Oops.

Today, reds and blues, Christians and Muslims, Sunnis and Shiites, global companies and anti-globalization activists are burning down their own cities – figuratively and literally – driven by hatred built on a fabricated foundation.

If nothing changes – if the ineffective tools chosen so far to “resolve” these conflicts are not superseded by more effective ones – then the wars will likely intensify, damaging or destroying the interests of all sides in the process.

That does not have to happen. Better weapons are at hand to fight these wars – weapons that kill not the combatants themselves, but the ideas and prejudices that turn resolvable conflicts into hate-driven wars of mutual annihilation.

We are experts on hate. We work with people who hate every day: Muslims and Christians who hate each other in the Middle East, Arabs and Africans who hate each other in Sudan, corporate executives and activists who hate each other across the developed and developing world. Our job is to decimate hate – to destroy it, and the counterproductive actions hate justifies, so that we clear a path for rational, sensible, effective behavior.

Our approach is called engagement. We bring together adversarial stakeholders – partisans with a stake in one another’s future – in a process that turns their attacks away from each other, and toward the systemic causes of the conflicts that divide them.

The most important part of stakeholder engagement is the process of dissipating presumption, prejudice, anger and hate. Once this is done, solutions can come forward.

Hate is a primitive emotion which can serve a powerful purpose in the right circumstances. When we are faced with a real threat, the imperative to meet the threat can close down our irresolute thoughts, dissipate uncertainty, deepen resolve, and focus us absolutely on the utter annihilation of the source of the threat. Hate is so powerful that it can overcome even our fear of death: soldiers and suicide bombers proudly give their lives in order to harm the objects of their enmity, and win the admiration of their comrades.

Hate demands an object of obsession, and the mind complies by finding one. Psychologist Gordon Allport said in 1954 that “The human mind must think with the aid of categories…. Once formed, categories are the basis for normal prejudgement. We cannot possibly avoid the process. Orderly living depends on it.”

But while necessary, the process has a dark side, says author Aaron T. Beck: “As soon as boundaries are drawn around an outgroup on the basis of religion, race, or creed, its individual members are perceived as interchangeable.” They are homogenized into a single, monolithic enemy. And that enemy ceases, in our minds, to be human.

What happens when hate is misdirected? How easily can groups of people be mobilized to set aside their objectivity and uncertainty, and ruthlessly destroy other groups of people in mindless and machinelike fashion?

Sometimes, all too easily. Sunnis and Shiites and Kurds, Israelis and Palestinians, Christians and Muslims, corporate executives and activists, blue states and red states – all these interest groups have allowed their legitimate differences to mushroom into suspicions, prejudices, deep enmities, and even hatreds, which cannot be rationally resolved. Some are willing to sacrifice even their own highest aspirations, in order to quench their thirst for retribution. The prophecy fulfills itself – hatred can be self-justifying, as it provokes a widening circle of mutual destruction.

But hate can be dismantled and defeated. Because it is rigid and unyielding, it can be readily broken. We seek to do so every day. We don’t use guns and bombs. We destroy hate by breaking apart its foundation.

Physiologically, hate has a single root cause: fear. When our security is threatened, our brains trigger the secretion of adrenaline, heightened awareness signaling fear. Fear, in turn, drives anger, as the fearful person seeks out and identifies someone or something to blame for the loss or change. Over time, if the fear does not dissipate, anger ossifies into hatred, a focused imposition of one’s disapproval on a seemingly unredeemable force of evil.

Much as we like to deny it in ourselves, the truth is, people like to hate other people – as long as that buys them acceptance by a group that hates the same people. Studies by Jennifer Bosson and her colleagues, reported in their 2006 article, "Interpersonal chemistry through negativity: Bonding by sharing negative attitudes about others," show that when people share a negative attitude, as compared to a positive attitude, about a third party, they feel a sense of closeness and affinity with one another. Sharing negative attitudes is alluring, they suggest, because it establishes in-group/out-group boundaries, boosts self-esteem, and conveys highly diagnostic information about attitude holders.

Hate, it seems, is not something people just do alone. Hate builds coalitions, tribes, and armies. It also wins wars and promotes security, if it is directed toward legitimate enemies. But in a transparent world, demagogues can amass personal power by harnessing hate, elevating and expanding it, and directing it to a common target.

