Bernie Mayer: Be Less Certain - Episode 8 of the the On Conflict Podcast

Bernie Mayer is a practitioner, author, and academic, and has worked in a wide range of situations around the world for over 40 years. He’s worked in child welfare, mental health, substance abuse treatment, and psychotherapy. As a founding partner of CDR Associates, Bernie has provided conflict intervention for families, communities, universities, and corporations.

Bernie talks about:

The importance of long-term approaches
Collaboration versus competition
Mediators’ values
Some of the most difficult times our world has gotten through.

Bernie Mayer - On Conflict Podcast Episode 8 cover art

Resources

Bernie Mayer’s social media and websites:

Bernie’s books:

Bernie Mayer – Quotes From The Podcast

(Anything uncertain is either replaced by ellipses or put in square brackets)

[2:30] “What we really need right now is the capacity to work on longer-term problems on a much more global level. And in order to be able to do that, we really are going to have to begin to learn to think differently, to interact differently, to communicate differently, and we just, over the eons that we’ve developed to who we are, have not had to do that, so that’s very scary, but it’s also very exciting.”
[03:40] “One of the things going on in the United States right now is that people are finding it harder and harder to think of their community as the people of the United States, and they’re much more withdrawn into a smaller vision of community. […] We are willing to make enormous sacrifices for our families and our immediate community, but what about the kind of sacrifices for the larger world community, or for generations to come…”
[06:23] “…[T]he threat that leads to war and the mobilization of war does tend to focus us in a different way, that’s why we use the metaphor of war all the time, usually inappropriately. Such as the war on drugs, or the war on poverty, or the war on terror. None of those metaphors work very well, but we resort to them because they mobilize our thinking, and that is something else we have to get beyond.”
[07:02] “I’m very reluctant to put myself forth as somebody who really has the answers, because I think the answers are derived interactively and collectively. But having said that, I’ll dive into what I sometimes call creative arrogance, and that is that I think the most important thing I have to offer is to challenge how we think.”
[07:36]“So my last book, ‘The Conflict Paradox,’ was really an effort to say we in our field of conflict management specialists, or whatever you want to call our field, tend to fall into this bifurcated thinking, and it plays into our inability to come to real terms with what’s going on in the world. So I talked about the need for us, if we’re really going to help people deal with profound conflicts, we ourselves have to look beyond some of that, both as conflict participants, which we are as citizens of the world, and as conflict engagement specialists, which is the way I think of my profession, and I think yours too. We need to challenge that.”
[09:36] “If we’re kind of looking at these really broad problems, we need to be realistic about our capacity to change and adapt, but realism devoid of optimism isn’t realism, and optimism devoid of realism is not real genuine optimism.”
[09:53] “[I]f you’re asking what my contribution is, it is to help people, I think, challenge their thinking but to do so in terms of the practical ways in which this comes to home to roost in our professional and personal lives, so it depends on where we are personally and professionally and communally for what that really means in practice.”
[11:08] “The problem with the Prisoner’s Dilemma is each move you make is either cooperative or competitive, whereas in real life, each move you make is both.”
[11:42] “One of the things I’ve often said is I want, I’m not going to be credible and effective in helping disputants cooperate if I’m not also credible and effective at helping them compete.”
[12:45] “We need to be able to have the most important conflicts of our time in a very meaningful, strong, often competitive way, so that we don’t have to go to war. The suppression of some of the issues […] has led to a much more potentially violent situation than if people had really struggled and competed about it much more dramatically over time. But on the other hand, they haven’t gone to war.”
[16:59] “I think engaging and being authentic and being respectful is not simply listening. And all communication to be meaningful is two-way. And I think it’s easy for us to say just go listen, and there have been some very good efforts to do that […], but I think the really hard thing is to go in there and to listen and to say ‘Let me explain where I’m coming from and listen to where you are,’ and what do we do when somebody starts spouting off misogynist or racist or homophobic or, you name it, stuff? […] and this is the hardest thing but it’s one of the places where conflict professionals have an important role to play, and that is to help people be able to say what they think and to talk about behaviour they think is not acceptable and to listen to other people about behaviour they think is not acceptable, and still maintain the relationship.”
[18:57] “In order for us to really be able to get past racism, we have to be willing to say what we think and listen to the response, including somebody saying ‘I think that is racist.’ And think about it. And we have learned, particularly liberals have learned, a lot of us have learned, to be so careful about what we say and how we talk about stuff, that we often don’t even know what we think anymore. […] I think the harder thing is to be really clear, ‘What do I really think?’ and to have the courage to say it. And then to have it come back at me because that’s ultimately what will help me change what I think. And the most profound changes in my life were when I was willing to do that.”
