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Newsletter #385 — September 18, 2025
Big Picture Newsletter Series - Post 1
This is the first of a series of posts which will make up what we are calling our "Big Picture Newsletter Series." The purpose of this series is to highlight the big ideas underlying the Beyond Intractability Project, the new Constructive Conflict Guide, and our Substack Newsletter. Our goal is to feature especially important ideas that many of our readers may have missed, particularly those who have not been following BI for a long time. We want to show how these ideas fit together to form a cohesive world view of how to help us, in the United States, and other developed democracies, get out of the civic mess we find ourselves in.
What Is the"Great Reframing"?
Despite our highly polarized society, there is one thing almost all Americans agree on: our government and our society are in serious trouble. People are angry, they are afraid, and they see their own and their families' lives getting worse, not better. They fear for their children's future, if not their own. Another thing they agree on: they'd like to find a way out of this fix.
We believe that a simple shift in the way we look at our problems offers a powerful first step toward accomplishing this goal. For reasons we will explain more below, we call this shift a "Great Reframing" — a fundamental change in the way we look at the problems we face. The change we suggest is this: Instead of assuming that our big social and political conflicts are between us ("the good guys") and them (the "the bad guys"), the Great Reframing defines the primary problem as the destructive ways we engage with each other about all those other things. It is the act of assuming "the other is to blame." It is the act of humiliating the other, trying to delegitimize, disempower, and disenfranchise "the other." Those actions, which often cause parallel toxic reactions on the other side, constitute the really big problem that is driving us further and further apart, and is preventing us from making any progress on the issues we care most about (things like the economy, immigration, climate, etc.)
None of the problems we face are as simple as us-vs-them, good-vs-bad. By assuming they are, we are not only making our problems worse, we are crippling our ability to address those problems successfully. The assumption that if "they are for something," then it is bad; and if "we are for something," then it is good, makes it impossible to agree on any path forward on pretty much anything. The beauty of the great reframing is that, by moving away from the now dominant, us-vs-them way of thinking about politics, we can transform former enemies into allies in the common effort to solve these pressing problems, while also building a democratic society that most everyone would want to live in (not just one political party or the other).
Why Do We Need This Reframing?
In recent decades, Western democracies and, especially, the United States (which is our primary focus), have been sliding down a slippery slope toward some awful combination of dystopian catastrophes: dysfunctional governance, autocracy, escalating violence, even war. Data show that a substantial number of people think political violence is justified under some circumstances, and many more think that their primary political goal is to resoundingly defeat and marginalize the other side. When the two sides are about equal in power, and both think as poorly as they do of the other, this thought process inevitably leads to more polarization, more escalation, more dysfunctional stalemate, and more political violence. During times when one side gains political control (as has now happened in the United States), you often see a vigorous effort to undo pretty much anything that the other side cares about.
It is easy to see how we got into this fix. When people get involved in a difficult conflict, they typically take sides very quickly. They form a story in their heads that describes what is going on: some people, ideas, and events are "good;" others are "bad." When there is a question of who is right and who is wrong, or who is good and who is bad, most people will automatically put themselves and people like them on the "good side." And they will put people who are different from them (and especially those who are opposed to things they want or believe) on the "bad" side. (Be honest: you do that, right? The answer is "yes." We all do.
These very different world views then drive the sense that the other side in a conflict is all sorts of bad things: "selfish," "self-serving," "stupid," "duplicitous," "hateful," or even "evil." We tend to assume that it is their choices and their behavior that is causing our own problems, not our own choices and our own behavior. Not only is that usually false (fault usually lies on both sides, although it can lie more on one side than another). But such over-simplification is problematic for other reasons too.
First, it tends to spiral. If we blame "them" for everything that goes wrong, they will likewise respond by blaming "us." If we lash out about that, they will lash back — sometimes speaking in more hostile ways, perhaps even adding in a threatening or outright hurtful action. If these tit-for-tat exchanges continue, they can easily escalate into acts of violence, large-scale civil unrest, and, even war.
