Structural Conflict

“STRUCTURAL CONFLICT”: THE POWER OF YOUR POWERLESSNESS

Many people, even highly successful people, harbor deep beliefs contrary to their personal mastery. Very often, these beliefs are below the level of conscious awareness. To see what I mean, try the following experiment. Say out loud the following sentence: “I can create my life exactly the way I want it, in all dimensions—work, family, relationships, community, and larger world.” Notice your internal reaction to this assertion, the “little voice” in the back of your head. “Who’s he kidding?” “He doesn’t really believe that.” “Personally and in work, sure—but, not ‘community’ and ‘the larger world.’” “What do I care about the ‘larger world’ anyhow?” All of these reactions are evidence of deep-seated beliefs.

Fritz, who has worked with literally tens of thousands of people to develop their creative capacities, has concluded that practically all of us have a “dominant belief that we are not able to fulfill our desires.” Where does this belief come from? Fritz argues that it is an almost inevitable by-product of growing up:

As children we learn what our limitations are. Children are rightfully taught limitations essential to their survival. But too often this learning is generalized. We are constantly told we can’t have or can’t do certain things, and we may come to assume that we have an inability to have what we want.

Most of us hold one of two contradictory beliefs that limit our ability to create what we really want. The more common is belief in our powerlessness—our inability to bring into being all the things we really care about. The other belief centers on unworthiness—that we do not deserve to have what we truly desire. Fritz claims that he has met only a handful of individuals who do not seem to have one or the other of these underlying beliefs. Such an assertion is difficult to prove rigorously because it is difficult to measure deep beliefs. But if we accept it as a working premise, it illuminates systemic forces that can work powerfully against creating what we really want.

Fritz uses a metaphor to describe how contradictory underlying beliefs work as a system, counter to achieving our goals. Imagine, as you move toward your goal, there is a rubber band, symbolizing creative tension, pulling you in the desired direction. But imagine also a second rubber band, anchored to the belief of powerlessness or unworthiness. Just as the first rubber band tries to pull you toward your goal, the second pulls you back toward the underlying belief that you can’t (or don’t deserve to) have your goal. Fritz calls the system involving both the tension pulling us toward our goal and the tension anchoring us to our underlying belief “structural conflict,” because it is a structure of conflicting forces: pulling us simultaneously toward and away from what we want.

Thus, the closer we come to achieving our vision, the more the second rubber band pulls us away from our vision. This force can manifest itself in many ways. We might lose our energy. We might question whether we really wanted the vision. “Finishing the job” might become increasingly difficult. Unexpected obstacles develop in our path. People let us down. All this happens even though we are unaware of the structural conflict system, because it originates in deep beliefs of which we are largely unaware—in fact, our unawareness contributes to the power of structural conflict.

Given beliefs in our powerlessness or unworthiness, structural conflict implies that systemic forces come into play to keep us from succeeding whenever we seek a vision. Yet, we do succeed sometimes, and in fact many of us have become adept at identifying and achieving goals, at least in some areas of our lives. How do we overcome the forces of structural conflict?

(Image: diagram illustrating structural conflict with two rubber bands)

Fritz has identified three generic strategies for coping with the forces of structural conflict, each of which has its limitations. Letting our vision erode is one such coping strategy. The second is “conflict manipulation,” in which we try to manipulate ourselves into greater effort toward what we want by creating artificial conflict, such as through focusing on avoiding what we don’t want. Conflict manipulation is the favored strategy of people who incessantly worry about failure, of managers who excel at motivational chats that point out the highly unpleasant consequences if the company’s goals are not achieved, and of social movements that attempt to mobilize people through fear. In fact, sadly, most social movements operate through conflict manipulation or “negative vision,” focusing on getting away from what we don’t want, rather than on creating what we do want: antidrugs, antinuclear arms, antinuclear power, antismoking, anti-abortion, or antigovernment corruption.

But many ask, “What’s wrong with a little worry or fear if it helps us achieve our goals?” The response of those who seek personal mastery is the simple question: “Do you really want to live your life in a state of fear of failure?” The tragedy is that many people who get hooked on conflict manipulation come to believe that only through being in a state of continual anxiety and fear can they be successful. These are the people who, rather than shunning emotional tension, actually come to glorify it. For them, there is little joy in life. Even when they achieve their goals, they immediately begin worrying about losing what they have gained.

Fritz’s third generic strategy is the strategy of willpower where we simply psych ourselves up to overpower all forms of resistance to achieving our goals. Lying behind willpower strategies, he suggests, is the simple assumption that we motivate ourselves through heightened volition. Willpower is so common among highly successful people that many see its characteristics as synonymous with success: a maniacal focus on goals, willingness to pay the price, ability to defeat any opposition and surmount any obstacle.

The problems with willpower are many, but they may hardly be noticed by the person focused narrowly on success. First, there is little economy of means; in systems thinking terms, we act without leverage. We attain our goals, but the effort is enormous and we may find ourselves exhausted and wondering if it was worth it when we have succeeded. Ironically, people hooked on willpower may actually look for obstacles to overcome, dragons to slay, and enemies to vanquish—to remind themselves and others of their own prowess. Second, there are often considerable unintended consequences. Despite great success at work, the master of willpower will often find that he or she has gone through two marriages and has terrible relationships with his or her children. Somehow, the same dogged determination and goal orientation that works at work doesn’t quite turn the trick at home.

Worse still, just as with all of the coping strategies, willpower leaves the underlying system of structural conflict unaltered. In particular, the underlying belief in powerlessness has not really changed. Despite significant accomplishments, many highly successful people still feel a deep, usually unspoken, sense of powerlessness in critical areas of their lives—such as in their personal and family relationships, or in their ability to achieve a sense of peace and spiritual fulfillment.

These coping strategies are, to a certain extent, unavoidable. They are deeply habitual and cannot be changed overnight. We all tend to have a favorite strategy—mine has long been willpower, as those close to me can attest.

Where then is the leverage in dealing with structural conflict? If structural conflict arises from deep underlying beliefs, then it can be changed only by changing the beliefs. Fundamental beliefs such as powerlessness or unworthiness can be difficult to change. They are developed early in life (remember all those “can’ts” and “don’ts” that started when you were 2?). For most of us, beliefs change gradually as we accumulate new experiences—as we develop our personal mastery. But if mastery will not develop so long as we hold unempowering beliefs, and the beliefs will change only as we experience our mastery, how may we begin to alter the deeper structures of our lives?