Conflict is the world’s greatest tragedy. It is a senseless waste of energy, time and resources and there is no resolution in sight. We experience conflict in every aspect of our lives, including: personal, interpersonal, societal, intergenerational, economic, and religious. Humanity continues its violent behaviors and countries spend trillions of dollars to defend themselves from each other. This waste of resources escalates, while millions of people don’t have enough food, shelter or clean drinking water. The young, the elderly, and the ignorant are the innocent victims of this insanity.
Sources of conflict are varied and endemic to our everyday lives. Conflict is so pervasive that we have come to think of it as a normal way of life; it is typical, but not normal. The conflicts we struggle with are structural in nature (see our articles The Path of Least Resistance and Relationship IQ). We learned that when conflicts are structural, the harder we try to solve them, the worse they get. This worsening conflict forces us to use all our energy managing problems, rather than creating solutions. Conflict management dominates our lives. That is why it is important to understand how we manage the conflict in order to help us end it.
