> The tragedy of democracy is that we must coordinate our criticisms into coherent proposals, and vote on them. Despite classes in civics and debating at som

> The tragedy of democracy is that we must coordinate our criticisms into coherent proposals, and vote on them. Despite classes in civics and debating at some good schools we are mostly given no training on how to do this as kids. Instead we are raised by "Hollywood diplomacy", which is deeply confrontational and revolves around vengeance and gun fights. Polarisation isn't just in the "environment" but in the lack of tools we are given to work with. There are actually long-form studies in things like Peace Studies (Columbia, George Washington Uni, Kroc Institute, Nottingham Uni in UK) I spent some time with graduate of a peace studies programme, which I initially mocked. But she introduced me to all kinds of ideas like those of Habermas and Discourse Theory. Most serious [fn] programmes on negotiation and diplomacy touch on this. How we get ordinary folk to take on board more of that is challenging but urgent. Sadly most of "western" life has conflict escalation built in as a value. EDIT: added some links for the curious [0,1] [fn] There's plenty of crappy MBA business type "how to get what you want" type programmes - I am absolutely not talking about those! [0] https://iep.utm.edu/habermas/ https://iep.utm.edu/habermas/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communicative_rationality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communicative_rationality