Amanda Ripley Quotes

Most Korean parents saw themselves as coaches, while American parents tended to act more like cheerleaders.

It was interesting to note that higher standards were seen not as an investment in students; they were seen, first and foremost, as a threat to teachers.

Statistically speaking, tracking tended to diminish learning and boost inequality wherever it was tried. In general, the younger tracking happened, the worse the entire country did on PISA. There seemed to be some kind of ghetto effect: once kids were labeled and segregated into the lower track, their learning slowed down.

Our disaster personalities are more complex and ancient than we think. But they are also more mal­leable.

These days, we tend to think of disasters as acts of God and government. Regular people only feature into the equation as victims, which is a shame. Because reg­ular people are the most important people at a disaster scene, every time.

Success,” as Winston Churchill once said, “is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.

Everywhere I went, in every country, people complained about their education system. It was a universal truth and a strangely reassuring one. No one was content, and rightly so. Educating all kids to high levels was hard, and every country—every one—still had work to do.

I’d been looking around the world for clues as to what other countries were doing right, but the important distinctions were not about spending or local control or curriculum; none of that mattered very much. Policies mostly worked in the margins. The fundamental difference was a psychological one. The education superpowers believed in rigor. People in these countries agreed on the purpose of school: School existed to help students master complex academic material. Other things mattered, too, but nothing mattered as much.

The Unthinkable is not a book about disaster recovery; it’s about what happens in the midst—before the po­lice and firefighters arrive, before reporters show up in their rain slickers, before a structure is imposed on the loss. This is a book about the survival arc we all must travel to get from danger to safety.

But first, before anyone else, regular people were on the scene, saving one another. They did incredible things, these regular people. They lifted rubble off sur­vivors with car jacks. They used garden hoses to force air into voids where people were trapped. In fact, as in most disasters, the vast majority of rescues were done by ordinary folks.

In many U.S. schools, sports instilled leadership and persistence in one group of kids while draining focus and resources from academics for everyone. The lesson wasn't that sports couldn't coexist with education; it was that sports had nothing to do with education.

Without data, you are just another person with an opinion . . . Without data, you are just another person with an opinion . . .

Dread = Uncontrollability + Unfamiliarity + Imaginability + Suffering + Scale of Destruction + Unfairness

Narrative is the beginning of recovery.

In most countries, attending some kind of early childhood program (i.e., preschool or prekindergarten) led to real and lasting benefits. On average, kids who did so for more than a year scored much higher in math by age fifteen (more than a year ahead of other students).

If life is really as purposeless, unfair, and uncontrollable...,then life is simply too terrifying to be managed. So we search for a redemptive narrative... That search is a survival mechanism.

Why do we procrastinate leaving? The denial phase is a humbling one. It takes a while to come to terms with our miserable luck. Rowley puts it this way: 'Fires only happen to other people.' We have a tendency to believe that everything is OK because, well, it almost always has been before.

We had the schools we wanted, in a way. Parents did not tend to show up at schools demanding that their kids be assigned more challenging reading or that their kindergarteners learn math while they still loved numbers. They did show up to complain about bad grades, however. And they came in droves, with video cameras and lawn chairs and full hearts, to watch their children play sports.

Tom was not good at math. He’d started to lose his way in middle school, as so many American kids did. It had happened gradually; first he hadn’t understood one lesson, and then another and another.

The human brain works by identifying patterns. It uses information from the past to understand what is happening in the present and to anticipate the future. This strategy works elegantly in most situations. But we inevitably see patterns where they don’t exist. In other words, we are slow to recognize exceptions. There is also the peer-pressure factor. All of us have been in situations that looked ominous, and they almost always turn out to be innocuous. If we behave otherwise, we risk social embarrassment by overreacting. So we err on the side of underreacting.

Interestingly, the only class that Eric actually enjoyed in Korea was math. He noticed it on his first day of school. Something was very different about how math was taught in Korea. Something that not even Minnesota had figured out.