A long time ago, the former President of the Palestinian National Authority, Yasser Arafat, was said to have claimed that his goal was to drive Israelis "into the sea" (The chant "From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free" is saying, in essence, the same thing.) We extrapolated from that idea to coin the term "into-the-sea framing" which defines a conflict as one in which the other side has to be entirely eliminated or at least driven to the powerless fringes of society. It might be done by disempowering them, forcing them into internal or external exile, imprisoning them, or, at the extreme, killing them. Into-the-sea framing leaves no room for compromise, no room for finding ways to live together. In fact, its goal is to avoid having to live together at all. Now certainly, most of us are not genocidal maniacs. We don't equate our hostility to the other side; our desire to ignore, isolate, or marginalize the other side, as an "into-the-sea" approach. We just don't want to have to deal with "those people," and we don't want their beliefs to affect us. They don't stop to think about the impracticality and immorality of such an aspiration.
Pretty obviously, this kind of framing is extremely provocative and dangerous, and is likely to be vigorously resisted. So anyone who wants to get out of an intractable conflict, in our view, must take a strong stance against into-the-sea framing and work to get disputants to redefine their conflict in more positive, win-win terms, rather than inevitably divisive win-lose terms. This, in turn requires a willingness to compromise with or at least coexist with people with quite different sociocultural perspectives and economic circumstances.
The beauty of the "Great Reframing" is that it avoids continuous escalation and hyper-polarization by placing blame where it belongs: on the conflict dynamics that are making the conflict so destructive — and on the things that people are doing to drive those dynamics. (Did you notice that, in keeping with one of the most important constructive conflict handling principles first coined by Fisher, Ury, and Patton, "be hard on the problem, not the people," we didn't say the "people driving those dynamics?")
Distinguish True "Bad Faith Actors" from "Bad Faith Followers"
Having said all of this, it is important to also recognize that there are some bad-faith actors who, for selfish reasons, deliberately try to undermine social cohesion and good-faith, democratic problem-solving by amplifying hostility and tension. Such individuals do need to be called out for what they are doing and strenuously opposed.
Still, we need to remember that attacking people directly is very dangerous. It humiliates them and that usually makes them very angry. It invites retribution, drives the escalation spiral, and reinforces the us-vs-them frame that we are trying to abandon. So, when countering bad-faith actors, we need to recognize that most of their followers honestly think that they are engaged in a good-faith effort to make democracy work. They have simply concluded that the us-vs-them escalation spiral is simply a fact of life and that they have no choice but to play "hardball politics" to the extreme as the only way to avoid getting overpowered by the other side. For these individuals, persuading them to join in the great reframing is much more likely to be successful than demonizing them — an approach that will just make things worse. If they are true bad-faith actors, they won't agree to participate in the great reframing. Those people need to be dealt with in more adversarial ways (as we will discuss in later posts in this series.)
More About the Great Reframing
First, let's get fundamental. What is framing? Framing is the way one sees a situation. It is the story we tell about what is happening. For instance, we can tell many different stories about immigration in the United States. For instance, we can frame immigration negatively by arguing that Biden and the Democrats let it get out of control and that foreign invaders are over-running the United States, driving down wages and taking jobs from US workers. Or we can frame immigration positively by highlighting the important contributions that immigrants make. They pick and package our food, build our buildings, make and serve our meals in restaurants, care for our children, the sick, and the elderly (as doctors, nurses, and health aides), and provide much of the technological expertise that drives our high-tech economy. When some say immigrants are criminals, others point out that they have fewer arrests than typical American citizens.
While some of these statements may be true, it is also true that these opposing ways of framing immigration are us-vs-them frames. Immigrants are bad. Or immigrants are good. Trump (and Republicans in general) are good (or bad) for opposing immigration. And Democrats are good (or bad) for supporting and enabling it. Each story blames the other side for being wrong. And the strength with which both sides hold their views has prevented us from passing an immigration reform bill for years, even though almost everyone agrees, we badly need to fix a broken system and polls suggest a large majority of people agree on the rough outlines of what that solution might look like.
The great reframing recognizes that immigration is a complex issue. Both sides have some truth to their arguments; and both sides overstate and, at times, overreach or even lie. It recognizes that much of the conflict is driven by the over-simplification of the us-verus-them story, and better results would likely be had if all sides were to work together to:
Understand the issue from all points of view,
Learn the real facts (there are real facts, though they can often be hard to discern in this fraught media environment)
Develop a number of potential problem-solving options that seem to meet the needs and interests of most parties.
