and so they decide to deal with what goes on on the surface and brush the serious core problems under the rug.
Excuse my bluntness, but, that's stupid. It seems to me that would only make the problem worse. I feel like 'real' niceness is managing social relations so that harmony may, over time, prevail, even if it requires a 'discussion' or two in the meantime.
This confuses me. Isn't 'discussing the issues' always a good thing? What can go wrong with a 'blunt' approach?
I think it's not a fear of conflict that is the problem, but rather a fear of being wrong. Conflict airs out our reasoning and allows a peek up the skirt of the conclusions that were drawn. Technically, you can justify anything if you wrap it up in a strong enough emotion and relate it to the ego. A straight line of reasoning untangles that knot and exposes any fallacies. If people equate being wrong with being useless or vulnerable, they may fear conflict or approach it over emotionally.
This confuses me. Isn't 'discussing the issues' always a good thing? What can go wrong with a 'blunt' approach?
That seems to be the problem of many feeling types: taking things too personally. After all, it is the feeling type who often fears conflict more than the thinking type.
Hey look. It is stupid for people to avoid conflict. But you do know why they do, right? Dealing with conflict is a HASSLE. It's uncomfortable. To many people, it's unnecessary, and some people feel like they have a lot to lose, or fear getting hurt.
Despite all that, resolving a problem is necessary, so it doesn't even matter what the other person's problem is. It's up to you as someone who wants to resolve the problem, to figure out how to work with them. This means respecting them, their feelings, their motivations, and their desires. Expressing empathy gives them the emotional space to open up; identifying the problem as something outside of them instead of them allows them to work with you to resolve it.
The thing is that no matter how stupidly someone else behaves, they have their own reasons, feelings, and desires for so doing. I guess the big question is that do we care enough about them to resolve the conflict, or do we just write them off as a lost cause and let the conflict go on, month after month, like a parasite inside of us?
Not so sure I agree with that. Thinkers can be pretty sensitive to criticism, too. "How dare you try to take apart my system that took me so long to build!" There can be a bit of pride invested in, and a great desire to preserve the system against the world. For instance, see certain scientists who lose their data so that no-one can critique, much less reproduce, their findings.
Maybe I'm on a different wavelength than you. In that case, the conflict you're speaking of is typeless.
"If you come across the Buddha on the road, kill him." - Zen Koan
The word 'agony' has come to mean an extreme mental or physical suffering, but has its origins in competition. From Late Latin and Greek, agonia 'a struggle for victory', from agon 'contest'. We also get the words 'protagonist' and 'antagonist'. The agon is the central conflict in a story or the central premise in a debate.
It is just ironic, to me at least, that we are inevitably conflicted over the worth and value of conflict.