How to cite this journal: Author, Date of the post, WMO Conflict Insight, Title of the post, ISSN: 2628 6998, https://worldmediation.org/journal/
ABSTRACT *
This essay asks whether the principal obstacle in politics is not ideas or law but unsound behaviour, deficient communication and personality disorder, and whether existing structures reward precisely these traits. Written as a sequence of open questions, it traces the influence of adversarial assumptions from mercantilism to modern theories of competition, considers the promise and the limits of the information revolution, and invokes Ortega y Gasset’s warning against specialisation that leaves individuals discounting their own experience and specialists indifferent to the whole. Drawing on Lawrence LeShan, the author argues that the widespread inability to face psychological pain leads people to ignore the pain of others and thus the issues society most needs to address, and warns that environments of risk and power favour those least capable of self reflection and empathy, particularly where the public prefers strong leaders to the responsibility of participation. The essay closes by asking what techniques of communication and conflict resolution might respond to this.
KEYWORDS *
Political culture, behaviour, empathy, personality disorder, communication, Ortega y Gasset, specialisation, information revolution, leadership, self reflection, psychological pain, participation
INTRODUCTION
Can it be that unsound behavior, communication deficiencies, and personality disorders, not concepts or even the law are the main problem in politics?
Do we reward unsound behavior?
Do we install processes that protect the diversity of voices and look out for the emotional, physical, and social health of participants? Governing has been marked by social hierarchies and power struggles including violence and death. Economic theory has often been based on concepts arrived from the war as many of the “facts/concepts” we use when applying ourselves for success, motivation, and legitimized behavior.
MAIN CORPUS
Has it always been this way?
Similar behavioral thinking and motivation are shown in economic theory from the time of mercantilism promoting gain as having to be at others’ expense to modern ideas on competition and comparative advantage. “Social capital” and “brute force” alongside other persuasive powers with coercion often lead the way. The nation-state seems only to cover feudal lords and merchant networks rather than building from the principle for the whole. Can we prove these ideas wrong? Are they counterproductive? Do some win in the competition at the cost of their own isolation, decreased empathetic capabilities, and diminished connections, or worse?
The information revolution
The Internet revolutionizes public scrutiny, conversation, and decision-making. Especially where media may be controlled by few people and online publishing/participation is a reality.
What about the quality of the thinkers and the information?
The Spanish philosopher José Ortega Y Gassett warned us against the hegemony of specialization. Everything becomes somebodies else’s domain leaving individuals discounting their lives – discounting their own experiences and sense of navigating the world. The specialist then in such a case being a product of modern education and in danger of myopia, lacking concern for the whole: If men confuse symbols (expert knowledge) with the realities of being human.
When the politician and the scientist are ignorant of the decencies of integrity or if they give in to threat and danger – can the public help?
Information gives the ability to engage but not necessarily the ability to know by having walked out of an experience or the ability to deal constructively with threats.
Do crowds have the real ability needed to bring solutions for a nation and humanity?
Based on interest various individuals can come to depths of knowledge that at times rivals the knowledge of experts. Magnifying diversity of discourse, diversifying the risk of participation. Specialists in psychological influence can however reach people through a wider spectrum and there is a danger of information cascade.
The ability to act and know the quality of information comes up for question
People often are overwhelmed. Business & other power may threaten the quality of information. Levels of maturity and intellect differ in the power to see correlations, classify significance, events, and potentiality.
Often society rewards the ability to subdue feelings
It is hard to know if the things needing attention are addressed. It is easy to lead the discourse astray. The power of feelings, unspoken communication, and social ties is routinely underestimated. For many it is really hard to be consistent – even to have integrity towards oneself. People can be kind, but also impossibly ruthless. It is hard for people to face their own psychological pain. When they can not they may ignore the pain of others as it reminds them of their own. In so doing they routinely ignore the issues needed to be addressed by society! Lawrence Leshan an American PH.D. in psychology maintains that aspects of psychologically not being able to face pain and issues while simultaneously being able to remain “normal” or “functional”threaten life on the entire planet and for sure any reasonable functioning of any political process! People may have various levels of dysfunctional upbringing in terms of “healthy” communication, empathy, and sense of the whole. Some lack empathetic skills. When there is a high level of needing praise and not being able to constructively deal with criticism the narcissist with power even if preaching democracy utilizes coercive means, weaknesses of people, and codependent group behavior.
SUMMARY *
The essay’s governing thought is that political dysfunction is better explained by the emotional and communicative capacities of those who take part in it than by the merits of their arguments. Inherited adversarial assumptions, the fragmentation of understanding through specialisation, an information environment that grants access without judgment, and a culture that mistakes the suppression of feeling for competence combine to produce a selection effect: the traits that succeed in politics are not those that make governing wise.
