Alastair's Adversaria - Dangers of Thinking Out of Conflict

Episode Date: August 6, 2026

This reflection was first published on the Anchored Argosy: https://argosy.substack.com/i/205446637/dangers-of-thinking-out-of-conflict Follow my Substack, the Anchored Argosy at https://argosy.substack.com/. See my latest podcasts at https://adversariapodcast.com/. If you have enjoyed my videos and podcasts, please tell your friends. If you are interested in supporting my videos and podcasts and my research more generally, please consider supporting my work on Patreon (www.patreon.com/zugzwanged), using my PayPal account (https://www.paypal.com/donate/?business=4WX77P4F8S7WL), or by buying books for my research on Amazon (www.amazon.co.uk/hz/wishlist/ls/3…3O?ref_=wl_share). You can also listen to the audio of these episodes on iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/alastairs-adversaria/id1416351035.

The following reflection is entitled, Dangers of Thinking Out of Conflict. It was first published on the Anchored Argosy. Throughout my adult life, I've routinely returned to questions of the manner of our thinking. Sometimes these have concerned the media that we employ, considering the ways in which they can form our perception, order our communication, and shape our expression. On other occasions, they have concerned the social, relational,

and psychological dynamics that impel and frame our thinking. thinking. If we are going to think well about anything, it is critical that we reflect, not merely upon the objects of our thought, but also upon ourselves as thinkers and about our processes, contexts, communities, and patterns of thought. Indeed, while objects of thought may be more discrete and distinguishable, we bring ourselves as thinkers and our habits and manners of thought to everything that we think about. So disorders in these areas are more likely to have a more general distorting effect upon our thinking. The following reflections pertain to a cluster of disorders of thought

that have psychological, social and structural dimensions. While there are some underlying commonalities, shared dynamics, family resemblances, and logical connections between the various issues that I will be highlighting, it's not my intent to present them as ultimately a single thing. However, I trust that it will be apparent that they are not unrelated phenomena. loosely expressed they concern the danger of privileging conflict in various ways in our thinking, while it is often needful to think about contested issues,

and we will frequently find ourselves in contexts of dispute, conflict, error, abuse and crisis. My concern is with the privileging of these in our thinking more generally. One of the greatest influences upon my thinking in this area is Edwin Friedman, whose thinking especially as articulated in the book A Failure of Nerve, has been widely referenced in various Christian quarters over the last few decades. Friedman's work has perhaps been most popular in some circles for his criticism of empathy as a means of leadership and situations of conflict and crisis. However, this is far from the most prominent element of Friedman's thought,

and indeed can be a very misleading focal point. When made the focal point of his teaching, it can invite several unhelpful tendencies that the rest of his work can guard against. I have written about this before. For me, the greatest insight in Friedman's work concerns the importance of self-differentiation and definition. Self-differentiation is what enables us to be present and engaged in situations without being overwhelmed by or reacting against their dynamics. With self-differentiation, we can maintain a non-anxious presence in context where people are losing their heads, succumbing to herd dynamics, failing to uphold boundaries, or getting snarled up in

reactive conflict with each other. We can preserve clear and firm boundaries without constantly fighting. I've compared this to our skin, which serves to bound our flesh from the world that surrounds us, enabling us to be present and engaged in non-sterell contexts without needing to have constant immune reactions against them, needing to quarantine ourselves or to sterilise our environment. Our skin is a boundary that is part of what makes it possible for our bodies to maintain their own internal homeostatic order, distinct from those of the contexts which surround us. Our skin limits what can permeate its boundary, protecting us from physical wounds, from toxins, and from other things that might harm or infect us. For an individual, being self-defined

and differentiated is like having a psychological order that has healthy boundaries and a homeostatic order, able to operate in many contexts and around unstable and reactive people with poor boundaries with equanimity and calm. The crucial insight of Friedman is that healthy thought and action must begin with mastering one's own spirit, with the exercise of self-mastery and the establishment of deep internal dynamics and wellsprings of reflection and deliberation protected from the emotional contagions and disorders that might surround us. This of course resonates with much of the teaching of the book of Proverbs concerning wisdom and the importance of guarding the heart. Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life,

