[00:00:00] Trisha: I would like to acknowledge the Dharawal people, the Aboriginal people of Australia, whose country I live and work on. I would like to pay my respects to their elders, past, present, and emerging, and thank them for sharing their cultural knowledge and awareness with us.

[00:00:40] Trisha: Hi there everyone, I'm Trisha Carter, an organizational psychologist and explorer of cultural intelligence. I'm on a quest to discover what enables us to see things from different perspectives, especially different cultural perspectives, and why sometimes it's easier than others to experience those moments of awareness.

[00:01:02] Trisha: The shifts in thinking. If this is the first time you've listened in, welcome. This episode, we have a guest who'll make you think about how change happens, not just for individual people, but also for whole groups of people who may have been raised to hate another group of people. And if this is the first time you've heard about this, you might want to go back to last week's episode, where we first met.

[00:01:28] Trisha: The Reverend Dr. Gary Mason, he's a Methodist clergy person who has worked for almost 30 years in the inner city area of Belfast. During that time his work has focused on peace building, conflict transformation and reconciliation. If you're really keen and you just want to jump right in and listen, feel free. We're now going to hear part two of shifts towards peace.

[00:01:55] Gary: I wrote an article, , on that, for a Middle East think tank a number of years ago called, Intergroup Consensus, because there's been a lot of work, Trisha, carried out, as you would know, between, negotiating with the enemy or the other.

[00:02:07] Gary: But how do you do intergroup consensus and bring your organization or your constituency over the line in mass as much as possible? And really, that's what had to happen to bring the conflict to an end.

[00:02:18] Trisha: and I think of all the individual groups, you know, you were a part of an interfaith group that had been reaching out across, the peace lines prior to, and then afterwards. And there would, it must have been, you know, a series of all these wonderful groups working, at the individual level, but also at the group level.

[00:02:38] Trisha: but I love that. That concept of switching off the lights one at a time, because that means that every individual is a point of success, if you like, or is an achievement along the way.

[00:02:50] Gary: I think also, Trisha, to say as well, gender, and I say this as a, as a, as a male person. That this was an original quotation from me when I started doing this work. I said, if you lock 40 men in a room, listening to their own reassuring voices, it's a recipe for disaster. It is well known where women are at the table, and this is proved statistically by the United Nations, where women are at the table, there is a higher percentage of a peace process holding.

[00:03:17] Gary: So this is not politics in too many spaces, as you and I know, and particularly in the Middle East at the moment. is dominated by men.

[00:03:27] Trisha: Yeah.

[00:03:28] Gary: You must have women at the table. It's absolutely crucial to have that. I have many women here who were superb peacebuilders and so I often say you need a multi disciplinary approach to peacebuilding.

[00:03:41] Gary: You need a Politicians mean, I mean, politicians by their very nature are adversarial people. Some of my closest friends are politicians, but they're in the business of proving the other side wrong. So they're not actually peacemakers.

[00:03:54] Gary: You need business people, academics, religious leaders, youth groups, you need every, and that's why the Good Friday Agreement was a success.

[00:04:02] Gary: look back to the Oslo Accords. I often say, Trisha, if you and I were having this conversation when we were, 30 years younger in the early 90s, the three big conflicts were South Africa, Northern Ireland, and the Middle East. South Africa, as you and I know, were moving slowly towards the end of apartheid.

[00:04:18] Gary: Most people assumed the Israelis and the Palestinians were over the line with the Oslo Accords, and it was those wretched Irish and British who just couldn't get it together. Here we are 30 years later. And one of the reasons many commentators say the Oslo Accords failed, it was an elitist process by a group of elites and was bounced on Israeli Palestinian society without preparation.

[00:04:40] Gary: So again, obviously I'm thinking through your organizational psychology on that. You know if organizations are going to change, preparatory work is crucial and that could take years. The Good Friday Agreement, we were prepared for something was coming. Downing Street Declaration, 92 93.

[00:04:57] Gary: Ceasefires, this, as we talk today, this month, is the 30 year anniversary of the lawless ceasefires. On the 13th of October. October, the IRAs began in August, uh, 1994, then we had negotiations for two years, 96 to 98, chaired by Senator George Mitchell, and then the Good Friday Agreement. So it was a long process of preparatory work, and civic society were involved in that, thankfully.