Most of us do not feel heard much of the time. That’s because most people don’t know how to listen. We jump to conclusions. We think we understand when we don’t. We tee up our next point, before the other person has finished talking.

Wealth had made rigor optional in America. But everything had changed. In an automated, global economy, kids needed to be driven; then need to know how to adapt, since they would be doing it all their lives. They needed a culture of rigor.

Why did math matter so much? Some reasons were practical: More and more jobs required familiarity with probability, statistics, and geometry. The other reason was that math was not just math. Math is a language of logic. It is a disciplined, organized way of thinking. There is a right answer; there are rules that must be followed. More than any other subject, math is rigor distilled. Mastering the language of logic helps to embed higher-order habits in kids’ minds: the ability to reason, for example, to detect patterns and to make informed guesses. Those kinds of skills had rising value in a

Understanding people doesn’t change them. It’s not nearly enough. But almost no one changes until they feel heard. That’s the third paradox of conflict. People need to believe you understand them, even as they realize you disagree, before they will hear you.

We’re socialized to believe that warmth and strictness are opposites,” Doug Lemov writes in his book Teach Like a Champion. “The fact is, the degree to which you are warm has no bearing on the degree to which you are strict, and vice versa.” Parents and teachers who manage to be both warm and strict seem to strike a resonance with children, gaining their trust along with their respect.

Economists had found an almost one-to-one match between PISA scores and a nation's long term economic growth. Many other things influenced economic growth, of course, but the ability of a workforce to learn, think and adapt was the ultimate stimulus package...For students, PISA scores were a better predictor of who would go to college than report cards...PISA wasn't measuring memorization; it was measuring aspiration.

Resilience is a precious skill. People who have it tend to also have three underlying advantages: a belief that they can influence life events; a tendency to find meaningful purpose in life’s turmoil; and a conviction that they can learn from both positive and negative experiences.

If parents simply read for pleasure at home on their own, their children were more likely to enjoy reading, too. That pattern held fast across very different countries and different levels of family income. Kids could see what parents valued, and it mattered more than what parents said.

Why were American kids consistently underestimated in math? In middle school, Kim and Tom had both decided that math was something you were either good at, or you weren’t, and they weren’t. Interestingly, that was not the kind of thing that most Americans said about reading. If you weren’t good at reading, you could, most people assumed, get better through hard work and good teaching. But in the United States, math was, for some reason, considered more of an innate ability, like being double-jointed.

Emotions are more contagious than any virus. You can catch them through stories, without any human contact. And of all the emotions people experience in conflict, hatred is one of the hardest to work with. If humiliation is the nuclear bomb of emotions, hatred is the radioactive fallout. That’s because hatred assumes the enemy is immutable.

Finally, it was clear that the real innovation in Korea was not happening in the government or the public schools. It was happening in Korea’s shadow education system—the multimillion-dollar afterschool tutoring complex that Lee was trying to undermine. I realized that, if I wanted to see what a truly free-market education system looked like, I would have

Wealth had made rigor unnecessary in the United States, historically speaking. Kids didn’t need to master complex material to succeed in life—not until recently, anyway. Other

Gary’s model of mediation was built on this idea that everyone needed to be in the room.

Shame rarely has the desired effect, even with people we know. It never works outside of your own tribe, and reporters are almost always on the outside.

The smartest way to help people stay out of high conflict is keep the new identity alive. Help them cultivate those newly revived roles.

There are lots of ways to rehumanize people, but one way is through great storytelling. It can be more powerful than any peace treaty.

Suffering accumulates, like debt.

A sense of empathy, combined with an identity as someone who helps and takes risks, may predispose one for heroism.

Since 9/11, the U.S. government has sent over $23 billion to states and cities in the name of homeland security. Almost none of that money has gone toward intelli­gently enrolling regular people like you and me in the cause. Why don’t we tell people what to do when the nation is on Orange Alert against a terrorist attack—in­stead of just telling them to be afraid?