Proverbs chapter 4 verse 23. A person formed in such wisdom will frequently need to think in situations of conflict, crisis and unrest, but they will be doing so from a place of inner composure and equilibrium. Where such composure is lacking, thought will tend to be reactive, imitative, conflictual, Girard's discussion of mimetic rivalry is worth considering in this connection, and unsettled, lacking the sort of depth of reflection and deliberation that affords the capacity calmly and carefully to weigh and respond to ideas, situations and persons. The establishment preservation and prioritisation of an inner peace that enables one to respond to conflict without reacting to or being overwhelmed by it is one of the most basic ways in which we

protect our thinking from the distorting forces of conflict. It should be a little more apparent why a narrow focus upon Friedman's critique of empathy as a leadership strategy with dysfunctional parties can prove susceptible to problems here. Unless we start with self-definition and differentiation, Friedman's helpful critique of empathy can be deployed in the conflictual frame of culture war, in ways that merely replace a failure to uphold healthy boundaries through appeasement of dysfunctional parties with attempts to establish boundaries through conflict with others. Neither of these approaches is healthy. Although Friedman is extremely helpful, I would want to foreground and prioritize positive and healthy function even more than he does, not allowing our vision of

leadership to become focused upon and ordered around situations of conflict and disorder. Such situations obviously arise and must be dealt with. However, such contexts are not the context within which leadership is most paradigmatically expressed. Rather, leadership is most paradigmatically expressed when someone leads effectively without conflict. Leadership should not be conflict avoidant, but good leadership avoids a lot of the conflicts that certain forms of bad leadership can precipitate. For instance, good leadership builds up lots of relational capital through considerate and loving interactions over time, relational capital that can be drawn upon when confrontation is necessary.

The fact that a leader consistently and diligently forms peaceful bonds with those they lead enables them to contain conflict when to rises. It may be foolish to try to deal with dysfunctional persons with empathy if that is read as appeasement. However, if such a person sees that, while firmly and uncompromisingly resisting their unreasonable demands, you can nonetheless exhibit genuine care and concern for them in many other ways, reactive dynamics are harder for them to sustain.

One will also likely enjoy a lot more support from other people in the situation. Such principles are important in any relationship. For example, arguments in marriage are best addressed, not in the immediate conflictual context that they arise in, but by ensuring that such disputes, when they occur, are surrounded by a dense network of loving and joyful interactions that localise them, and render them much less threatening and totally.

totalizing. Of course, those who devote themselves to cultivating such interactions will find themselves less afflicted by the disputes. I first read Friedman a couple of decades ago. One reason why his insights so resonated with me was due to the fact that I had on two critical occasions in my formation step back from some issue due to the recognition that my processes of thinking had become disordered, even though I did not see how the ideas I was considering were. In the first case, it was recognising that I had allowed the foil of one opposing, yet increasingly persuasive position, to dominate my thinking and had started to move into a panicked narrowing of my frame, losing the ability to think more broadly about issues beyond the misleading, as I later realised,

frame set by my interlocutors. Once I broke with the frame that they had set, I began to see several other routes out of the supposed impasse. In the second, I once again recognised that my frame had been narrowed through fixating upon a set of disputes. I had lost perspective and balance, exalting some secondary matters to an unwarranted centrality. I had allowed the heat of the disputes to give me my sense of priorities, while in the bigger picture the issues that I was focused upon were not matters of first importance, and in my focus upon them, I had allowed matters of first importance to become obscured by them. Most concerning, I came to recognize that my heart

