Delphic Maxim 80: Despise strife
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day.
80. Despise strife
Whenever you read the kind of self-help books and ‘guides to life’ (of which genre this series of posts might best inhabit), you find a fair few things about avoiding conflict. It’s unproductive, it’s negative, it doesn’t really get you anywhere. I’m inclined to agree.
Strife — which is such a cool word to use — takes a conflict into a more bitter, twisted domain. Strife feels like it connotes trouble and vexatiousness, as though the conflict is out of control and swirling like a maelstrom. It’s a flashpoint that exists in a way beyond reason and strategy. Conflicts can have strategic outcomes — you can plan for them, you can prepare and reason your way through them. Strife is an outbreak of madness and chaos, and in a sense you simply have to fight your way through it.
So I think it’s reasonable for us to despise strife. I’m a little fatigued by the sheer number of times the word despise comes up in these maxims — it’s like the Greeks had nothing better to do with their time than fang around with a deep loathing of things. Actually, that’s probably not so far from the modern millennial experience — despising things comes as naturally to my generation as it does to the superannuated and crotchety.
I don’t enjoy being in strife. It’s troubling and I lose my bearings. Strife is a desperate fugue, a cloudy fog of war that prevents us having a sense of clarity. This isn’t just because we might be feeling rage; more often than not, strife makes us feel uncertain and threatened. Strife eliminates the possibility of flight, and leaves us with only the fight response, and that’s why I find it unpleasant. Any circumstance that closes down our strategic options — and flight should always be a strategic option — leaves us vulnerable.
Given this, it makes sense that strife is a state of being that we should despise, even if despising requires so much energy. It can inspire us to avoid such a state, which in practical terms involves being careful where we tread. Strife can be avoided quite easily, if simply by being prepared, doing what we say we’re going to do, being timely about the things we need to do, and taking care not to be an unnecessary jerk to the people around us (especially if those people have the power to make our lives more difficult).
Conflict is unavoidable, that’s just a fact of life. People disagree, and we have competing interests from time to time, and sometimes people are just jerks. But escalating things to the flashpoint of strife is an unfortunate thing, and we can avoid it by being more careful in our approach.
When strife does engulf us, our best bet is to ride it out — to attempt to de-escalate the situation. You can fight through or you can try to degrade the strife, reintroduce a strategic element, and hopefully calm the chaos. Despising something doesn’t mean we’re paralysed by hate, but rather that we aim to transform the situation into something preferable.