There is nothing more important to a person who is undergoing a life crisis than to be understood,” Gary likes to say. Being understood is more important than money or property. It’s more important even than winning.

Listening doesn’t mean agreeing. It doesn’t mean legitimizing or amplifying what other people say. I still decide what to put in the story—and what to keep out. Listening deeply does not mean creating false equivalencies

Without a doubt, American teenagers can perform at the top of the world on a sophisticated test of critical thinking. Students at traditional public high schools that took the test in Fairfax, Virginia, also trounced teenagers around the world.

One way to prevent high conflict is to learn to recognize the conflict entrepreneurs in your orbit. Notice who delights in each new plot twist of a feud. Who is quick to validate every lament and to articulate wrongs no one else has even thought of?

In Korea, math moved fluidly. When the teacher asked questions, the kids answered as if math were a language that they knew by heart. As in Tom’s class in Poland, calculators weren’t allowed, so kids had learned mental tricks to manipulate numbers quickly.

Whether they are at an airline or at a command center, experts will err on the side of excluding the public, as we have seen. If they can avoid enrolling regular people in their emergency plans, they will. Life is easier that way, until something goes wrong.

One thing was clear: To give our kids the kind of education they deserved, we had to first agree that rigor mattered most of all; that school existed to help kids learn to think, to work hard, and yes, to fail. That was the core consensus that made everything else possible.

The Iron Child culture was contagious; it was hard for kids and parents to resist the pressure to study more and more. But all the while, they complained that the fixation on rankings and test scores was crushing their spirit, depriving them not just of sleep but of sanity.

In a series of experiments, safety officials ran regular people through mock evacuations from planes. The trials weren't nearly as stressful as real evacuations, of course, but it didn't matter. People, especially women, hesitated for a surprisingly long time before jumping onto the slide. That pause slowed the evacuation for everyone. But there was a way to get people to move faster. If a flight attendant stood at the exit and screamed at people to jump, the pause all but disappeared, the researchers found. In fact, if flight attendants did not aggressively direct the evacuation, they might as well have not been there at all. A study by the Cranfield University Aviation Safety Centre found that people moved just as slowly for polite and calm flight attendants as they did when there were no flight attendants present.

This strange new test called PISA, which stood for the Program for International Student Assessment. Instead of a typical test question, which might ask which combination of coins you needed to buy something, PISA asked you to design your own coins, right there in the test booklet.

In river rescues, members of the Kansas City Fire Department rescue squad yell profanity-laced threats at victims before they get to them. If they don't, the victim will grab on to them and push them under the water in a mad scramble to stay afloat. "We try to get their attention. And we don't always use the prettiest language," says Larry Young, a captain in the rescue division. "I hope I don't offend you by saying this. But if I approach Mrs. Suburban Housewife and say, 'When I get to you, do not fucking touch me! I will leave you if you touch me!' she tends to listen.

The question then was not what other countries were doing, but why. Why did these countries have this consensus around rigor? In the education superpowers, every child knew the importance of an education. These countries had experienced national failure in recent memory; they knew what an existential crisis felt like. In many U.S. schools, however, the priorities were muddled beyond recognition. Sports were central to American students’ lives and school cultures in a way in which they were not in most education superpowers. Exchange students agreed almost universally on this point. Nine out of ten international students I surveyed said that U.S. kids placed a higher priority on sports, and six out of ten American exchange students agreed with them. Even in middle school, other researchers had found, American students spent double the amount of time playing sports as Koreans.

Parents who view themselves as educational coaches tend to read to their children every day when they are small; when their children get older, they talk with them about their days and about the news around the world. They let their children make mistakes and then get right back to work. They teach them good habits and give them autonomy. They are teachers, too, in other words, and they believe in rigor. They want their children to fail while they are still children. They know that those lessons—about hard work, persistence, integrity, and consequences—will serve a child for decades to come.

