How a fight about lawn edging explains wars between nations

Avi Rozen was fifteen minutes from a tennis game and still had a lawn to mow. He raced through it, skipped the edging, and was halfway up the stairs when his wife Hannah called out to ask whether he was going to edge after all. What followed was an argument over a few feet of grass that, Rozen later realized, revealed something much larger.

He protested. She pushed back. He started seeing her as demanding and unreasonable. Seeing her that way, he acted more selfishly. Acting that way, she started seeing him as self-centered and immature. Seeing him that way, she pushed harder. Around and around it went, each of them provoking exactly the behavior they were complaining about in the other.

Rozen and Yusuf al-Falah call this collusion rather than conflict, because conflict suggests something that merely happens to people, while collusion is something people actively manufacture together, each supplying the other's justification. And they argue the pattern doesn't stay contained to two people. We recruit allies, friends, coworkers, entire departments, who agree with our accusing view of the other side, and the conflict spreads from a couple to a family to an organization to a nation.

Al-Falah traces this all the way back to Abraham's two sons, Isaac and Ishmael. Jews and Christians believe Isaac was the chosen son with rights to the land; many Muslims believe it was Ishmael. Centuries of descendants on each side have felt mistreated by the other, gathered their own allies, and provoked exactly the behavior they say they're fighting against. Substitute either name into Rozen's lawn-edging diagram, al-Falah says, and it still fits.

The uncomfortable implication is that being right about the underlying dispute, who deserved the land, who started the war, who should edge the lawn, doesn't stop collusion, because collusion isn't about who's correct. It's about what happens once both sides have started seeing each other as objects to manage rather than people to understand. Breaking it never starts with winning the argument. It starts with someone refusing to keep feeding their half of the loop.

Take one fight you keep having with the same person and actually diagram it: what they do, how it makes you see them, what you do in response, and how that in turn makes them see you. Somewhere in that loop you'll find you're both supplying each other's justification. Notice who you complain to about this person, because gathering allies who nod along with your accusing view is usually how a two-person disagreement quietly becomes a group war. Catch yourself the next time you lump someone into a flat label like typical anything, and force yourself to use their actual name instead. You can't make the other person stop their half of the pattern, but you were never actually required to keep feeding yours.