The New Humanitarians Volume III - Search for Common Ground

Welcome to today's deep dive. We have a really fascinating mission ahead of us today.

We really do. It's one of those topics that just kind of rewires your brain.

Exactly. So for all of you listening, we are unpacking a really profound document today called Search for Common Ground.

Right. And it's essentially a history, but also a master playbook authored by John Marks and Susan Collins Marks.

Yeah. And our core objective today is figuring out how to take the world's most explosive, deeply entrenched conflicts and just entirely drain the gasoline out of them, which is a heavy task. Very heavy. We are talking about moving away from those bitter adversarial you or me battles to non-adversarial you and me solutions.

It represents a fundamental rewiring of how we approach human interaction. And to grasp the sheer magnitude of this conceptual shift, we really need to travel back to 1982.

Right, which puts us square in the deep freeze of the Cold War.

Exactly. Everything in global politics at that point was framed by MAD, mutually assured destruction.

The psychological weight of that is just, I mean, knowing the US and the USSR could annihilate the globe at any second was immense.

And John Marks, who we will be discussing at length today, comes up with this brilliant metaphor for the situation.

I love this metaphor.

It's so good. He suggests imagining two young boys standing knee-deep in a small room that is completely flooded with gasoline.

Okay.

One boy is holding 12 matches. The other boy is holding 9 matches.

And they're standing there in the fumes, fiercely arguing over who has more matches.

Right. That image captures the absurdity of the geopolitical landscape perfectly.

'Cause everyone was focused on the matches.

Exactly. John realized that every diplomat, every international security expert, they were intensely obsessed with arms control treaties.

Analyzing weapons stockpiles.

Rearranging the mix of matches so the world felt slightly safer.

But John looks at this dynamic and points out this glaring flaw. It only takes one single match to blow the entire room to pieces.

Just one.

So if you want the world to be genuinely safe, You cannot simply count the matches. You have to drain the gasoline out of the room.

You have to change the entire underlying framework of what security actually means.

Which is such a massive paradigm shift.

It is, which brings us to the core value of this text. This document is not just a history lesson about Cold War diplomacy.

No, not at all.

It is a blueprint for social entrepreneurship and practical peacemaking. The principles we are going to explore are tools that you listening to us right now can apply to your own life.

Whether you are navigating a toxic workplace or dealing with a complex family dynamic.

Or trying to understand community polarization. This is about transforming conflict rather than just trying to manage it.

So to understand how this blueprint was constructed, we should probably start with John's own origin story.

Because he did not begin his career as a peacemaker.

No, he spent a long time tearing systems down before he ever tried building one up.

His early trajectory was incredibly traditional. Back in 1966, at age 22, he came to Washington with a very linear path in mind.

He wanted the glamorous life, right?

Oh, absolutely. His ultimate dream was to have a Foreign Service career. He envisioned himself as an ambassador, working in the magnificent U.S. Embassy in Paris.

Negotiating treaties.

Driving a sleek sports car around Europe.

But the Vietnam War derailed that linear path pretty quickly. His draft board refused to give him a deferment, to take a diplomatic post in London.

So he had to pivot.

Yeah, he employed a highly unusual strategy to stay out of the military. He became one of the few people of his generation to actually go to Vietnam specifically to avoid the draft.

Which sounds counterintuitive.

It does. But he went as a civilian official working in a pacification program west of Saigon.

And that experience on the ground fundamentally altered his worldview. By 1970, he resigned from the State Department in protest.

The breaking point for him was the US invasion of Cambodia.

Right. For context, expanding the Vietnam War into neutral Cambodia sparked massive domestic outrage and student strikes across America.

John could no longer support the establishment's approach, so he just changed sides. He went to work for a US senator to help secure the amendment that ultimately cut off funding for US military involvement in Vietnam.

And that kicks off what we might call his adversarial phase.

Yeah, he becomes a major whistleblower. He co-authors a massive bestselling exposé on intelligence abuses called The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence.

It was really going after the system.

And following that, he writes another award-winning book about the CIA's use of LSD and behavioral techniques called The Search for the Manchurian Candidate. He is out there publicly exposing the dark underbelly of the establishment.

What's fascinating here is the internal shift that happens next.

Yeah, this is the turning point.

John became a minor culture hero for this investigative work. People applauded him for speaking truth to power and throwing monkey wrenches into the machine.

But he grew deeply troubled by it.