They suspected that children learned best through undirected free play—and that a child’s psyche was sensitive and fragile. During the 1980s and 1990s, American parents and teachers had been bombarded by claims that children’s self-esteem needed to be protected from competition (and reality) in order for them to succeed. Despite a lack of evidence, the self-esteem movement took hold in the United States in a way that it did not in most of the world. So, it was understandable that PTA parents focused their energies on the nonacademic side of their children’s school. They dutifully sold cupcakes at the bake sales and helped coach the soccer teams. They doled out praise and trophies at a rate unmatched in other countries. They were their kids’ boosters, their number-one fans. These were the parents that Kim’s principal in Oklahoma praised as highly involved. And PTA parents certainly contributed to the school’s culture, budget, and sense of community. However, there was not much evidence that PTA parents helped their children become critical thinkers. In most of the countries where parents took the PISA survey, parents who participated in a PTA had teenagers who performed worse in reading. Korean parenting, by contrast, were coaches. Coach parents cared deeply about their children, too. Yet they spent less time attending school events and more time training their children at home: reading to them, quizzing them on their multiplication tables while they were cooking dinner, and pushing them to try harder. They saw education as one of their jobs.

Self-sufficiency was a religion for Rescorla. He once told a friend that every man should be able to be sent outside naked with nothing on him. By the end of the day, the man should be clothed and fed. By the end of the week, he should own a horse. And by the end of the year, he should have a business and a savings account.

rigor mattered. Koreans understood that mastering difficult academic content was important. They didn’t take shortcuts, especially in math. They assumed that performance was mostly a product of hard work—not God-given talent. This attitude meant that all kids tried harder, and it was more valuable to a country than gold or oil.

The more time I spent in Finland, the more I started to worry that the reforms sweeping across the United States had the equation backwards. We were trying to reverse engineer a high-performance teaching culture through dazzlingly complex performance evaluations and value-added data analysis. It made sense to reward, train, and dismiss more teachers based on their performance, but that approach assumed that the worst teachers would be replaced with much better ones, and that the mediocre teachers would improve enough to give students the kind of education they deserved. However, there was not much evidence that either scenario was happening in reality.

Most of human history, there were no nation-states, no country identities at all. Humans did not assume they had anything in common with other humans whom they would never lay eyes on, hundreds or thousands of miles away. But since humans invented national identities, we’ve gotten quite convinced of their realness, willing even to kill and to die for them.

In Oklahoma, the CEO of the company that makes McDonald's apple pies told me that she had trouble finding enough Americans to handle modern factory jobs-during a recession. The days of rolling out dough and packing pies in a box were over. She needed people who could read, solve problems and communicate what had happened on their shift, and there weren't enough of them coming out of Oklahoma's high schools and community colleges.

Carnegie dreamed up the Hero Fund himself. For all his ruthlessness as a businessman, he had a soft spot for civility. He disdained football as a sport for savages, so he donated a lake to Princeton University to give athletes another outlet. He was a pacifist and railed against the traditional definition of heroes as warriors. “The false heroes of barbarous man are those who can only boast of the destruction of their fellows,” he wrote. “The true heroes of civilization are those alone who save or greatly serve them.

Another simple but powerful tactic is distraction. Intentionally focus your attention on something else, even in the midst of conflict. Sometimes, Curtis imagines the young men he works with as they looked when they were small children, innocent and sweet. “I look at everyone and see my grandchild,” he said. “That’s the state I have to see them in.” He recategorizes them in his mind. They are not gangbangers. They are people who were children once, who lost a first tooth, who needed help tying their shoes, who liked to dance.

