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Introduction:
Morton Deutsch talks about Deutsch's "first commandment of conflict:" know what kind of conflict you are in.
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This rough transcript provides a text alternative to audio. We apologize for occasional errors and unintelligible sections (which are marked with ???).
The First Commandment of Conflict
Morton Deutsch
E.L. Thorndike Professor and Director Emeritus of the International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution at Teachers College, Columbia University
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A: I would like to
have a dialogue with bin Laden and see. I don't know if it would be possible,
but when somebody has an attitude that requires your destruction for their
happiness or survival, you are in a zero-sum conflict. That's what one of my
students call, "Deutsch's Commandments of Conflict."
My first is to
know what kind of conflict you're in. There are some conflicts that are
zero-sum.
Q: No matter how you cut it?
A: There are interpersonal relationships that you sometimes cannot
separate, but in some relations, where I say, my values must dominate the world,
or dominate you, and I will persist until you're dominated. And I don't want
your values to dominate me, you don't want your values to be dominated by me.
Then you may be in that kind of conflict. If separation is possible that's
probably the best way to handle that kind of conflict. Let people who have that
kind of belief, who want to spray their territory with some sort of thing to
kill off gypsy moths, and those who don't. If they can do it only there, but not here,
there's one way of resolving the conflict. But otherwise, if you have to do it
one way everywhere, then it becomes zero-sum conflict.
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