Exactly. He realized that his entire professional identity was defined exclusively by what he was against.

Right. Tearing things down leaves you with rubble.

He wanted to build a new system, something sustainable.

And that pivot, is what leads to the creation of his nonprofit, Search for Common Ground, in 1982.

Though the reality of starting this organization is something any entrepreneur listening will recognize.

Oh, for sure. It was an audacious vision, shifting the world away from win-lose approaches. But on day one, it was just John and one other employee.

The grand philosophical vision usually clashes with the mundane reality of meeting payroll.

So true. He had to scrape by in ways that require a lot of humility. His initial funding came from a $20,000 grant that he jokingly referred to as his severance pay.

He managed to secure some foundation grants because the anti-nuclear movement was gaining traction at the time.

But my absolute favorite detail from the text is his Tupperware fundraising.

That is incredible.

He would literally stand up in people's living rooms, pitch his vision for global peace to a handful of guests, and ask for substantial financial contributions.

It takes immense vulnerability to put your livelihood on the line in someone's living room. And even with all that hustle, the organization was barely staying afloat.

This is where the story gets deeply personal for him. John's mother passes away and leaves him a modest 5-figure inheritance.

And his father advises him to do the standard smart thing.

Buy stocks, buy bonds, invest it safely for the future.

But instead, John invests the entire sum into his vision.

He uses that money to cover his own living expenses so he can afford to miss paychecks while building the nonprofit.

A huge gamble.

He later admitted that he completely pissed away his inheritance, just as his dad warned, but he considered it the best investment he ever made.

And that runway was crucial because it led to a massive merger of visions. While John was undergoing this profound transformation in America, his future wife and closest colleague was going through her own intense crucible in South Africa.

Right. Let's bring Susan Cullen marks into the picture. She was raised in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, and she had this incredible role model in her mother.

Her mother was one of the first members of a women's human rights group called the Black Sash.

Yes, this was a group of white women who would stand silently wearing black sashes to mourn the loss of constitutional rights and protest apartheid laws.

And Susan's mother would actually take her into black townships when Susan was just 5 years old.

Seeing the visceral, devastating impact of systemic racism and discrimination at age 5, I mean, that imprints a deep, unshakeable passion for justice.

It showed Susan early on that privilege could be utilized to challenge unjust systems.

And as South Africa began its fragile, volatile transition from apartheid to democracy in the early 1990s, Susan was operating directly on the front lines.

She wasn't just observing the transition, she was actively mediating it.

She was physically stepping between warring groups during bloody street clashes. At one point, she actually took a bullet in the leg while trying to calm down a violent confrontation.

That illustrates a staggering level of commitment to peacebuilding.

Seriously.

Her work was driven by a specific, deeply rooted African philosophy called Ubuntu.

Ubuntu translates roughly to "I am because we are." Right.

It is the principle of the profound interconnectedness of all human beings. The core belief Susan carried into every mediation was that if you give people the space to be their best selves, generally, they will step into it.

That brings us to their meeting. It is 1993, and John travels to South Africa to produce a TV series about their political transition.

He is having a drink with a co-producer and mentions offhand that he is divorced but looking for a partner.

The producer asks what his type is, and John replies, "A tall, beautiful mediator." And the producer immediately knows exactly who fits that description. They meet the very next day. Within 26 hours, they bonded completely.

They instantly recognized that they shared the exact same vision for the world.

In fact, the first time John explained his realization about not wanting to tear down the old system anymore, but wanting to build a new one, Susan jokingly accused him of peeking into her private notebooks and stealing her ideas.

It is a remarkable alignment of the builder and the mediator. Think about how rare that is, finding someone who completely shares your operational philosophy.

By 1994, Susan moved to Washington. They were married. And they were leading System search for common ground together. Under their joint leadership, this scrappy 2-person operation exploded, growing 20% a year until they had 350 staff members operating out of 17 countries. Okay, let's unpack this playbook they developed because they weren't just expanding for the sake of scale. They adhered to a strict set of operational rules.

First and foremost, no parachuting allowed.

Yes. In the world of international aid and conflict resolution, there is this pervasive habit of dropping into a conflict zone for a short visit, dispensing Western advice, and flying out.

Search for Common Ground rejected that model entirely. Peacebuilding requires deep, long-term commitment. You must be on the ground, immersing yourself in the culture and understanding the immense historical complexity of the conflict.