Evaluate the pros and cons of each option, and then
Make a recommendation to the decision makers who ultimately have to set policy.
Explained in a more generic way, the Great Reframing argues that our biggest threat is not each other. Rather, it is the breakdown in the civic culture of democracy that:
Prevents us from hearing all points of view and evaluating "truth" for ourselves,
Forces us to take sides, even when issues are complex and muddled and neither side seems to hold "the truth,"
Prevents us (and our leaders) from collaborating to develop response options that might help everyone, and
Prevents us (and our leaders) from evaluating and then choosing such options.
Instead, all we can do is choose our own side's option, which is likely to be unacceptable to the other side, so is unlikely to be implemented (except for usually brief periods when one side or the other gains full control). And even if it is implemented, the policy change might well be undone as soon as the other side gains power.
In addition, the stalemate created by this destructive us-vs-them framing makes us much more susceptible to domination and manipulation by bad-faith actors and outside aggressors who know how to foment division and then gain power with divide-and-conquer strategies.
Societies that view themselves as their own worst enemy cannot endure. If we want to survive, let alone thrive, as a culture and as a country, we need to stop framing "the other" as the enemy, and realize that hyper-polarization, destructive conflict, and the hatred and fear it creates are our true enemies. We need to replace those emotions with respect, care, understanding, and a desire to get to know and work with our fellow citizens to solve problems together and to resist the bad-faith actors who are driving us apart.
The direction our country moves is not inevitable. We can keep sliding or even start running down that slope towards catastrophe, or we can start climbing back up out of the hole that we have dug ne for ourselves. The choice is ours. If we want to climb back up, a first step is to reframe the nature of our problem. Because the us-vs-them approach is sending us hurtling further downward.
To Explore This Further
See the following sections in the Guide to Constructive Conflict.
Intractable Conflict Challenge and Opportunity -- An overview of both the positive role that intense conflict can play in promoting social learning and the ways in which such conflicts can undermine societal problem solving and democratic institutions while increasing intergroup hatred and strife.
The Illusion of Simplicy -- Much of the intractability problem stems from the fact that we fail to recognize the complex nature of intractable conflict and, instead, fall back on simplistic images that see conflict in hyper-polarized, binary terms (e.g. good vs. evil, us vs. them).
Failure to Recognize the Need to Limit Destructive Conflict -- Many people think polarization, conflict, and even war is inevitable -- "it is just human nature," some say. But the lethality of modern conflict and warfare makes the importance of conflict limitation and war prevention of utmost importance.
Collaboration Problems -- The best decisions usually come out of collaborations where people with different expertise and viewpoints collaborate to evaluate problems and develop solutions that will meet the needs of people of all political stripes. But hyper-polarization makes such collaboration very difficult. Opponents don't trust each other, they don't believe each other, and they seldom are willing to sit down with the other side to listen and learn.
Constructive Framing & Future Visioning -- If you frame conflicts as shared problems that need to be solved collaboratively, and work together to develop a vision for the future that will be acceptable to all, you are much more likely to be able to deal with conflict in a constructive way.
Resolve Fact-Based Sources of Conflict -- If conflict is fueled by suspicion, assumptions and misunderstandings, then one of the simplest ways to reduce it is to find out the facts of the situation. Every conflict resolution process needs a solid base of facts to stand on. However, agreeing on "the facts," can be, in itself, a challenging conflict resolution problem.
Collaborative Problem Solving/Consensus Building -- is used to settle conflicts that involve many parties and complicated issues. The approach seeks to transform adversarial confrontations into a cooperative search for information and solutions that meet all parties' interests and needs.
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About the MBI Newsletters
Two or three times a week, Guy and Heidi Burgess, the BI Directors, share some of our thoughts on political hyper-polarization and related topics. We also share essays from our colleagues and other contributors, and every week or so, we devote one newsletter to annotated links to outside readings that we found particularly useful relating to U.S. hyper-polarization, threats to peace (and actual violence) in other countries, and related topics of interest. Each Newsletter is 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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