Human Conflict

Some thoughts on human conflict. I have in mind verbal conflict, legal conflict, non-violent political conflict. I write these as recommendations to myself. I don't guarantee that they are the best fit for your personal circumstances. I don't intend this post to reference a particular conflict.

 

From Meditations Book IX, Section XVIII:

It is not thine, but another man's sin. Why should it trouble thee? Let him look to it, whose sin it is.

But it was against me! Through it, I've suffered a loss! Is the loss--if indeed it be one--magnified through wounded eyes? What noble high road would you not hesitate to recommend to a stranger who had suffered a similar loss, assuring yourself all the while that had you experienced the same grievance, you would have taken such a road, would have responded more ably, with more practicality, with more sense? Then why not actually take that higher path that in other circumstances you unhesitatingly recommend and know to be true? Didn't the injurer previously act that way, on numerous occasions? Then, if you knew in advance, why be so surprised and hurt this time?

 

But through it, he has obtained an advantage, and I a disadvantage! The injury compels reciprocity! Only then will there be justice! Is the loss what you think it is? Aside from conventional loss, the other person has inscribed his bad actions into the eternal fabric of the universe, locked as they are in the past, where he can't retrieve and undo them. In a sense, his primary victim, therefore, is himself. You on the other have not done so. From that perspective, is there not an overwhelming sense of relief? By not responding, you have escaped a rather ugly fate. Would imprinting the universe with two bad actions really restore justice, or would it render the past twice as corrupted, and the ethical purity of two lives diminished instead of just one?

 

It's different this time! Normally I'd be forgiving, but this is the one exception! Perhaps, but when does it not seem different? By what measure is it the one exception? Didn't it often feel like the one exception previous times? Won't it be the one exception again the future? Is your grace limited to  the intervals between the tests you repeatedly deceive yourself to be the one true exception, and does it become meaningless therefore, for being so? Why are you handing over the limits of your good behavior to the other person, to play god over you, predictably reactive as you are to the other person's provocations?