Conflict

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Conflict

Thursday, December the 14th, 2006-12-14

While listening to 6CD of Beethoven's concerti bought for €15.00 at Carrefour Department Store. Which makes $3 per disk. Who is conned?

I am now on the triple concerto. It brings me back to my youth, when I was twenty, when not a day would go without Beethoven.

It is strange that the Beethoven I rediscover now is totally different from the Beethoven I met when I was twenty. When I was twenty, Beethoven told me to fight, now Beethoven tells me not to worry, life is eternal.

Now I care little about the emotions, about the strength, about the persuasions. I am interested in the story Beethoven is telling, the tools he used, and most of all the interpreters. I fell in love with “old” interpreters, men who suddenly had all the time in the world, men for which each accord had a total value, each note was to be savoured as if it was the very last note ever to be heard.

I have also learned from my teachers to train myself in listening to what Beethoven does not say.

I also try to understand how he was able to make a compromise between the music he wanted to write and the music he wanted to sell. If I write something that I want to be read on the net, I cannot write the way I want. How do you make a compromise between the Human you want to be and the human you want the others to love?

I have asked many times on the net a question:

Which painter, an and after the 18th century had the same impact as Beethoven on music and the answer can only be one name:

None !!!!

When I had students and I showed a painting, I would tell them:

<<Look, look carefully and tell me what you do not see!>>

All painters are so minor compared to Beethoven.

One has to wait until Picasso to find a man who will transform the world, our vision of the world, the tools to handle the World.

But this is not at all the subject of this letter and most probably I write it because I am getting more and more dotty.

The real subject was again America and the Art and Science of Conflict Analysis and Solving.

It does not matter that nobody will believe me.

It does not matter that now we have entered in a new area of “I hate America” and anything America does and gives is wrong.

I was lucky to be amongst the generation twice liberated by American “Boys”.

I got my first understanding that literature was not boring from American writers, all the Steinbeck, Hemingway, criminals, generation.

I got my job for life from an American writer that nobodies remember (Bromfield).

I got my tools without which I would have had no hands from Apple.

I got my love of soils and soil conservation from American scientists.

But suddenly I notice that in my thanks I never expressed my gratitude for the teachers who taught us “Conflict Management”.

The very first book I read about “Conflict Management” had been in those days read by everybody. It was the Dale Carnegie book.

Dale Carnegie taught us a few facts of life:

The sound we love most is the sound of our name.

The solution we love most is the one that proves us right.

Guess between listening or talking, what we prefer?

Sure, later generations have made fun of Dale Carnegie, transforming him into some kind of Evangelistic Preacher.

Later, due to lack of funds, I joined the FAO of the United Nations. I may sound strange that I joined FAO due to lack of funds, but it is true.

The FAO in its wisdom assumed that we were idiots and undertook to train us.

FAO was quite right in assuming that we were Human Management idiots. We were trained in pig and cow and farm management, not in Human Conflict Management;

So, often we were packed of to the lecture rooms where for three days we were given the best lecturers that FAO could find. (the dark side was that our desk remained empty during that time which meant doing the day work at night, but who cares at thirty?)

The Consultants trained us.

I was especially lucky as my French Chief (Michel Mathieu) had been trained by an American (Richardson) and contrarily to most trainees he applied what he had learned.

So what did we learn?

Mostly the same stuff as criminal negotiators.

For instance we could be forbidden for days and weeks to use any negative formulation.

But most of all we got rules.

I am thinking of Rachael when I write this.

We were given rules:

Do not jump into looking for solutions, allocate at least as much time to understanding the problem as to finding solutions.

Another formulation I read recently from a priest is

The solution is in the problem.

But here come the most important rule of all the rules, one that is true for anybody under any circumstances:

It is so simple that you will not even balk at its formulation:

What do they want?

We were made to fall time and time again in traps prepared for us. We were taught to prepare lectures, say on the breeding of pigs, and we would enter the Hall and start our lecture with Audio Visual aids made at great pain to find ourselves pelted by the audience which was composed of Muslims. We had totally failed to check whether what we wanted to say was what they wanted to hear.

During my first year at the Agricultural Preparatory school (Svalöv), we were told by the Headmaster to remember that we were idiots and that our task was not to address farmers but to listen to them.

The Headmaster also reminded us that farmers, who would come to evening lectures, were tired and had other worries than listening to the proper way of maintaining a tractor. The Headmaster told us to expect that the farmers would fall asleep. But he gave us the trick to wake them up, the key sentence in any conversation and situation:

Utter the word:

GOLD!

And they would all wake up.

