I have to say something

Coming from a position of power

I just heard about a conversation a friend of mine got into over the holiday where he ended up being called rude. It was with an elderly relative, and it was predictable. She started it, by saying things she knew her relative would disagree with. My friend asked her for more detail about what she was claiming and she didn’t have any. But that didn’t solve anything, it was contentious.

I advocate asking questions, but something about these questions didn’t work. I am not quite sure what, I wasn’t there, but they didn’t sound like bad questions as I wrote about sometime ago.

What I said to him was that these kind of interactions backfire, they just make people more entrenched in their beliefs. He said, “I had to say something.” The conversation made me think of a post a wrote a while ago “I want to fight back; they deserve it.”

Analyzing who said this has helped me realize that people think fighting with those who disagree with them is powerful. Anger feels powerful.

This is a manifestation of the conflict style of “competing,” where your needs are prioritized over others.  This has the upside of quick decision-making but the downside of being potentially harmful to others. 

And many of the people who hold this belief  are men — specifically white men, who do have power.  I first heard this from a person who held a position of power both because he was a white man and because of the backing of his union, a power derived from a group of people.

This helped me realize that the suggestions I’ve been making are typical of people who don’t have power, who have to use other methods to get their way.

But an angry response that derives from power doesn’t help us solve our long-term problems. You can force a person to say or do something, but force doesn’t work to convince people of anything. As Abigail Van Buren said,  “People who fight fire with fire usually end up with ashes.”