That is one reason President Bush’s war on terrorism, and particularly the Iraqi conflict, is going so badly. Terrorism is fueled, not destroyed, when it is fought in military terms alone, with a detached clinical precision. Our enemies understand this. They want us to lose our cool, and we oblige them. TV clips of X’s and O’s signify targets to us. To the communities where they happen, they are homes, workplaces, schools, and places of worship. And to terrorists, they are recruiting stations.

That is why terrorists seek to draw our fire: every time we direct our weapons toward the places they hide, some innocents inevitably die. New victims are created, and new villains too. The crowd comes to fear not the individual terrorist among them, but the powerful avenger. The terrorists seem to be Davids to our Goliath, and people begin to sympathize with and support them. A few even join their ranks. In this way, we fall into the terrorists trap: we build their base of support, as they shrink ours.

That is one reason fatal jihadist terrorist attacks have not decline. In fact, they have increased, by 607 percent, since the President declared “Mission Accomplished,” according to RAND data analyzed by Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank, research fellows at the Center on Law and Security at the New York University School of Law. Even outside the terrorist hot spots of Iraq and Afghanistan, jihadist terror attacks are up 35 percent. By fighting terrorist fire only with our own counter-fire, we build their armies for them.

Source:  Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank, Center on Law and Security, New York University School of Law, March 1, 2007

Meanwhile, the Republicans and Democrats battle over timetables for withdrawal. They both miss the point. No matter what timeline we adhere to, the best our military can do now is to hold the line, maybe. The solution is not to cut and run. It is to fight – but with new weapons.

To vanquish terrorism, we must first and foremost deal with its progenitor: the manipulation of hate. Demagogues, fundamentalists, and military strategists do three things to harness hate to destroy their enemy: they homogenize, dehumanize, and demonize their foes. As Aaron Beck explains:

“First, the members of the opposition are homogenized; they lose their identities as unique individuals….” Essentially, the enemy group is cast as a monolith – all those people are the same.

“In the next stage the victims are dehumanized. They are no longer perceived as human beings for whom one can feel empathy….” In other words, they are not human – not like us. (I remember what my grandmother – an otherwise decent and wise woman – said about Southeast Asians in the middle of the Vietnam War: those people just didn’t value human life like we do. Because of this, she explained, we were forced to reduce ourselves to their level.)

“Finally, they are demonized as the embodiment of Evil. Killing them is no longer optional; they must be exterminated. Their continued existence becomes a threat.” (17)

We have done exactly this with terrorists and their supporters. They have done exactly this with us.

When nations go to war, they almost always secure the support of their citizens in part by homogenizing, dehumanizing, and demonizing their enemy. Leaders take the evil represented by the Hitlers, Pol Pots, and Bin Laden’s, and libel whole populations by association. Their followers dutifully direct their fear, anger, and hate accordingly, against classes of people defined by their nationality, ethnicity, religion, or even company. As Beck further explains, “The problem here is not a lack of morality per se, but the vice-like hold of the primal thinking, oriented to fighting. The ultimate remedial approach … is the clarification and modification of the belief system that predisposes the individual to overreact to supposed threats, the development of strategies to catch the hostile sequence in its earliest stage, and the abandonment of violence as an acceptable weapon.”

[“Prisoners of Hate: The Cognitive Basis of Anger, Hostility, and Violence,” by Aaron T. Beck, 1999, p. 13]

How can anyone take a volatile, hate-infested situation, and take the first step toward ending the battle? Through engagement. Our approach to engagement has two core components: one rational, the other – far more important – emotional.

First, we seek to identify the systemic cause or causes of the conflict: its rational roots. Why are people angry? What do they fear? How is their security or well-being apparently at risk? How can the cause of their fear be remedied? This requires research – but not as much as one might think. The rational bases of conflict are not as complex as the cultural and emotional ones, so the process takes weeks, at most. Then we outline a set of steps that would, in a simple world, solve the problem at hand.

But we never take this supposed solution directly to an active battlefield. To do so would be counterproductive. Most people are too emotionally invested in their conflicts to let go of them for rational reasons alone. They will not release their fears voluntarily – their fears must be taken from them, by force if necessary.

So the second thing we do – and the real basis of our success – is to systematically destroy the fear and anger that drives hate and blocks resolution. This we do in three steps:

First, we differentiate the enemy. Based on careful research, we show each side the people that stand on the other side – and how diverse and varied those people are. We help them see how the supposed enemy monolith actually consists of a wide array of groups and individuals, each with distinct interests and characteristics. We explain who the people are – their personalities, interests, insecurities, idiosyncracies. The things they care about – the things that really drive them. This makes them seem less like demons, and more like regular people – which they mostly are: some enemies; most neutrals; and a few potential peace-makers. This helps to humanize the enemy, and identify insiders there who might be open to a higher level path toward resolution.

