How Hostile People Turn Every Conversation Into a Fight
BY: DAIMAN TEER for THE SIMPLETON STAR
There are people who argue because they genuinely disagree with you. There are people who argue because they enjoy the intellectual exercise. And then there is a third category: people who argue because, somewhere deep inside their wiring, conversation is supposed to end in combat. These are the people who can turn astronomy into a fistfight, politics into a moral indictment, and the color of the sky into an opportunity to tell you that you are an idiot. They do not necessarily care what the subject is. The subject is merely the ammunition. They lock and load their point of view with absurdity or obscurity to the point where you are no longer listening, you’re dodging dangerous ammunition.
There are people – usually men – who do this in almost every conversation because they have very demented inner travails. Despite this sickness they somehow manage to turn this aberrant behavior almost to an art form. Someone could make a relatively harmless observation about astronomy and expect an ordinary conversation to follow. Perhaps the observation concerned the limits of human knowledge, the possibility that current theories were incomplete, or the extraordinary difficulty of understanding a universe that humans can observe only through the narrow instruments available to them. Instead of disagreement, the man might initially agree. Wonderful. A conversation. Wrong.
With certain people, agreement is merely the opening act. The argument will come. It always comes. If astronomy fails to provide the necessary friction, another subject will be found. If politics does not produce sufficient heat, something personal will. If nothing else is available, the argument can be manufactured from the wording of a sentence. Eventually, if necessary, the conversation can concern whether the sky is actually blue.
Hostility wearing the costume of intellectual debate.
This is where the difference between disagreement and argumentative hostility becomes important. There is a phrase that describes this behavior particularly well: hostility wearing the costume of intellectual debate.
It looks intelligent from a distance. There are opinions, counterarguments, emphatic declarations and occasionally impressive vocabulary. The participants appear to be engaged in serious intellectual exchange. But beneath the surface, the objective may have very little to do with discovering what is true, understanding another person’s position, or persuading anyone. The objective is to provoke. Almost always, the arguer has been doing this poking since childhood. The parents were poked, the peers were poked and anyone in a position of authority was provoked. It’s a flaw, a permanent defect that creates a crack that widens into a chasm and stretches to the extent of a fault line.
Psychologically, this can involve several different traits and mechanisms, and it would be foolish to diagnose a stranger with a personality disorder merely because he enjoys arguing. Narcissistic, borderline, antisocial and other personality traits can sometimes contribute to chronic interpersonal conflict, but having an argumentative personality does not automatically mean that a person meets the criteria for any psychiatric diagnosis. The important thing is the behavior, not the label. To simply say that the person in question is “mentally sick” is usually sufficient. In other words, if it walks like a duck. Or, in better words, if you think someone is a mental case, and you think this several times over the course of time, odds are that you’re correct in your ad hoc diagnosis.
One particularly destructive pattern involves a need for control. The argumentative person establishes the subject, defines the terms, challenges the other person’s motives, rejects reasonable clarification and gradually forces the conversation into a narrower and more hostile space. The other person begins by discussing an idea and ends by defending his own character. That transformation is the real trick. A person who feels compelled to dominate every conversation may experience disagreement not simply as intellectual difference but as a threat to status, competence or control. The discussion therefore becomes personal even when the original subject was not. The person is no longer trying to establish whether a proposition is correct. He is trying to establish who is superior.
That is why these arguments can become strangely disproportionate to their subjects. A trivial disagreement can produce a reaction more appropriate to an insult or betrayal. The intensity seems absurd because the stated subject is not actually carrying the emotional weight. Something else may be happening underneath it. The argumentative person may need the other person to react. If he can make someone defensive, angry or confused, he has changed the power relationship. He has taken an ordinary conversation and converted it into a situation in which the other person is now reacting to him. He controls the tempo. He controls the escalation. He decides when the next accusation arrives.
And then comes the most useful weapon in the entire arsenal. “Look how angry you are.”
Suddenly the anger becomes the subject. The thirty minutes of provocation preceding it have disappeared. The misrepresentations, personal remarks, insinuations and increasingly outrageous comparisons no longer matter. The person who spent half an hour throwing lit matches into the conversation now points to the smoke and announces that the other person has an anger problem. This is the anger trap. It is psychologically effective because anger really does make people less articulate. Once someone is furious, he may speak too quickly, raise his voice, repeat himself, make mistakes or say something he later wishes he had phrased differently. The provocateur can then seize upon those imperfections as evidence that his opponent is irrational.
The trap is complete. Provoke the reaction and then use the reaction as evidence that you were the problem.
There is another variation of the same technique. The provocateur makes an accusation that nobody actually made, forcing the other person to deny it. The conversation then proceeds entirely on the provocateur’s terms. A person says, “I noticed something unusual.” The response becomes, “So you’re saying you support the opposite?” “No. I didn’t say that.” “Well, would you rather see this?” Now the innocent observation has become a moral referendum.
