Cómo estar en desacuerdo

On How to Disagree | The Book of Life

Disagreement is especially pressing now, because of certain large societal forces that have been building for the last couple of centuries.
1. Politics
The developed world is now democratic. We’ve long been moving away from habits of deference and from hierarchies in which most people don’t feel it’s their role to have much of a view about a lot of things.
2. Relationships of Equality
To ask any couple what they disagree about is one of the more fascinating and consoling exercises: we realise we’re not alone.
3. Technology
Technology has made disagreement more vivid. We are very readily brought into contact with other people’s abrasive attitudes – which, until recently – we could never have encountered.


HELPFUL MOVES

• DON’T RUSH OVER DISAGREEMENTS
• DISAGREEMENT IS NORMAL
• DON’T IMPORT ENERGY FROM ELSEWHERE INTO YOUR DISAGREEMENT – Energy gets imported in at least five distinctive ways:

1. Anger is redirected and concentrated
2. We are arguing with the past
3. Frustrated sexual desire gets channelled into disagreement
4. We are trying to compensate for a feeling of humiliation
5. We long for clarity in an ambiguous world

• TRAUMA: AUDIT OF THE BIOGRAPHY OF IDEAS
• UNFORTUNATE INTRODUCTIONS TO IDEAS
• SURRENDER THE PLEASURES OF SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS
• THE USES OF ART IN SOLVING DISAGREEMENT
• UNDERSTAND THE ROLE OF TECHNOLOGY IN CREATING ENEMIES

1. The fear of not being heard at all
2. The sense of being anonymous
3. It’s not a person on the other end

• SNOBBERY
• HUMOUR
• THE ROLE OF SEDUCTION AND REASSURANCE
• STRATEGIC PESSIMISM - The pessimist therefore shifts the focus away from an attempt to convert to an attempt to endure and manage disagreement. This involves two responses:

1. Human Rigths
2. Manners