Once this knowledge can be effectively conveyed to most of the leaders or grassroots on both sides, the battle between them passes a point of inflection. It begins to grow more slowly, or even decline in intensity. Peoples’ higher natures have a chance to move into position, and to influence their actions. Once the lie of the demonic enemy is revealed, hate loses what feeds it; hope emerges and begins to grow.

At this point, the nature of the battle changes for nearly all those who are involved in the engagement process. Despite their internal programming – the embedded instinct to identify a common enemy and unify the tribe against it – people cannot deny the opportunities revealed by their new understanding. Even if the battle goes on, seemingly unchanged, the combatants begin to envision a path toward resolution.

Now we take an additional step. We sit down with people from all sides, informally, often one-on-one, to seek to better understand their legitimate ends. Using their own words and ideas, we seek to describe, in words and symbols, a vision of the future that represents the highest aspirations of all sides, or as many as possible. We share this vision continuously with the various contenders, refining it so that it represents their highest common vision and interest.

Then, we work with open-minded people on all sides, to plot a roadmap that leads toward the vision. Since no ideal can be instantly reached, our job is to craft a map that realistically leads toward real progress for all represented sides. Benchmarks are identified along the road. Between each, a set of steps is set forth: specific “to do’s” to be carried out by different stakeholders which collectively drive progress toward the common vision.

Some steadfast opponents resist or drop out of the process, and attack it from outside. But they are generally marginalized by the credible voices within their movement who now see greater gains through collaboration than conflict.

The process can take a year or two – especially if, predictably, one or both sides take time out to revert to all-out war. Generally this happens once or twice, but each time, the battle is more desperate, its energy less sustained. The hypnotic effect of hate is broken when each side’s humanity is understood and felt.

Sometimes – especially when the humanization process has already begun to some extent – the process is faster.

Consider a religious battle we helped cool. In 1998 the Catholic Church in Sudan lost a lengthy legal battle with a private contractor in the Omdurman Courts, a suburb of Khartoum, the nation’s capital. This costly and embarrassing loss by the church was followed by great swirling political and commercial intrigue, as the battle continued to be waged in every legitimate and illegitimate court, police jurisdiction, and power base either could bring to its side.

On Easter Sunday 1998, armed police were sent under court order to arrest the Archbishop of Sudan and the Bishop of Khartoum, and to seize the assets of the Catholic Church across the country. From the outside, it appeared that the Sudanese government was engaging in religious persecution, upping the ante on the prior battles, and escalating the Civil War to unimaginable heights.

We began to engage informally with various stakeholders in the situation, to better understand what was going on. In reality, we found, the arrests and assets seizure were unrelated to the battles triggered by the court decision. We gradually began to understand the sequence of actions, and how the interests of the parties had collided, where misunderstandings may have occurred, and where the machinations of third parties with personal disputes related to the Archbishop were used to worsen the situation.

If we had simply conveyed this information to the parties, they would not have set aside their conflict. They were too invested in it by this point.

Instead, we brought the Foreign Minister, the Sudanese Ambassador to the US who was a well-recognized Muslim Sheik, the Archbishop, and the Bishop together to begin a dialogue – something that had not been done for 15 years.

At first, before trust was developed, the engagement was indirect, as we shuttled back and forth between the parties – not negotiating, but simply engaging in dialogue. This stage lasted over one year, with both sides only allowing limited direct contact with each other. Our role was partly that of cultural and institutional translators: we could convey messages without the emotional baggage or rhetorical hot buttons that might (intentionally or not) have accompanied them in direct dialogue. We could explain to each faction what the others meant by their words and actions.

This helped to destroy the notion of the homogenous enemy, by differentiating the members of the ostensible enemy, so that they were understood as individuals with varying interests, outlooks, roles, and personalities.

This opened all sides to monthly face-to-face coffee meetings. The Archbishop, now an ordained Cardinal, began to meet with the government, sometimes to work out a specific problem, sometimes just to have coffee. This simple beginning – especially the informal nature of the engagements – made it impossible to ignore the essential humanity of people on all sides. Without the rigid you-versus-me of formal negotiations, the participants gained in mutual understand and trust. They wanted to find common ground, and eventually they did.

