Not everybody gets what they want

“No one got everything they wanted, but the American people got what they needed.”

Joe Biden

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“I should like to ask you to agree for the moment to think of conflict as neither good nor bad; to consider it without ethical prejudgment; to think of it not as warfare, but as the appearance of difference, difference of opinions, of interests. For that is what conflict means—difference. … As conflict is here in the world, as we cannot avoid it, we should, I think, use it. Instead of condemning it, we should set it to work for us.”

Mary Parker Follett

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This piece isn’t about politics and, yet, it is. We are in a weird world in which:

1. We seem to think if we don’t, or can’t, get everything we want the world is going to crumble before our eyes
2. We seem to think if we don’t, or can’t, get everything we want we have lost, i.e., somehow there was a pathway to getting 100% and the ‘others’ didn’t get it
3. We seem to think about public issues as personal issues, and vice versa, conflating some fairly horrible personal compromise advice and public good compromising.

Yeah. We receive an onslaught of banal personal advice suggesting any compromise screws us individually, as in dreams, desires and some fairly unforgiving beliefs in ‘things.’ Its nuts. And unhealthy.

The suggestion is that if you “compromise with life, you kill your dreams and live your plan B, C and D.”

Once again. That’s nuts.

Rarely, if ever, does anyone get 100% of what they want. And let’s be clear. Rarely, if ever, 100% of what you want is actually the best for 100% of the people. Therein lies the challenge of compromise. Your 100% never represents the best for the 100%. Period.

Which leads me to say we have corrupted the way we think about how collective debates and agreements work.

Simplistically, the corruption has occurred in individualism. Look. I am not suggesting every individual shouldn’t seek out what they want or even what they believe is best for them and what they believe. What I am suggesting that pursuit shouldn’t ignore what the other people in their community, city, state, province, country and maybe even the other 7,999,999,999 people in the world may want and need. That’s the layers of compromise. Yeah. That’s a lot of layers. Yeah. Maybe that’s why getting 100% of what you want is a bit of a fantasy. But in fantasyland there are people screaming ‘winners and losers’ ignoring the fact that, well, no one seems to be winning and shitload of people are thinking they are losing. We have corrupted compromise or at least corrupted the idea of conflict and conflict resolution.

“The corruption of the age is made up by the particular contribution of every individual man; some contribute treachery, others injustice, irreligion, tyranny, avarice, cruelty, according to their power; the weaker sort contribute folly, vanity, and idleness; of these I am one. It seems as if it were the season for vain things, when the hurtful oppress us; in a time when doing ill is common, to do but what signifies nothing is a kind of commendation.”

Montaigne

This corruption of compromise breeds a sense of everything changing, but in an invisible corrosive way. We only see the change in a low level slightly nagging a feel of unease & unhappiness. And because of that, mentally we shift our focus to what is visible and away from the invisible <that which creates the unease> and we fixate on what we think we know rather than unlearning/revising what we know. In other words, we get stuck in the fantasyland of what we want as being the ‘be all and end all.’

Once again. this is nuts.

We want lots of things and the odds of getting all these things is really really low. And you know what? Sometimes what we think we want is not actually what we need nor what we should want. Sometimes the ‘other side’ is suggesting something that is better than what we say ‘we want.’

Which leads me to integration, not compromise.

Technically speaking, what the Biden administration just did was not compromise, it was more like integration. Integration is a Mary Parker Follett idea. Presented as part of a lecture series on the psychological foundations of business management, to the Bureau of Personnel Administration conference group in 1925, Follet argued that conflict, as a natural and inevitable part of life, does not necessarily have to lead to adverse outcomes. Rather, if approached with the right attitude a conflict can present an opportunity for positive or constructive development. Follett suggested there are three ways to respond to conflict:

• Dominance
• Compromise
• Integration

Dominance means victory of one side over the other. This works in the short term, but is unproductive in the long run. Compromise means each party having to give up something for the sake of a meaningful reduction of friction. Far from ideal, compromise often leaves each side, if not each person, unsatisfied – having given up something of value. Finally, integration, the option championed by Follett, means creatively incorporating each persons/groups fundamental desires/interests into the solution.

And that is where I will end. I began with a Biden administration thought and end with, well, “no one got everything they wanted, but the American people got what they needed.” The solution integrated aspects of what everyone brought to the table and if we are really honest, the end product was probably a bit better than either of the side’s solutions going in. And isn’t that the way it is supposed to work? You don’t get everything you want, but you get a lot of what you need. Ponder.