and its loves had become disordered. Focusing upon external disputes and responding to their imperatives, I had neglected the wells of spiritual life that I should have been digging through devotion to scripture and the means of grace. Friedman helped me to give a bit more articulation to my recognition of the necessity of preserving a much broader frame than those set by disputes, and of maintaining a sense of balance and proportion in unsettled contexts, not allowing conflicts to distort my sense of reality in the truth. Besides having a sense of what is true or false, healthy thinking requires a good sense of the relative weight of different truths, so that we are not thrown off balance by dispute. Even amidst the genuine urgency of conflict, we cannot allow the immediacy

of its demands and concerns to distort our sense of the bigger picture. Allowing the dangers, the opposition, the concerns, and the errors of contexts of dispute and conflict to set our deeper priorities and orient our thinking, we will end up anxious, reactive and quite unbalanced. Such an approach will tend to pursue health through measures akin to the constant administration of medicine and supplements, rather than through a balanced diet. Medicine responds to disease and disorder, whereas a balanced diet more directly seeks to provide the conditions for health. If we allow our attention to become focused upon avoiding or attacking disorder and disease, we will tend to produce sickliness rather than true health.

Focus upon the avoidance of disease allows disease to set our agenda. From Friedman, I learned how essential it is to prioritise the creation of realms of peace from which we can act, both internal and social, within which we are not focused upon antagonistic engagement with hostile forces and can be wholly concerned upon planting and growing. Such realms enable us to meditate deeply upon good things in appropriate ways, largely able to resist the deflecting pressures of opponents or evils. Unsurprisingly, they require healthy and effective psychological, contextual and other boundaries.

Thinking form primarily against the foil of opponents can easily become disoriented and disordered, chiefly and narrowly concerned with avoiding or combating specific dangers, rather than with a general concern for health. The aversion, such approaches developed to specific dangers or opponents, can come to frame their commitment to the truth. Caught in false dilemmas to uphold the truth is increasingly equated to fighting against a particular set of errors. Yet errors and abuses are seldom the polar opposite of truth and healthy function, but distortions of them. That a position is more susceptible to some serious error does not imply that a position that is less susceptible to that error should be favoured over it. Social media is extraordinarily

effective at encouraging such reactive thinking as the worst of our opponents and the most divisive situations are constantly propelled onto our feeds, presenting them as the foil and context for our own thinking. Meanwhile, our opponents experienced the same effect with the worst their opponents being presented as the foil for theirs. When such a setting, rather than, say, private reading of less contested physical books, is the primary formative context for people's thinking, they will naturally develop highly unbalanced and reactive forms of thought. Focused upon the most unhinged and vicious elements of the other side

and setting up false dilemmas between mutually reinforcing extremes, they will become increasingly insane themselves, which will in turn confirm their opponents in their escalating craziness. Many people just need to log off and to read more books in private. However, avoiding such a posture is much more easily said than done in situations where someone has experienced injustice, been wounded or suffered abuse. Likewise, it can be difficult to appreciate goods to which people who oppose us or hate us are committed. Recalling from something or some group that has harmed us,

it can be difficult to retain the genuine good of that which may have been perverted within it, or not inappropriately, to generalise from it. Such painful experiences can inoculate people against many good things. If our concern is never to be betrayed, we may never trust. If our concern is never to be disappointed, we may never hope. If our concern is never to be wounded, we may never love. Keeping sight of the truth of Abusa's non-tolitusum, abuse does not count. counsel use is often challenging in such circumstances. It is much easier to speak of than to practice

self-definition and differentiation in context where others do not recognize respect or allow us our boundaries. While most of us could advance much further in self-definition and differentiation through taking greater charge of ourselves, the conditions for doing so are considerably more favourable for some. However, while we should be compassionate and charitable towards persons in unchosen circumstances that are deeply incongusive for their self-definition and differentiation, we also need to recognise that their capacities for balanced and healthy judgment are not unlikely impaired as a result. Despite the seeming unfairness of the situation, such victimhood frequently makes people less equipped to act as guides to goodness and health,

