Heidi and Guy Burgess Talk with Tom Klaus and Lamar Roth in their "Third Space"
Newsletter 322 - February 13, 2025
Tom Klaus and Lamar Roth have a podcast called "Getting to the Third Space with Lamar and Tom." They describe the "third space," as "a space where two or more people with differing viewpoints, ideologies, and worldviews can come together to hear, listen, share, and connect with one another." They explore "how to talk with one another about significant, even controversial, issues with grace and humor. Getting to 3rd Space features "Table Talks," modeled after the conversations Lamar and Tom learned to do around the kitchen tables of the Midwestern communities where they grew up. Their "Table Talks" focus on one or two topics each podcast and explore how they, and occasional guests, think and feel about them, and why. Sometimes the podcast will feature a guest and focus on learning more about them and their work.
Guy and Heidi were honored to be their guests in early January, where we talked about our work, and how what we are trying to foster with BI is very similar to Tom and Lamar's notion of "a third space." It was such an interesting conversation that we wanted to share highlights of it in our newsletter, just as we do for the people we have been interviewing. Our conversation was so long, however, that Tom and Lamar broke it up into two parts. They released the first part on Feb. 3, and that is the one we are talking about here. The second half is scheduled for release on Feb. 17, so we'll plan to write a second post on that later in February.
After introducing us, Tom and Lamar asked if there was anything else about our background that we wanted to share. We shared several stories, one of which might be of interest to our readers, even though most of you have a general notion of who we are, at least if you have been reading our newsletters or using Beyond Intractability for some time. We explained that when we started BI's home organization, it was called "The Conflict Resolution Consortium," because we were funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation's Conflict Resolution Program. We were surprised and disappointed, however, when we told our mostly liberal friends that we'd received a big grant from the Hewlett Foundation to start a "conflict resolution center." We quickly learned that they thought conflict resolution was "selling out." Most of them were environmentalists who were fighting big corporations and the government in an effort to protect the environment. And they didn't want to "resolve" that — unless resolution meant "win."
They thought we were traitors. They thought that we were going to push them into accepting some compromise that they didn't want anything to do with. And we'd invite people to come to seminars and nobody would come. They weren't interested in talking about "conflict resolution" or ways to do that.
But then one day we got the idea to reframe what we were doing. Instead of focusing on the third party resolution, a mediation kind of framework, what we did was focus on what we came to call "constructive confrontation." All of our activist friends knew that the conflicts they were in were horrible and they were destructive and they did want to find a better way of doing it. So we started having seminars about how can we handle our fights and our conflicts more constructively. And we went from a 95% rejection rate (to our invitations to come speak at a conference) to a 95% acceptance rate—overnight. Once you start thinking about conflict and trying to persuade people that getting a more sophisticated understanding of conflict dynamics helps them protect their interests, rather than forcing them into some sort of compromise that undermines those interests, then people are very interested.
So, that got us started thinking about helping people in all walks of life, not just those in the conflict resolution field, to better understand causes of conflict and conflict dynamics, as well as fundamental ways of approaching conflict so that it is constructive, not destructive. That led to what we called the Constructive Confrontation Project, later the Constructive Conflict Initiative, and now we are rearranging much of the BI website into an online book called the Constructive Conflict Guide, which is focused particularly of political conflicts and hyper-polarization, and what can constructively be done to remedy that in the U.S. and other democracies around the world. (Here was gave a nod and thanks to our colleagues Louis Kriesberg and Bruce Dayton who have written six editions of an excellent textbook called Constructive Conflict. Before we started the Constructive Conflict Initiative, we asked them if it was okay that we used that same term, and they readily agreed)
That early experience with our fiends also led us online. The Consortium was started in 1988, before the Internet existed. But as soon as it became available, we realized that the Internet would allow us to reach many more people than we could possibly reach in individual classes or training programs. So we began putting conflict resolution knowledge on the web, first with CRInfo (The Conflict Resolution Information Source), and then later BI. Out goal with both these and our many other projects was to help as many people as possible to learn how to engage in conflicts constructively, not destructively.
