By
Guy Burgess

November, 2023

Synopsis

This is the first half of a presentation that Guy and Heidi gave to the Trust Network on November 14, 2023. This video explains what massively parallel peacebuilding is, and why we think it is the best way to address large scale, highly complex conflicts and strengthen democracy such that it can navigate those conflicts and make successful, wise, and equitable decisions.

Full Transcript

Slide 1 —  Hi, this is Guy Burgess. In this series of two videos, I'd like to describe an idea that Heidi and I have been developing for a number of years, massively parallel peacebuilding. And I'd like to talk about why the strategy is needed, how it would work, and why it's realistic. 

Slide 2 —  To start with, I want to highlight what our core objectives are. Years ago, we learned from Boutros Boutros Ghali's's Agenda for Peace about the word peacebuilding. Originally, the notion was that in war-torn societies, you tried to first make peace. And then once you've done that, then you need peacekeepers to keep the peace. But the real challenge was peacebuilding, which was the long-term effort to reconcile a society and to build a society in which deeply divided communities can live together in peace and prosperity. And the way that this was done really involved building a power-with democracy.  And this is something Heidi and I have also been talking about for a bit. So peacebuilding and democracy building sort of go hand in hand. And what we're trying to do is to figure out how to do this.

Slide 3 —  Now in order to do this, the first thing that we've tried to figure out how to handle is how to deal with the scale problem. And the scale of modern society is really pretty hard to wrap your mind around. We, in the conflict field tend, to think in terms of a mediation triad, where you have two parties and a mediator. That's three people. But what we're dealing with here is large regions, small countries, big countries, 30 million people, 300 million people. And to get some sense of just how big the difference is between the small-scale mediation triad and society-wide peacebuilding, consider the fact that a person walking around town at, say, 1.7 miles an hour is going four orders of magnitude slower than the International Space Station that makes around the world every 90 minutes. Now, that's also the difference, incidentally, between conventional and nuclear explosives. What we're talking about with respect to conflict is something like a six or seven or even eight order of magnitude. So that's on the order of... well, it is a staggering number. And so part of what we've been trying to do is to figure out how we can come up with a strategy for working at that scale.

Slide 4 —  The next thing that we've been trying to figure out is how to deal with the complexity of modern society. And the way that we describe complexity. very often. to our students. is by starting with a pool table. And here you imagine a bunch of balls on the table, and you line up the cue ball, and you hit the perfect shot, and all the balls go exactly where you want. That's the way that we think about complicated mechanical systems. They all behave in predictable ways. If we take the shot right, then the balls go in and we win.

The thing about complexity and complex social systems is it's more like a pool table with hundreds of millions of balls scattered all over the place, and hundreds of thousands of actors who are trying to take the perfect shot all at the same time. And obviously, that's a whole different game because it's all chaotic. And no matter what you do, somebody else may have done something that have made whatever you did try to not work. So we're also trying to deal with a strategy for dealing with that kind of complexity.

Slide 5 —  And the other thing that we've tried to do with all of this is understand society as this giant sea of individuals that are engaged in conflict interactions all the time. So the basic conflict interaction is you have somebody in legal terms, it's the plaintiff, who says "things would be better if you would do something else." And then the defendant, the other person says, "no, I don't think it'd be better. That wouldn't be fair." And so then what you have is the problem of deciding whether or not the plaintiff's idea should be implemented, or whether the defendant has a good point.

And there are broadly three basic ways in which we can answer this question. One, we can do it democratically, and this is small d democracy, not Democratic Party democracy, which is to use a series of democratic processes to make wise, equitable, efficient, nonviolent decisions that preserve relationships.

Often you have a different way of resolving these, which are more authoritarian, where somebody has power over everybody else, and they say just "this is the way it's going to be," usually because it's in the authoritarian's best interest, without any real consideration of what the plaintiff and the defendant wanted. And then the third option is dysfunctional anarchy, where you can have, well, you just can't decide and you just fight over it forever.

Slide 6 —  So we have this image of a three-way continuum of a society in which any dispute that's playing out in that society can be placed on this continuum. At the top, if you handle things in democratic ways and fair and effective ways, then you get closer to the top. If it's all dysfunctional anarchy and fighting about it, then you're off to the lower right. And if you fall into the trap of authoritarianism, you're in the lower left.

And the thing about societies is if you get down into the authoritarian realm, especially, the authoritarians can prevent you from ever getting back out of it, because they can exert all sorts of ruthless, terrible force to stop you. There's a trap on the dysfunctional anarchy side, too, where people just feel that it gets hopeless and nobody tries anymore.

So what we want to do is to cultivate a situation in which as many disputes as possible are handled in democratic ways.

Slide 7 —  Now, there are a bunch of challenges in doing this. One is you need some set of principles for deciding what's fair. And the idea that we found most useful builds off the Charter of Compassion's observation that all the world's major religions have some formulation of the Golden Rule as one of their core teachings. This golden rule site  has a list of all of these. And it's basically the notion that you should treat others the way you'd like to be treated. So cultivating that and then building down from it, that gives you a set of fairness principles that you can apply to a whole range of issues to decide whether or not you're making things better or worse.

Slide 8 — The second challenge is how you handle the messy, cumbersome process of making decisions. The graphic in the upper right is a graphic of how laws are made. And if you look at that, it's an unbelievably daunting process. There's always been this line about people who like sausage and the law, that is the law-making process, shouldn't watch either of them being made. And the truth is that the democratic legislative process is really messy.

