All conflict is global
All core human values matter. Listen a bit deeper every day.
"One World" means problems can’t all be resolved only locally anymore. I believe most of our major problems as a world and as a species are now global. There are no physical frontiers where other people don’t already live. In a real sense there is no “escape”.
Most of us individually and collectively (nations, tribes, political parties, religions or so called “races”) get caught in the trap of hoping to resolve issues at the local or personal level because it is the only thing we seem to have any direct power to influence so…we clean up our own back yard but don’t pay attention to the leaking landfill all our ‘homes’ are built on…we buy filtered water and our streams, lakes and oceans are polluted.
We make careful budgets to afford the basics of life and a few extremely wealthy or powerful families, nations, companies or groups steal and squander billions for selfish gain that hurts us all.
All we have to do is look around to admit this is a painful part of the reality we share. We are quite literally in the same boat and most of us know that.
History is a great teacher. No one is “going” anywhere. Despite hundreds of thousand years of bloodshed, persecution, bigotry and endless forms of tribal-religious-national-philosophical-class-political-gender-race-generational “warfare” we now dominate the biosphere as a species. More and more people are coming to the inescapable conclusion that we cannot kill or lie our way out of our shared human problem.
There are solutions that move us in a better direction, solutions which many people agree upon and yet we cannot implement. Some say the problem is “conflict”, but that seems to be an incomplete conclusion. Conflict, like collaboration is natural to our species and perhaps evolution itself.
As I’ve stated before conflict cannot exist unless someone ‘cares’ about something…and ‘caring’ is what makes us human in the best sense. Conflict is not always bad. Conflict can be a tool for growth and creativity, but it can also waste valuable energy and resources if we use it selfishly to overpower one another. Those forms of conflict are dead ends. They lead nowhere but to an endless recycling of abuse, destruction and waste.
Mastering the art of conflict that includes and transcends our values and our history is a goal worth striving for and this way of seeing and engaging in conflict is one tool that can get us there. Core Values Negotiation is not an escape from conflict; it is a conscious and cooperative entering into conflict. It may mean that we each have to give up a little bit of false mental security about our ‘core truths’.
If you have read the material on the Corevaluesnegotiation.com website and taken the survey you may start to experience a bit of healthy doubt that I call ‘cognitive dissonance’. It is the sense that your personal story may not be as “complete” as you thought it was. That can be scary at first, but it can also be exhilarating if you keep listening to people who hold values you may have pushed aside while in a state of conflict.
My advice…keep opening up to those doubts and talk with people who are different from you. Seek to understand those you do not yet understand until their story begins to make sense to you. Join a zoom call, fill out a survey or contact me and I’ll do my best to help you make sense of that which may not seem to make sense now. I have as much to learn as anyone. Together we can learn faster.
