Despite your best?wishes

One thing I feel most people fail to realize when it comes to life lessons and the conflicts which plague human relationships is the role intent plays. We are led to believe that every evil deed someone does must certainly be intentional, premeditated and willful, they meant to hurt us for their own selfish gain. We think of ourselves as the innocent ones while others are the villains.

When someone borrows something from you and refuses to payback, you vilify that person and put an evil intent on every action of his, when somebody is jealous or envious of you, rarely do you acknowledge any blame on your part, but you rather consider the other person despicable for expressing a basic human emotion.?

Like every soldier who goes to war will tell you, they consider themselves the hero while the others are the villains and depending on where you are looking from, they are either absolutely correct or absolutely wrong.

Despite our best intentions we hurt others, we are all heroes and villains depending on the angle you are looking from. I really don’t think there is any human being who can make unanimity on this subject, if you can name one, put it in the comment section. I am not trying to make the point here that people aren’t evil, or they do not have evil intentions, there are definitely a lot of bad people out there who will do very evil things, I want to point out other causes independent of intent which can vilify a person and lead to conflicts.

Self Preservation?

A prime directive of every human is that of self-preservation, which basically means putting yourself above everything else. Following that you have the Preservation of your offsprings, aside from that all the other things are merely a factor of principle, in much more simpler terms, you are going to fight to survive at all cost and only be willing to sacrifice your life for your offspring, the rest of the people only matter based on your principles.?

What does this mean concretely? This means that every human is essentially fighting for themselves, their interests and their survival, as long as these aren’t threatened they are willing to help others but once it comes down to this then they will stick for themselves and their offspring. So many wars and conflicts are also based on this or find their source from this. When it comes down to even a very small level, even the nicest and trustworthy person will be compelled to betray you when it’s a matter of self preservation, with the only exception happening when they have strong principles.?

We’ve seen people die for others, that wasn’t a natural instinct but rather a product of some strong principles which means you can’t assume it as the default. You can’t assume that a person will pay you back your debt and starve himself, you can’t assume that your friend won’t betray you to save himself from prison or a serious problem, you can’t assume that your brother won’t throw you under the bus when its a matter of life and death. Having strong morals and principles isn’t a default option for anybody so if you do have them, that doesn’t imply the other person does and if you are honest with yourself, you’ll see that you would have done exactly the same thing.?

Miscommunication?

Another reason which leads to so much divide and conflict comes from miscommunication, which might be intentional but also unintentional. Saying the right thing at the wrong time, or the wrong thing at the right time, being at the right place at the wrong time or the wrong place at the right time. Human communication is not linear, it's dependent on many aspects which aren’t always under our control. What you say, how you say it, where you say it, to who you say it, when you say it, why you say it, the backstory, the tone and much more are all things which could tamper with our communication and eventually lead to conflict when it wasn’t our intention initially.?

So many conflicts can be avoided with the right words, and so many other conflicts can be started with the wrong words. Sticking with the example of the person who borrowed from you, with the right words they can convince you to be patient but with the wrong words they will only make you more angry. It might not have been their intention to delay with your debt but that's what just so happened and from there miscommunication does the job of creating conflicts.?

When you look at all those factors I just outlined above, do you really think you are in control of every one of them? And even if it was the case, your perception will still be false because it is biased, even when you feel like you said the right thing, that doesn’t mean the person heard the right thing, so you have no way of guaranteeing no conflict will occur.

False Perception?

Reality is the one thing you can’t control, a big part of reality is perception and that is very much an individual experience. You can influence the perception of others but you can’t control it, this means that even though you might try your best to paint a narrative, you can’t define the narrative. To make it even more simple to comprehend, you can tell a story, but you can’t guarantee what lesson people are going to take from it. Even with the most compelling story on earth, people are going to see the good, others the bad and yet again others might consider it worthless.?

This goes to show you that no matter what you try to paint as a picture, there is really no guarantee that people are going to receive it the way you intended for it. This is what leads to many conflicts, what people perceive or take away from different scenarios, a clear example of this phenomenon is in politics. On one hand you have people who perceive their favorite candidate as being exceptional, while others perceive the same person as being the worst, yet they are all exposed to the same information and no matter their bias, they always come to different conclusions.?

So how can conflicts be avoided, then? how can you ensure there is no conflict when two persons can’t even agree on what they are seeing! you?can’t?

Various Differences?

Finally, there are differences between us which lead us into conflicts no matter how we feel about it. Things like trust issues, past traumas, opinions, biases, politics, mentality, emotions, predispositions, environment and much more. These subconsciously influence our actions without us even realizing it, taking environment for example; some people grow up in environments with a lot of conflicts to the point where it becomes a normality to them while others grow up in peace loving environments, mixing these two kinds of persons will undoubtedly lead to conflict whether they like it or not because their understanding of conflict has already been eroded.?

Conclusion?

There is no way you can totally avoid conflict, through this article I hope you can understand that not every conflict comes from an evil intent but sometimes because of forces beyond our control we end up in conflicts?

Thanks for reading ??

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