[00:05:25] Trisha: And when we think of, you know, the work that needs to be done in other areas, there's a lot to learn from that in terms of recognizing the steps, that the slowness almost, that it's not going to be something that happens and there will be some fallback as well. I'm, I'm wondering, what are you doing now in terms of maintaining or continuing to build the peace in the community?

[00:05:49] Trisha: You know, what are the emphasis or is the next generation growing up and thought, wow, our parents were just crazy or is there still some remnants?

[00:05:58] Gary: Yeah, listen. this is a known guy, every day when I'm home on the island of Ireland, because I spend time in the U. S. in the Middle East, I'm doing peace process. As I said, it normally is a 50 year process. The three big decisions in the Good Friday Agreement, Trisha were release of political prisoners, or terrorists, however people want to frame them, the reform of policing, and weapons decomissioning In other examples, weapons decommissioning was meant to take place two years after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement. IRA did not decommission their weapons until 2005 and the Loyalist groupings until 2009. In fact, the Ulster Volunteer Force, Red Hand Commando, read their weapons decommissioning statement in my church building in June 2009.

[00:06:47] Gary: Now if the Brits and the Irish or the U. S. Had it been so rigid and said, right guys, two years, it's all off. That have been nuts. So you've got to show flexibility in these agreements. They're not set in stone. That's not, you're not bringing down, you know, the tablets from, from a mountain after the good Lord has spoken in a sense. There was a process in relation to that, and there's still an ongoing process. I mean, our outstanding issue here, Trisha, and to your listeners is dealing with the past and legacy. We still, we've had several attempts and they've all failed. We still have not gotten agreement. And these were serious attempts, just not tweaking at the edges, so to speak.

[00:07:27] Gary: We've had several attempts and they have failed. And we're now having another go. We've But my colleague who I'll be with tomorrow night is Brian Rowan, a well known and award winning BBC journalist who's a friend and we're doing something tomorrow night together. And we meet for coffee periodically there to kind of, as men getting older to reminisce about the conflict.

[00:07:47] Gary: But he's right when he says, if we don't, if our generation, Gary, don't deal with this, We're going to kind of vomit all this junk over the next generation. So we have to get closure around that or around legacy. And that, that is not easy. I mean, as one American historian says there, Trisha, the terror of remembering versus the terror of forgetting. But if you don't get closure, so South Africa, as you know, had the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and I keep saying, I mean, it wasn't that like a five star success as some people would say, but it was reasonably successful in drawing closure in relation to that. So a lot of my work is around memory and dealing with memory.

[00:08:29] Gary: I mean, 1 in 5 ex prisoners here, if you're saying about conflict related issues, Trisha, 1 in 5 ex prisoners are drinking themselves to death through alcohol, so they're self medicating. They will die through that. Northern Ireland has the highest dose of antidepressants in Western Europe. One of the highest in the world.

[00:08:51] Gary: More people have committed suicide here since 1998 until we chat here today. The pair of us on what? October the 23rd than actually died in a conflict,

[00:09:02] Gary: almost trauma. You can imagine. I mean the Middle East at the moment, within the Israeli Palestinian living in fear there at the moment, the trauma that's being created there.

[00:09:12] Trisha: horrific. Yes.

[00:09:14] Gary: in relation to that, it's an ongoing, it's an ongoing business, an unfinished business of the process. Dealing with the past -

[00:09:21] Trisha: the trauma that people have experienced, you know, whether they were a part, you know, initiating the violence or on the sidelines and experiencing it, that requires such a depth of mental health care and, For any country that is difficult, to be able to provide that. And I guess it, it does, in lots of ways, it does come down to impacting on, on the small levels of community and on the individual relationships as well.

[00:09:51] Trisha: So we go from thinking about the big picture situation and the data and the situations to, a family who might be torn up because somebody is suffering from PTSD. And then how do you support that? And so I can imagine you're probably jumping, within your pastoral, care perspectives from caring for individuals to reminding the community.

[00:10:15] Trisha: And it feels like both those shifts have to go hand in hand all the time.

[00:10:20] Gary: I'm constantly,

[00:10:21] Gary: I mean, you and I know for the background psychology, people need to remember their debt. And I'm not denying that, but I've often said we have this amazing ability to weaponize history

[00:10:34] Gary: against the person. So, David Reif, New York journalist, wrote a book there called In Praise of Forgetting, and he's not asking, for example, he says this quite clearly actually, Trish, in the book, he says, look, I'm not asking Jews to forget the Holocaust, I'm not asking African Americans to forget slavery.

