What Is The Antidote to Contention?

It's funny which memories stick with us.

Winter 1987. I was in 3rd grade, and at recess my best friend and I had gotten into an argument about something I'm sure was very important to both of us.

The bell rang to go back in. We weren't walking together, but we were within earshot of each other. I joined a conversation with some other friends. One friend commented to another about how someone was being a "butt" to them.

"Let them be a butt," was my response.

My best friend turned at the top of the stairs leading into the "portable" where our class was held.

Our teacher stood there holding the door open as we shuffled in. My friend stopped and told the teacher that I'd called him a bad name.

My teacher never believed the truth, and I got sentenced to miss afternoon recess.

I was young, but it's the first time I remember being completely incensed at someone. I was furious that my best friend had gotten me in trouble over something I didn't even do. During that missed recess, I spent the time thinking about ways to get even with him. As far as I was concerned, our friendship was over, and all I could think about was what I was going to say to put him in his place.

Fortunately for us, the contention ended when we met at the flagpole to fight it out, only to realize that both the original disagreement and everything that followed were misunderstandings.

The thing is, contention isn't disagreement.

We can disagree, even vigorously, without despising each other. Contention starts when defeating the other person becomes more important than resolving the disagreement—or at least finding common ground.

In the domains where I work, I'm generally right. I'm the person people come to for answers. On one hand, that feels good. On the other, it can make it hard to admit when I'm wrong. I've also worked with people who are not always easy to communicate with, and when disagreements emerge, it becomes far too easy to start despising the person rather than doing the harder work of reconciliation.

In general, it feels like society has been on a kind of death march toward adversarial behavior becoming the default mode:

• politics rewards the devastating sound bite;

• social media rewards outrage and certainty;

• the 24/7 news cycle rewards conflict;

• algorithms reward whatever keeps us emotionally engaged;

• even ordinary conversations increasingly borrow from the language of combat.

Today, people are constantly getting destroyed, owned, crushed, cooked, exposed, ratioed, etc.

We've built an enormous cultural scoreboard around winning interactions that were never supposed to have winners.

Take marriage, for example. For centuries, it's been about a mutual agreement between two people to put the other's needs and self-interest ahead of their own. If you do that for each other, marriages thrive. I know. I've been married to my best friend for almost 26 years, and we've only gotten better at it with time.

Friendships aren't supposed to have winners either. In a lot of ways, they follow the same pattern as marriage. Seeking to understand and appreciate each other is key to strong relationships.

Neighborhood disagreements and workplace disagreements aren't supposed to have winners and losers.

Honestly, I don't think even democracy works very well if half the country believes its principal responsibility is humiliating the other half. (Two-party systems need some rethinking, but that's a conversation for another day.)

Winning Has a Hidden Cost

I once had a boss with whom I was good friends for many years. We spent time together outside of work, went on a few double dates, and occasionally traveled together for leisure.

Things changed when we started a new business together that required tremendous personal sacrifice. One year, with a team of just three people, we closed millions of dollars in new business. We worked ourselves to the bone, day and night, and when it came time to be compensated for our work, the capitalist imbalance was too great for me to bear.

My partner reasoned that he was the money guy. That's true in business. It seems there's always a money person. Even when everyone works equally hard, the money often gets the highest compensation in the end.

I got a decent payday, but it wasn't life-changing money. My partner, however, made enough that he could have reasonably stopped working for the next 30 years and been okay.

I had begged for help throughout that year and been turned down each time.

When I finally reached a breaking point, I quit.

He asked me for a number that would convince me to stay. There was no number, because either it would be so high that he would resent me, or I would feel cheated and resent him.

I left the company on bad terms with a person who had once been my best friend.

In a way, I'd won the argument. I got what I wanted, and he had to hire six people to replace me.

What I lost, however, was a friendship that had once been dear to me.

You can prove a point and damage a friendship, sometimes beyond repair. You can have the last word and lose someone's trust. You might embarrass an employee in a way that ensures they'll never speak openly to you again.

Bringing it a bit closer to home, you might defeat your spouse's argument yet make home feel a little less welcoming or even less safe. Or, to pick the favorite soup du jour of the talking heads, you might prevail politically while making civil society less civil.

That ledger matters.

