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181 " 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. "
― Amanda Ripley , High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out
182 " 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. "
183 " Any modern movement that cultivates us-versus-them thinking tends to destroy itself from the inside, with or without violence. High conflict is intolerant of difference. A culture that sorts the world into good and evil is by definition small and confining. It prevents people from working together in large numbers to grapple with hard problems. "
184 " 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. "
185 " He built a new vantage point, above the fray; a way to see himself, his old conflict, and his new purpose, in alignment. This expansion is a running theme in every story I’ve encountered of people shifting out of high conflict. Something happens to slow time and create space—maybe the birth of a child, maybe the death of a loved one, maybe even a stint in prison or the signing of a peace treaty—and in that precious space, under the right conditions, something new begins to grow. "
186 " 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. "
― Amanda Ripley , The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way
187 " symbolic concessions matter a lot in conflict. They disrupt the feedback loops and lower everyone’s guard, creating space where there was none, at least for a moment. "
188 " This is another peculiarity of high conflict. It can be one-sided. It can spiral out of a feud that lives mostly in our own heads. The other person may never even know they’re in our high conflict at all. Which means that we all may appear in conflicts we aren’t even aware of. "
189 " This ritual of making light, positive connections, outside of conflict, sounds obvious, but we neglect it all the time in our regular lives. These fleeting, pleasant encounters help expand the definition of us. Gary’s neighbor may be one of them when it comes to the water rate debate, but she’s one of us in the garden. "
190 " Psychologists Julie and John Gottman have studied conflict in some three thousand married couples over the years, and they’ve found that the couples most capable of keeping conflict healthy were the ones whose everyday positive interactions exceeded the negative by a ratio of 5 to 1. This is the “magic ratio, "
191 " People are wired to sort the world into us and them, but we are also wired to expand our definition of us, under certain conditions. Big shocks like a pandemic can make us encompass the entire world, overnight. "
192 " Relationships change us, way more readily than facts. "
193 " You know what this means, right? It means those after-work happy hours or birthday cakes for a colleague are not just awkward ordeals, forced upon us by corporate overlords. They are investments in our future sanity, a way to build up the ratio of positive exchanges to manage the negative ones sure to come. "
194 " it’s ideal if people don’t just talk but actually work together on some kind of common problem. This triggers our instincts for cooperation, rather than competition. It activates our desire to collaborate, rather than win. "
195 " 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. "
― Amanda Ripley , The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why
196 " Contact theory works best when everyone has enough motivation, stability, and power to take risks and withstand discomfort. These are pretty major requirements. "
197 " You cannot measure what counts in education—the human qualities, "
198 " nuclear power is the carbon fairy. It could help solve climate change, and it could be done safely. But many people, especially on the Left, don’t even want to discuss it. “Many people don’t seem to want to just solve climate change,” Mark told me. “They want to use climate change to turn the world into something they’d like to see. "
199 " 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. "
200 " 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. "