It's got to figure out how to limit escalation to the point where you can actually work together, how you can communicate, work through some complex ideas, analyze problems, share decision-making power fairly, have some vision of where you want to go, and collaboratively solve the problem, and think of it all at the same time. So what we're really about is trying to figure out how in the world you could do something like that. And that's what it takes to make democracy work.  And that's why we've never really quite pulled it off yet. And there are so many stories of democratic failures. But that doesn't mean it's not possible. And what we want to do is highlight a way in which that might actually happen.

Slide 9 —  So the next challenge that we've figured out that you've really got to address is what we call the "bad faith actor problem." There's one set of skills that work if you have competing parties who are making a good faith effort to figuring out how you can work together in mutually beneficial ways. Then you got a pretty good chance of actually pulling it off.

A lot of our problems these days stem from the fact that they're bad faith actors. These are folks who have figured out that it's in their interest to prevent democratic processes from working. You have "authoritarian wannabes" who would like to have some sort of authoritarian control over society. And the way they do that is they prevent democracy from working. You have foreign rivals. You have media companies who figured out that, hey, conflict sells, so we got to keep people fighting. Then you have advocacy groups that really think that they ought to dominate the society. So that's another set of problems.

Slide 10 —  The fourth challenge that making democracy work at this society wide scale has to deal with is what we call hyperpolarization. And this is something we've focused a lot of attention on over the last almost 20 months now with our Substack newsletter. The problem with hyperpolarization is it gets you to the point where you just hate everybody on the other side and support everybody on your side. And you don't consider the issues anymore. It's just, are they a friend, an ally, or an enemy? And that determines your position on things.

So once you get to that, you can't really work through the kind of issues that it takes to make really good decisions. So how do you build a process that does these four things, meets these four challenges at the scale of modern society?

Slide 11 —  The next thing that you have to understand is that there's no way that you have some sort of top-down or even middle-out process where somebody figures out, " Hey, I've figured out how to do this. And the expect that everybody's going to listen to their revelations and do exactly what they want. This is where you run into the complexity problem, where you have lots and lots of different people trying to do different things at the same time, and you get chaos.

Slide 12 —  And that could give you a sense that it's all hopeless and society can never learn and we can't get any better. But the truth is, and if you look at history, the world we live in today, for all of its problems, is phenomenally better than the world that existed however many years ago you want to look. And the reason that it's better is that complex systems have a different way of learning. We have highlighted three principal thinkers here in this slide that give you a sense of the way these complex social systems work.

First, there's Adam Smith. He's the guy who invented the invisible hand or discovered it. The invisible hand evolved and he just put a name to it. But it's this notion that necessity is the mother of invention. So you've got all of these inventions.

And then Darwin comes into play. Darwin had this notion that while the good ones, the good inventions, the good ideas tend to be selected for and the stupid ideas fall away.

And then you have Emile Durkheim, who wrote about the division of labor and figured out  that in giant societies the only way you can do really complex things is everybody specializes.

So you combine these three things with respect to individual disputes, and in each case, you start bending social decisions in a more positive direction.

Slide 13 —  So here's where you start to get to this notion of massively parallel peacebuilding or democracy building. This learning engine—where problems create opportunities— leads people to say, "hey, well, if I could push things this way," so you wind up getting a whole bunch of guys on our mythical pool table here, all trying to shoot the balls in the same direction. And that's how you start reinforcing social change. And altogether, you get lots and lots of people to do things that by working together, actually change society and make it better. And that's why society has continued to evolve, with many catastrophes along the way over the many centuries.

Slide 14 —  So in the next part of this, what I want to do is to look at actually how this massively parallel process is working out in reality. To highlight some of the roles, and remember, this is a division of labor type system. Highlight the various roles that are being played and some of the people who are playing them. So with that, I will leave you with just two references. If you want to know more about this, a great deal of information is available on our website, Beyond Intractability.org. That's the home of the Intractable Conflict Knowledge Base Project. And then there is our Substack newsletter that comes out a couple of times a week with lots of interesting articles on all of these topics.

Photo Credits

Slide 2: Mediation Silhouettes – Source: https://thenounproject.com/term/mediation/160374/; by Gilbert Bages from the Noun Project; Permission: Attribution 3.0 United States (CC BY 3.0 US)

Slide 3: Pool Table: Source: https://pixabay.com/en/pool-game-billiard-cue-774332/; Permission: CC0 Public Domain Free for commercial use No attribution required

Slide 7: How laws are made graphic -- Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Visualization-of-How-a-Bill-Beco... By: Mike Wirth and Dr. Suzanne Cooper-Guasco; Permission: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported; Date Acquired: November 10, 2023.  Sausage - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sausage,_potatoes,_steak_and_Zho... By: Missvain; Permission: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International; Date Acquired: November 10, 2023

Slide 10: Network Visualization – Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Social_Network_Analysis_Visualiz... By: Martin Grandjean; License: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported; Date Acquired: May 14, 2023 Archimedes Levered – Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Archimedes_lever_(Small).jpg; Body:
Mechanics Magazine; Permission: Public Domain; Date Acquired: November 16, 2023

Slide 11: Adam Smith -- Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?search=adam+smith&title=Specia... Permission: Public Domain; Date Acquired: May 18, 2023 Charles Darwin – Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?search=Charles+Darwin&title=Sp... Permission Public Domain; Date Acquired: May 18, 2023. Emile Durkeim – Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:EMILE_DURKEHIM.jpg; By: Power Renegadas; Permission: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International; Date Acquired: May 18, 2023 Network Visualization –  Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Social_Network_Analysis_Visualiz... By: Martin Grandjean; License: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported;
Date Acquired: May 14, 2023

Slide 12: City – Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ISS-30_City_lights_of_Dubai,_Uni... By: NASA; Permission: Public Domain; Date Acquired: May 16, 2023