Why Are We Yelling?: The Art of Productive Disagreement
Buster Benson
288 pages, Portfolio, 2019
If disagreement is a tree, anxiety and cognitive dissonance would be the water and air that help the tree grow, and the fruit that we have spoken of in passing up until now – security, growth, connection, and enjoyment – is what the tree produces. A disagreement that’s oriented entirely around the fruit of security will never yield productive questions because in those conversations information and questions are used to attack and defend our positions. There’s no reason to ask your enemy a real question, because the assumption is that they see uncertainty as a vulnerability and will try to use it against you—and vice versa. In order to shift out of battle mode, we need to remember to value different kinds of outcomes, reorienting the purpose of the conversation away from security and toward growth, connection, and enjoyment. When you do this, incidentally, security also comes along indirectly. Each of these four fruits of disagreement can be sought after individually, but the art of productive disagreement will ultimately show us how to seek all of them together.—Buster Benson
Security
When you’re being attacked, the fruit of security easily takes top priority. It’s the original and primary fruit of disagreement, and the one we’re still the most obsessed with.
Did someone try to take away your toy? Argue with them to get it back. In this way, disagreement protects your possessions.
Did someone insult you or your community? Argue with them to restore respect. In this way, disagreement protects your self-worth.
Disagreements themselves can be interpreted as a threat to individuals and groups. You’re more secure in a group where people mostly agree with one another, and less secure in a group where everyone disagrees, because exile is one way to resolve disagreement. Groups, therefore, are incentivized to minimize disagreement.
Within the category of pursuing security are all of the things that the voices of power, reason, and avoidance generally encourage us to do: Resolve the disagreement. Get everyone to agree. Disagree and commit. Settle it and move on. Shut it down. Put differences aside. Agree to disagree. Put it to a vote. Seal the deal. Close the loop. It’s the one-size-fits-all, habitual response to conflict and a big part of the reason why the way we argue has stopped being productive.
Pros of Seeking Security:
- You gain immediate results of increased security.
- This strategy can be applied to any disagreement.
- By definition, it’s the “safe” option.
Cons of Seeking Security:
- Squashing disagreements will prevent other fruits from being found.
- Closing down disagreements prematurely in the name of security can give a false sense of alignment that eventually comes back in uglier ways.
Growth
The fruit of growth differs from the fruit of security because obtaining it often requires taking risks and sticking your neck out a bit. The fruit of growth is harvested at the frontier, while the fruit of security is most often found at home.
If you’re in an argument about where to go for lunch, the safe bet is to go somewhere that you have been before and know you’ll like. The growth bet is to try going somewhere new, in the hopes that it’ll be even better than the places you’ve already been. There’s a trade being made between security and progress, which means that this fruit is often found only after a certain minimum amount of security has already been established.
If you’re alive in seventeenth-century Europe and are unhappy with your lot in life, the safe bet is to stick around and try to make the best of what you already have. The growth bet is to get on a ship and start a new life across the ocean. This is an easier bet to make if you have enough money to build a life across the ocean, or if things are just so dire where you are that they couldn’t possibly be made worse by taking a giant risk.
You can see how seeking the fruit of security exclusively will lead you to a different argument than seeking the fruit of growth. If you’re just trying to survive, you won’t be as likely to take larger risks, even if those risks might pay off and give you more security in the end.
The actual manifestation of growth can be a lot of different things. It can come from a fight over territory and possessions, or a fight over a championship title, or a fight over which ad campaign will lead to the most new customers. Growth can be selfish (“THAT’S MY TRAIN!”) or it can be collaborative (“Let’s find out if that noise was a ghost or just a gust of wind”).
Pros of Seeking Growth:
- The spectrum of possible outcomes is wide, which is another way of saying it’s risky.
- By trading some security for the possibility of growth, you can potentially earn larger payoffs.
- Growth can compound over time, leading to more security than a straight bet on security alone would yield.
Cons of Seeking Growth:
- It requires an assessment of risks, which opens up the door for conflicts of head, heart, and hand.
- Risk can also lead to losses if you miscalculate, underperform, or are just unlucky.
- Growth can come in many forms, some easier to measure than others.
