Boundaries

Boundaries are the various divisions between ourselves, others, and our environment that create a convergence of everyone’s rights.

When we put together everything everyone is entitled to do, we have a set of barriers that demarcate each individual’s philosophical “territory”.

While the fringes of these boundaries have plenty of gray area up for debate, some things that are inherently within the sole control of a living being are non-negotiable. Those things are called “rights”.

Most interpersonal conflicts are grounded on either misunderstanding boundaries or trying to assert privileges as if they were rights.

The laws of a territory should abide by everyone’s inherent rights, but they frequently don’t. However, the people in power have the privilege of doing anything they want within the limits of their power, so rights will be violated as long as we have people with power who can abuse their privileges.

Rights

There are many human rights:

Animals have rights as well, but only proportionally to their sentience.

This isn’t the limit to human rights, and there’s technically no end to what can be demarcated as legitimate implicit rights. Rights are derived from the responsibilities that they’re connected to, and those responsibilities determine the scope of what a person must do to maintain those rights.

  • Don’t lie.
  • Don’t steal from others.
  • Notify affected parties of relevant changes.
  • Honor what you say you’ll do.

Privileges are expansions on our rights, but have further responsibilities associated with them.

  • The freedom to travel across public spaces without harassment.
  • The ability to use assets, such as technology or information.
  • The ability to use others’ assets, including their ideas.
  • Every other form of power.

Rights vs. Rights

The complicated part about each person’s rights is that it applies to everyone else.

Because the power dynamics are biologically configured to be uneven, and we’re not always loving, almost every person has abused another’s human rights at one point or another. Some part of it is upbringing, but most (if not all) human souls have evil in them that will entertain the desire to violate others’ rights for self-interest.

Our upbringing can also dictate that we don’t have certain rights that we have title to. Even though our intuition will disagree, we’ll often sabotage our understanding of the world to accommodate or fight what we’re taught.

The only way any one person can reliably satisfy another’s human rights is through loving them. Otherwise, we usually won’t consider others’ mental rights, even with elaborate social engineering.

In the absence of love, the only way people can ever make sensible decisions is through rebelling against a common enemy. This is the only way that large-scale groups will band together, though they will often turn on each other when that outside enemy is destroyed.

One of the trickiest debates about freedoms includes the right to speak. By speaking, we express our souls onto our environment. While it’s the only way for us to stumble through the trial-and-error method of discovering truths, it can also be abused to immorally gain power or distort truths, especially via influence. Thus, a government’s regulations about free speech will dictate how much they trust the average citizen.

Privileges

Beyond rights, we also have privileges. Rights are things we ought to have, but privileges are things we can do even when we have no inherent right to them because they’re part of others’ rights.

Many times, people believe their privileges are rights, often from a privileged upbringing or cultural indoctrination:

  • Being believed isn’t a right because that would infringe on others’ rights to think and believe what they want.
  • Any physical possession or property isn’t a right if it significantly harms other individuals.
  • Love isn’t a right, since that would require others to desire differently than they prefer.

Agreements

When people are willing to comply with others’ standards, they’re engaging in a type of agreement, also known as contracts. We trust the parties we agree with because we have either developed a habit of trusting in the past (i.e., proof of prior performance), or because we have some reason to imagine there will be future performance.

Everything we do with others that isn’t out of love is an agreement for one of our purposes:

These agreements exist so we can feel safe about what others will do with us. In the absence of evil, we wouldn’t need them.

Each agreement works through a similar story:

  1. Initial engagement by at least one person expressing interest in a purpose connected with someone else. In a casual engagement, it’s usually a slow transition, with both sides respecting what they see as the others’ rights.
  2. Discussing a negotiation of terms, both implicit and explicit.
  3. The entire duration of the agreement, which can last for minutes to decades. Both sides usually can feel how long they expect the agreement to last, even without anything formalized.
  4. The agreement will terminate if it stops being useful to both sides, sometimes prematurely. If the side with more power still wants the agreement, they can often coerce the other side to stay in that agreement. In this world, nobody usually cares about the side with less power, though there’s plenty of politics in discussing it.

The negotiation often involves making promises based on boundaries set in the future (i.e., expectations). Even if we don’t articulate those boundaries, we still hold them and expect others to respond at a later time.

The value we give to others in exchange for doing something (often represented as money) comes from a few variables:

  1. How much we don’t enjoy the task.
  2. How difficult it would be for us to learn or do it ourselves.
  3. How little we’d trust complete strangers to do the work.
  4. The likelihood we believe that person would succeed at the task.
  5. The consistency or inconsistency of finding other people to do that job.
  6. How dishonorable or disreputable the job is.

By using language, we can make promises to clarify what we agree on. How well we honor those agreements has an immense impact on our reputation.