Another massive rule they instituted was walking the talk internally. If your mission is to reconcile warring parties, your own staff has to reflect that reconciliation.

They made it a mandate to always hire staff from all sides of a local conflict.

A defining case study for how these rules functioned in reality was Burundi in 1994.

This period immediately followed the horrific genocide in neighboring Rwanda. Burundi shares the same ethnic mix, Hutus and Tutsis, and the violence there was escalating rapidly.

Other NGOs and development agencies were pulling their staff out because the environment was deemed too dangerous.

But Serge for common ground runs toward the fire.

They travel to the capital, Bujumbura, and realize they need to defuse the tension immediately. In Rwanda, hate radio had been weaponized to incite the killers. Serge decides to use radio to do the reverse.

They create a production facility called Studio Ijombo, which translates to "wise words." Crucially, they set it up as a studio, not an independent station. Right. If they launched a station, they would be viewed as competition by local broadcasters or as a target by the government. As a studio, they provided free, high-quality, balanced programming to all the existing local stations.

They effectively turned the entire local media ecosystem into a vehicle for de-escalation.

Following their hiring mandate, they employed mixed teams of Hutu and Tutsi journalists.

These teams would go out into the field together. They provided physical protection for one another, and they demonstrated to the deeply divided public that cooperative work was possible.

Their most popular creation was a radio soap opera called Our Neighbors, Ourselves.

The premise was remarkably simple: a Hutu family and a Tutsi family who, over the course of the show, learned to peacefully resolve their everyday disputes.

But we should explore why soap operas are so effective here.

Yeah, why fiction instead of just news?

When you hear a fictional character struggle with a universal problem, like a difficult mother-in-law or a failed crop, Their ethnic identity becomes secondary to their shared humanity. Parasocial relationships form.

The listener's brain starts categorizing these characters as friends rather than the other.

Exactly. That psychological rewiring is incredibly powerful. The show ran for 616 episodes. Polling showed it was listened to by 87% of the population.

The fictional characters literally became part of the national folklore. But they did not stop at media. They implemented vital work on the ground with the youth.

Young militia members, often paid just a few dollars a day, were the ones carrying out the actual violence in the streets.

This leads to one of the most revealing anecdotes from their time in Burundi. They organized a weekend workshop and brought together 30 ethnically mixed, formerly violent youths.

These were individuals who had been actively fighting each other just weeks prior.

They spend the Saturday afternoon talking, playing cards, making music. But as night falls, a terrifying reality sets in.

Nobody wants to go to sleep.

When the organizers announce it is time for bed, there is dead silence. When you put a room full of violent enemies together, no one feels safe closing their eyes.

They are terrified they will be killed in their sleep.

It highlights the raw physical reality of trauma. But exhaustion eventually wins out. In Macedonia, they produced a 41-part children's TV show called Na Shimalo, or Our Neighborhood, in association with Sesame Workshop.

It featured a magical talking apartment building where Macedonian, Albanian, Turkish, and Roma families all lived together.

It reached 91% of Macedonian youth.

In Nigeria, they produced The Station, a 52-part TV drama about a multiethnic, multireligious newsroom in Lagos.

They used entertainment to model the exact behavior they wanted society to adopt.

Their commitment to scale and deep immersion eventually led them to the Middle East. By the year 2000, as the Second Intifada broke out, which was a major Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation, violence escalated drastically.

John and Susan realized they couldn't manage a Middle East peace program from a comfortable office in Washington.

They made the life-changing decision to move to Jerusalem for 2 years to co-direct the program themselves.

They rented a house just 70 yards from the Green Line, the 1949 armistice border that essentially divided the city and marked the boundary of the conflict.

We must be very clear about their approach here because it perfectly reflects their core values. They worked to find common ground between Israelis, Palestinians, and Arabs without ever taking a side.

It was strictly about mutual understanding. For example, Jon produced a 4-part documentary series called Shape of the Future. It examined the fears and aspirations of both Israelis and Palestinians in an entirely even-handed way, demonstrating how a negotiated settlement could address those fears without threatening the national existence of either side.

It made history by becoming the first program ever broadcast simultaneously on Israeli, Palestinian, and Arab satellite TV.

Providing a shared narrative reality is crucial, but sometimes when standard diplomacy fails, finding that common ground requires an incredibly unconventional approach.

Highly unconventional.

