top of page

Polarising Conflicts

Modern Development without Taboos

Fascinated, people look at ever new conflict zones and often do not realize that the underlying problems are more or less the same in character everywhere. This could probably be solved much more effectively and without loss by a common recipe than by individual approaches, which usually have a considerable start-up time.   

The author of these lines, who did not stylize himself as a raven quite unfoundedly, has witnessed this during his more than 80 years of life in the own country as well as in many other ones. He is increasingly pursued in the public presentation, which often significantly deviated from the self-perceived picture. The more he learned to process these impressions, the more obvious at first glance were appearing ideas for general guidance on solutions, which make sense under very different local conditions.

Conflict research has had a rich tradition in Germany since the two world wars, as a glance at a search engine can quickly show using this keyword. However, measured against the investment, actual and reasonably simple to be applied results are scarce. Some of these projects were apparently more or less silently closed, partly because the leading inspiration failed and partly because of frustration caused by low effectiveness.

Was the underlying "philosophy" not correct, were the proposed methods too complicated, or did the conditions change too much? Mostly, it seems, this question remained unanswered, and the blame was projected on "other circumstances," a well-known process for psychologists.

In the framework of this website, two interlocking approaches were discussed, on the one hand a newly considered approach to understanding any kind of development, and on the other hand a modernized version of the Middle Way originally formulated primarily by Buddhism.

The basic thrust of both advances is a conscious transition from static to dynamic conceptions, which can equally result in considerable simplification for complex situations and in greater flexibility both in the respective close-by and in the far-away range. These proposals should apply in a similar way to the private and to the public sectors. „Test runs“ mostly carried out privately have been quite successful, but in the political sphere the acceptance still seems to be close to zero so far. As a single and also older person, a publicity campaign certainly necessary for a success can not be started, so that little is changed. Who will pick up this thread?

As a stimulus the numerous completely different countries are mentioned, in which such similar situations were experienced again and again. It was Switzerland, France, USA, Mexico, several other Latin American states, Bavaria as a state in the state, the Soviet Union in transition to Russia, the turmoil-plagued Ukraine (especially Odessa), Goa (India), Thailand (the clashes around the monarchy) and finally Berlin after the fall of the wall.

There it is not uncommon to still find walls in the heads and probably also in other parts of the body. But a look at the different parts of the human body can definitely contribute significantly to better and generally understandable conflict resolution. The majority of such conflicts seem to be based on either one-sidedness or excluding resp. exclusive polarization, in which attenuating mechanisms or harmonizing interactions are difficult to find, and which in themselves have only detrimental consequences for all sides and also for the representatives of these tendencies. The thorough prevention of change might be equivalent to a taboo (see "four taboos")  

© Hans J. Unsoeld, Berlin 2017

Updated March 27, 2018     

bottom of page