For everyone, in any high-emotion situation, the most tried and tested method is to practice rhythmic breathing. Taking slow, deep breaths is one of the few actions that influence both our somatic nervous system (which we can intentionally control) and our autonomic system (which includes our heartbeat and other actions we cannot consciously access). The breath is a bridge between the two. That’s why breathing is used by Special Forces soldiers and by martial arts practitioners and by pregnant women in labor. Because it is the best tool we have in the moment.

Tracking in elementary school was a uniquely American policy. The sorting began at a very young age, and it came in the form of magnet schools, honors classes, Advanced Placement courses, or International Baccalaureate programs. In fact, the United States was one of the few countries where schools not only divided younger children by ability, but actually taught different content to the more advanced track. In other countries, including Germany and Singapore, all kids were meant to learn the same challenging core content; the most advanced kids just went deeper into the material.

This kind of parenting was typical in much of Asia—and among Asian immigrant parents living in the United States. Contrary to the stereotype, it did not necessarily make children miserable. In fact, children raised in this way in the United States tended not only to do better in school but to actually enjoy reading and school more than their Caucasian peers enrolled in the same schools. While American parents gave their kids placemats with numbers on them and called it a day, Asian parents taught their children to add before they could read. They did it systematically and directly, say, from six-thirty to seven each night, with a workbook—not organically, the way many American parents preferred their children to learn math. The coach parent did not necessarily have to earn a lot of money or be highly educated. Nor did a coach parent have to be Asian, needless to say. The research showed that European-American parents who acted more like coaches tended to raise smarter kids, too. Parents who read to their children weekly or daily when they were young raised children who scored twenty-five points higher on PISA by the time they were fifteen years old. That was almost a full year of learning. More affluent parents were more likely to read to their children almost everywhere, but even among families within the same socioeconomic group, parents who read to their children tended to raise kids who scored fourteen points higher on PISA. By contrast, parents who regularly played with alphabet toys with their young children saw no such benefit. And at least one high-impact form of parental involvement did not actually involve kids or schools at all: If parents simply read for pleasure at home on their own, their children were more likely to enjoy reading, too. That pattern held fast across very different countries and different levels of family income. Kids could see what parents valued, and it mattered more than what parents said. Only four in ten parents in the PISA survey regularly read at home for enjoyment. What if they knew that this one change—which they might even vaguely enjoy—would help their children become better readers themselves? What if schools, instead of pleading with parents to donate time, muffins, or money, loaned books and magazines to parents and urged them to read on their own and talk about what they’d read in order to help their kids? The evidence suggested that every parent could do things that helped create strong readers and thinkers, once they knew what those things were. Parents could go too far with the drills and practice in academics, just as they could in sports, and many, many Korean parents did go too far. The opposite was also true. A coddled, moon bounce of a childhood could lead to young adults who had never experienced failure or developed self-control or endurance—experiences that mattered as much or more than academic skills. The evidence suggested that many American parents treated their children as if they were delicate flowers. In one Columbia University study, 85 percent of American parents surveyed said that they thought they needed to praise their children’s intelligence in order to assure them they were smart. However, the actual research on praise suggested the opposite was true. Praise that was vague, insincere, or excessive tended to discourage kids from working hard and trying new things. It had a toxic effect, the opposite of what parents intended. To work, praise had to be specific, authentic, and rare. Yet the same culture of self-esteem boosting extended to many U.S. classrooms.

In Finland, all education schools were selective. Getting into a teacher-training program there was as prestigious as getting into medical school in the United States. The rigor started in the beginning, where it belonged, not years into a teacher’s career with complex evaluation schemes designed to weed out the worst performers, and destined to demoralize everyone else. A teacher union advertisement from the late 1980s began with this breathtaking boast: “A Finnish teacher has received the highest level of education in the world.” Such a claim could never have been made in the United States, or in most countries in the world.