Occasionally, these agreements become formal rules if they outlast a few significantly impactful trends. In the case of long-term partnerships, such as entrepreneurship or marriage, the relationship will influence and be part of many trends across its duration.

The person or group who most wants to leave the engagement will transition through phases of distancing if they’ve found a better means to their purpose:

  1. Pursuing different interests than the other.
  2. Performing different actions than the other’s expectations.
  3. Waiting indefinitely for the other party to engage in the inevitable looming conflict, and often intentionally avoiding them to prevent it.
  4. Officially confronting the tension and terminating the shared experience.

In the case of a group who wants to keep power, they’ll try to make new agreements that intensify or add to possible purposes of the departing party. This is the cause of both harsh government regulations and pay increases.

Disagreements

It’s generally human nature to want mutually beneficial agreements with everyone. We will often compromise to avoid the worst of them. Our desire to reconcile is most of the inspiration for cultural standards and norms.

But, sometimes that’s not possible. All we need is someone perceiving a purpose of theirs that will fail or an irreplaceable scarcity, combined with something we imagine someone else can do about it.

Usually, we avoid the conflicts around us because we’re afraid of the power others may wield against us or are honoring a principle we believe in. We can often fix many of our problems more easily than if others were helping us.

We always start conflicts from a perceived need, specifically when the trouble of making the conflict becomes less than avoiding it. This decision is significant because every conflict risks sabotaging the relationship with the other person, which we value if we want to be loved.

This perceived need to address something has several degrees of intensity:

  1. Discuss: We mention it because we want others to open up a discussion about the matter. We usually want people to increase their understanding and make or thoroughly consider decisions, or we know they don’t understand. Most things sit in this realm for mentally well people, especially regarding religion and politics.
  2. Defend: We have a conviction on the matter and don’t feel it’s appropriate to leave an idea uncontested. Usually, we people to change their minds about their opinion. Every healthy person has a handful of these.
  3. Die For: We have chosen to closely identify with the matter. Often, we’ve integrated the concepts so closely that we require others to honor their standard on it. Every single person has at least a few of these.

Usually, healthy people start conflicts after witnessing three instances of the issue. The first and second ones may be improbable, but the third time typically confirms we’re seeing a pattern that isn’t creating the results we want.

Conflicts only become unhealthy when we don’t properly calculate the risks, make them needlessly, or don’t manage them well.

Arguments

No matter how, our disposition makes its own mix-and-match reaction to the conflict:

  • Opposition – animal fight reaction, often involving aggression or hostility against the disagreement.
  • Conformity/compliance – animal flight reaction, focusing on agreeing over understanding the disagreement.
  • Sympathy – focusing on feelings more than reasoning.
  • Questioning – focusing on reasoning more than feelings.

When we react, we’re usually running strictly off feelings.

Generally, reacting leads to seeking blame, which is specifying who caused the problem. It’s a power tactic in groups, but doesn’t create any meaningful results because the action to break something is typically different from the action to fix it.

There are several reasons an argument will arise:

  1. One person is unwilling to understand the other’s desires, at least as it pertains to them.
  2. One person has run out of patience with the other, for any reason whatsoever.
  3. Someone is maliciously trying to distort how things appear to others.

Disagreement Scope

Not everyone disagrees on the same values, even when they’re in a team. There’s a “depth” of disagreement based on how well someone understands the conflict:

  1. Refuting the central idea: They can state their opponent’s thoughts in their words and can give a well-reasoned explanation of what’s wrong with the idea and why. This is the only way to win someone over and discover the truth, but requires tremendous patience.
  2. Refuting a non-central idea: They can quote their opponent’s words and explain how that idea is wrong. They never address the central idea, and sometimes insert their ideas (“straw man”). This is often as far as most people get, especially on the internet.
  3. Counter-argument: They state the opposite of the argument, then defend it with reasoning and evidence. In this situation, they’ll never convince the other person, but will allow observers to see an alternate viewpoint.
  4. Contradiction: They state the opposite of the argument, but without any reasoning or evidence.
  5. Attacking tone: They redirect the focus to the speaker’s choice of language. At this point and beyond, they’re focusing on distorting image more than truth or influencing anyone.
  6. Attacking the person: They redirect the focus to the speaker’s authority (“ad hominem”). At this point, they’re often afraid their opponent might be right.
  7. Blindly attacking: They’ll use insults and call their opponent names. This person is operating strictly on animal impulses and isn’t expressing enough present maturity for a useful engagement.

