Bridge-Building in Times of Hyper-Polarization and a Chat GPT Demonstration

Susan's Introduction
 

Susan: Welcome, folks. My name is Susan Goodwin, and I am one of the co-chairs for the Environment and Public Policy Section of the Association of Conflict Resolution. And we call ourselves by our acronym EPP. And we are the host for today's webinar. And my wonderful co-chair is Diane. You want to say hi, Diane? 

Diane: Good morning. Hi, everyone. So glad to see you're here. 

Susan:. And so we're going to just go through a few little housekeeping items, and we will review the agenda.  And I'll make some introductions, and then we will really start diving in. And so welcome again to our webinar and dialogue.  So let me just give a little bit of a background to who Heidi and Guy are, just as a way of explaining how I decided, "Oh, gosh, I need to reach out to the Burgesses." I've been following them with their Beyond Intractability, which is now a Substack, with great admiration and interest because I, like many of you, have been struggling, since the beginning of January, with what's happening in our country and with the state of democracy and the fact that we as facilitators, especially in public policy, it's basically our job to facilitate and mediate many democratic forums and I've been thinking, "Oh, gosh, what's happening and what's our role?"

Heidi and Guy have been partners both personally and professionally since the early 1970s. They both received their PhDs in sociology in 1979 from University of Colorado and then did post-doc work at MIT a year later during the energy crisis of the late 1970s and early '80s. And so that, together with their dissertations, encouraged their focus on difficult conflict problems ranging from international conflicts to domestic, US, environmental, and public policy conflicts.

They often say their strongest conflict resolution credential is that they've been living and working together for over 50 years. So, wow! That is a very strong credential! After working in a variety of short-term practical conflict jobs, they received a grant from the Hewlett Foundation back in the 1980s, as many of you or maybe some of you, at least, were also part of that pool of money that came from Hewlett. And so they started the Conflict Information Consortium at the University of Colorado, where they taught until they retired in 2020. They also taught peace and conflict at the University of Colorado and other universities, including George Mason University School of Conflict Analysis and Resolution, now the Carter School. They have been prolific writers, books, and with their free newsletters.

They have had kind of a hybrid career of theory-building, practice, and teaching. And their current focus is hyperpolarization, which we will hear from them about today. And they now have this Substack newsletter. If you are not a subscriber, I encourage you to become one. And they are soon going to be deploying an extensive Guide to Constructive Conflict through an updated Beyond Intractability site. So without further ado, I'm going to give the mic over to you, Heidi and Guy. 

Guy and Heidi's Presentation

Guy: We're going to have a joint slideshow as we do most things. So I'll talk for a bit, and then Heidi, and we'll switch back and forth. But the perspective that we've been taking in the last couple of years is looking at the problems with US democracy, thinking of democracy as a giant dispute-handling system. And we think that that tells you a lot about the difficulties we're in, and what we might do about it that you don't get from conventional political science approaches.

00:10:47.000 This is interesting. Our slides are not fancy. Oops, there we go. We're getting there. Yeah, before we go too far, we have been working, as Susan suggested, on the Beyond Intractability Project for well over 30 years. It's a giant free knowledge base at Beyondintractability.org.  We're going to update that very soon with a new Constructive Conflict Guide, which will have over 3,000 resources on 350 topics arranged in a systematic way that goes through the process of analyzing conflict problems and figuring out solutions using the massively parallel framework that we're going to talk about.

We also have a free substack newsletter that has our latest thinking and a lot of guest presentations as well, as well as lots of links. So we encourage you to look at that. 

Before we start talking too much about the cracks in US democracy and what we might be able to do to repair them, we thought it'd be good to start by talking about why we have a democracy in the first place.  And when I've tried to explain this to my students, I've started with this Carl Sandberg poem features two guys talking. And one guy says, "Hey, get off this estate." The guy says, "What for?" He goes, "It's mine." Well, where'd you get it from my father? Where did he get it? From his father? Where did he get it? Well, he fought for it. Well, I'll fight you for it.