Now, the ground was cleared for a rational approach to the conflict. We helped the parties discover on their own the systemic causes of the conflict, the true source of the fear or threat. Once systemic causes are acknowledged, any “solution” based on prejudice or blame alone is recognized as a divisive illusion. Within a year, the parties were engaging on their own, and these discussions cumulated in building a model for trust between the government and the Catholic Church which helped hasten the end of the North – South Civil War that had plagued Sudan almost non-stop since 1955. Recent events of Muslim-Muslim violence in Darfur have overshadowed this accomplishment but do create a template for finding peace there as well.

Of course, it is best to intervene well before hate drives people to violence.

For example, around ten years ago, top executives of three Mitsubishi companies called us into a meeting, to help them deal with an angry boycott campaign led by rainforest advocates. Grassroots activists from Rainforest Action Network (RAN), accusing the companies of destroying the world’s rainforests, were scaling their buildings, unfurling banners, disrupting traffic and attracting all kinds of media coverage.

The companies could not understand why they were being targeted. They felt that, as auto and electronics makers, they had no real ties to the timber industry. The activists argued otherwise: the companies were part of a Japanese keiretsu or industrial alliance whose members included rainforest timber harvesters, RAN said.

Both sides saw the other as a homogenous monolith: the executives were cast as ruthless profit maximizers that supposedly did not care if they ruined the environment. The activists were considered dishonest demagogues who misrepresented the facts in order to mobilize funders and volunteers.

To crack these presumptions, we took a two-fold approach. First, with a respected environmentalist, we convened a group of forestry experts and others, in a study group to identify the systemic roots of deforestation. This helped show that forest destruction was primarily the result of market forces – no single company was to blame, nor could one company alone solve the problem.

Second, we studied the people and groups on both sides of the battle. Who were they? What were their interests, their ambitions, their hopes, their fears – legitimate and otherwise? How did their interests differ? How did their personalities differ? Then, we communicated this information to both sides. To the activists, we identified the institutionalized reasons the companies acted as they did, and the distinctive personalities of the players that might suggest opportunities for dialogue. To the companies, we conveyed the real interests of the activists – not the vitriolic rhetoric, but the legitimate underlying concerns, as well as the institutional interests served. We identified people they could talk to, and elements they had in common with them.

That helped draw both sides into direct engagements – informal at first, and later formal. Step-by-step, understanding and trust grew. Soon, the activists began to scale back their public attacks. The executives became internal advocates of sustainability within their companies.

Eventually, Mitsubishi Motors and Mitsubishi Electric signed a formal agreement with RAN leaders, committing them to be the first companies to specify “no old growth timber” in their paper and wood purchases. Soon, 400 other companies followed their lead, helping to transform the market for timber. No laws were passed, no lawsuits filed. The conflict was resolved by harnessing personal relationships, on behalf of a joint strategy to use corporate buying power to shift market demand.

Today, we help resolve conflicts and build alliances between the world’s best known corporations, and some of its most impassioned activist groups. But while these partisans increasingly see the mutual value of engagement, the tools remain underutilized in political, religious, and military conflicts – and most particularly in the war on terrorism.

President Bush and his potential successors in both parties should take note of advice former President Richard Nixon once offered: "Always remember that others may hate you but those who hate you don't win unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself." He knew, at some level, his own fatal flaw, the one that ultimately spoiled what was, in some ways, an extraordinarily successful presidency, one that dissipated Cold War hatreds that he himself had earlier fanned.

The war on terrorism that began on a grand scale on September 12, 2001 targeted a ragtag enemy trapped in the Afghan hills. Today, our failed strategy has transformed that weak army into a better organized global network of anti-American combatants, many willing to give their lives to express their hatred toward us.

We need bullets and bombs to destroy terrorist cells wherever we find them. But our overarching strategy must be to undermine fear, anger, and hatred, by engaging the developed and developing worlds, Christian and Muslim, Sunni and Shiite and every other creed. It will not be easy to undo the damage done in the past six years. It may require a generation of sustained effort, patience for setbacks, and a resolve to set aside the simple minded rhetoric of ideologues, red and blue. But if we are to avoid the fate of Constantinople, no other strategy will succeed. Only engagement has the power to dissipate hatred and foster the collaborative problem-solving required to build a sustainable peace in this century.