Welcome to Conflict Confidential, a newsletter about people and problems, human (dis)connection, and conflict transformation.
We exist, together. We move through the world alongside each other but live immersed in our own perceptions. We subtly seek confirmation from one another. We consider our surroundings to assess our placement. We cross-check with our friends, or refresh our algorithms, to determine if our realities match up- if we’re wearing the right uniform, if we’re disliking the right people, if our personal experiences are relatable. But how is it going for each of us within each moment of each day? That’s the only thing we can truly intimately know.
But we also know our relationships. We know how it feels to be a person. We know if our IRL interactions are mostly unpleasant or interesting, disappointing or life-affirming. We might have seasons in our lives where most of our interactions trend one way or the other. We sometimes might get stuck, looping similar experiences with new people, or even just the same people. Our relationships reinforce how we view ourselves.
“Witness me!!” I’ve started yelling in my house. I’m kind of joking. But am I? Constantly I’m bombarding my husband with the thoughts swirling around in my mind. He might be making himself a sandwich when I burst into the kitchen to tell him about a phone call I just had, or an interview I listened to earlier that’s making me question everything. Working from home has exacerbated my tendency to (over)share what I’m experiencing with whoever is around me. It’s my way of affirming my own human existence, by connecting with others. I know it’s probably very annoying. But there’s something to it.
People crave connection. We want to feel like we belong. We want to feel seen, heard, and understood. Despite how we feel about those other people, they actually feel the same way too. Bonding with others is a fundamental need in all of us.1 Culture, family dynamics, institutions, and (social) media influence how we understand connection and how we react to the world.2 We tend to be unified in roles, group identities, or shared belief systems. But there is not much in the mainstream to encourage us to feel like we’re actually ALL unified all the time. If anything, it’s something we need to be reminded of. And boy oh boy did the pandemic serve as a harsh reminder of how we really are all connected. It made human interconnection scary. But we have an opportunity to transform this difficult realization into a new way to engage with one another. It’s time to embrace our interconnection.
I struggle with the idea of interconnectedness. Yet I hear about it constantly.3 It’s challenging to comprehend we all are interconnected and so too are our actions. Maybe because of my personal background.4 Or maybe because so much of the messaging in our modern world is you or me-focused, not a whole lotta we. Sure, sometimes there’s a feeling of “we” in political contexts. Or when we connect through common aims at work, or when we gossip. But in the day to day order of things, not so much. Mia Birdsong kinda put it best in this Hurry Slowly interview about our longing to be known of what it feels like to be a parent in a big city - 30 apartment units, 30 separate babysitters. While we parents in the building could come together to arrange a communal system of childcare, we just don’t. We don’t do “we” in our culture. We do “me.” And you do you.
Some of us are lucky to have a “supportive community” within our families and friends. But does anyone really feel supported by greater community? It’s a stretch to expect anyone outside of our circles to be that concerned about us, or for us to care for every stranger as we do the people we intimately love.
But what if we did?
There is a concept called “Beloved Community” in the Kingian Nonviolence philosophy of conflict reconciliation. In the tradition of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and movement strategies of the Civil Rights era, the idea of Beloved Community is not just some idealistic utopian vision without interpersonal or group conflict (because conflict is a natural part of the human experience.) Instead, Beloved Community is an attainable reality if people commit to and practice nonviolence. This doesn’t mean just not acting violently. It means being proactively nonviolent, to learn how to take nonviolent action. To stop violence when we witness it, and when it arises within us- in our thoughts, in our perceptions of others, in our daily interactions. The term “violence” is not just the most heinous acts. It’s also a level of cruelty that’s ingrained in us from living in a culture obsessed with punishment, identity hierarchies, and the constant othering and cancelling of people who do things we don’t like.
To practice nonviolence in ourselves and be in beloved community with others we need to start with love.5 I know, I know. This some hippy dippy shit. But stay with me. At the core of Beloved Community is the idea of agape love. Not a romantic kind of love (eros), or love between friends (philia), but rather a love that is a spontaneous and unflinching goodwill towards all people. Très Buddhist, non? Caring for others just for the sake of it.