This raises the specter of a society that's basically organized around what we call "I'll-fight-you-for-it rules" or power-over politics. The idea is that you can have what you can take, and you can keep what you can defend. It's a pretty dismal thought. 

But it's worse than that. There's also Matthew's Law, or Matthew's spiral, we call it sometimes. It's an idea that Kenneth Boulding was kicking around with years and years ago. I was lucky enough to get to work with him as a graduate student. He's got lots of great things to say about this field. He was fond of quoting the "Gospel of Matthew, "which has this rather stunning line, "For to everyone who has, more will be given, and he will have an abundance. But from one who has not, even what he has will be taken away." And this is the notion that power-over rules tends to lead to the accumulation of power. And as you accumulate power, that comes with the ability to accumulate even more power. And you have this giant race to see who can accumulate the most power. And eventually, some individual or group winds up on top. And all this invokes Lord Acton's law. He's the guy who famously said, "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." This is what we're really worried about— a true dystopia, a kind of a 1984 updated to 2034 technology in which we have a combination of political dysfunction, oppression, authoritarianism, and violence. Democracy is our best shot at avoiding all of this. 

Heidi: So we talk about power-over versus power-with democracy. We realize that democracy has lots of problems. There are many things that have to be fixed. But we still argue that it's humanity's best attempt to constrain power-over behavior. 

Now, democracy is based on a grand bargain. We get individual rights, the freedom to live the life as we choose, as long as we grant that freedom to others, and as long as we fulfill our collective responsibilities. Among these are charity towards others, which Guy likes to talk about in terms of the golden rule, which Karen Armstrong and the "Charter of Compassion" argues is a rule that exists in every major world religion. It's the notion that we should treat others the way we'd like to be treated. 

Another responsibility is active civic involvement. We often say that democracy is not a spectator sport. We can't just root for our side and not do anything else.  We need to get involved, at least, at the very least, through being informed and voting with that information every two or four years, but ideally a lot more than that. Getting engaged in our local government, being on boards, going to hearings, writing our congressmen and our state legislators to tell them what we think and how we want them to vote. Even involvement with PTAs and school boards counts to what we would count as active civic involvement.

We need respect for the rule of law, which means not only following laws ourselves, but expecting our leaders to do so as well. And if they don't, participate in the collective defense, which doesn't just mean serving in the military. Most of us don't do that. But we need to hold internal power-over actors to account. And most of us are just griping when we see things we don't like. We're not doing things about it. So we'll be talking more later about what might be done about it and collecting ideas from you as well.

In its essence, democracy is a network of power-with relationships. We have relationships with our neighbor. We have relationships with our government. We have relationships with the rest of civic society. And to the extent that those relationships are strong and trusting, democracy works well. To the extent that they are polarized and distrusting, democracy starts to have trouble.

And of course, our democracy is in a lot of trouble now because our relationships are breaking down, and we don't trust our institutions and all of the social capital that should be holding us together is ripped and tearing us apart. 

So we've set up these four continua between destructive power-over politics on the left and constructive power-with politics on the right.

The top continuum is the difference between value-claiming and value-creating. This is basic Fisher, Ury, and Patton  with either principal negotiation or distributive win-lose negotiation. And you guys are mediators. I know which one you want. Same one that I want. 

The second continuum has, on the left side, exploitative relationships and on the right side compassionate relationships.

The third continuum is between coercive and cooperative relationships. Power over actors rely on coercive power. Power with actors use negotiation, exchange, and persuasion. Kenneth Boulding, again, wrote a famous book that was called Three Faces of Power, in which he argued that most people think that power is force. But actually, there's three kinds of power: force, exchange and what he called "love." Most people don't relate to the term "love" in that way, so we alternate between "persuasion" and "integration." It's the glue that holds society together. And he pointed out that nobody thinks of that as power. But actually, it's the strongest form of power because the other two forms of power require integrative power to work. You have to obey a coercive leader. If people don't obey him, he loses his power.