[00:10:53] Gary: But I'm asking us in the way that we deal with history, sometimes it's absolutely toxic, and I mean, to quote an Irish literary writer, where he says, quite humorously, but very, very candidly, I think we should build a monument to amnesia in Ireland, and then forget where we put it. You know, and, I mean, even now, I mean, if your listeners are interested and they're bored some evening, pour themselves a glass of wine, go onto YouTube and look at murals in Belfast, wall paintings .

[00:11:24] Gary: depicting the history of this place. And as I often say, there's a, there's a great, TED talk there called the danger of the single story or the danger of the single narrative, which you know. So these paintings depict what the other did to us,

[00:11:38] Gary: never what we did to them.

[00:11:40] Gary: So you're just getting one narrative in relation to that.

[00:11:43] Gary: I mean, there's competing narratives. And if you're going to drill into this in detail, any conflict, you need to realize that there is not just one story here. I mean, even within our space, for example, is it, is it Northern Ireland that most of the British would say, Republicans won't call it that name.

[00:11:59] Gary: They say the North are the six counties. Is it the war of independence? In 1948 for Israel, or is it the Nakba for the Palestinians, even in the U. S. where I work, the civil war, which seems a long time ago to you and me in many, many ways. Is it the civil war or some, people in the South say, no, it's the war of Northern aggression.

[00:12:21] Gary: So even though even the terms and phrases we use show very clearly what side of history we are on.

[00:12:29] Trisha: Mm.

[00:12:29] Gary: And that's why I think in a lot of the work I do, it's bringing people into a room not to agree, but to understand the other person's narrative. So this is not about agreement. This is about living together.

[00:12:41] Gary: And there's a writer there in Israel, Micah Goodman, who's written pretty extensively, and he's this great quotation, just noted it here. And he says, the right's monopoly on the image of Zionism, the left's monopoly on the image of human ism and religious society's monopoly on the image of Judaism. All hurt Israeli's ability to think about Zionism, humanism, and Judaism objectively.

[00:13:07] Gary: Then he says this briefly in two sentences. He says, where people fail to judge beliefs by their own reasonableness, but instead view them according to the sectarian identity of their adherents, we can conclude that crowd psychology has replaced independent thought. Crowd psychology has replaced independent thought.

[00:13:31] Gary: And I think for leaders in conflicted and post conflicted situations, We need to do the best to deal with crowd psychology because crowd psychology, as we know, for the background psychology, many, many times leads the verbal and physical violence. People need to independently think these through and hopefully come to rational conclusions that violence is very difficult to stop once it begins.

[00:13:58] Trisha: And recognizing how that crowd has influenced them. So what is the, the stories that you've, imbued growing up and that you've just taken and accepted in your heart instead of recognizing them as stories that are valid for you and a hundred meters down the road, somebody has completely different stories.

[00:14:20] Trisha: So yeah, I love your not to agree, but to understand, I think there's an understanding we need to do of ourselves and recognizing how we've been shaped and molded. By the crowds that we belong to and, being open to recognizing that other people have been shaped and molded by their crowds instead of, you know, pointing and judging.

[00:14:42] Gary: Yeah, and that whole concept of, you know, dehumanization, there Trish dehumanization precedes genocide. If you can dehumanize a person, it's pretty easy, sadly, to kill them and, uh, and uniforms do that. I know that uniforms do serve a purpose according to the military, because it is, it is our gang, it's our crowd, it's our army.

[00:15:03] Trisha: Mm hmm.

[00:15:03] Gary: But it also dehumanizes the, it's crowd psychology. They all look the same to me. They are all the,

[00:15:09] Trisha: Yeah.

[00:15:10] Gary: there's no individuality in many, many ways as well. And I mean, James Joyce, the Irish literary writer once said, Actually, I was thinking this quotation last night when I was out for a walk, looking at the world at the moment where James Joyce said, history is a nightmare from which I'm trying to recover.

[00:15:25] Gary: And it is, you know, You go, like, at the moment, between Ukraine, Chinese Taiwan tensions, U. S. election coming up, the Middle East, you're going. The thing that struck me, Trish, it's worthwhile telling the human story there, when the Russians invaded Ukraine, our second oldest, text me and he said, Dad. Is there going to be a third world war? I never, you know, never in my life thought that any of my kids would actually ever sent me a text with those words on it. But as you know, listen, I subscribe to foreign affairs. I read the economist and multiple different magazines. I've read, I guess in this last six months, a number of thinking writers, not nutters as we would say thinking people, asking, are we on the verge of a third world war?