Lamar then asked us what were some of the "big things" that we've learned in our many years working in this field that people are not generally putting into practice or are not doing as well as they could. Since Tom and Lamar had shared the questions they were going to ask beforehand, we knew they were going to ask that — and we knew (as so often happens) that Heidi's and Guy's answers were totally different.
Heidi said that she immediately thought of the conflict skills class she used to teach at the University of Colorado.
I always ended that class on the last day we met saying, "if you only remember two things out of this class 10 years from now, the two words I want you to remember are "listen" and "respect". And that's what I keep falling back on.
If you listen, really listen, don't listen to rebut, but do what's called active listening or reflective listening. So you're really trying to listen to understand what another person is saying, that goes a long way. to diffusing tensions, at least at the interpersonal level and to some extent at higher levels. And similarly to that, if you treat people with respect and you follow the golden rule, treating people the way you'd like to be treated—don't humiliate them, don't demean them—treat them like respectable human beings, even if they aren't, things will go a lot better. Even if you think you're talking to somebody who is a hideous person. It doesn't do any good to point that out to them. It's just going to make them worse. Treat them with respect, and it's much more likely that they will treat you with respect coming back.
Guy's answer was very different, though they do reinforce each other.
One of the stories I tell my students is based on an old Carl Sandburg poem that I first became aware of when it was made into a cartoon by Jules Feiffer. It features two guys talking. And one guy says...
I want your land. [The other says]
You can't have it.
Why not?
It is mine.
Well, where'd you get it?
I got it from my father.
Where'd he get it?
Well, he got it from his father.
Where'd he get it?
He fought for it.
Well, I'll fight you for it.
This is way most of human history has been lived. I call it "I'll fight you for it rules." It's where things are distributed on the basis of who has enough power to fight and win and take it from somebody else. What we're ultimately trying to do is to move beyond "I'll fight you for it rules," — which we also call "power-over" forms of social organization or democracy — to "power-with" social organization.
Much of our democratic history involves the efforts of one group to overpower another. If we are going to evolve past I'll fight you for it rules, we need to change that, to reframe it in a power-with way. We need to figure out fair ways of allocating wealth and power and status within society, giving people the freedom to live life as they choose, provided that they give other people the same rights. So in a big sense, what we're trying to do is to figure out how to make a power with society really work. And while there's a lot of progress that's been made, a lot of it associated with the slow evolution of democracy, we're still a long, long way from that.
Guy went on to talk about the distinction between complicated and complex systems. This is a difference that most people do not understand, but it is critically important if one is to figure out how to best manage or engage in societal-wide conflicts (such as the political conflict in the United States or any other democracy). He talked about our friend, Wendell Jones, who was a physicist, who was the person who taught us about this distinction, and why it is so important.
Complicated systems are systems that are made by humans. There is a design, they are built to the design, and most of the time, they operate as they are expected to. Cars, these days, are very complicated. But still, they behave (almost always) in entirely predictable ways. You push down on the accelerator, and the car goes faster. You push on the brake, it slows down. You turn on the air conditioning, and it blows cool air. The people who design cars know how they are supposed to work. If they break, a mechanic can usually fix them (or tell you the fix is too expensive, and the car is "totaled").
Complex systems aren't like that. There is no blueprint, no one-to-one relationship between inputs and outputs.
Rather, complex systems are made up of lots and lots of independent actors that each operate under different and ambiguous decision rules. So they don't react the same way to the same circumstances each time. And they're all interacting in a complex social or biological ecosystem where everything impacts everything else.
The way I tried to explain this to my students is to imagine a pool table—a great big pool table with lots and lots of balls —for all the people in society, as representing a conflict. If you think about the conflict in the complicated sense, and this you will see in report after report coming out of think tanks, they say, essentially, "do this, and all the balls will go into the pockets just right, and the world will turn out just fine." And what they are essentially trying to do is to line up the perfect pool shot that will make everything happen just the way they want. They are thinking that society runs in a deterministic kind of way.