The range of disagreement a person typically sits within will indicate plenty of information about their motivations:

  1. Focusing on the central idea means they’re concerned with the ideas the other person has.
  2. Focusing on any ideas means they’re concerned with truth in general or like to philosophize.
  3. Making counter-arguments means they simply want to prove themselves right or prove their opponent wrong.
  4. Contradicting means they want to stop the other person from continuing in their dialogue.
  5. Attacking the tone means they feel strongly against the information, but don’t understand why.
  6. Attacking a person means they are either dysregulated or wish to maintain an image.
  7. Blindly attacking means they feel they will lose something if they lose the argument.

Conflict Management Skills

We like to imagine our conflicts are only with others, but they’re not. Inner conflicts ripple out to interpersonal conflicts, which ripple into society.

In general, society requires two possible approaches to conflict management:

  1. Be a nice person, which makes conflicts incredibly rare and skewed in your favor because others tend to make general judgments that nice people are good.
  2. Be competent in your specialization, which means others will trust you’re more likely to be correct.
  • In failing both, you’re likely to become enslaved in some form through having little value to everyone through your freedoms.

Each person in a conflict can only combine a few specific approaches to resolve it:

  1. Give them what they want. (Lose/Win)
  2. Take what you want, without their permission. (Win/Lose)
  3. Withhold what they want, with the possibility they may get what they want some other way. (Win/Lose, but they may perform Win/Lose back)
  4. Persuade them to give you what you want in exchange for what they want. (Win/Win or Partial Win/Win)
  5. Make everyone lose by destroying what they want and giving up what they have that you want. (Lose/Lose)
  6. Take a creative “third option” by involving other people to intensify or clarify the conflict:
    • Include other people with power to control that person.
    • Advertise the conflict to create more power shifts.
    • Bring in another person to judge the conflict.

Often, in most conflicts, there’s a differing understanding of the values we express in language, and the only solution is separating the values we mean versus the values we’re saying.

We tend to express our conflicts as if we’re dogmatic about a subject, but more often than not we simply have a popular belief in one side of something (e.g., someone may only be 55% convinced of a subject they’re screaming about).

When plenty of power is at stake or people are breaking cultural norms, most people are too angry to reliably separate the values other people intend versus what they’re expressing, and direct their focus strictly toward correctly their understanding of the problem.

Thinking without assumptions in a conflict can become habitual, but it requires tremendous restraint.

Besides suspending judgment, defusing most conflicts require several additional skills:

  1. Understand exactly what that person wants more than they do.
  2. Logically dismantle every justification the opponent is using, including any distortions of the truth to appeal to feelings.
  3. Creatively find a mutually acceptable solution beyond what everyone sees at the moment.
  4. Skillfully influence them to see beyond their convictions to understand your perspective.
  5. Patiently avoid submitting to anger through all of it, which usually requires ignoring the need to be important.

These skills are challenging to master, mostly because they require experience with difficult people to finesse them. Nobody likes pain, so the only qualified conflict-managers are either constantly seeking conflict, grew up around it, or worked around difficult people.

Skillful negotiators validate others’ feelings, but don’t give in to harsh demands or permit them to control an argument. To create results, they tend to employ fear for short-term effects and love for long-term solutions.

In the absence of sufficient skills, a fight may break out. When two people fight, they’re using any form of power to make the other person submit under it. Since everyone’s conceit is engaged, only stronger people can break up that fight to prevent people from dying or suffering disproportionately. In the case of the strongest group fighting against another, those conflicts have far-reaching consequences.

Resolution

At the end of a conflict, there are only several legitimate things anyone can do in a conflict:

  1. Give them what they want.
  2. Withhold what they want.
  3. Take what you want, without their permission.
  4. Make everyone lose by giving up caring about what you want and destroying what they want.
  5. Persuade them to exchange what you want from them in exchange for what they want from you. This sometimes involves holding your possessions or property hostage until they give what you want.
  6. Take a creative “third option” outside the scope of the conflict.

Often, the last two (“third option” or mutual trade) can actually intensify a friendship over time after a conflict.

Understanding is the key to starting a healthy dialogue, but everyone involved must be willing to understand each other to permit a mutually desirable result. In the absence of that, someone will leave unhappy with the arrangement.

Privacy

Privacy is a specific type of safety with others. Most protections give others safety to do things, but privacy is the specific safety of not having others access something, which may include communicating information. It’s the ability to say “no” to others’ understanding.

The information individuals may obstruct from others is a very specific list, though people may interpret anything as private depending on their culture:

  • Observing a person while they’re not fully clothed.
  • Knowledge of what a person possesses or may possess.
  • Past events tied to someone.
  • Ability to do specific things or with a specific tool.

Our feeling against others violating our privacy is usually irrational. We tend to imagine that all violations of our safety represent a risk:

  • If everyone knew where you lived, most people wouldn’t care.
  • Where you ate lunch or spent last Friday isn’t typically relevant to most people.
  • Your music preferences can’t do much if everyone else knows.

