In this episode, Trisha, an organizational psychologist, and cultural intelligence expert explores key themes in conflict transformation. This is the second part of a moving discussion diving into the shifts that need to happen in individual hearts and minds to build communities and societies towards peace. Trisha’s guest the Rev. Dr. Gary Mason, has over 30 years’ experience in peace-building in Belfast. He shares his experience, observations and wisdom around perspectives of history, the power of the narratives we share and encourages us all to continue the work of

Learn more about Gary's work https://www.rethinkingconflict.com/ and you can reach him at gary@rethinkingconflict.com 

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And reach out with any questions you may have for the CQ Fellows trisha@cicollective.com

[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.

[00:01:55] 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.

[00:02:18] 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.

[00:02:50] 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.

[00:03:27] Trisha: Yeah.

[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.

[00:04:02] 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.

[00:04:40] 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.

[00:05:25] 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?

[00:05:58] 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.

[00:07:27] 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.

[00:08:29] 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.

[00:09:02] 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.

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

[00:09:51] 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.

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

[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.

[00:11:24] 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,

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

[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.

[00:12:29] Trisha: Mm.

[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.

[00:13:31] 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.

[00:14:20] 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.

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

[00:15:09] Trisha: Yeah.

[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?

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

[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.

[00:17:55] 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.

[00:18:44] 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.

[00:19:37] Trisha: Right.

[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.

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

[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.

[00:21:24] 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.

[00:22:02] Trisha: Mm.

[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.

[00:22:48] Gary: out

[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.

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

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

[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.

[00:24:30] 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.

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

[00:25:35] 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.