And finally, there's collaboration and civic engagement as opposed to might makes right. And that's another one where I know where folks from ACR live. But the thing that's interesting to us and why we were so excited about Susan's invitation for us to come talk is you, is that you folks are the experts at moving people from the left side of that past diagram to the right (from value claiming to value creating, from exploitative to compassionate relationships, from coercive, might makes right power to persuasion, exchange, collaboration and civic engagement.)

If there's anybody who knows how to do that, and if there's anybody who knows how to help other people do it, it's you folks. So we're excited to get ideas from you. 

Guy: So before we go further into what we might be able to collectively imagine in terms of fixing this web of relationships, it's worth acknowledging that there are giant fault lines in society, and those fault lines are doing much to undermine this web of relationships. 

And I think part of our problem is we misunderstand the nature of these fault lines. We tend to think of the big conflict as between the left and the right, Republicans and Democrats. And while that conflict is there and it's significant and very real, it's not the whole side of the story. 

So what to me, and to both of us really, makes sense is to think in terms of a two-dimensional conflict. On the one hand, you have the left versus the right conflict between grassroots citizens that lean one way or the other. And then you have a different conflict that runs opposite that, which is the conflict between the power-over actors who are seeking to dominate and exploit a society and the grassroots citizens on the left and the right who are trying to prevent that.

The thing that power over actors are doing is they're using divide-and-conquer tactics that go back well over 2,000 years to Philip of Macedonia, who was credited as having developed this terrible idea. But the idea simply is that you try to encourage tensions within a society, encourage the escalation spiral, get people to hate each other, and get people so mad at each other that they forget that they can cooperate to fight the power over actors. And they wind up getting dominated. 

So again, we have the power over actors casting lightning bolts into society, trying to split it apart. And it turns out that's relatively easy to do because of escalation dynamics. I go back to classic Pruitt and Ruben in their book on escalation. When you have tensions, it's not hard for things to escalate from an initial phase where you're just trying to defend your interests to the point where you're more concerned about winning, and then you're really concerned about hurting the other, more than winning. And then eventually, you get so angry that you resort to the kind of violence that can destroy everything. Sadly, our society is hovering near the top of this continuum, which is partly why we're so committed to trying to find some way around this. 

The other thing that hyperpolarized politics produces is what we call pendulum politics, where you have the give and take between two power-over factions, which move society radically from one direction to the other. This slide shows just the last three swings of the presidential election from Trump to Biden and now back to Trump. And one of the things you'll notice about this pendulum is that it violates the laws of physics. With each swing, it goes further and further to the side, rather than less and less (which is the way a real pendulum works) to the point where it actually threatens to tear down the whole building.

So the big question that this way of thinking highlights, I think, and what I'd like to be the focus of our discussion, is how can we simultaneously diffuse the red-blue conflict, while we also promote power-with democracy by constraining power-over actors? There really are big differences in terms of cultural values, economic circumstances, etc. between the left and the right. There's a lot of tension there. So we need to work through that in a way that prevents runaway escalation.

But at the same time, we need to figure out how folks at the grassroots level —both Democrats and Republicans together  can challenge the bad faith actors and constrain their power.  That's really what we've got to figure out how to do. 

Heidi: Now, the hitch here, well, there's lots of hitches, but one particular problem is the sheer scale and complexity of US or any other large society. Mediators are typically used to working around tables. So family mediators have a husband and wife and one mediator. It's three people around the table. Environmental mediators often work with bigger tables. So you've got a consensus building process with 20, 30. I did one with 50 people around the table. That's tricky, but it's nothing like trying to put an entire society around the table.  Obviously, that can't be done. So we have to come up with other ways of handling this scale and complexity. 

