ENDING WAR
“War is failure to imagine mutual victory.”
~Frederick Livingston
The Red Line in the concept map below suggests that war can break out if one side dominates the other. The Green Line shows the path toward a Harmonious Agreement between adversaries, who talk with mutual respect to resolve conflict and avoid warfare. The arrowheads indicate that each colored line represents a process. The Red and Blue lines go off into the future. Only the Green Line leads to Harmony.
In the map, MYTH is a story told to bring people together, to build community, or to ease suffering and loss. In contrast, False Narrative is a story told to achieve personal gain or domination. Myth and False Narrative, Fear and Trust, and the other pairs of
concepts across the map are “competing concepts.”
Where the Red and Blue lines cross—the Cross Points—represent opportunities for
give-and-take conversations that can lead to mutual understanding.
Cross Points ~ Opportunities for Mutual Understanding*
Applied empathy can lead to cross points of compromise.
Cross Point 1 ~ Myth & False Narrative
Being willing to talk and listen, Mythmaker and False Narrator share their stories.
INITIATION THROUGH STORYTELLING
The listener puts on the storyteller’s shoes,
walks after the voice, enters places of need
or injury, steps to the threshold of empathy.
False Narrator says,
Your people cut down our trees, stole them.
My people will starve without your grain.
Our god tells us, ‘Take the land it grows on.‘
Myth-maker replies,
We cut no living trees, took only dead logs.
Our children will die without home fires.
The gods say, “Take only what you need.
We provide enough for all to live well.”
While they ponder dire costs of war,
False Narrator feels pulled beyond
the logic of power.
What if these adversaries imagine
they might trade firewood for grain?
Both sides can get something they need.
Both avoid war debt.
No one must kill or be killed.
No one needs to lose family in war.
From the way the stories go, adversaries
might listen to how the other side feels,
accept the initiation into empathy,
and learn what it feels like
to go along with someone else’s plot.
Cross Point 2 ~ Fear & Trust
Trust must find a way to satisfy the concerns of the Fearful.
THE MARRIAGE OF FEAR TO TRUST
To the jailhouse of Fear there is a key.
A guide to the lock moves along
the narrow way through false imaginings
of hell’s fires, huge in their encounter,
god-like, but only that.
On the plains of Trust, horizons hide threats.
The borders of fear are allowed to expand,
locate sources of harm, draw back, and
collaborate with trust toward understanding.
In the grandeur of the typhoon, swell and trough
are one, a kind of breathing. Trust and fear,
swell and trough, heartbeat and rest.
Unending resonance.
The Trough of fear becomes the Swell of trust
one alive in the other.
~Mike Edwards
Cross Point 3 ~ When Goodwill and Greed Meet
As GOODWILL and GREED come near one another,
an opportunity for empathy comes into view.
They want to explore the opportunity
to plant seeds of Trust,
which might lead to strategic empathy.
Both sides recognize
the humanity of the other
and feel empathy might be an advantage.
They move around in the world
with growing respect.
Sprays of leaves on twig-like branches
nourish the roots of their mutual interest.
Girth grows around the pencil-thick trunk
of their fragile collaboration.
Through give and take of ordinary conversation,
both sides discover the possibility of hope,
hope they might satisfy their needs.
Cross Point 4 ~ Where Domination Learns Of Mutual Respect
Not mattering—the inability
to find meaning in life—fuels insecurity.
A Dominant Someone needs
to be noticed by everyone
and admired by all.
In this way, control is secured.
Whereas the tiger of wrath
paces through the jungle each night
sniffing around for signs of betrayal,
the horse of instruction
pulls the tyrant’s cart of troubles
up the hill for a view of people trying
to feed their families
to enjoy raising their children
who need to feel it’s safe to be a kid.
Dominant Someone seizes on
what will be gained by providing
the people with what they seem to need.
Dominant Someone learns, finally,
that the best way to be admired
and to have useful, healthy control
of situations is through generosity.
Gratitude from everyone across the land,
even from Dominant Someone,
becomes the ultimate good
down the road of Mutual Respect.