The Headmaster also taught us to understand that nobody cares for a solution if there is no problem.

Let us say that you are a farmer, it has been a long day, I am standing there and describing the procedures for greasing a tractor.

All farmers are bored; they take it for granted that they know far more than I do about the art of greasing a tractor.

So we were taught a trick.

Our Teaching Aids Specialist had created a device, a simple electric cord with a punch button for each listener.

So in a very innocent way he would ask:

"I will now state how many greasing points there are on a tractor and please push your buttons when you think I am right."

And he would start enumerating numbers, such as ten, twelve, and the farmers would roll laughing when the found out that most of them had figures which where inferior to half the real figure.

But had this test not been anonymous, who would have replied and who would have dared laugh?

You would think that there is a long way from Swedish Farmers to Africana and Asian farmers?

Yet, the behaviour is the same.

In an African group you must work so that never you force any farmer to utter a sentence which would commit him to a specific behaviour. All decisions belong to the group, not the individual family. In Africa, conflict management is an art and a science that has been learned over million of years. Its first and only rule is

The Group is more Important than the Individual.

In Asia you must never ask a student or a farmer a direct questions, worse of all not ask a question which must be answered by Yes or No. The first rule amongst Asian Farmers is that nobody must be made to loose face. But are they really behaving in a way different from ours?

As years past I learned more and more to understand what my teachers had been trying to tell me:

Who cares about an answer to a problem that does not concern him?

In my job in Africa, trying to teach farmers to double their maize yields, how often did I find that I was finally doing something quite different, trying to find ways of keeping soldiers off the maize fields, of trying to make women grow cash crops, of finding ways of conserving rain water, well all the usual stuff.

Our teachers went further and further in our training. Our first quarter of an hour had to be devoted to making the participants express what they wanted, then making all the participants share with all t he participants, then trying to find some way in which the Group could work out a solution. And we were not cheating; I did not know the solution.

With the years passing, the question has grown in my head.

What do I want?

Of course I want shameful things, such as being important, rich, important, loved, important, respected, deified, important.

But what do I really want?

Do you know what you really want?

So, while it is outdated and not something to be admitted, I do admit that without my American teachers I would just have remained the stupid boy I was.

Thank you America, even if you are no longer there to hear my thanks.

NO !!!

The world we love most:

We will never admit it, but when somebody else says something, a voice inside our head wants us to shout that this is nonsense and that "I" do know better.

So FAO taught us to listen to farmers.

If you can listen ot farmers, should you not be able to listen to your spouse?

Farmers would shout extravagant claims, such as:

"Fertilizers poison the Earth";

"Fertilizers make tomatoes unsalable".

As agronomists we wanted to shout at them and tell what what idiots they were, how could they despise fertiliwers that were going to double their production and make them for once in their life a profit?

Yet, we were told:

LISTEN!!!!

And FAO would only accept one form of reply from us:

Thank you for explaining to us the problem

Let us see what we should do

And here comes a trick that dates back to the biblical times, a trick we like so much to forget.

My boss when confronted with an agressive farmer would thank him for his analysis and then ask him to check whether he had properly understood the arguments presented by the farmer.

We humans are so strange, and we love so much to say:

NO !!!

that when we hear our own arguments revoiced by another participant, then the voice inside us is still there telling us that we should oppose this presentation, even if this presentation is exactly what we said previously.

New Chapter which is exactly the same as the preceding one

Years passed on the job and as the years passed, and as I learned more and more I wondered at the miracle that the young boy I once had been, could have survived and earned a salary while knowing so little.

I will ask you a very simple question which will make you doubt my sanity and probably make you throw away the text.

Here is the question:

Who is the buyer?

Like most of us I never gave any attention to that problem. It needed the comment of my Associate in Zambia, a man who had worked a life time in the Danish Industry, to make me understand that I had totally missed one of the most important aspects of the commercial world.

You snigger?

Of course you snigger!

If you have an apple tree, that you have harvested apples, that your neighbour does not have apples, then you are the seller and he is the buyer. This is the normal way of life, you have something that somebody wants and you sell it.

So why I am making such a fuss about such an obvious situation?

I will accept with reservations that in the case of the apples there is not much to say that you will believe.

But to wake you up, let us assume that you are a beautiful flourishing young woman, not yet linked, free of her decisions and investments, you, that beautiful young woman, are you a buyer or a seller?

When I look at the television series, I discover this world I have never known, where beautiful creatures spend hours, or is it days, in preparation for an out-evening, and then they will appear in the feast looking like a goddess just descended from Paradise. If you have seen the television add of 2006/7 for the Dior perfume, the one with Charlie Theron, then, all your dreams have been put on screen.