He’d experienced it as a private trauma. Failure in American schools was demoralizing and to be avoided at all costs. American kids could not handle routine failure, or so adults thought.

playing with numbers was still considered taboo, a subject best left to the later years, despite America’s obvious and enduring math handicap. For too long, what American

It was hard to explain, but there just seemed to be something in the air here. Whatever it was, it made everyone more serious about learning, even the kids who had not bought into other adult dictates.

most Americans said teaching was a hard and important job, but many of them, including teachers and teaching professors, didn’t seem to believe it required serious intellectual heft.

The Finns decided that the only way to get serious about education was to select highly educated teachers, the best and brightest of each generation, and train them rigorously. So, that’s what they did. It was a radically obvious strategy that few countries have attempted.

on patrol with the study police

Finland had required a matriculation test for 160 years; it was a way to motivate kids and teachers toward a clear, common goal, and it made a high school diploma mean something. Korea rerouted air traffic for their graduation test. Polish kids studied for their tests on nights and weekends, and they arrived for the exam wearing suits, ties, and dresses. In America, however, many people still believed in a different standard, one that explained a great deal about the country’s enduring mediocrity in education: According to this logic, students who passed the required classes and came to school the required number of days should receive their diplomas, regardless of what they had learned or what would happen to them when they tried to get a job at the Bama Companies. Those kids deserved a chance to fail later, not now. It was a perverse sort of compassion designed for a different century.

In most countries, attending some kind of early childhood program (i.e., preschool or prekindergarten) led to real and lasting benefits. On average, kids who did so for more than a year scored much higher in math by age fifteen (more than a year ahead of other students). But in the United States, kids’ economic backgrounds overwhelmed this advantage. The quality of the early childhood program seemed to matter more than the quantity.

You cannot measure what counts in education—the human qualities,

In the United States and other countries, we’d put off this reckoning, convinced that our kids would always get second and third chances until well into adulthood. We had the same attitude toward teachers: Anyone and everyone could become a teacher, as long as they showed up for class, followed the rules, and had good intentions. We had the schools we wanted, in a way. Parents did not tend to show up at schools demanding that their kids be assigned more challenging reading or that their kindergarteners learn math while they still loved numbers. They did show up to complain about bad grades, however. And they came in droves, with video cameras and lawn chairs and full hearts, to watch their children play sports.

Was it possible to hammer 3.6 million American teachers into becoming master educators if their SAT scores were below average?

Parents who read to their children weekly or daily when they were young raised children who scored twenty-five points higher on PISA by the time they were fifteen years old. That was almost a full year of learning. More affluent parents were more likely to read to their children almost everywhere, but even among families within the same socioeconomic group, parents who read to their children tended to raise kids who scored fourteen points higher on PISA. By contrast, parents who regularly played with alphabet toys with their young children saw no such benefit.

PISA was developed by a kind of think tank for the developed world, called the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the scientist at the center of the experiment was Andreas Schleicher.

But even in other, more overtly dire situations, crowds don’t tolerate irrational panic behavior. Most of the time, people remain consistently orderly—and kind, much kinder than they would have been on a normal day.

These days, we tend to think of disasters as acts of God and government. Regular people only feature into the equation as victims, which is a shame. Because regular people are the most important people at a disaster scene, every time.

Sometimes it’s hard to get people to do worst-case planning because the worst case is so bad. People just throw up their hands.

In general, TV makes us worry about the wrong things. Your brain is better at filtering out media hype when it is reading. Words have less emotional salience than images. So it’s much healthier to read the newspaper than watch TV.

