True Believers

3. Factors That Make Conflict Intractable

This introductory article was written by ChatGPT at the direction of Heidi Burgess, who reviewed, edited, and approved the final content.
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Many people hold strong moral, religious, political, or cultural beliefs. These strong convictions are not, by themselves, a conflict problem. Indeed, many movements for justice have depended on people who were deeply committed to moral principles. The problem arises when people become "true believers" in a more dangerous sense: they are so certain that their worldview is the only legitimate one that they deny the right of others to think, believe, or live differently. They do not see conflict as a disagreement among people with competing interests, identities, or values. They see it as a battle between truth and evil, purity and corruption, salvation and destruction.

This kind of certainty makes conflicts much harder to resolve. People who regard their beliefs as sacred or absolute are often unwilling to bargain over them. Research on moral conviction shows that attitudes held as moral mandates can be experienced differently from ordinary preferences or policy opinions. Similarly, research on sacred values in violent political conflict found that adding material incentives to encourage compromise can sometimes backfire, producing more anger instead of more flexibility. When people believe that compromise itself is immoral, ordinary negotiation tools may have little effect.

True believers also tend to simplify complex conflicts. They divide the world into believers and enemies, patriots and traitors, the righteous and the corrupt. This can justify censorship, coercion, intimidation, exclusion, or even violence because opponents are no longer seen as legitimate participants in a shared society.

Violent extremist movements such as ISIS offer an extreme example. The Council on Foreign Relations' backgrounder on the Islamic State describes a movement that sought to impose its version of religious-political order by force, using terror against those it defined as enemies. The Taliban's rule in Afghanistan offers another example of a governing movement imposing a narrow moral order on society; UN reporting on the Taliban's morality-law enforcement describes broad restrictions affecting personal, public, religious, and economic life, with especially severe consequences for women and girls.

True-believer dynamics are not limited to religion. Secular ideologies can become equally absolute. Communist, fascist, white supremacist, nationalist, and revolutionary movements have all, at times, treated dissent as treason and opponents as enemies to be eliminated rather than citizens to be persuaded.

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's explanation of Nazi racism shows how a totalizing racial ideology helped justify exclusion, persecution, and genocide. Britannica's account of China's Cultural Revolution describes another case in which ideological purification produced social upheaval, persecution, and institutional breakdown. These examples differ enormously in context and severity, but they all show what can happen when an ideology claims total authority over human life.

Constructive conflict handling with true believers is difficult because the goal cannot simply be "finding a middle ground." Some demands are too coercive or destructive to compromise with, especially when they deny basic rights or threaten violence. Still, it is important to distinguish between hard-core true believers, their followers, and people who are only loosely attached to the movement. Conflict resolution efforts may be able to reduce recruitment, protect potential targets, open exit paths for doubters, strengthen alternative sources of meaning and belonging, and build coalitions among people who reject coercion, even if they disagree on many other things. The challenge is to defend pluralistic, democratic life without imitating the absolutism of those who would destroy it.

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This page was created by ChatGPT in response to this prompt. It was then reviewed, edited, supplemented and approved by Heidi Burgess. More information about how and why we are using AI in this way, and about the growing number of ways in which Beyond Intractability is using ChatGPT, Claude and other AI systems to generate content and build out the BI system, is available on our BI/AI Overview Page.