Countering Conflict with Positivity
On the drive north to Bemidji this morning, I listened to several more of Eric Weinstein's Portal podcasts. He did one with a woman named Julie Lindahl, who had been a classmate of his wife at Wellesley. She grew up in Brazil and discovered her German grandparents had been an "SS Couple", deeply committed to the Nazi cause, and that her grandfather had done atrocities in Poland. Her book on her research into her family’s dark secret, called The Pendulum, was published in Sweden (where she now lives) and America in 2018. She and Eric had an interesting conversation. I thought the most fascinating part was a comment she made about being asked by the Swedes to join an effort to work against a far-right group beginning to form on the island where she had settled. It was difficult, she said, "combatting" neo-Nazis directly because people were somewhat afraid to get involved. What did work, it turned out, was building up the threatened community by inviting people to participate and be there for unrelated positive reasons rather than for the negative reason of the movement they were trying to counteract.
I think it’s really interesting that a way to effectively counteract the bad things that are happening in our society today might be not necessarily by immediately rushing to battle, but rather to do specific positive things and invite people to participate. To get people involved in something hopeful and positive rather than focusing only on addressing the negative directly. Lindahl said that by putting their energy into doing positive things unrelated to the negativity they were addressing, the community was strengthened, businesses renewed their commitments to invest, and people moved into the community rather than leaving. Sounds like a useful lesson!