You know what I’m talking about. You know exactly who the offenders are in your Facebook feed. You have friends who like to talk about or post things on politics, religion, or nearly anything else. And you can’t believe how many things they say are outlandish, offensive, and outrageous. What’s their deal?
Believe it or not, there is a pretty simple explanation for much of this kind of behavior. What you’re observing is conflict neurosis. It’s an obscure concept that originates in the study of international affairs, but its application goes far beyond that.
The thrust of conflict neurosis is that you should expect irrational behavior when there is any significant conflict.
Where there is real conflict between two groups of people – whether political, military, or ideological, both groups will act in a manner that displays the neurotic behaviors medical professionals expect to see in someone suffering from serious mental illness. Conflict neurosis is the system of neurotic behavior and beliefs – the crazy talk – that often results from people being highly vested in a movement or idea.
This extreme vesting can happen because their lives are threatened, because their human rights are at stake, because they have had powerful negative experiences with the subject matter, or even because they have a simple but great fear of change. But regardless of how it happens, the symptoms of the trauma are the same:
- People adopt an oversimplified picture of the real state of affairs. Every act of the other side is explained by a few selected motives that are in keeping with this oversimplified picture.
- Every problem is the fault of the other side, usually because they are immoral and untrustworthy.
- Many matters which are peripheral the actual debate are forced into the area of conflict.
- The process of moralization is pushed to the extreme so that everything one side does is considered justifiable, while everything the other side does is deemed immoral.
- People who do not completely and utterly condemn the opponent are viewed with distrust and suspicion. Any admission that the other side’s position has even the smallest amount of legitimacy is tantamount to betrayal.
- It becomes increasingly difficult to consider new events in an objective and flexible way. The scope of perception of reality diminishes. If the true situation is more complex or more varied than what fits one’s narrative, one must ignore this complexity. As a result, one’s position gradually no longer fits the facts; the facts must be tailored to fit one’s position and history must be oversimplified.
- In the extreme, the other side is dehumanized, sometimes profoundly.
Like clinical neurosis, conflict neurosis seems to offer a solution to the problem, but the would-be solution is only temporary. The fundamental problem is not solved, but aggravated. When conflict neurosis influences or directs the actions of a person or a group of people, it is very difficult to find a basis for reciprocal trust, and a mutually acceptable resolution to their dispute becomes nearly impossible. In the meantime they are filling your Facebook feed with a lot of things that have you asking, “How can anyone say this?”
It’s hard to change a crazy person’s mind, even if it’s not the clinical kind of crazy. The challenge for each of us is to identify our own conflict neuroses and try to resolve them. It’s not easy, because it requires admitting where we have gone down the same road as those whom we often so strongly disagree with. But if you read this far and think the bullet points above perfectly describe your ideological opponent, but you don’t contain any reflection of you, then you might want to re-read them.
NOTE: Portions of this post (principally, the bullet points) heavily quote R.L. Warren’s 1987 piece, “American Friends Service Committee Mediation Efforts in Germany and Korea.” I also drew from Benyamin Chetkow-Yanoov’s brief discussion of conflict neurosis in “Social Work Approaches to Conflict Resolution: Making Fighting Obsolete” (Routledge 1996). Quotation marks have been omitted for clarity.
Stephen, I absolutely agree it applies to the marijuana debate. Gauging which side of a given debate carries more conflict neurosis is a delicate job in most cases, though not necessarily all.
In this article, I see a direct correlation to the fight over cannabis legalization. From my perspective, and given the evidence of what has been said, the prohibitionists are the more neurotic, compared to those on the legalization side.