The Backstory

Composer/performer, educator and facilitator Guy Mendilow launched ASC out of the feeling that to navigate today’s pressing complexities — as well as remarkable opportunities — people and communities need as much imagination, adaptability and humanity as can be mustered. And yet, on individual, community, institution and national levels, these are stymied.

For example, Mendilow is concerned with the intensification and calcification of high conflict. A social-work-turned-legal concept, high conflict is typically marked by a dangerous reduction of complex people and situations into simplistic binaries — usually a distinct “us” vs monolithic, dehumanized “them,” whether Black vs White, Good vs Evil, Republican vs Democrat, etc. 

It is vital to differentiate high conflict from healthy conflict, or “friction that can be serious and intense but leads somewhere useful,” as author Amanda Ripley writes, often expanding humanization rather than collapsing it.  While healthy conflict requires neither agreement with, nor permission for others’ viewpoints and choices, when wisely navigated, it can result in increased understanding of the perspectives, experiences and circumstances underlying surface actions and talking points. 

The way out of high conflict generally starts with people’s experience of being understood and accepted as they are, irrespective of agreement. Yet a paradox of high conflict is that it shuts down people’s willingness to listen and learn. Instead, high conflict frequently self-perpetuates through confirmation bias, or the tendency to interpret events and details as further evidence for one’s preexisting beliefs. By blocking its own exits, high conflict easily becomes all-consuming and totalizing, to the point that even listening to a member of the opposite identity can jeopardize one’s status and story-of-self.