The problem is that at the same time you're trying to line up your perfect pool shot, there are literally hundreds of millions of other people trying to do the same thing on the same table. And that produces noise and your shot won't work the way you expected it to work. So you cannot work with a complex system by thinking about it in complicated, deterministic terms.
Ever since we learned that distinction between complicated and complex, we've been trying to figure out what that means in terms of conflict, and how we can best interact with the complex systems that intractable conflicts are. That is where our whole notion of "massively parallel peace (MPP) and democracy building" came from. It's a complex approach to a complex problem — many independent actors, acting according to their own decision rules, being, at best, very loosely coordinated, to accomplish a particular goal (that they may not even entirely agree on). MPP, Guy explained,
is driven by society's learning engine — that necessity is the mother of invention. The way society has managed to evolve, to be as sophisticated as it is, is all problems create opportunities for people who can solve them. And so, instead of thinking of a grand solution of all of our conflicts or social problems, what you try to do is encourage lots of people to work on individual aspects of those problems. and try to support them when they find a way to make significant contributions. So we need to start thinking of a massively parallel effort instead, of some guy with the grand solution. And all of the stuff that we've done in the last 20 years is trying to implement that idea in one way or another.
We then switched to discussing our Newsletter-306, which was entitled "The U.S. in 2024, An Election That Worked and a Democracy That Doesn't." It was that newsletter, Tom and Lamar told us, that made them decide they wanted to invite is on their podcast. In that newsletter, we discussed the notion that democracies allow the voters to choose their leaders, but it doesn't promise what those leaders will do. However, if people don't like what their leaders did, they can "throw them out" every two years (for Congress) or four years (for the President). In autocracies, your are stuck with the leader, whether you like them or not.
Tom asked about the difference between liberal and illiberal democracies, and Guy explained that we think about it in terms of a three-way continuum.
Imagine a triangle. At the top, you have a "power-with" democracy that really works. At the bottom right corner, you have a stable authoritarian autocracy where there is one guy who controls everything and ruthlessly, brutally suppresses anybody who complains. That's one form of dystopia. The other dystopia is at the other corner of the triangle, which is anarchy and chaos and civil war, where nobody emerges in control and all you do is you have an endless series of fights over everything and everything about a society.
So what we're trying to do is to help societies move away from the two bottom corners, as far up the sides of the triangle toward a stable power-with democracy as possible. The thing about thinking about democracy as a complex system is that it has all of these different components. And each one of them you can sort of nudge a little bit in a more positive direction. And the secret to strengthening a democracy is a lot of independent efforts to focus on different aspects of the system and nudge them a little bit. It can be the law, it can be politics, it can be in the economy, it can be in culture, all sorts of things to nudge the society away from the bottom corners and up toward the top.
An illiberal democracy would be one that's falling down the right-hand side of the triangle, getting closer to autocracy.
We then talked about our use of the term "lawfare," which is loosely translated to mean using the law to engage in "warfare." Now, warfare can be literal in some cases, but in our newsletter we were referring to the "war" between the Left and the Right in the United States. Guy explained how it wasn't only the Right that is engaging in "lawfare;" the Left has as well. We are actually getting into something of a lawfare arms race (although we didn't use that term at the time). But the more one side uses such illegitimate tactics, the more the other side tends to decide that it must use the same (or even more extreme) illegitimate tactics, if it is to prevail.
This relates to the last topic we talked about in this half of our conversation. That was the relationship between the extremes of each party — the people we call "true believers" — who aren't going to work with the other side, compromise, or back down, no matter what, and the much larger middle, who are willing to compromise if it will help them solve problems and get what they need. Tom referenced our statement in the newsletter which said
The problem with U.S. democracy is not its inability to hold reasonably free and fair elections. The problem is the divisive, hyper-polarized, us-or-them way in which we think about politics. President Trump isn't the problem, he is a symptom of the problem. Likewise, President Biden isn't the problem, he's a symptom of the underlying problem — the collapse of political norms that, in a healthy democracies, require us to treat our political opponents in the same way that we would like to be treated.