And the solution that we've come up with, well, it's not our idea, we're just putting a name on something that's already happening. We first called it "massively parallel peacebuilding" because we were writing in terms of what was going on with peacebuilding. Then we started applying it to the United States and talked about "massively parallel problem solving" and "massively parallel democracy building". The idea is that there are lots of people and organizations who are doing different things, but they're all pursuing roughly the same goal. And that you might call "strengthening democracy," "defending democracy," "building collaboration," "lowering hyperpolarization." You can call it whatever you want. But we're all basically on the same page, working towards making this society more functional than it currently is. And you've got bridge builders, and you've got educators and trainers, and consensus builders and constructive advocates and civic reformers.

We've come up with a list of 54 different kinds of actors who are currently engaged and need to be engaged in this strengthening- democracy project. We divided them into two categories: strategists and actors. And if you're interested in this, we have a number of posts and newsletters on this.  (See Newsletters 223, 226, 236, and 239.

The strategists are the thinkers.

They're the ones who are trying to figure out what's going on and what needs to be done. There's conflict lookouts. There's people that we call democracy-firsters.  They are the people who say, "We've got to fix democracy before we fix anything else because, we can't fix anything else, If we don't fix democracy first. We're in that camp." Complexifiers try to get people to stop focusing on us- versus-them, simplistic ideas about what's going on and look at the real complexity of the situation.

There are lots more actors. And you probably can't read this because it's really small, but I'll read the top level to you. Grassroots citizens, visionaries and healers, de-escalators, constructive communicators, issue analysts, collaborative problem solvers, power balancers, democracy defenders, mediators, facilitators, consensus builders—you're in most of these blocks!  There's a few of them where most of you would probably say, "No, I don't fit there." But you fit in a whole lot of these blocks. 

And that's, again, why I think that it's so exciting that we got to talk to you and hopefully get many people thinking about where they can plug into actions along some of these lines. 

The problem is that right now, still, most actors are thinking in terms of what we call "massively parallel partisanship." So, it's everybody on the left trying to work together to defeat the bad guys on the right. And it's everybody on the right who's cheering because their guy is in power right now, and they're working as hard as they can to defeat those bad folks on the left. And as long as we keep with this mindset, we're going to be driving that hyperpolarization spiral higher and higher, and we're going to be pushing the pendulum farther and farther. And it's going to do more and more damage. We've got to do something different.

So, what we think we need to do is, again, massively parallel democracy building, where we're still pursuing our interests on the left and the right, but we're doing so in a win-win way that listens to and, treats as legitimate the folks on the other side. Everybody down in the bottom part of that triangle, not the folks up at the top in the gold part of the triangle who are trying to use power- over to dominate us all. That's not what we're talking about.  We still need to fight them, but we need to work together to coalesce ourselves. 

So one of the things that we've been thinking about a lot is what a democracy-for-all vision would be. We argue that you can't get somewhere if you don't know where it is. And we've been writing a fair amount about the substantive principles and procedural principles of a shared democracy-for-all.

We're hoping that some of these ideas will get fleshed out in the small groups, so I won't talk about this much. But it seems like some substantive principles are fairness and rights and responsibilities, like I talked about before, and procedural principles are rule of law, value-creating, consensus negotiation, compromise, that sort of thing. 

Guy: So now we want to go into our break out session. One of the values of bringing together people in meetings like this is you get to talk to each other. You can listen to things in other ways and read articles. But I think the interaction is really important. So what I'd like you to consider is "what do we, as the conflict resolution field, know that can make a significant contribution to efforts to diffuse hyperpolarization and build a democracy in which most everyone, on both the left and the right, would like to live.

We say "most everyone" because our power-over actors, that's not their vision for the future. But most everyone else, I think, realizes that that's a vastly preferable approach. So, in your groups, I'd like you to try to identify as many substantive and procedural opportunities as possible. Remember, this notion of massively parallel is a lot of independent projects working on different aspects of the problem at the same time.  The problem is so big and involves so many different people and institutions that we can't negotiate any kind of giant consensus and plan. It's a lot of independent efforts and a lot of incremental efforts that work within the resources that you have available. So try to focus on that. 