[00:16:16] Gary: Like our generation, Trisha, never, never would have believed we'd even be having this conversation. So the world is not in a good place. And I mean, leaders politically and religiously and secular leaders need to be influencing people's language. I mean, I look at the U. S. at the moment. I mean, I woke up this morning at seven and my tradition in the morning is normally my wife Joyce and I wake up is I read Apple news there on my iPhone and you just go like just end up depressed.

[00:16:45] Gary: I mean, we need good leadership globally. We just do. And a lot of it is not there at the moment.

[00:16:52] Trisha: I think, many of the people who listen to this podcast are people who are more global. And so they're often working, you know, across different countries. they are often. leading diverse teams or members of diverse teams. So there are people who appreciate and value difference. And I think that's where the hope sits that in the world, we do have these people who have, been exposed across to more than just our own crowd.

[00:17:20] Trisha: And so we've been exposed and, and, you know, I'm, I'm meeting with people who, are other cultural intelligence facilitators and who see the possibilities. And I take hope and encouragement from the work that many of them are doing, and hope that we can, you know, shape language. Sarah Black, who introduced us, she's working on that whole concept of communication and how the language we use.

[00:17:45] Trisha: Changes the way people think and feel and so there is, there is hope. I think we can, we just need, we know we've got a lot of work to do.

[00:17:55] Gary: Let me tell you a story as we more or less begin to come to the conclusion. When I was a kid, young boy in the seventies, my grandmother warned me. Don't you ever bring a Catholic over this door. That's the world I grew up in. It really was the same. I would imagine many parents have said to their white kids, don't you ever date a person of color. They do it in the States. I do this lecture in the States, Trisha, called, when the curtains are closed and teasingly ask people of my skin color. Now, I want you to tell me about all those racist stories you heard at home when the curtains were closed and no one else was listening. Of course, nobody puts their hand up and says, Oh, here's mine, Gary.

[00:18:33] Gary: There's my dad said this. My brother said this. My, my minister actually said this. Nobody wants to say. So going back to the 70s and my, dating life. So I knew it was a risky business dating

[00:18:44] Gary: 2 percent of people were dating across the political divide in the 70s. Many who fell in love and wanted to be together, either married or long term partners, they moved to Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the States, England, Scotland, Wales, they got out of this, sectarian cockpit, as I call it, the good news, Trisha, which is today, 20 to 25 percent are in long term relationships or marriages across the political divide.

[00:19:14] Gary: So I teasingly say, when I tell that story, well, Maybe romance will find a way because people now are not demonizing each other. There's still a sectarian society. It's not utopia here by any, but it's a changing space you know, I look at our, our kids. I mean, one of our sons is in a long term partnership with someone from the other tradition.

[00:19:37] Trisha: Right.

[00:19:38] Gary: circle of friends are Catholics, Protestants, more persons of color are coming to live in this space. Sadly, that's bringing racism along with already dealing with the wretched beast of sectarianism, but it's changing and leadership allows that. To happen and the thing that give me most pleasure Trisha that I work with.

[00:19:59] Gary: I formed an emerging young leaders group in 2019 about 60 of them. I have a Middle East emerging young leaders group of Palestinians and Israelis twinned with my British and Irish with these young people who will be the future practitioners. and implementers of a hopeful peace process in the Middle East.

[00:20:18] Gary: they're learning some of the lessons from our 20s and 30s post conflict. That gives me the most excitement in what, what I do. It's, it's working with an emerging generation who do want to make a difference. And do not want to stereotype people the

[00:20:35] Gary: way many of us have done in the past.

[00:20:37] Trisha: I think that is really encouraging. I'm wondering, what advice would you give someone who's hoping to, you know, to make a difference in this area?

[00:20:45] Gary: Storytelling, it's just so powerful. Listening circles, I mean, get back to that book of David Reeves. He quotes that Goscale academic in it, where he says, Science has long proven that storytelling is one of the most effective mechanisms of changing a person's mind. Here's how I illustrate this, Trisha.

