num_pages: 368
description: When we are baffled by the insanity of the other sidein our politics at work or at homeits because we arent seeing how the conflict itself has taken over.Thats what high conflict does. Its the invisible hand of our time. And its different from the useful friction of healthy conflict. Thats good conflict and its a necessary force that pushes us to be better people.High conflict by contrast is what happens when discord distills into a good-versus-evil kind of feud the kind with an us and a them . In this state the normal rules of engagement no longer apply. The brain behaves differently. We feel increasingly certain of our own superiority and at the same time more and more mystified by the other side.New York Times bestselling author and award-winning journalist Amanda Ripley investigates how good people get captured by high conflictand how they break free.Our journey begins in California where a world-renowned conflict expert struggles to extract himself from a political feud. Then we meet a Chicago gang leader who dedicates his life to a vendettaonly to find himself working beside the man who killed his childhood idol. Next we travel to Colombia to find out whether thousands of people can be nudged out of high conflict at scale. Finally we return to America to see what happens when a group of liberal Manhattan Jews and conservative Michigan corrections officers choose to stay in each others homes in order to understand one another better.All these people in dramatically different situations were drawn into high conflict by similar forces including conflict entrepreneurs humiliation and false binaries. But ultimately all of them found ways to transform high conflict into something good something that made them better people. They rehumanized and recategorized their opponents and they revived curiosity and wonder even as they continued to fight for what they knew was right.People do escape high conflict. Individualseven entire communitiescan short-circuit the feedback loops of outrage and blame if they want to. This is a mind-opening new way to think about conflict that will transform how we move through the world.
language: English
title: High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out
publisher: Simon & Schuster