Another way to think about this is to just ask you to address this big question: How can we simultaneously diffuse the red-blue conflict while also protecting everyone's vital interests and defending power-with democracy by constraining power-over actors? 

Now, as we do this, I'd like you to put aside your partisan hats and think like a mediator, not a disputant. That's easy to say when you're talking about somebody else's conflict. But when it is your conflict and your lives and your future and the future of your children that is at stake, that's pretty hard to do.  But I think mediators and the mediation perspective can help people find ways through conflicts they can't find through by themselves. And that's what I'd like to do for the remainder of our time together. Tthis is also a time for outside-the-box thinking. We're all sort of in a box of hyperpolarization, and we need to think of something different. 

So be bold. Think about some tentative ideas. We want this to be a safe space where you can raise controversial issues that you're not even sure about, but we can start thinking collectively. As we write up reports on this, we'll stick with Chatham House rules. That is that we'll try to share ideas but not attribute those ideas to any one person. And if you don't have time to get your ideas out today, we'd certainly welcome an email. Just go to the Beyond Intractability website and use the contact form, which is a direct email to us, and we'll get it and try to respond. 

Question and Answer Section

Susan: Before we go to our break out groups, we have time for a bit of Q and A.  I have one or two questions that people have sent me that I will ask. But before I do that, I'm curious if Mary Dumas (who is also on the leadership committee and former co-chair, who helped me plan this with the Burgesses) Mary, can I turn to you and see what's on your mind? 

Mary: Well, I'm a big fan of this idea of thinking of democracy as a large-scale dispute resolution process. So I was wondering if you might describe a little bit more detail about the distinction of substantive issues around fairness that come up when people are trying to talk about the difference of power-over actors at smaller community levels. So substantively, how do people address power-over actors in the spirit of this multi-parallel approach you're talking about? Do you have any examples to share? 

Guy: Well, a couple of thoughts. First of all, within a democracy, conflicts occur sort of at two levels. Within partisan groups on both the left and the right and within sub-identity groups within there. You have people with different images of how society should be organized and what's fair and what are the roles of various people and what the rules that set up the social hierarchy should be. And those are in often deep conflict with one another. 

But those tensions are different from the tensions of people who we call "bad-faith actors," because they're not really making a good-faith effort to make democracy work. They don't really care about the issues. They just want to foment conflict as the ticket to making this divide-and-conquer strategy work. And you can see that in the hypocrisy that you'll often see with political leaders who will change positions to whatever's politically convenient and expedient at the moment.

So part of what you need is to recognize that these fundamental value conflicts do exist. But what democracy is, is not a system for deciding which one of these value systems we should embrace.  It's a system for allowing competing value systems to coexist in a spirit of tolerance and mutual respect, but also a spirit where, when there are tough issues, you'll work through them together. And what I call "the engine of social learning" is conflict where you challenge people to do things better. What you need is a system that encourages that and facilitates it. But it's the system that underlies all of these differences. It's the glue that holds our diversity together.

Heidi: As is always the case, I was going in a completely different direction than Guy did. It's amazing that we actually live together and work together. But I was thinking that I have in the past asked the group to grapple directly with the question of what fairness is. There's lots of different definitions of fairness.  I usually relate a story that when we were just starting in this field, we started writing a book with our mentor, Paul Wehr, that was called Justice Without Violence. And it was looking at the use of nonviolence to obtain justice. And we started by deciding with the group of authors— it was an edited book. We had a lot of different contributors. What did we mean by justice? It is a very similar question to the question of what do we mean by fairness?

Well, we went round and round and round for several hours, and the philosopher just wouldn't accept any definition.  He was just giving us a really bad time. We finally decided to define justice in its opposite, that we could all agree on what injustice was. There were obvious examples of injustice.  So we just sidestepped the definition of justice because it was obvious that we couldn't ever agree. And I think that's true with a discussion of fairness too. But if you get people engaged in a discussion that's well-facilitated about the different definitions of fairness, and get people to explain why they see it the way they see it, people will come up with a better understanding of why we feel so differently about these things and how there might be legitimacy to people who argue for views that are different from our own. That people, for instance, who argue for or against reparations for slavery or for other ill-treatment in the past, there are good reasons to argue for it. There are good reasons to argue against it.