and unfairness compounded when groups guilty of mistreating them can highlight their unbalanced and reactive postures in order to discredit them. Such persons will naturally struggle to order their lives in ways that do not accord some focal position to the evils that they have suffered. When we have experienced or perceived some serious evil or dysfunction, especially one to which others are turning a blind eye, it can, of moral necessity, become a particular focus of our attention and labour. Where such practice of attention is not counterbalanced by deepening self-definition and differentiation, putting down deeper roots into sources of truth and goodness and establishing robust contexts of peace within and in our most immediate contexts,

it can become an extreme liability. Much social media reinforces and cultivates habits of unbalanced perception, repeatedly feeding us with material that confirms us in our distorted perspectives. As a catechesis of attention and perception, it is unrivaled for driving deep perceptual ruts into our consciousness. from which we cannot easily escape. Whatever ills you are most inclined to notice in the world, whatever groups most concern or annoy you,

social media is never going to run out of material to intensify your negative impressions of them. The practice of doom-scrolling, progressively yet consistently produces a jaundiced vision, which colours our perceptions of everything. It encourages bitterness, despair, hatred, anger and other vices. Besides this, the narrowing of attention involved makes it increasingly difficult to see

and truly to delight in good, healthy, virtuous, and wholesome things in the world, especially anything that might run contrary to our deepening habits of attention. Such training of attention ill-equips people for good action, tending more to radicalise them. Their narrowing focus on a few aspects of reality progressively blinds them to much else. For instance, their fixation upon the diseased tissue of society can leave them inattentive to the healthy. Person so formed will often be inclined to advocate

for the most extreme and likely destructive or damaging measures as due to their narrowed attention, threatening evils have come to eclipse all else in their minds. They have little sense, for instance, of the many aspects of society that are good, healthy and sound, and the ways in which such aspects of society can be built up to and equip us to withstand the evils, with much less need for aggressive burn-it-all-down-style measures.

Such people can become an immense liability within society as their distorted perceptions of what are generally very real problems confirm them in their sense that nothing short of extreme measures will suffice and all sorts of goods and principles must be sacrificed due to the existential nature of the cause. Scripture charges us to devote our attention to those things that are wholesome, good, true, praiseworthy, excellent, commendable, lovely, and to positive reports, Philippians chapter 4 verse 8. Without ignoring genuine evils, our minds should not dwell on

and in them in the ways that it does in the good. Considering how many and growing evils there are in the world and in our societies, it is amazing how much good exists and remains. While recognizing and alerting people to evils and problems, we must still prioritize celebrating and drawing attention to what is good. Amidst political polarization, it is still quite possible to speak across many of our divides in many contexts. Amidst breakdown of relations and trust between the sexes, countless men and women are still entrusting themselves to each other for life

and being faithful to each other. Amidst awful cases of abuse, myriads of leaders are quietly and faithfully caring for and protecting vulnerable and dependent persons in their communities. amidst racial tensions and antagonisms, it may never have been easier to find people of different races living life together happily and well. Amidst the corruption and betrayal of rulers, countless people are quietly, humbly and faithfully serving their societies and their exercise of authority. Amidst the evils and dysfunctions attending technological developments, we are

enjoying many immense benefits. Amidst the many failures of upbringing and schooling, countless well-adjusted kids are having happy childhoods. Amidst the rise of a post-literate society, there are many committed and disciplined readers who want to press deeper in their studies. Amid secular and increasingly non-Christian societies, we are seeing movements towards greater seriousness and faith. None of this requires denials of,

or turning blind eyes to, very real and increasingly threatening evils and problems. However, it is imperative that we retain a, clear sense of and seek to pursue and extend those things that are good. We should not despair or adopt a burn it all down mindset, but even as we warn of the various evils of our day, chiefly attend to cultivate delight in and build upon that which is good, and resist allowing our minds to be consumed by attention to evils. Humanity was not originally created chiefly to be soldiers in a war against evil, but to be gardeners in a garden, servants of a peaceful good. The good that man served was never