[21:44] “I’m not trying to say all mediators have the same value base. And there’s lots of different kinds of mediation, some of which does not share my value base. But I think implied into a lot of the work a lot of us do is certain values about equality, about the importance of people being given the ability to have a say over their own lives, about the capacity of humans to come together and problem-solve in an effective way.”
[22:41]“I’m not saying we have to push our values on other people, but one of the reasons we can make a difference in a powerful way is that we are value-based, we act on the basis of our values. And if we try to pretend they are not there or give them up, we won’t be as effective, and people won’t believe us. People know us. ”
[23:56] “…[T]here are many more important things to do than just being neutral third parties helping other people talk. They are helping people understand the conflict, they are working with one side of it or with a group of people who can come together right now, they’re strategizing, they’re designing systems, they’re doing all sorts of things that we will do based on our values, and we shouldn’t hide them.”
[24:56] “…[W]e have an obligation now more than ever to help people say what they think, to help people who feel unempowered think about how to engage in a dialogue in a more effective way, and to advocate our own values.”
[25:10] “And I’m not sure the most effective abstract thing we can do right now is to go out there and try to pull people together in the United States or in England, let’s say in England for a moment – to pull people together on the far side difference of the Brexit issue, or the immigrant issue, or in the United States, to pull the, you know, the 37% of no-matter-what-he-does-we’ll-support-Trump, for example, together with the fairly large number, I won’t put a percentage on it, who can’t stand him no matter what he does together. There may be opportunities to do that and sure, let’s seize them. But I think, on the other hand, I think there are other groups who really we could help talk together right now. There are a lot of, in the United States right now, disaffected Republicans who don’t know where the hell to go. I’d like to be talking to them.”
[28:39] “Let me just say that I’ve never tried […] to see myself as trying to persuade people to come to the table. I’ve always tried to see myself as sort of a consultant to them, as to whether it was wise for them and in their interests to come to the table, and would would make it a table they wanted to come to, and I’d still say that’s the best way of approaching it.”
[29:21] “I try very much to say, ‘I don’t know that it’s always right for people to come to the table.’ I want to find a way of being useful to people whether it’s a good idea for them to come to the table or not. And if I really believe in self-determination or autonomy, then I’d better believe they know better than I do as to whether they should come to the table. Mediators wring their hands all the time about why don’t more people use mediation, and there’s a lot of reasons for that that I’ve often said, ‘Well try for a moment thinking they know what they’re talking about, and see where that takes you.’”
[30:28] “…[W]e need to be able to think of our community in a different way, and we need to be able to develop the capacity to think longer-term in terms of consequences, but we still have to [be able to deal with] our immediate needs.”
[30:54] “…[T]he biggest mistake we often make is we don’t start by truly understanding what our own interests are in a broad enough way, whether it’s as professionals or as leaders or as opinion-makers or just as citizens. Or immigrants. I think that’s work that we need to do. And I think one of the ways we don’t do it is we often think about what’s important to us by reaction to others. Whatever it is that Trump says […] ‘I’m on the opposite side, they’re wrong.’ And that’s not a worst place in the world to start, but go deeper, and go beyond just what we often think of as our interests. Go beyond, I’d say into looking more deeply and to what it is that gives us a sense of who we are, or what I’d call our, and others too, our identity [needs], on that level, then we’re not going to open up the dialogue.”
[32:14] “I’ve often said, you know there’s three words I wish I could give to people in conflict: […] be less certain. And I apply that to myself all the time. […] And I think that [… we’ve got to] know ourselves, but we also have to challenge our certainties. That doesn’t mean that we don’t get to strongly advocate for what we believe in, but with the humility of knowing that maybe we’re wrong. That’s another paradox: the more willing we are to challenge our certainties, [the stronger in the long run we will be for a really rich forum of advocacy].”
[34:05] “…I know these are difficult times, and very discouraging, but we’ve been through difficult times before, and when people in the United States say, you know, ‘We are as polarized as we ever have been,’ I want to point out to them ‘Well we did fight a civil war, you know.’ I mean it’s not like we haven’t been through polarized times before.”
[34:59]“…I know one of the hardest parts right now, particularly from an environmental point of view, is people feel like ‘Boy, if we don’t get on top of what’s going on almost yesterday, we’re screwed,’ and maybe we are, but that kind of panicky pessimism can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, and I don’t choose to share it, you know, maybe I’m naive as hell, but I choose not to share it.”

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Episode 8: Bernie Mayer – Be Less Certain

Resources

Bernie Mayer – Quotes From The Podcast

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