Conflict, crisis, consumption: What’s eating our nation?
- sciart0
- May 1
- 2 min read
Excerpt: "Right now, according to Graham Boyd at the University of Mississippi, we only feel heard about 5% of the time, which means are we all terrible listeners? Is anyone listening?
As George Bernard Shaw is reported to have said, "The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
When people feel heard, something incredible happens. I've seen it again and again, again.
Everyone that I followed for "High Conflict" at some point reached what's known as a saturation point, which is kind of like hitting rock bottom, right? Where something happens where you suddenly start to question whether all of this conflict is actually worth the cost.
It's a moment of dizzying disorientation where people have to decide whether they're gonna stay in high conflict or do something radically different. I followed Curtis Toler, who was a fairly high-ranking gang leader in Chicago for many years. He was in a longstanding vendetta with a rival gang for lots of reasons that were very understandable from a long history of violence, but there was this moment when he saw his son graduating from eighth grade, and for a variety of reasons, which I explained in the book, all of a sudden, he found himself just silently weeping, which is not something Curtis typically did in public or in private.
But all of a sudden, he had this moment where he started to really question existentially whether this conflict was still worth it, and this moment's really important because a lot of people hit a saturation point, but they have nowhere to go. No one is welcoming them out of the conflict, because at this point, they've become so dangerous or so toxic that nobody wants anything to do with them outside of the conflict itself."