Let us assume that this “out of this world” creature is a woman.

She is selling something.

Or is she selling something?

She is selling her beauty.

In Darwinian words, she is selling her fertility at its maximum value.

But, can we really accept that she is selling her beauty, her fertility?

Let us assume that she is not stepping down the stairs of a very posh party for very rich and famous peoples, but stepping down the ladder of the pig sty. What has changed?

She is selling her fertility, but is she only selling is she not buying?

Now that your mind is fluttering about the dreams raised in your head by the idea of Charlize Theron stripping off her cloth one by way and walking towards you, let us throw a slow ball at you at see if you can catch it.

I said that the example of the apples was very ordinary and boring.

You are selling your apples, but are you sure that this is what you do?

What if I told you that you are buying your neighbours gold?

You are not an apple seller but a gold buyer.

Same with this goddess, she is not only selling all the rights of fertility; would you not agree that it would be futile for her to sell her fertility is there was nobody who had any use for it?

So she is not only selling, she is buying. She is buying your attention, a moment in your life, possibly all your life, possibly all the life in the Universe.

At FAO, it took me a long time to understand that we were not a charitable Organization, but a commercial Organization, that we were selling and buying.

At first it does not make sense; Does it to you?

All things considered, FAO has been created to receive resources from the rich and make them available to the poor. This is a donation process, similar to a cloud charged with water opening over a dry field and discharging its water.

If you think like this, you have understood nothing.

As the sentence is heavy on my heart and making typing a clumsy business I had better get rid of it.

I saw the truth the day I understood that the Poor Countries demanded bribes to accept the Financial Assistance we were entrusted with handing over to them.

With a bit of luck by now you are so bored with the subject of buying and selling or you are lost in your dreams of Charlize Theron walking in into you bedroom that you do not care at all about what I write.

So I can bang the hammer on the sore toe.

My dog, a stray dog, adopted a year ago, a dog that was so thin that he flirted with death, my dog refuses to eat his dog food unless I add two small bits of meat in it.

He has fully understood the rules of selling and buying.

Normally, he is the buyer and I am the generous donator. Not so, not so at all, he is blackmailing me:

If I (dog) do not get a bribe, I will not eat the dog food.

What power has he got on me and how does he know it?

He is a cynical dog, playing on my love for him. He has fully understood the market for being a happy dog.

It was the same with poor countries; but worse.

In the seventies, everybody wanted to help the poor countries.

Charity had become a business.

Agencies were created in the donor countries to manage the funds to be handed out.

Agencies were created to implement the projects.

Humans were earning their living, earning quite a generous living, executing the plans. I was one of them.

So a market had been created.

Soon, of course, the poor countries understood that if they refused the offered assistance, the Agencies in the Donor Countries would crumble, the International Agencies would have their mills crushing thin air, and the advisers would be left at the disposal of the unemployment market.

When there is a market, you are a fool if you do not play the market.

So, while it was never stated openly, we all knew the basic rule:

“What is there in this package for me?”

What can you offer which cannot be clearly identified as bribes?

It was offered.

Duty? Cars, many of them.

Office Equipments, computers, copying machines.

Buildings, maintenance.

And the most beautiful of all bribes, the participation to International Seminars. Any Official from a poor country attending one of these seminars could make in one week as much as he would make in one year on his salary.

The Organization of Seminars became for us and them another business branch. We needed the propaganda value of the seminars and the funds to organize them; they needed the money

from the seminars. We all had to pretend that the seminars were useful. And as good soldiers, we did.

By the end of the famous years of Great Generosity, we had been totally corrupted by the situation. Nothing was said, all the rules were understood. We were selling International Aid to Poor Nations.

How more preposterous can life be, a life when you have to bribe a destitute to accept a thousand dollars gift?

So, are you a buyer or are you a seller?

You still think that I am writing under the stupor of the fumes of some alcoholic beverage?

If you really believe that you understand whether you are a seller or a buyer, then I am worried for you.

Another Chapter, which is exactly like the preceding one

So I won't have to twist my brain into finding a chapter name

What is a deal?

You have apples, he has gold, and you exchange the apples against gold.

So why did he come at night and shoot you through the head?

This is a vivid way of illustrating one of the first lectures we had on marketing.

We are usually convinced that a good deal is making as much money as possible from our assets. If I manage to sell my apples for two dollars a pound rather than one dollar a pound, I have made a better deal. And enriched a funeral parlour?