To me this seems like an exercise in perception. What we practice in our thoughts as we move through the world becomes what we do in our actions. I admit I am very conditioned to being judgmental. It’s taking a serious rewiring to practice being loving towards people I’ve actively disliked, or strangers. It requires intention and willpower. Like, I recently caught myself in a grocery store eying a very big man filling his shopping cart to the brim with two liters of neon green soda. You’re connected to him, I reminded myself before I went down a different thought path. I repeated it. Not sure I believed it, really. But there I was, standing near him, witnessing. Enough of a proximate connection for care. I’ve started trying to think like this more and more. It’s not easy! But I will say, it does make getting through the day a lot... kinder.
The real challenge comes when we’re being confronted. I have my share of tense relationships. I pay attention to the news, even when it’s upsetting. I work with many people with widely differing world-views whose actions directly negatively impact other humans. I know that people can behave in such despicable ways. And yet. I recognize they are still a part of our community too. It’s true! They might not like or agree with us, they might act in ways that try to hurt us. But pretending they don’t exist, dismissing them, deleting them from our lives does not get us any closer to being safe with one another. Doesn’t get us closer to a more just world. It just reinforces the walls that deprive us of the ability to really see one another. We can’t connect. We can’t understand each other because we don’t have ways to know one other as people deserving of compassion.
We can continue playing Us v. Them forever, (and we know capitalism is happy for us to keep doing just that.) Or we can call it a fucking day and just practice being people, together.
When we embrace people as one of us we allow for their humanity. We might see their negative actions as signs of suffering. We might see people as flawed, as stumbling feeling humans, instead of categorically “bad” or “wrong.” This doesn’t mean suddenly inviting our longtime enemy for dinner with a side of reckoning. But perhaps we simply start by thinking of them as a part of our beloved community too. They’re in here with us, they’re a part of us. Maybe, for now, we’re comfortable with them just being way over there. Even from afar, we can care for them too.
Because if we care for each other, we’ll stand up for each other. We’ll be more likely to help one another like we would our friends, our families. For better or worse, we are a collective family, existing together on this spinning planet. The least we can do is become aware of our own perceptions and actions towards others. We can’t expect everyone to get this memo right away. But we each have the power to make this small change within us. As the late great Grace Lee Boggs has told us: we must transform ourselves to transform the world. So let’s get to it, family.
Still here? I philia love you, long reader. Just wanna say it’s taken me several months to get this post out because I’ve been focused on co-launching an organization that is putting these ideas into action. Introducing After Incarceration. We’re bringing people together to see and hear each other. We’re reaffirming that those of us who have lived through incarceration always have been and always will be a part of our community. We create space to process the trauma of being separated from community, of enduring our culture’s short-sighted approach to accountability: which is punishing harm by causing more harm and making people feel less than human. We support each other as we recognize what we need to overcome, individually, collectively, so we can build the future we want for ourselves.
See also: abolish prisons.
It feels good to be with others who understand WE are the ones who can shape change. In doing this work I feel so much more connected to people. I invite you to become a part of this growing community. Maybe your personal capacity right now is to make a contribution to help this work reach more people, especially those in our community who need connection the most. Maybe you have time or talents to offer. Or maybe you just want to open yourself up to engaging with new ideas, new folks. Let’s connect!
It really is going to take changing how we relate to one another to shift us all towards something better than what we’re living in now. We’re who controls our destinies. It may be daunting, so we start small. We start with ourselves. Be bold. See change.
Connecting and bonding with others is one of our underlying motives as human beings. Some of our other deep-rooted motives include obtaining food and water, finding love, winning social acceptance and approval, reducing uncertainty, achieving status and prestige. Check out Atomic Habits by James Clear to understand how these motives are manipulated to hook us into bad habits, and how we can change.
Can’t throw a stone into the Social Justice/spirituality/self-help/philanthropic worlds without hitting the term “interconnected.”
I was raised by Soviet Jewish immigrants who fled corrupted communism and religious persecution to live prosperously in a Western capitalist society which encourages an Us v. Them social framework. I then became a public defender in an Us v. Them adversarial criminal legal system that addresses conflict in a totally dehumanizing way. Interconnectedness is not in my social DNA.
“Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” – MLK