Kurosawans versus Eastwoodians: what drives conflict?

What I have to say here is not particularly original, it is an exercise in introducing terminology.

Last night, I was chatting with a learned friend of mine, a deeply erudite lawyer with similar [socialist] political beliefs to mine. We started talking about the causes of conflict in society. It became apparent that we have very different views. In this piece, I wanted to bring out this difference and label it, because although the conceptual questions involved have been discussed and alluded to many times, such discussions are scattered, unnamed and disorganized.

We both agreed that there is a small minority of the population- sociopaths, serial killers, people who try to destroy others friendships just because it’s fun- that sort of thing- that cause a disproportionate amount of conflict because they’re nuts. Sadly, such people are drawn to politics and other areas where they can cause a lot of harm. They are perhaps 2%, certainly not much more than that, of the population. They as much deserving of sympathy as horror, Aristotle wrote of similar people that they are less evil than those with vices, but more frightening.

What we disagreed on was where the remaining conflict comes from.

I held that, in the main, people think they’re the heroes of their own story. We convince themselves that we’re doing the right thing with carefully spun narratives. However, we’re such good propogandists inside our own head, that we can rationalize our way to doing bad things. Conflicts arise because people convince themselves they’re in the right because it suits their interests. Outright lying is rare, rather people’s memories of events are distorted, or people at least convince themselves that their lies better illuminate “the essential truth” of the situation. Usually both people in a conflict are rationalizing and self-deceiving to a certain degree, making themselves out to be more right than they usually are- although there certainly are cases where only one person is in the right.

On this view of mine, the great danger to virtue is not being farsighted enough to see things from the other person’s point of view, and doing something awful by accident. I call this view the Kurosawan view. I do not watch movies, but I understand that in Rashomon by Kurosawa, the same event is retold by many people, each with different perspectives on what happened. It is not so much that they are lying, as that they, through the forces of cognitive dissonance, have reshaped their own understandings on what happened. The truth, if it can be reached at all in such difficult cases, can only be reached by the triangulation of stories.

My friend held that, in the main, conflict happens because some portion of the population- between perhaps 10 and 30 percent, are bad people. They are some combination of greedy and/or hateful and are willing to lie and cheat to get their own way. It is not that they are too easily deceived by themselves. Broadly speaking, they know what they are doing. I call this the Eastwoodian view because, while I do not watch movies, from everything I have heard it is emblematic of the world view of Eastwood’s oeuvre.

My friend granted that my view is generally held to be the one that “right thinking” educated people believe, but he held that is false sophistication. We both agreed, for example, that my view is more compatible with traditional Marxism, at least in the simplest case. My friend acknowledged that, but suggested that intellectual courage requires facing a world in which naked, unrationalized selfishness and cruelty are major drivers. Comforting stories don’t change fact that a good portion of people are ratbags.

In his experience as a lawyer, he said, he had observed many, many conflicts between stories that could not be resolved by the supposition that people had unconsciously altered the events in their own mind. A certain percentage of people are bad spirited, they lie, they bring false torts, they refuse to give compensation in tort cases where they are clearly in the wrong unless forced. The best explanation is that in some people, the light that directs us to care about others and about decent conduct, simply doesn’t shine very brightly.

Obviously the split between Kurosawanism and Eastwoodism is a matter of degree. Sound off in the comments where you fit.

Conflict versus mistake

Years ago, when I suggested the terminology of conflict versus mistake theory, I did so largely because I thought conflict theory was the obviously better theory in many instances, and that bringing out the conceptual distinction would alert people to this. I was shocked to find that many people thought that mistake theory was clearly better.

I was also shocked to find many people thought that conflict theory, if true, implied that the problems of society were caused by bad people- a position they saw as self-evidently silly. They saw conflict theory as a kind of moralizing- as pointing to sin driving social problems.

At the time I didn’t understand it- what does conflict have to do with wickedness? Wickedness is a cause of social conflict, but, I thought, it is far from the main one. Now, I think that perhaps I’ve worked it out. Perhaps, in at least some cases, these people are Eastwoodians about conflict. Thus they think that if conflict theory is true, it must be because bad people are ruining everything. However, such an inference had never even occurred to me.

Edit:

So I wrote the above piece, was pretty happy with it, then came back to it and reread it, only to find it comes across as a little naive. Yes, I acknowledge in passing that it’s a matter of degree, but no one takes disclaimers made in passing seriously. So let me spell out what I think in a little more depth.

It’s a matter of degree, a spectrum, in at least two ways. The first and most obvious is that clearly my friend is right about some wrongdoing, and I am right about other cases of wrongdoing- it is a question of who is right in the main.

The second, more subtle way in which it is a matter of degree is that there is a spectrum of psychological attitudes from “hero of their own story” to “self-consciously cynical bastard” with plenty of space in the middle. A lot of cases probably don’t fit into either of the neat little stories my friend and I told. The purpose of this post is to bring into sharp relief a disagreement, and that means a certain amount of hyperbole, though the disagreement is real.