If the objective was to preserve the relationship and solve the problem, "I won the argument" may actually represent a failed transaction.

So often, especially in emotionally charged disagreements, we measure the wrong output.

There's an enormous difference between thinking, "That idea is wrong," and thinking, "That person is what is wrong."

Once people become nothing more than their opinions, political affiliations, religion, mistakes, deficiencies, professions, demographics, or positions in an argument, cruelty gets much easier.

When people are distilled down to categories, you no longer have to listen. You don't have to extend grace to an avatar or wonder whether a caricature might know something you don't.

Fortunately and unfortunately, actual people are inconveniently complicated. They have histories, children, fears, reasons, contradictions, and things they've endured that you know nothing about. They might be very well informed on a subject or completely ignorant of the truth.

That's okay.

The point isn't that everyone is right in their own way. That's the moral relativism schtick of our time. The point is that being right or being wrong doesn't make us more or less human.

The Antidote Isn't Agreement

We don't have to put blinders on.

Seeing the other person as more important than winning doesn't mean pretending that false things are true. It doesn't mean turning a blind eye to harmful behavior or abandoning our moral convictions. It most certainly doesn't mean tolerating abuse, avoiding necessary conflict, or splitting everything down the middle.

You should say no sometimes. You should leave sometimes. Or fire someone. Or call a terrible idea a terrible idea. You might even need to fight a misguided law.

Where we have to be careful is what happens internally while we do it.

It is this:

Can I oppose what you are doing without needing to diminish who you are?

That, my friends, is a much harder standard.

It's not always easy to catch ourselves when arguments start to heat up, but if you can create enough space to ask yourself one question, it can change the nature of the disagreement:

What outcome am I pursuing?

Am I trying to understand, persuade, solve something, protect someone, or clarify what happened?

Or am I trying to embarrass them, prove I'm smarter, punish them, demonstrate loyalty to my side, or simply enjoy the satisfaction of being right?

A pretty simple test for contention may be whether I would still say what I'm about to say if nobody else were watching.

That's a good social-media test in particular.

Lest we turn this into a listicle of "Seven Habits of Non-Contentious People," let's look at a few concrete behaviors.

• Instead of delivering a rebuttal, ask one more question to deepen your own understanding.

• Try restating the other person's position as accurately as you can, in your own words, before criticizing it.

• Lower your voice when the other person raises theirs.

• Correct someone privately and with grace. Humiliation is never necessary.

• Acknowledge what they got right.

It might look like actually saying, "I may be misunderstanding you," or, "I want to understand your position."

Sometimes, it might look like ending a conversation because neither person is capable of doing anything useful with it anymore.

Or, hardest of all, it might mean allowing somebody to walk away without knowing that you won.

We're entering a period of history in which societies face enormous disruptive forces: technology, AI, automation, economic change, environmental uncertainty, political instability, and fundamental questions about our own work and meaning.

Addressing those problems will require a tremendous amount of disagreement.

Reasonable people are going to have radically different ideas about what should happen, so the goal can't be the elimination of disagreement. What we need, more than ever, is healthier disagreement.

We simply can't afford the assumption that people who disagree with us are therefore our enemies.

The next decade probably won't suffer from a shortage of difficult questions. The likelier shortage will be people capable of arguing about those questions without learning or choosing to hate each other.

I've spent enough of my life studying Christianity that I can't pretend these are original ideas.

"Love your enemies" may be one of the most unreasonable instructions ever given to human beings, which is probably why we've spent two thousand years finding "creative" ways around it.

Jesus didn't say enemies weren't enemies or that wrongdoing wasn't wrong.

He said to love them anyway.

The crystal-clear lesson is the insistence that the person standing across from me retains his value even when I believe he is profoundly wrong.

I have no grand ideas about how to fix this glaring societal problem other than bringing it back to home base.

The next time you disagree with your spouse or someone you love, argue with a coworker, feel yourself getting angry about a political post, or have to listen to one more person talk confidently about something you know is absolutely wrong, ask one question:

Is this person more important to me than winning this exchange?

Can I remember, even while disagreeing with someone, that they matter to me more than the satisfaction of defeating them?

I don't know if that fixes society.

But it might fix your next conversation.

And that's probably where we all have to start.