Laszlo Bock, Work Rules (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2015) David Brooks, The Social Animal (New York: Random House, 2011) Arie de Geus, The Living Company (Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2002) Angela Duckworth, Grit: The Power of Perseverance and Passion (New York: Scribner, 2016) Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business (New York: Random House, 2012) Amy Edmondson, Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete in the Knowledge Economy (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Pfeiffer, 2012) Adam Grant, Give and Take (New York: Viking, 2013) Richard Hackman, Leading Teams (Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2002) Chip and Dan Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard (New York: Broadway Books, 2010) Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging (New York: HarperCollins, 2016) James Kerr, Legacy (London: Constable & Robinson, 2013) Patrick Lencioni, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2002) Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World (New York: Portfolio, 2015). Mark Pagel, Wired for Culture (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012) Daniel Pink, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (New York: Riverhead Books, 2009) Amanda Ripley, The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013) Edgar H. Schein, Helping (Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2009) Edgar H. Schein, Humble Inquiry (Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2013) Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline (New York: Doubleday Business, 1990) Michael Tomasello, Why We Cooperate (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009)

In almost every other developed country, the schools with the poorest students had more teachers per student; the opposite was true in only four countries: the United States, Israel, Slovenia, and Turkey, where the poorest schools had fewer teachers per student.

Kids meet the expectations you set for them,

The Unthinkable is not a book about disaster recovery; it’s about what happens in the midst—before the police and firefighters arrive, before reporters show up in their rain slickers, before a structure is imposed on the loss. This is a book about the survival arc we all must travel to get from danger to safety.

In any situation where cooperation matters, keep the groups flexible. Avoid schemes that designate one winner and one loser, one group that’s on the inside and one that’s on the outs. Mix up the identities as often as possible.

the loving ideal that we think of when we talk about brothers and sisters turns out to be relatively rare. Only about a third of American adults report having a close, supportive relationship with a sibling. Another third have either a hostile or a competitive relationship. The rest are generally apathetic about their sibling—or have fond feelings but rarely speak.

It was a classic high conflict. Everyone was worse off, except for the lawyers.

A conflict that had lasted five years was resolved in less than twenty-four hours. The final agreement was only two pages long. Once the conflict entrepreneurs got sidelined, it appeared, the sisters were free, at last. The conflict became healthy.

Just as leaders can exploit our worst instincts, they can call us to our best selves. We each contain many versions of ourselves, which can be summoned or suppressed, depending on the moment.

Conflict can explode when social pain becomes unbearable. When it becomes something worse than exclusion, when it becomes humiliation. Humiliation is “the nuclear bomb of the emotions,” the psychologist and physician Evelin Lindner wrote. That’s why it’s the third fire starter, following group identity and conflict entrepreneurs. Humiliation poses an existential threat that jeopardizes the deepest part of ourselves, our sense that we matter, that we are worth something. It is “the enforced lowering of a person or group,” Lindner writes, “a process of subjugation that damages or strips away their pride, honor and dignity.

Conspiracy theories reassure us that life is not, after all, fragile and chaotic. No, in fact, powerful people are pulling the strings, on purpose. And they must be stopped.

The Bahá’ís try to select people who do not crave attention and power. “Being elected is not a status symbol,” said James Samimi Farr, a Bahá’í spokesperson. “It’s a call to further humility.

give people more than two choices. It doesn’t fix everything, but it reduces the power of the binary. Complexity doesn’t collapse into us and them quite so easily.

Another way to reduce the binary is to shift to proportional representation, where seats in Congress get allocated in proportion to the votes won by each party.

Even if their preferred party does not get the most votes, they still have a voice. They can still be heard, which we know by now is half the battle.

When people feel understood, they trust the other person to go a little deeper and keep trying to get it right.

The conflict trap makes it incredibly hard for us to dig ourselves out once we get stuck. We know we want peace. We figure out what we’re willing to compromise to get there. The other side does, too. We’re so close—but then we find we can’t budge. The invisible forces that pulled us into the Tar Pits, including binary choices, social pain, the illusion of communication, and the idiot-driver reflex, all become stronger.

We don’t want to be the first to make a peace offering, even one we’re willing to make, because we worry this will be seen as a sign of weakness and then we’ll be asked to give up more. We don’t trust that the other side really wants to make peace. Every objection to making peace speaks directly to our biases and stereotypes. We can’t stop thinking of our side and the other side.