We live in a culture that is addicted to fighting. We fight when fighting is bad for us. We fight when it is not in our best interest, or when it doesn’t even make sense.
As with any addiction, we fight because it makes us feel better at the moment. Fighting makes unpleasant feelings go away temporarily, but in the long term our problems return and even get worse.
Many of our institutions are based on fighting, as Deborah Tannen describes in her book The Argument Culture: Stopping America’s War of Words. For example, child custody cases are often decided by having the two parents fight in court. This process creates enemies where once there were only two people with different opinions. The parents may believe, probably correctly, that in order to win the fight they have to disparage the other parent. The anger and resentment from this process may last a lifetime. In this process everyone loses, especially the child.
We will always have problems. In order to live in peace we must look for solutions that do not require fighting.
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