If we at least come to understand where people are coming from and why, we might be able to grapple with the problem a whole lot better. And the small groups that I've run, yes, people have gotten a better understanding of that. Have we solved it for the nation? No, we can't solve it for the nation. But we can start respectful educational listening conversations. 

Susan: I got another question from our colleague, Larry, who is not feeling well, so he can't come online to talk. But he has asked about active civic involvement and what that could or should mean in your view. Can we encourage and/or require people to be to go beyond just voting and paying taxes and jury duty to be more deeply involved in civic engagement?

Guy:  A short answer, which is that if we could spend half or a third of the time we spend on political hobbyism, that is, reading the news and sharing articles that make us mad, on public participation opportunities. And if those participation opportunities could be expanded, something that this group's very well-positioned to do, we would have accomplished a lot.

Heidi: Well, in this case, I like Guy's answer. I would just go a little bit deeper or maybe it's less deep. I'd say to Larry, "No, I don't think we can require it." I mean, that's not the way democracy works, although I have been intrigued with the notion of requiring voting. But I don't think we can require it, but we can make it fun. A lot of reason that people get involved in political advocacy is that they get with and "in-group" and it is fun. And I've heard of a lot of stories. There's a fellow up in Fort Collins, Colorado, Martin Carcasson, who has been running deliberative dialogues for a long time. And the people who get involved find it to be very enlightening and fun.

So if we can start getting people to realize that this isn't onerous, it actually is valuable, eye-opening, fun. And they start recommending it to other people and other people and other people. We were just at a conference last week where they were talking about "snowball conversations" — conversations that get bigger and bigger as they go along.  People will figure out that this is worth doing.

And if we design it so they don't have to leave their work to do it, if we make it more accessible, Zoom really helps with that. We might be able to do pretty well. 

Guy: One other quick idea. There's a lot to be said for national service. We're of the Vietnam draft generation. And while we didn't want to be drafted to go to Vietnam because we thought that the war was ill-advised in all sorts of ways, it was widely seen as acceptable for the government to ask us to do something. And that's worth reinvigorating.

Small Group Discussions

At this point we divided up into small groups. Each group had a facilitator who led the discussion and recorded key ideas on the Miro white board (Miro is a white board app that works independently of Zoom.) We saved all of the notes that were put into Miro, and I was planning on writing a report on these discussions after the fact.  But when I looked at all the notes, I thought, wow, these are really going all over the place!  How am I going to put this all together?

I know several people who have used ChatGPT to do that, so I decided to try it.  I told ChatGPT the two questions we gave the group, and then gave it their answers.  I thought the essay it created was great -- though it did leave out some ideas, which I have put back in. I also did some light editing, as did Mary Dumas. In some instances, ChatGPT's end result was actually more polished than mine — in my effort to put in extra ideas, the line of thought sometimes got disrupted.  But most of the key ideas, I think, are here and with Mary's help, pretty accurately reflect the ideas of the groups. We would welcome further essays or even short notes from people reading this about your thoughts on these questions.

Question 1: 

What do we, as a field, know that could make a significant contribution to efforts to defuse hyper-polarization and build a democracy in which most everyone (on both the left and right) would like to live?

ChatGPT's (Edited) Summary of the Responses

What Environmental Mediators Know About Defusing Hyper-Polarization and Strengthening Democracy

In an era marked by deepening polarization and growing distrust across the political spectrum, environmental mediators offer a vital—yet often underutilized—source of insight. As practitioners grounded in dialogue, relationship-building, and managing conflict across divides, we know things that can help rebuild a democracy in which most people, regardless of ideology, feel seen, respected, and included.