Review Three: Beyond Machiavelli

Review Three: Beyond Machiavelli (Beyond another man's moccasin)
Fisher et. al.
Penguin (1994)

The point of good negotiations strategy is not ultimately outdoing the competition which may be so much harder for developed world advocates of multi-party talks and Harvard-inspired negotiators to realize than they think. The whole purpose of resolving conflict must then be an ability to reach beneath the skin of an argument and find a better one, perhaps one that not only suits a combatant more discretely, but reflects the kind of knowledge and resepect for cultural differences than often meets the media pin hole but usually only penetrates global consciousness in bouts of fire, mayhem, or spectacular misfortune.

Fisher et. al. advocate an openess to partisan perceptions in some attempts to understand them in the hopes of discovering some aspects of a perception or patterns of perception which may be addressed or met through dialogue. However increasingly, as the pervasiveness of technologies and media demands portray perceptions in phantasmagorias of increasingly oblique, increasingly obtuse, increasingly polarized views of the world thus an entrenched opposition to dialogue only becomes more non-constructive. It is the sway of the media which often outlines the abusive reorientation of values through the same marketing formats which mostly finance news today.

Television has taken us to the brink of mindlessness as one negotiator said something to the effect recently on CNN that in reference to one of many global crises, "more brainstorming is required with stronger emphasis on brain..." However too truly television stimulates only a soma-like induced wave-length in the human brain, not useful for framing horizons of future forecasting or even permitting scant access to long-term memory. Television excites only a very small portion of the frontal cortex, that associated with short-term memory. The reading mind, in the converse, makes the brain fire the likes of spark-like waves, which makes me think of flint tools, which links the mind not only to a currency of thought in the short-term but constantly encourages a referencing to long-term memory and forges the diverse interconnections between symbols, patterns, significances, necessary for a conscious driven control, interaction, and evaluation of inputted data.

Fisher et. al. remind the reader that the mind is learned and taught how to process new information, what to consider relevant, what constitutes constructive thought, what constitutes destructive thought, what is deconstructionist (as some reviews may appear to be) and what in fact consititutes no thought at all. Which is the point in view, feelings and not thought often drive a higher number of decisions made due to conflict than reason alone. So attempting to put on those moccasins is not necessarily abstracting or distracting the mind but perhaps engaging the feelings required for amelioration or the challenge of righting a wrong. As none feels the feelings of another then trying to draw the perceptions of competitors is not a pointless exercise. It takes the same amount of creative ingenuity to compile a SWOT analysis. Fisher et. al. exemplify the concurrent and divergent perceptions of Syrians and Israelis dredged out of thirty years of unresolved, simmering conflict to make this point.

Such drafts are often then presented to parties involved to try to gauge accuracy and try to assess the quality of the excercise itself, which in itself may provoke a dialogue to make diverse positions even clearer. This is termed an essential step toward building credibility between parties. However, the current state of global media appears to encourage the opposite effect among people. There is the mistaken perception so easily, confidently made upon the face value of events and situations, through a desire for easily understood messages, to implicate with interpretation rather than to address competitors directly. Indirectly many stereotypical tendencies are fed by a desire to paint a picture rather as one sees it rather than as another would prefer. As Fisher implies these attempts at understanding the viewpoint of a competitor will encourage empathy, in many cases, while often it seems knowledge of others is often treated more as a weapon than as a bridge building exercise. At the same time, deep knowledge is often so rare, it is often never attributed with credibility. It might even seem many individuals might seek to refute credible knowledge rather than put it to prosperous usage in the possible resolution of conflicts when the net benefit is often continued conflict to avoid other possible resolutions or concessions.

Fisher et. al. suggest exactly that, basically that the surface elements, those most easily known, easily transmitted to the satellites and media of the world are often merely a veneer on deeper issues, just as the past twenty years have seen the largest outflow of FDI from developed to undeveloped countries, these same unresolved seemingly perpetual conflicts might simply indicate some deeper, effective flaws and disadvantages to the free flight of capital and global exchange policies. How far and how long can the moccasin serve if the direct effect of global media has served to unlearn the brain from the storm?