Recent days have wrought the agony of a large massacre in New Zealand, the exposure of widespread corruption in college admissions processes, fierce debates about immigration and border security, devastating plane crashes, and more immoral misconduct from public figures.
Scientists also announced major breakthroughs in Alzheimer’s research. An Indiana businessman donated $7.5 billion to charity. 3-D printed homes are being expanded in the U.S. to fight homelessness. Stem cells are being used to restore vision to blind people and halt HIV. And a small group of teenage boys mounted an innovative, death-defying rescue of a young boy dangling from a ski lift.
From all sides, we are barraged with information that provokes both fury and faith in humanity. And with each dose of provocative material, we are faced with a choice.
What will we bring to the mayhem?
Silence? Cynicism? Dismissal? Escalation? Vitriol?
Hope? Gratitude? Compassion? Understanding? Curiosity?
Let’s bring the question closer to home.
You enter a conference room before a meeting and overhear two colleagues cruelly belittling the work of a third colleague who hadn’t yet arrived. You can’t stand the two of them, but you also agree that there are legitimate concerns about the missing colleague’s work quality. What do you do?
You are having coffee with a friend, exchanging views on politics of the day. Someone in the coffee shop who doesn’t share your views at all overhears your conversation, leans over, and calmly explains why he feels your views are wrong. He’s a fellow parent on your child’s soccer team. How do you respond?
During a team meeting, your boss turns to you and asks your opinion about his proposal for a new division-wide communications plan. You have strong concerns about whether it will actually address the employee engagement concerns raised in this year’s survey. The rest of the team already “told him what he wants to hear” and gave their support for it. What do you say?
Everyday opportunities invite us to use our voices for good. But we often lack the courage, confidence, or skill to respond in a way we feel can have a positive outcome. Worse, our increasingly polarizing political landscape has conditioned us with trigger-happy instincts to refute views we might disagree with, reject others for having those views, and convert others to our views. We have dangerously conflated speaking “your” truth with speaking “the” truth. We seem to have lost our sense of civility and discourse.
In the face of being provoked by the humanity around us, many resort to silence, neither speaking out respectfully with dissenting views, nor speaking up with encouraging support. On the other extreme, people resort to outrage and harsh judgment when we even remotely detect disagreement, or blind advocacy if we’ve determined someone thinks “enough like us.” To be provoked or provocative has deteriorated to mean “Be offended, insult back, or shut down.”
None of these reactions results in positive outcomes or change. They only provoke perpetuating the status quo. So how do we go against the grain of either being the silent majority or the loud, hateful minority? In his book, Love Your Enemies: How Decent People Can Save America from the Culture of Contempt, Arthur Brooks discusses research on conflict due to motive attribution asymmetry – the phenomenon of assuming that your views are based in love while your opponent’s views are based in hate. We see this in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And more recently, we see this in American politics between Republicans and Democrats. Brooks says, “There is an “outrage industrial complex” in American media today, which profits handsomely from our contempt addiction. This starts by catering to just one ideological side. Leaders and media on both the left and right keep their audiences hooked on contempt by telling audiences what they want to hear, selling a narrative of conflict, and painting gross caricatures of the other side. They make us feel justified in our own beliefs while affirming our worst assumptions about those who disagree with us—namely that they are, in fact, stupid, evil, and not worth giving the time of day.”
There is good news. We have other choices. People with whom we disagree are not our enemies. Disagreement is healthy. Indecency and contempt are destructive. Disagreement provokes positive change and innovation. Indecency and contempt provoke exhaustion, fear, and hopelessness. To counter the provocation of contempt, Brooks suggests spending more time with those who are different than you. Go where you think you’re not welcome. He says, “Seeking out what those on the other side have to say will help you understand others better. You will be a stronger person, less likely to be aggrieved or feel unsafe when you hear alternative points of view. Plus, such understanding will also improve your ability to articulate and defend your own beliefs in a way that others find compelling, or least defensible. You might change a mind or two. And if your argument is weak, you’ll be the first to know.”
In my interview with Chris Campbell, former Senate Finance Committee member and Assistant Treasury Secretary, Insights from Congress on Working with People Who are Very Different than You, Chris offers profound insights about building bridges across the greatest of divides. The most difficult, but most provocative advice, was to see opposing views as legitimate, no matter how outlandish they seemed. When we start from a place of legitimacy, we provoke a hospitable and open exchange.
When Brooks asked the Dali Lama what to do when feeling contempt toward others, the Dali Lama responded, “Practice warm-heartedness.” So simple. So difficult. So provocative.
All of life is a circle of provocation – provoke, get provoked. Our capacity as humans to do both is beautiful and dangerous. That we can incite changed minds, hearts, and behavior in others is nothing short of miraculous. That we can do irreparable damage to minds, hearts, and relationships is catastrophic. Be thrilled by humanity’s magnificence. Be outraged by humanity’s depravity. Decide what to do with that thrill or outrage before it provokes you. Today, likely in response to one or the other, you will provoke someone to think, feel, or say something. You get to decide what that is and how you do it.