If I buy your apples for fifty cents a kilo while you were hoping to get two dollars a kilo, but that was the end of the market, buyers were already moving away, all the other farmers had sold their apples, so you have to take what is offered, and you sold the apples at a quarter of what you expected.

And you wake up at night, you wife asks you why you are so twitchy, you explain, birds name are uttered to depict your imbecility, so you go to the cupboard where you keep grand-fathers moose shooting gun, you load it, you go to the buyer and never again will he buy apples at fifty cents a kilo.

At the Preparatory Agricultural School, the teachers wanted to convince us that

A good deal is a Deal when both participants are satisfied.

Yet, which one of us business men/women, can curb his desire to get he maximum for what he is selling and pay the minimum for what he is buying?

You have all been involved in “not so good deals”.

You have not?

Never shared your life (and bank account) with a woman/man?

And if you tell me that neither he nor she has ever thought that this was the worse deal he/she ever did and that he/she was conned, then may I suggest that you are not expressing what you are telling your psychiatrist?

And we are coming back to the Dior short film showing Charlize Theron peeling off her cloths one by one, walking into the bedroom and just as she reaches the bedroom door, turning round and looking towards you, kind of “what are you waiting for”.

I believe the accepted expression is:

“In your dreams”;

So what is a good deal in a situation like this?

You remember Marilyn Monroe in “Men prefer blondes”, where she states so clearly that

"What is wrong with a woman liking diamonds?"

Men like curves and want them and have the money to buy diamonds.

Women like diamonds and have the curves men want but not the money to buy the diamonds.

So is it not the fairest trade possible?

My boobs for your diamonds?

We feel that this is not quite like this that a man should be bonded to a woman, but really, what is wrong in that deal?

They both get what they want.

And the deal has the advantage of automatically eliminating all the men that do not have the financial resources to play in that category, and it eliminates non fertile women from sources of power. So very Darwinian and Trumpy, even if so chocking!

Nice Deal Marilyn.

Is it such a nice deal?

Why will they end killing one another?

Two factors might fall. The market might fall and the rich diamond supplier becomes a diamond seller, putting his beautiful curvy blond wife at the kitchen sink washing socks. What do poor little women do then to protect her legitimate interests?

The curves will fall, leaving the buyer with his hands full but not quite the way he has envisaged. What does a poor little rich man do then to protect his image and not have other rich people sniggering at his fallen down wife?

It can all be summarized into buying and selling, in other words in

TRADING

With the additional fun, that one must never admit that Love is Trading.

In our teaching, the young courageous boy who looks like a turnip and totally lazy falls in love with the beautiful all curvy blond who is as dumb as a doorbell and there is a happy end.

In our teaching the insipid boring young man from the house next door, travels on a sabbatical year, meets the young plain giggling girl from the take out, they both marry and have children and live happily together.

Which is of course not true.

The bonding between man and woman is a very Darwinian process.

You never fall in love with a loser.

You always fall in love with the winner.

You always sell something; in this case it is a uterus to be made available to sperms. As it is too rough for our sensitive eyes and noses, Nature has built a skin around all the complicated machinery that makes us tick, and built restraining glasses into our brain so we see only what we are supposed to see.

Our life in this Universe can be summarized in a very short sentence:

Sur-vive through Trading.

Yes why is it like this?

We shall never know.

Altruism, a Case of the Stupid Good Guy?

Much mathematical thought has been given to the value of being a good guy.

You would expect mathematics to prove what we all feel, that being a good guy is good for everybody.

Not so, not so at all.

Want to test yourself?

Two men are sitting on the sand, face to face, scratching meditatively their toes.

Arrives a stranger who seeing that they are not fully occupied, puts a heap of 100 one dollar coins in front of them.

They are interested, could this be Christmas day?

The stranger tells them.

“Here is the deal, the coins are yours if you can agree on the following. One of you goes away with seventy coins the other goes away with thirty coins.”

“If you cannot agree between yourselves as to who goes away with the seventy coins, then nobody gets anything.”

This mathematical problem has been tested again and again and apparently we humans prefer that we both be as poor as we were rather than seeing our mate get far more than I get.

This is only one phase of the mathematical testing of our behaviour when confronted with a situation demanding altruism.

It would appear that in the long run an egoistic behaviour is better both for the individual and for the group or tribe.

What would you do when you are doing your shopping if the Manager of the shop knocks on your shoulder and tells you that you and another of the customer will only pay part of the purchase bill if you can agree with another customer as to who will get a 30% discount and who will get a 70% discount.

Be lucky if this proposal is not the root of a total war.