[00:21:04] Gary: So I'm going to take both of us back decades, that when you and I were sitting in our pajamas at five or six years of age at seven o'clock at night and your mom or your dad or your grandparents or an uncle or an older sibling comes, they say four magic words. And I know when you heard them and I heard them, we jumped up out of our beds.

[00:21:24] Gary: Once upon a time, cause you and I wanted to hear once upon a time, what daddy and then the story, what mommy or what granddad, what, what was the story? How do we, and I say this, how do your listeners create - for all of us, once upon a time moments. So I say to churches in the states that have not dealt with racism, I mean, the church in the states irritates me to well, uh, end.

[00:21:48] Gary: They still have not dealt with the legacy of slavery. I'm saying, you guys need a truth and reconciliation commission to deal with the legacy of slavery. And I say, you need to use sacred space. For once upon a time moments,

[00:22:02] Trisha: Mm.

[00:22:02] Gary: Australians use it or South Africans or Chinese or Koreans or Europeans or South Americans or North Americans, how do we be that in a hub, be it in a religious institution, be it in an organization, let's have some once upon a time moments, because hearing the person's story humanizes the person doesn't demonize them and allows relationships to be cemented.

[00:22:26] Gary: And to move forward. So I suppose another way of putting it is, to your listeners and to me, keep creating once upon a time narratives and stories.

[00:22:36] Trisha: That is excellent. Thank you, Gary. Gary, I'm going to put your website. in the show notes for people to read some of your writing, is there anything else if people want to contact you, what is that the best place for them to reach

[00:22:48] Gary: out

[00:22:48] Gary: Yeah, my, my email's pretty simple. The website is on there. It's just Gary at rethinkingconflict. com. So it's, it's there. And, look, I'm, this is what I do. I mean, I set Rethinking Conflict up after 30 years in the inner city of Belfast. And I kind of say, you can look at this term religiously or psychologically or sociologically.

[00:23:10] Gary: For whatever years I have ahead, I just want to give my life and experience away. To make sure that people don't live through what I had to live through for a 30 year period, or as I go back to those, those 70s where you went to sleep at night listening to gunfire and bombs in the distance. No person should have to live like that.

[00:23:30] Gary: And sadly, toxic religion and toxic politics contributed to my life and sadly is globally contributing destructively to too many other people's human existence. People like you and me, we need to stop that as best

[00:23:45] Gary: We can, and I think we need a way to do it.

[00:23:47] Trisha: Yep. Thank you. Thank you.

[00:23:49] Trisha: so much, Gary.

[00:23:50] Gary: You're welcome.

[00:23:51] Trisha: As we end this really thoughtful episode 42, I want to take a moment to thank you for listening in with me to Gary and to all the amazing people we've been interviewing over the last episodes. As Gary said, we have work to do, but we're not alone in that work as I hope this podcast shows you, and we know we need so much more of this in the world.

[00:24:11] Trisha: I began this podcast when I was part of the inaugural CQ Fellows group, people all working with cultural intelligence to skill and help others in many different situations and places in the world. It's a year now since colleagues and I from that group graduated, and some of them have been part of this podcast with me.

[00:24:30] Trisha: You've had a chance to hear about their work. Tim from episode 15, the work he's doing in education in Australia. ,. Lauren in episode 18 and the work she's doing with organizations in the USA. Rick, episode 21, the lawyer working in higher education in the U. S. and we know how challenging that has been.

[00:24:49] Trisha: Lucy in episode 24 and her training work across the UK. Kristen in episode 27 who has just completed a growth experience taking people walking the Camino track in Spain. Jennifer in episode 36 with her work with public service and community groups in the UK. And Mark working in a global business in episode 38.

[00:25:10] Trisha: All of us were among an amazing group brought together by David Livermore, who features in episode two and four.

[00:25:16] Trisha: Next week, most of us will be together again in San Diego, where I get to meet in person with Mikkel from episode 26. Who's part of this year's group of CQ fellows. It's going to be a time of reflection, of learning what everyone has been doing, seeing the shifts they've made, hearing about new research and discoveries.

[00:25:35] Trisha: If there's anything you'd like me to ask them, please reach out via my email in the show notes or through LinkedIn.

[00:25:43] Trisha: And thank you for your learning and the work that you are doing in this area We will try and keep the podcast schedule going, but there may be a few gaps. We do have a great episode ready to go for next week, so don't forget to follow or subscribe to be sure you join us for the next episode of The Shift.