All or nothing

How can we bring back the lost art of finding the common ground?

When I was little, I had a book called The Second Princess. In the book, the younger of two princesses wants to get rid of her older sister because of the special treatment she gets as the first princess. In the end, the king and queen reach an agreement with their daughters and declare that the younger princess will be the first princess on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. The lesson of the story was about compromise and sharing. The second princess did not get rid of her sister as she wanted, and her sister didn’t get to continue being the centre of attention like she wanted - the moral was about finding a middle ground. If that book came out today, one of the sisters would have won, and the other would have lost. Compromise is no longer on the table. 

The idea that she could get rid of her sister (and to be clear, she tries to negotiate with a wolf and a bear to come to eat her) is an embodiment of the most extreme solution to a problem that could be, and was, solved with a simple compromise. This penchant towards the peripheral is one that we are increasingly witnessing beyond the realm of picture books. The deepening social and political divisions of the past six years have given rise to fringe political and social ideologies gaining confidence. These notions, long disregarded as beyond the realm of reasonable, logical, partisan debate and discussion, have flourished. There is a tolerance and, at times, embrace of fringe political ideas in a new and concerning way. 

The fringes have always been here - anti-vaxx ideology has existed for as long as there have been vaccines; calls for tearing down legacy institutions and overhauling the system are nothing new. But these conversations have, until recently, been reserved for the niche movements and broadly rejected by the body politic. Anti-vaxx parents are yet to be heeded in their desire to enact their choice for their child and still send them to a public school. We still have our banks and police forces. These fringe ideologies have been legitimized and brought into mainstream discourse, increasingly polarizing our world. This embrace of immoderate notions as part of what our political parties and institutions stand for as the only answer to the problems we face deepens the divides between us.

It was all for one; now it’s all or none. 

When you learn how to negotiate in law school, they talk about something called your “BATNA”, your “best alternative to a negotiated agreement”. The idea is to understand the best alternative if you cannot reach an agreement through negotiation. For a negotiation to be successful, both sides need to be willing to do a give and take; you need to accept that the most reasonable, logical thing to do when trying to produce the best outcome for everyone is to go into the room having already accepted that it is not a my-way-or-the-highway situation. If you are playing the game as though it’s all or none, then your BATNA is to get nothing - or maybe commit arson. Bringing fringe political ideas to the table - ideas that insist only the most extreme answer will do - leaves you with very little room to negotiate. This makes everyone worse off in the end. 

A problem with extreme ideas, wherever they come from, is that they so often rely on the premise that the only solution is a radical shift; they measure success not by finding the best compromise for everyone but by identifying a clear winner and loser.

There are no true winners in an all-or-nothing system. When the law is unjust, our moral imperative, as stated by John Locke, is to rise and do something about it. But most problems are not solved through massive social revolution. Most are solved one step at a time through reasonable compromises. Radical ideas rarely allow for this kind of compromise. It is change or bust. But between tearing down the system and leaving it as is, are the shades of grey where real, lasting change, more often than not, happens. It is okay to move in molehills instead of mountains, especially when this allows us to work together. 

We are losing our grasp on civil debate. And we need to get it back. Just because everyone is entitled to their own opinion does not mean that their opinion is worthy of merit or popularization. We need to push back when we see extremist fringe ideas pushing to overtake public discourse and lead us in a direction that will inevitably deepen the divides between us. Democracy is not a zero-sum game, and we need to stop treating it as one. The goal of negotiations is often for everyone to walk away a little unhappy. No one will completely get their way; that’s how it should be because that’s how we approach what is best for the greatest number of people. 

We need to find our way back to the all-for-one-and-one-for-all notion that guided our social and democratic objectives for so long. To do this, we need to stop legitimizing and giving space in the mainstream to the promotion of extreme ideas, no matter how much they trend on Twitter. 

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