Book Review: High Conflict
High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out by Amanda Ripley (Simon & Schuster, 2021).
Whom do you hate?
Don’t duck the question; you know there’s someone whose face just popped into your mind. Maybe several someones. I have some too—we all do. It might be someone you know, or someone on TV or social media that you’ve never even met—doesn’t matter. Just the thought of those people gets our blood pressure going and makes us want to throw things. And doesn’t it seem lately that there are more of them than ever?
Our world has always been full of conflict, but these days it feels like life is conflict. Every incident that takes place, big or small, national or local, huge natural disaster or small school board meeting, is an opportunity—almost a mandate—to pick a side, identify a villain, and try to scream everyone else down. Trolling the other side gets you lots of eager followers, and open displays of hatred just prove how serious and authentic you are.
I don’t know about you, but to me it doesn’t feel like a sustainable state of affairs.
In such a turbulent environment, I don’t know much good a book like Amanda Ripley’s can do, but I do wish I could make lots of people read it. Ripley has done her research and then some, conducting extensive interviews with everyone from former gangsters and guerillas to conservative corrections officers and progressive synagogue members. She’s interested in how conflict takes on a life of its own, growing uncontrollably and demanding more of our attention until we end up basing our entire identity on it. And she’s committed to finding and sharing ways to get out of it.
It’s not that Ripley is completely against conflict. “We need healthy conflict in order to defend ourselves, to understand and each other and to improve,” she explains. “… High conflict, by contrast, is what happens when conflict clarifies into a good-versus-evil kind of feud, the kind with an us and a them.” When this happens, she continues, the conflict is no longer about what originally started it. Instead, it’s about taking down the enemy at all costs. And that’s when it can get dangerous.
I appreciate that one of the first stories Ripley tells is about Gary Friedman, a lawyer whose unique style of conflict mediation has helped people all over the world—but who eventually found himself slinging mud in a bitter community conflict. It’s a sobering but needful reminder just how easy it is for us all to get sucked in, however well-intentioned, intelligent, and experienced we are. It’s also something of a gentle and unthreatening way to lead us into a book that will soon go on to deal with much bigger and more serious conflicts, the kind that can get you killed just for being someone’s relative or wearing your hat the wrong way.
Ripley warns us who and what to watch out for when conflicts begin to escalate: the “fire starters” who have their own reasons for stoking the flames. As often as not, there’s someone who stands to benefit from a high conflict, gaining money or power or status from undermining our identities and reducing us to a state of insecurity that will cause us to lash out. “It is important to be vigilant,” Ripley advises. “To notice when one of our identities feels newly electrified, and to ask the question: Who does this serve?”
While the forces that encourage high conflict are powerful, and Ripley takes them very seriously, she doesn’t take a pessimistic view; instead, she looks for stories of how people found a way out. Examining our own vulnerabilities and identifying the fire starters trying to take advantage of them is a good start. Who in our lives is encouraging us to hate and fear others—and, more importantly, why?
Ripley also observes that sometimes the very things that pulled us into high conflict, like the group identity found among families or religions or countries or even sports fans, can be the same things that help us put a stop to it. “When they’re not generating it themselves,” Ripley writes, a touch dryly, “families compete with high conflict all over the world.” Time and again in these stories, it’s personal relationships—with a child or a parent or even just someone who has some interests in common—that point the way to the exit.
There are places in the book where I wish Ripley could have gone a little deeper, perhaps exploring how reformed drug dealers and killers deal with the guilt of their former lives, or how a Colombian guerilla trying to rejoin society can find new ways to deal with the injustices she’d been trying to fight in the first place. But no one book can address everything, and what Ripley has addressed here, she’s handled in sensitive, thoughtful, and inspiring ways. Her book taught me a lot, including some good ways to manage the angry and hateful feelings I described at the beginning of this review, and I hope it will do the same for plenty of other readers. Goodness knows we all need it.
(Cover image copyright Simon & Schuster.)
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