Most privacy concerns over small things are associated with others’ ability to predict your behavior. However, people keep making decisions that shift their habits around, so those behaviors are only approximate. We’re all somewhat predictable, but it’s impossible to predict people with enough precision to accomplish a purpose as long as we’re changing, even with an algorithm.

This privacy sometimes extends to everyone, but more often only applies to outsiders of a group. Typically, there’s someone responsible for managing that privacy, so they usually have disproportionate power over that information.

Often, in a larger group, the leader doesn’t have the time to keep close track of everything. In that case, the manager will often assign “keys” to everyone who’s in that group (e.g., ID cards, passwords, physical keys).

Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to keep track of those keys. The manager must trust everyone’s ability to keep track of them. And, if any of them are stolen, it creates two possibilities:

  1. Everyone had the same key, so they must get new ones.
  2. Everyone had a different key, and the stolen keys are rendered invalid.

Unfortunately, every single security idea requires a comparatively unsafe “door” or entryway that someone could theoretically enter without official authorization. Power and understanding always tempts our human nature, so every effective privacy measure is complicated, ridiculous, and time-intensive.

Technology magnifies our results, so it also magnifies the role of privacy against intruders. We can make elaborate security systems, but it allows elaborate invasions of those systems.

Application

Most mental disorders come from bad boundaries. Healthy boundaries require saying “no” when someone violates a boundary, and honoring others saying “no”. We often assert our boundaries well enough, but tend to ignore others’ rights by comparison. It’s far more complicated when we have past trauma or don’t understand others’ rights.

Very often, there’s a violent counter-reaction to violations of human rights. Most people tend to overstep retributive justice until they feel they’ve satisfied their rights, but some political movements actually thrive on this sense of injustice.

For everyone to be truly free, we need rules to protect when people violate others’ freedoms.

  • Those rules involve taking away the rights of people who have failed in the responsibilities associated with those rights.
  • The rights-enforcers also run the risk of abusing their privileges bestowed to them, which is the formation of a bad system.
  • In the void of sufficient rights, some people are granted privileges, which come with further responsibilities.

Asserting human rights is probably most of the trouble plaguing society.

  • We’re consenting to obey a government because they do a good-enough job protecting us from evil, but that only happens as long as we keep consenting.
  • We often create complex rules to find justice or peace, but it often only slows evil desire and rarely ever stops it entirely.

Don’t seek extra privileges or the enforcement of your rights unless you’re ready to take on the responsibilities that come with them. This will be meaningful if you do, but will be torture when you’re required to act later.

Everyone who runs this world has gotten there either through knowing someone powerful (e.g., monarchies), military strength (e.g., dictatorships), or popularity (e.g., democracy).

Nothing is technically free, and receiving anything is technically consenting to an unspoken agreement.

There’s a lot of power in “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. Nobody can be fully trusted, but everyone can be useful.

Conflicts are healthy when managed correctly by everyone. Through them, we can understand others’ points of view, become more patient and loving, and develop future skills for good boundary-setting.

When you have a lousy job, your boss made an agreement with you for you to trade your labor for money. By acquiring trade-specific understanding, you can gain more power than you had and find a better job, either by finding a better boss who will give you a better arrangement or by taking a social risk on adding value to the public.

When we use technology to increase the amount of time we can communicate, we often lose the quality of each individual engagement compared to in-person. Since technology removes distance, it mixes us with various cultures across the world, and our conflicts are guaranteed to become more frequent.

Our upbringing often teaches us to avoid fights, but we must never back down from a fight over principles we believe in. Instead, we must learn to negotiate instead.

Hardly any people are as thoroughly convinced on a subject as they appear to be. Usually, a bit of solid reasoning based on their existing perspective that incorporates yours (often delivered with a compelling story), combined with time for them to ruminate on it, is enough to radically influence them over to your perspective, but that doesn’t mean they’ll shift their inner thoughts on the matter.

If you can easily influence someone toward your views, someone else can easily influence them away. The strongest people are also the ones who tend to disagree the most, and that’s a critical part of selecting a good leader to prevent an organization from becoming a bad system.

When we want to influence others who don’t want to understand, we’re wasting our time. It’s particularly difficult for us to disengage if we’re fighting past trauma.

We tend to trust larger groups because they seem stronger, but a larger group is less safe than a smaller one because they can’t handle privacy as intimately.

Many bad systems unscrupulously use their power to predict human behavior, but there are far too many variables to reliably do it. Maybe in a hundred years’ time, but as soon as people become aware someone is trying to predict them they’ll rearrange their thoughts, so a working model is never reliable if anyone knows about it.