That is precisely what happened when someone casually asked what had become of an old friend named Marty. Marty had always seemed like a fun and wonderful person. The answer was that the friendship had ended because Marty supported Donald Trump. The obvious question was why a political preference was sufficient to destroy a good friendship. The answer was not an explanation of the friendship. It was a moral ambush: “Would you be friends with a guy who supports a rapist?” Notice what happened. The question was about a friend. The answer transformed it into a question about moral character. That is the technique.
And it is not limited to politics. Religion will work. Science will work. Race will work. Sex will work. Movies will work. Restaurants will work. Automobiles will work. Sports will work. Almost anything will work because the subject is secondary. The machinery is what matters.
The same pattern can appear in romantic relationships. Consider a handsome man who could easily have a satisfying dating life but repeatedly seems attracted to complicated relationships and unconventional partners. All of the relationships fail. There is nothing inherently wrong with unconventional people, of course. The question is why someone with every opportunity for an uncomplicated relationship might repeatedly seem to choose situations that generate unusual amounts of conflict. Perhaps some people simply prefer complicated relationships. Perhaps they are uncomfortable with normalcy. Perhaps they find ordinary relationships insufficiently stimulating. Perhaps conflict provides emotional intensity that tranquility does not.
And then one day he meets a psychiatrist. He dates the psychiatrist for several months. Eventually, she departs with nary a look back — as though she fears turning into a pillar of salt.
There is an obvious joke available here, but beneath the joke is a serious point. A psychiatrist is not magically omniscient because of their profession, and dating a psychiatrist does not turn every disagreement into a psychiatric evaluation. But if a person with professional experience in human behavior spends substantial time with someone and eventually tells that person that there are significant problems in the way he relates to other people, perhaps the response should not automatically be to dismiss the observation.
It should at least be considered. Not because psychiatrists are infallible. They aren’t. But because self-examination becomes increasingly important when the same kinds of conflicts keep appearing in different relationships, different friendships and different settings. At some point, the question becomes unavoidable: What if the common denominator is me?
That is an extraordinarily difficult question for someone whose psychological defenses depend upon always being right. If the other person is always stupid, dishonest, unstable, malicious or incompetent, then no self-examination is required. Every conflict has already been explained. But human beings are not usually that simple. A person can be intelligent and still be emotionally immature. A person can be accomplished and still be cruel. A person can be persuasive and still be wrong. A person can win arguments and still be incapable of maintaining healthy relationships.
This is where the Problem Sphere develops. Some people do not merely have conflicts with others. They create an environment in which conflict becomes the normal gravitational force around them. Family members begin avoiding certain subjects. Friends learn when to change the topic. Romantic partners learn which buttons not to push. People who have known the individual for years may simply watch when a new person walks into the argument because they have already seen the movie. The newcomer does not know the rules. He assumes he is having a conversation. The experienced people in the room know better.
They have learned that entering the argument only creates another target. Eventually, everyone within the person’s orbit adapts to him. Some become quiet. Some become distant. Some become angry. Some leave. Some return. And some simply sit back and watch the next person discover what everyone else already knows.
That is the Problem Sphere. The person at its center may genuinely believe that other people are constantly unreasonable. What he may fail to recognize is that his behavior has changed the behavior of everyone around him. People aren’t necessarily behaving differently because they dislike him. They may be behaving differently because they have learned how to survive interaction with him.
There is one final lesson in the Simpleton’s Guide. If a person finds himself arguing constantly, he should ask himself a simple question: Does he actually enjoy solving disagreements, or does he enjoy having them? Those are two entirely different personalities. The first person wants an answer. The second person wants an opponent. And the second person may eventually discover something uncomfortable. The people around him may not have stopped talking because they lost the argument.
They stopped talking because they finally realized there was never supposed to be an argument in the first place.
BIBLE VERSE:
“A soft answer turneth away wrath: but grievous words stir up anger.”
Proverbs 15:1
WHY I CHOSE THIS VERSE:
This verse was chosen because the problem described in this article is not really disagreement. It is escalation. One person says something provocative, another responds, the first person pushes harder, and before long an ordinary conversation has become a battle. Proverbs offers a remarkably simple alternative: do not add fuel to the fire. A calm answer does not mean surrendering an opinion or allowing someone to walk over you. It means refusing to let another person’s hostility determine your own behavior. Sometimes the most intelligent response to an argument is simply not to provide the argument with the oxygen it needs.
PRAYER
Give us the wisdom to know when a disagreement is worth having and when it is better to walk away. Help us remain calm when others seek to provoke us, and keep us from answering anger with anger. Give us the strength to speak with kindness without surrendering our convictions, and the good sense to recognize when silence is the wiser answer. Amen.
