This piece is on a topic that has a really high degree of relevance to one of the bigger roadblocks or struggles that I’ve been dealing with recently. Something that I’ve found somewhat fascinating over the years is whether we ever actually change people’s minds when we have conversations or share our perspectives, or think we are making sound arguments. A more cynical assumption I suppose would be that people basically think what is convenient or adaptive in a narrow sense for them to think and merely ignore perspectives that disagree with their own. I feel generally ignorant when it comes to how we would even know if someone actually changed their mind in a deep way, and how we might measure that. Do people really flip a full 180 with any regularity in the real world, or is this only really an edge scenario? While many such questions fill my mind when I think about this topic, it certainly seems true that people can be convinced to back down given the right set of requisite conditions being met, but how do we react when we not only cannot achieve compromise nor have a real negotiation?
Frankly the scope of this topic effortlessly ventures beyond the significance of conversations or situations that arise in my personal life, but I want to start by using myself as an example to help illustrate some of what I wanna get at. First and foremost, I think it’s probably true that you can’t negotiate if you can’t walk away or say no. If your opponent has all the chips, you’re not playing a game anymore, you’re just delaying fulfilling the dare at that point, in many scenarios. I am far from intending to give a negative or pessimistic valence to this piece by the way, I merely mean to suggest that it’s hard to leverage when you have almost nothing to take advantage of. We can negotiate with our bosses generally because we can quit, and because they pay us in compensation for our contribution. To not pay us, puts them in debt or trouble, and for us not to work does something similar to us. This is of course all too obvious, but I wanted to touch on these principle ideas first, to get to the next piece of the unique situation of not being able to negotiate. From what I can tell, it seems like negotiation, or a conversation where two or more parties who can both walk away, and who have something to gain, interact to achieve some kind of agreement or compromise, is actually important because each party has different goals or needs and wants. They have perhaps different philosophies, different preferences, and perhaps too big a gap in those traits between parties results in a wobbly agreement, or an inability to cooperate. I think what happens when we try to cooperate with someone who does not agree with us and who we can not negotiate with for whatever reason is often an exercise in futility. Assuming we can’t walk away, this really leaves us with either going silent and attempting to get what you want or need through a black market method, which I’ll define as anything trying to achieve the usual result, simply under the table, or you butt heads until the stronger or more stubborn party emerges the victor.
The next logical question of course is why does this matter, why do I think this is important? I’m certainly not the first to say it, and this isn’t a politically geared post by any means, but when people can’t cooperate with each other they fight instead. Without negotiation we have nothing except submission, black market methods, or war from what I can tell. The less dangerous sounding and more mundane version of this, is that if one is in a relationship let’s say with parents or figures at some point in your life that have power over you, whom you cannot effectively negotiate with, you may be forced to seriously evaluate what your best, non-antagonistic options are. Is there anyway to say “fuck you” or resolve the difference that you haven’t considered, that has a reasonably high likelihood of success, and hopefully relatively low stakes? This is an important point for me especially because I find that often we haven’t found the best way to be honest about our wants and needs with people around us in a way that they can compromise with us, which can be bundled up in fear, and anxiety that we may have not worked through. It’s not always that negotiation is impossible, but that we may sometimes refuse to place certain things on the table.
Having hacked this bush to death at this point, what do we actually do when we arrive at some situation when a difference in philosophy is truly unresolvable? To answer the question properly let’s just assume that we’ve invested so much energy into trying to figure out if the dispute can be resolved the easy way that it’s as good as unresolvable. On some level this may be advice not needed, but in my experience, limited as it may be, I’ve felt that being candid with myself about what my goals are, what my passions are, and what my philosophy as a person, applicable to this situation is, and then putting that forth for myself helps me try to make logical next steps. I recall some joke that Warren Buffett I think had made, jesting that at some point in a person’s life everyone has to tell their father to go to hell in order to move on in their lives. Our father’s may feel otherwise, but on some level I think we have to recognize that our lives and decisions are ours and no one can decide how it will or should be lived but us. It may sound cliche but no one is gonna come up and put that oxygen mask on for us if we really need it, which is distinct from being loved or cared about. In my view it’s just a pragmatic recognition that taking accountability means being able to take care of our needs and wants, say no or yes as we think makes sense, and be able to deal with occasional furrowed brows when others don’t get what they want from us at every turn. I’ve learned that so many things are vying for my time and attention and by Jove not everything deserves my time and attention, I have to work things that do for myself. There is no objective and perfect measure that someone figured out of how much you should tolerate, or how much money is moral to make, or how much joy or suffering there should be in your life. These things come down to our own choices and personal philosophies.
A bit more ramble-y and probably complain-y than usual, but this is also sort of a letter to myself to really keep some of these things in mind. I’ve simply learned that trying to convince others that your life goals make sense is usually resources better spent on just grinding out the damn things. Hope this helped you stay a bit more honest, I know I need to, and I hope you will be well.
Orion Aeneas Webster,
FourthEye author
FourthEye 
Leave a comment