Now, this was written before President Trump took office, and given the chaos of his first couple of weeks, I'm not sure I would still say that President Trump isn't a problem — though I would say, he isn't the problem. There is never just one problem — it is a complex system. We still say that he is a symptom of a larger problem, of which Biden was a symptom too. And that problem is hyper-polarization.
Our leaders, the media, and many grassroots citizens have villainized the other side to the point where they see them as a direct threat to "our democracy" and pretty much everything else that they care about. As a result, they were willing to do whatever they thought was necessary to win the election— including things that would previously have been seen as grave and wholly unacceptable violations of democratic norms. Up until the last minute, for example, the Democrats were willing to run a candidate who clearly was unfit for the job, because they thought he was was the only one who could beat Donald Trump. And Trump, too, is clearly unfit for the job, but the Republicans were too afraid of him to stand up to him, and the Democrats' policies were so opposed by a majority of American voters, that they chose Trump over the Democrats, even with all his obvious faults. If we didn't have this hyper-polarized situation, Heidi argued, we wouldn't have had either of these candidates. We would have had better choices on both sides. It is the hyper-polarization that is forcing us all to ridiculous extremes. And the extremes have effectively disenfranchised the moderate middle.
Lamar asked if we thought that the moderate, disenfranchised voices represented the majority of people in the U.S, and whether they represented the swing voters. Heidi referenced More in Common's work on The Perception Gap. More in Common surveyed thousands of people on both sides of the political divide, recording their beliefs about many different controversial topics, and what they thought the other side believed about those same topics. They found out that most people's beliefs were much more moderate that the other side expected.
They put this all together and identified seven "hidden tribes." At the far left of a diagram that has seven bars, arranged side by side, they had the progressive activists, which made up 8% of their respondents. On the far right they identified "devoted conservatives," who made up 6% of their respondents. Given that this was a well-done poll, it seems likely to fairly accurately represent the whole U.S. population. So that adds up to 14% of the population. Then they had traditional liberals and traditional conservatives. That's another 11% for the traditional liberals, 19% for the traditional conservatives. So that's another 30%. And then there were three "tribes" in the middle. There was a group they called "passive liberals," who made up 15%, the politically disengaged, who made up 26%, and moderates, who were at 15%.
So depending on how you look at it, if you only include the really impassioned people on the right and the left, that's only 14% of the electorate. But those are the people who are most engaged in the primaries. Those are the people who are choosing the candidates. Those are the people who gave us two really weak candidates at the end.
Even if you go in one level and discount the far left and the next tier, what they call the traditional liberals, and the far right and traditional conservatives, you're still less than 50%.of the population. You still have 54% who are passive liberals, politically disengaged, or moderates.
So the answer, according to their poll, which I find quite credible, is that, yeah, there's this huge middle. It's the disengaged, it's the moderates, it's the people who voted for Kamala even though they really didn't like her because they really disliked Trump. And there's lots of people that I know who voted for Trump who really didn't like him. He's not a very likable guy. But they became so afraid of the progressive agenda that they felt like they had no choice.
So there is a huge center that needs to get engaged and mobilized and active if we are going to make our democracy work for everyone, instead of working only for the "true believers" on the one side that happens to win.
There was much more depth to our conversation in this first half -- and much, much more in the second half. So we encourage you to go to Tom and Lamar's Substack to hear the first half of our discussion. For some reason, the video doesn't seem to be coming up now, but we still wanted to release this post while the conversation is still fairly fresh. And we'll share ideas from the second half of the conversation after Tom and Lamar release it.
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BI sends out newsletter 2-3 times a week. Two of these are substantive articles. Once a week or so we compile a list of the most interesting reading we have found related to our topics of interest: intractable conflict, hyper-polarization, and democracy, and we share them in a "Massively Parallel Peace and Democracy Building Links” newsletter. These links include articles sent by readers, information about our colleagues’ activities, and news and opinion pieces that we have found to be of particular interest. Each Newsletter will be posted on BI, and sent out by email through Substack to subscribers. You can sign up to receive your copy here and find the latest newsletter here or on our BI Newsletter page, which also provides access to all the past newsletters, going back to 2017.
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