Doug Noll argues that humans lack biological mechanisms to inhibit violent impulses, especially with powerful weapons available. He explains why people invalidate others' emotions: it soothes their own anxiety triggered by threat response. Mediators, he says, have a higher calling to foster peace.
Chapters
It's possible to mediate evil, but it takes a lot of patience, and it takes a lot of knowledge and insight by the mediator in working with people, because evil is extremely difficult, especially when it involves violence and war. That's because of the biology of his brain. Another problem we get is the effective tools of violence. Remember I said that we did not develop inhibitory responses, mechanisms, biologically to violence. Because we weren't capable of doing much violence to each other. Maybe we could break a bone. Maybe you got really lucky, smash somebody's head in with a stick if you caught them asleep or something. But that took a lot of work. Today, today we have Alright, one of my problems is I'm really politically incorrect. Today we have idiots like the NRA. And you may be gun lover and I appreciate that, but here's the problem. People, what the NRA does not understand, what gun people do not understand, is that we do not have the biological mechanisms in our brain to consciously make a decision about what to do with a weapon or not. And as a consequence, System 1 thinking goes into play, emotions go into play, and people get killed all the time because we don't have the biology to control the weapons. That's the hard truth. And the reason that we have— the reason that we suffer from nuclear holocaust, or we suffer from genocide, or we suffer from Sandy Hook, or other tragedies like that, is because our policymakers are unwilling to acknowledge that our biology is extremely limited in its ability to inhibit violent response. And when we create tools of violence, when we create tools of violence and we don't have the biology necessary to inhibit them, all we're going to do is perpetuate more violence. And that's one of the reasons why peace is so elusive, because we have too many tools of violence out there that allow people who have no inhibitions or low levels of impulse control to take these tools of violence and use them unthinkingly, unconsciously, and disastrously. For people. All right, that's enough. That's just to give you— I don't want to embarrass you any more than I have to. All right, so why do we engage in these emotionally invalidating statements? We do this, and we all do it. Well, hopefully we're going to stop that after today. But why do people engage in emotionally invalidating statements? Because it's uncomfortable for us to see this person being in that place. Thank you, Noah. Exactly correct. One of the primary reasons that we invalidate somebody else's emotions is because we are soothing the anxiety that we feel being in the presence of a person who's having a deep emotional experience. Because we have never been trained how to be with somebody who's highly emotional. We become anxious because, primarily, we don't know what that person is going to do. And that's— that at a certain primal level in our brain triggers flight or fight. It triggers the amygdalic process, which is the part of the brain that's our early warning radar that warns us about threats. And we will do anything to get out of that anxiety. And so when somebody is highly emotional, we don't know what to do with it, and so we try to diss it. We disrespect it. We dismiss it. We invalidate it. And what has been your experience When you're with somebody who's highly emotional, whether in a conflict or not, and you engage in— let me restate it. Let's ask it this way. It's probably easier to answer. How do you feel when somebody emotionally hasn't validated you? And you're feeling really upset about something and a close friend or partner or parent or somebody says, "Get over it." How does that make you feel? More upset. More upset. Angry. Angry. Hurt. —humiliated, dismissed, demeaned. Absolutely. And how many times have you used an emotionally invalidating statement to soothe yourself and watched a conflict or an emotion flare up and get even more intense? We've all seen it. We've all done it. Why is it then that we do not pay attention to our emotions? And I'll tell you that the enlightened— business we call mediation expands and grows and matures, we're going to be called on to do a lot more difficult work than just mediating a litigated dispute. You know, caucus-based mediation of litigated disputes is really pretty easy, relatively speaking. And I think we have a higher calling than that. And I think we can do a lot more with it, but it's going to call on a lot more inside of us to do that kind of work. And that's where I think we're going, and that's why I come to Texas to teach you and push you and motivate you to go to that higher calling so that we really can find peace in our lifetimes. And that's my great motivation. I hope that all of you will join me on the journey, and together, together we can turn Texas and the United States and the world into a better place to live for our children and grandchildren. So thank you very much.
