, they usually advise learning something about the other side’s culture. That’s a good start, but you should make yourself aware that you have a culture too, which is hard to do if you believe your worldview is somehow not a worldview at all, but just the natural way to see things. Seeing your own culture isn’t just a challenge for professional negotiators, but for everyone who interacts with people with different worldviews to our own. We all have our own gods, which seem entirely normal where we come from.

  * * *

  When he was a graduate student in anthropology at UCLA, Joe Henrich travelled to the jungles of Peru to carry out fieldwork among the Machiguenga, a people indigenous to the Amazon basin. Henrich ran a behavioural experiment used by Western economists to test people’s instinct for fairness. He expected to find that, even in an isolated culture like this one, people would play the game in roughly the same way as Westerners, since the prevailing assumption among social scientists was that humans share the same psychological hardwiring. The experiment was a bargaining game, in which two participants had to agree to split a given amount of money in a way satisfactory to both. When the game was played with American students, people’s instinct for fairness meant they would reject a low offer of cash from the other individual even if it meant both walking away with nothing. But, as it turned out, the Machiguenga found this absurd. Why would anyone turn down free money?

  Henrich wondered if the assumption of universalism made by economists and psychologists was deeply misleading. He led a study of fourteen other isolated, small societies, from Tanzania to Indonesia, and found that all of them played the game differently to North Americans and Europeans. Together with collaborators, Henrich went on to reveal that a whole range of established findings in psychology, from spatial awareness to moral reasoning, did not apply to people who were from cultures other than Western industrialised countries. This work culminated in a 2010 paper entitled ‘The Weirdest People in the World?’ By WEIRD, Henrich and his fellow authors meant the 15 per cent of humans who are Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic. Henrich wanted to convey that the Western mindset was not just different to the rest of the world, it was deeply, interestingly odd – that if anything, it is we in the West, not people like the Machiguenga, who are the truly exotic tribe. Until scientists understand that, they cannot claim to understand humans at all.

  People with a WEIRD mindset are more likely to ‘punish’ people who seem to be cheating them with a lowball offer, because they live in societies in which strangers often do business with one another. People from close-knit societies like the Machiguenga perceive the offer as a gift that comes with obligations – the Machiguenga in Joe Henrich’s test, for example, had been more likely to reject the generous offers than the modest ones. The larger the gift, the more burdensome the obligation. WEIRD people tend to be more analytical, breaking up situations into parts and assigning them to abstract categories. Those with a more holistic mindset, like East Asians, focus on the relationships between things and between people, relying more on intuition to figure out what’s going on. For instance, when study respondents are presented with a diagram showing a scarf, a glove and a hand, and are asked to pick the two most closely related objects, Westerners tend to pick the scarf and glove, because both are pieces of winter clothing, while East Asians are more likely to pick the hand and glove, because of their close relationship to one another.

  Inspired by Henrich’s work, cultural psychologist Thomas Talhelm ran tests like this with groups of American conservatives and liberals. He found that liberals and conservatives think as though they are from completely different cultures – ‘almost as different as East and West’. Liberals are more WEIRD than conservatives: more analytical, readier to think in abstractions. No wonder that American liberals and conservatives have so many dysfunctional disagreements: they perceive reality in fundamentally different ways.

  While both sides think their worldview is normal, their mutual misunderstanding is not symmetrical. Jonathan Haidt, a political psychologist, also ran a study in the USA, one that asked liberals and conservatives the same set of questions about moral and political issues. Then he asked the liberals to answer like conservatives and the conservatives to answer like liberals. The conservatives were significantly better at predicting how liberals would respond than vice versa.

  ‘Conservatives understand liberals better than liberals understand conservatives,’ Haidt concluded.

  * * *

  After the first group of children were sent out of Mount Carmel, Koresh and the community were under the impression that the FBI had agreed to send in milk for the remaining children. But the milk did not arrive, because the FBI had decided to use it as a bargaining chip. Their position was that they would only deliver milk if more children were released. A Davidian, Kathryn Schroeder, raised the issue with one of the negotiators:

  FBI: I can only provide it to you, I can only provide it to you –

  Schroeder: If we send out four more kids, that doesn’t make sense.

  FBI: Listen, I’ll, I’ll get the milk to you for two kids.

  Schroeder: You get the milk to me for the two kids that went out Friday.

  FBI: Kathy, perhaps we’re wasting one another’s time. All right? Put somebody else on.

  Schroeder: I mean all you want, all you want to do is bargain?

  FBI: Kathy!

  Schroeder: Are you going to bargain with human lives?

  If any one conversation between the FBI and the Davidians exemplified the problem of cultural mismatch, it was the argument over milk. The FBI talked about the children as if they were tradeable objects, when, to the Davidians, they were sacred entities. This discrepancy wasn’t because the FBI negotiators were inhumane – the whole point of focusing on children was because they felt the children should be put out of harm’s way. It was because they were locked into the technocratic mindset of negotiators. The FBI saw themselves as the rational ones; they never imagined that there might be a different kind of rationality to the behaviour of the Davidians. The children left at Mount Carmel included Kore
sh’s own, who were considered particularly special, with a significant role to play in the End of Time. They, of all children, couldn’t just be handed over for milk.

  When the FBI negotiator stresses that his prime concern is for the welfare of the children, Schroeder is sceptical: ‘It doesn’t sound like you’re concerned.’ ‘I’ll be happy to talk with you,’ he replies, ‘if you want to use reason.’ According to Jayne Docherty, author of a perceptive book on the Waco negotiations, this was typical of how the male FBI negotiators behaved with female Davidians: they implied that they were too emotional to think straight. In many types of disagreement, there is often a party who seeks to play the game by their rules of engagement, and a party who questions those rules. One side sees themselves as reasonable; the other as if they are being ever so politely stamped upon. Pain and rage can build up under the surface of an apparently polite conversation, unacknowledged – until there is an eruption.

  Indicating his growing impatience with the conversation, the FBI negotiator repeats his proposed bargain to Schroeder: ‘Send the children out, the milk will be there . . .’ He simply cannot understand why she does not grasp his logic. But it’s not that Schroeder doesn’t grasp it, it’s that she resists it, because she feels like she is being pushed around:

  Schroeder: If, if I don’t . . . what I’m saying is you’re saying that we don’t have anything to say to each other because I don’t agree with your stipulations. That’s – it’s like who’s controlling whose mind here? Dave is not controlling my mind. You’re trying to control my mind.