CONCLUSION
Who is in control?
Sociopathic or psychopathic tendencies can thrive where there is risk, challenge, and power. The general public looks for “strong leaders” preferring not to have to take the responsibility, risk, and time needed for sensibly participating in political discourse or governance. There is danger in the confusing lacking ability of self-reflection and empathetic skills with strength and decisiveness! We tend to lift up individuals rather than the context that gives them support or needed safeguards. What techniques of communication and conflict solutions do we have that we can apply? Can we deal better with personality disorders or psychological pain? The wolves do not want anything that hinders their raiding of society. Can we help them?
POTENTIAL SOLUTION *
The essay’s closing observation contains its own answer: we lift up individuals rather than the context that gives them support or needed safeguards. That is precisely where mediation practice has something to offer, because mediation is fundamentally an argument about context. It holds that behaviour is shaped by the structure people find themselves in, that the same person who becomes rigid and combative under adversarial conditions can become creative under different ones, and that changing the structure is more reliable than changing the character.
Applied to political life, this suggests attending less to the diagnosis of leaders than to the design of the processes that select and sustain them. Debate formats that reward the sharpest attack produce politicians skilled in attack. Deliberative formats, in which participants must first restate the opposing position to its holder’s satisfaction, in which time is allowed for reflection rather than reaction, and in which facilitation protects the quieter voices, reward a different set of capacities. Citizens’ assemblies and similar structures, now tested in several countries on questions that had defeated parliaments, show that ordinary people asked to deliberate under good conditions produce careful and often courageous conclusions, which speaks directly to the essay’s question about the capabilities of crowds.
Two of the essay’s concerns deserve a more precise response. On specialisation, the corrective is not to distrust expertise but to change the relationship between experts and citizens: experts who present evidence and uncertainty to a deliberating public, and who are questioned by that public rather than deferred to, restore what Ortega feared was lost without discarding what specialists actually know. On the psychological dimension, the practical instruments already exist in the conflict resolution field, and they are ordinary rather than clinical: supervision and reflective practice for those who hold authority, structures that require decisions to be explained to those affected by them, and institutional accountability that does not depend on the self restraint of the powerful.
A caution belongs here as well. Diagnosing political opponents at a distance is itself a familiar move in polarised societies, and the language of disorder is easily used to disqualify people rather than to understand them. The safer formulation is structural: certain environments reward certain behaviours, and where power is unaccountable, where information is unverifiable and where the public prefers strength to participation, the behaviours rewarded will be the ones the essay describes. Build accountability, protect the quality of information, and make deliberation something citizens actually practise, and the same environment begins to reward something else.
The essay’s final question, whether the wolves can be helped, is more hopeful than it first appears. Mediators encounter people daily who arrive rigid, defended and combative, and who become something else when the room changes. Not everyone does. But the practice rests on the observation that most people are less fixed than they seem, and that what looks like character is often the shape a person takes under the conditions they are given.
* Added by the WMO Editorial Team
REFERENCES *
- Ortega y Gasset, J. (1930). The Revolt of the Masses. Revista de Occidente, Madrid (chapter on the barbarism of specialisation).
- LeShan, L. (2002). The Psychology of War: Comprehending Its Mystique and Its Madness. Helios Press, New York.
- Fisher, R., Ury, W., & Patton, B. (2011). Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In (3rd edition). Penguin Books, New York.
- Rosenberg, M. B. (2015). Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life (3rd edition). PuddleDancer Press, Encinitas.
- Fisher, R., & Shapiro, D. (2005). Beyond Reason: Using Emotions as You Negotiate. Viking, New York.
- Bush, R. A. B., & Folger, J. P. (2005). The Promise of Mediation: The Transformative Approach to Conflict. Jossey Bass, San Francisco.
- Fishkin, J. S. (2018). Democracy When the People Are Thinking: Revitalizing Our Politics Through Public Deliberation. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
- Organisation for Economic Co operation and Development (2020). Innovative Citizen Participation and New Democratic Institutions: Catching the Deliberative Wave. OECD Publishing, Paris.
- Surowiecki, J. (2004). The Wisdom of Crowds. Doubleday, New York.
- Sunstein, C. R. (2009). Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide. Oxford University Press, New York (on information cascades and group polarisation).
- Goleman, D. (2006). Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships. Bantam Books, New York.
- Lederach, J. P. (2005). The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace. Oxford University Press, New York.