Here's where it gets really interesting. Let's look at Iran in 1996. Serge had made a long-term commitment to improving U.S.-Iranian relations.

They organized a series of confidential high-level back-channel meetings in Europe.

But eventually the talks stalled. The participants could not convince their home governments to adopt any new policies.

The standard diplomatic channels had completely frozen. Political framing made any public compromise look like weakness.

During one of these frustrating meetings, an Iranian participant throws out a highly unorthodox idea.

He suggests that to break the deadlock, they need Americans to openly return to Tehran, where they haven't been seen publicly in almost 20 years.

Obviously, any American stepping foot in Iran would face heavy criticism. But he notes the people who would be the least criticized are wrestlers.

That is a brilliant culturally specific insight.

Wrestlers hold a unique place in Iranian folklore. They are viewed as great mythic heroes. And wrestling is the most popular sport among the masses.

It completely bypasses the traditional political framing. You aren't sending diplomats, you're sending athletes into a shared cultural space.

This is where Surch's principle of chutzpah goes into overdrive.

Oh yeah.

They travel back to Washington and contact USA Wrestling. They convince the athletes it is safe. They secure an unofficial green light from the Clinton administration.

They set up meetings with Iran's UN ambassador.

They even coordinate with the Swiss government, which handles US interests in Iran. They go so far as to give USA Wrestling the private cell phone number of the Swiss ambassador in Tehran, just in case things go sideways.

The sheer logistical nerve required to pull that off is staggering. It embodies a concept they adopted from Japanese martial arts. Aikido.

Yeah.

In a discipline like boxing, you meet force with force. You try to reverse your attacker's energy 180 degrees. If you punch a wall, you break your hand, right? But in aikido, you accept the attacker's energy, blend with it, and redirect it slightly, maybe 10 or 20 degrees, so that both of you end up safe.

They knew they couldn't hit the U.S.-Iran political conflict head-on, so they redirected that geopolitical tension through the shared cultural love of wrestling.

And the strategy worked flawlessly.

In February 1998, the American wrestling team marched into the arena in Tehran. Proudly carrying the US flag.

The media broadcast this image globally. It provided a massive, powerful contrast to the awful imagery of the hostage crisis from years before.

They created a vivid, positive new image for the world to digest.

It is a masterclass in social entrepreneurship. Throughout their career, John and Susan outlined 13 specific principles for executing this kind of work.

Let's highlight a few of those principles. We already mentioned chutzpah, which is Yiddish for absolute nerve and effrontery.

You have to be audacious to pitch a wrestling tournament to two hostile governments.

Another principle is Fingerspitzengefühl. It is a German word that means having an intuitive sense of knowing right at the tips of your fingers, having perfect timing and instinct for when a situation is ready to shift.

But perhaps the most applicable one for our everyday lives is their focus on finding the trim tab The trim tab is a fascinating mechanical metaphor. On a massive ship or an airplane, the trim tab is a tiny little rudder attached to the trailing edge of the main rudder.

Moving the main rudder against the pressure of the water or air takes enormous energy.

But the trim tab requires very little effort to move. When you move the trim tab, it creates a low-pressure zone that pulls the big rudder, which then turns the entire massive ship.

They were always looking for the societal trim tabs, the small, precise interventions that yield massive systemic results.

This raises an important question for you, our listener. When you analyze your own life, your career, or your community disputes, how often are you relying on adversarial win-lose tactics?

Are you standing in a room full of gasoline arguing about matches, or are you actively searching for the trim tabs?

How can you apply a little bit of Aikido to the conflicts you face every day, redirecting the energy rather than meeting force with force?

So what does this all mean when we pull back and look at the whole picture? The Marx ultimate message is incredibly grounding. Conflict is entirely normal.

It is an unavoidable, natural part of human interaction and progress.

But violence is a choice. We have to learn to understand our profound differences deeply, but we must choose to act on our commonalities.

To leave you with one final provocative thought to mull over, the source text points out that the Chinese ideogram for the word crisis is a combination of two distinct characters: danger and opportunity.

Danger and Opportunity.

The next time you face a crisis or a deeply entrenched conflict in your own life, remember the advice of systems theorist Buckminster Fuller: "You never change things by fighting the existing reality." Instead of fighting it, how can you build a completely new model that makes the old one obsolete? Can you find that fertile creative space between the old world breaking down and the new one being born?

That is the real search for common ground. Thanks for joining us on this deep dive. We'll see you next time.