Connection
Sometimes the path toward personal growth is aligned with the path toward connection with others, but that’s not always the case. Sometimes, in order to grow, we have to break off a relationship. And sometimes, in order to connect, we need to put our own needs aside for a while to better prioritize others’ needs. And at the same time, if we seek the fruit of connection with others over growth, we may still end up with more collective growth over time. For example, when I prioritized understanding why others believed in ghosts over proving that my beliefs were correct, the increased trust and connection established opportunities for me to learn more about how different people think that would have otherwise been inaccessible to me.
Connection differs from security because it often requires putting trust (and risk) into other people’s hands. For example, if I hear that someone has beliefs about guns or vaccinations different from mine, and I seek to connect with them around these beliefs even though I consider their beliefs unsafe in a fundamental way, it might lead me to see the world from a new perspective, or to consider a new edge case, outcomes that ultimately benefit me more than seeking only to protect myself from the threat of their beliefs.
As with the fruit of growth, the fruit of connection also benefits from a foundation of safety relative to the threat. I’m more willing to let a stranger into my house to hear about their candidate’s positions if I don’t consider them a threat to my direct safety. And on the flip side, building connections with people successfully will improve our security.
Pros of Seeking Connection:
- Building connections with others also leads to growth and security over time.
- We’re social creatures who find enormous fulfillment in relationships and are much less anxious and more resilient when we have strong relationships surrounding us.
Cons of Seeking Connection:
- Trust takes a long time to build. As they say, it’s earned in drops and lost in buckets.
- Trust can be betrayed in costly ways.
Enjoyment
Enjoyment is a fruit that binds many of the other fruits together but can also play against them. Enjoyment differs from connection when it comes at others’ expense. For example, making fun of someone can both bind your immediate group together and push others away. How many insults and examples of systemic harassment and abuse are framed as jokes, but are anything but enjoyable to those who are the butt of them?
There is a way to enjoy a disagreement without sacrificing connection and growth. There’s a certain kind of friendship—perhaps you can think of examples from your own life—where a long-lasting, innocuous disagreement even helps hold the friendship together. I love arguing about whether or not artificial intelligence is an existential risk to humanity with my friend Rick. I love arguing about whether or not the ends justify the means with my friend Tony. I love arguing about whether colleges will remain relevant in twenty years with my friend Carinna. Not all friendships have core disagreements, but there’s no doubt that they can add something enjoyable to the relationships that do have them.
Pros of Seeking Enjoyment:
- Seeking enjoyment helps motivate us on long journeys of growth and connection.
- The spark of enjoyment is a clear antidote to the spark of anxiety.
- Following our enjoyment is a way of understanding our inner interests better.
Cons of Seeking Enjoyment:
- Sometimes enjoyment can come at a cost, if it’s used to belittle.
- [Insert all cautionary tales of chronic hedonism here.]
An Abundance of Fruit
If your only goal in a disagreement is to increase security, either by battling threats or by minimizing conflict within a certain environment, you will never ask wide-open questions that enlist everyone in a collaboration toward growth, connection, and enjoyment. It’s just not how that mind-set works. The voices of power, reason, and avoidance don’t really want the vulnerability that a big open question creates, because that would give power to the other side.
At the same time, the other three fruits of disagreement aren’t as valuable as the fruit of security on their own. What good is learning something new if it’s then taken away from you? What good is building relationships with others if they use them to betray you? What good is enjoying a conversation if you’re also being robbed at the same time? Short answer: it isn’t any good.
In the long term, though, the fruits of growth, connection, and enjoyment outweigh the immediate and obvious value of security. Ultimately, productive disagreements return the same or more security in addition to the other three fruits.
Accepting this truth is the mental shift we need to make.
The battle for security is a zero-sum game. Because it assumes bad faith, it creates an eat-or-be-eaten environment for disagreement. If I’m safe, it means that the other side is weaker than my side, and the incentive for me in disagreements is to maintain that position of superiority. Security is a scarce fruit acquired in win-lose situations.
The battle for security, growth, connection, and enjoyment together, on the other hand, create a non-zero-sum game. To be “non-zero-sum” means that it’s possible for both sides to win, and it may even be the case that helping the other side grow, seeking to connect with them in meaningful ways, and finding ways to enjoy the thrill of productive disagreement together are strategies that beat a battle for security alone. Is it possible that by seeking all of the fruits together, you might expose vulnerabilities in yourself that the other side then uses against you? Yes. But that’s only more reason to listen to the voice of possibility about how connection can be improved, and how you can grow together and shift the environment away from one where the dynamic is about attacking and defending vulnerabilities in the first place.