primarily defined oppositional over against the forces of evil, but positively in terms of the internal ends of God's good creation and creatures. While the garden needed to be bounded and protected, and in a fallen world this involves conflict, the primary task was always one of maintenance and extension of its goods. Such peaceful cultivation never ceases to be our principal duty, and while dealing with the evils and conflicts that hamper it, we should not allow them to obscure it, and while struggling against opponents, should always resist the tendency for an oppositional and combative posture to become totalising. Our principal and focal task remains one of peaceful cultivation, which necessitates keeping conflict in its place,

and not permitting it to dominate our imaginations and horizons. When we allow our thinking to be dominated by a polarized and oppositional frame, it both squeezes out and flattens out reflection. Reflection requires non-hectic and peaceful space and time, where we can suspend and step back from the pressing urgency of our immediate contexts. Without such space and time, our thinking becomes narrowed and instrumentalized, answering to the imperatives of our conflicts, rather than attending and responding to the reality of the world. The sabbatical space of true leisure and contemplation being excluded, thought gets co-opted to underwrite the cause and the side.

Anything that unsettles or weakens the cause or the side will be resisted because conflict has been totalised. Besides so squeezing out reflection, reflection will also be flattened out. framed in polarised and oppositional ways, one's antagonistic posture over against some other position becomes its most defining and salient feature. The more subtle and nuanced positioning can be discouraged and distrusted, especially when it downplays the antagonism with another tribe or differentiates one too strongly from members of one's own supposed side. One might compare this to a situation where one focused narrowly upon whether someone is Canadian or American.

emphasizing the importance of that our position and defining everyone chiefly by how they stand relative to it. Anyone who considered that someone in Rochester, New York might have much in common with someone in Toronto, Ontario, that they do not share with someone in Honolulu, Hawaii, might be considered a threat. The fixation upon the side of the border one fell on would dull and discourage almost all consideration of absolute positioning and produced resistance to the notion that important commonalities might be discovered with people on the other side of it. Were we to think primarily as gardeners and only secondarily and occasionally as soldiers, are imaginations more committed to the possibilities of peacemaking than to the imperatives of war waging, without discounting their reality, such oppositions might be much less dominating realities in our consciousness.

The issues that matter most are often not focused at the point. of fearsist contention. The framing of our conflicts is seldom the most illuminating for reflection, frequently involving false dilemmas. Pursuing charitable conversations with those with whom we differ, seeking to bound our oppositions with common good, charitably to pursue mutual understanding, to break our differences down to size, and, if possible, to frame them through shared reflection upon the truth, is extremely worthwhile practice. Discussing issues with opponents, in such a manner, even if we do not persuade them, as a practice with many benefits to commend it. Likewise, the demands of debates are not typically the criteria of healthy reflection.

Those whose thinking is overwhelmingly forged in oppositional debates can have criteria of evidence and standards of proof that foreground the need to refute resistant opponents, focusing upon material that is serviceable for this purpose, whereas thinking pursued chiefly in peaceful devotion to the truth. truth can practice a much more expansive attention to it. We should not allow our commitment to truth to be positioned too much by a resistance to error. This is one of the dangers of what we might term apologetics' brain, where a focus on debates and arguments with non-Christians prevails, for instance, rich typological and allegorical reading of scripture is unlikely to occur.

Scripture, of course, was not primarily written to serve apologetic arguments. If we are to think think well, we need to think primarily from a position of peace. Pursuing and cultivating such peace, both within and in our relationships with others, must be fundamental and central to all our reflection. This reflection was first published over on the Anchored Argosy, the substack that I share with my wife, Susanna. My work there, here, and in various other places, is made possible by the generous donations of people on Patreon and PayPal. the links for those are below. God bless and thank you for listening.