Communication in times of War and Crisis

11/20/2022

What it can, may, should, and must achieve to contribute to better understanding.

The world in bad shape

The times are terrible and grim, at least for most people. What can, should, may, and must communication achieve and contribute to improve this situation? What could and should be our role as communicators, as architects of relationships between people - what can we contribute to enable understanding and positive exchange, and to help shape the world as hopefully a better place? Considerations on this matter.

War no longer just far away, but in the midst of Europe, closer than ever before.
Climate crisis and systems that offer no solutions and collapse.
Inflation: considerable loss of value, many people are threatened with poverty. Structures that previously seemed reliable are eroding.
Loss of communication skills: instead of exchanging ideas peacefully with others, people are isolating themselves, seeking conflict, the more aggressive the better, refusing to engage in dialog.

Positive role models? Currently: None to be found.

Where opportunities were once seen, there are now increasing risks. Fear of the future becomes the predominant feeling. Unlike, for example, twenty years ago when we started with DRIVE. Positive images guided us: Peace, Love, Happiness. Interacting with people, curiosity about other cultures, what we can learn from them, how we can improve ourselves and each other. The melting pot as a positive image of modernity in art, music, economy, and society? Unity and exchange as opportunities for individual and collective development? These images are sidelined, displaced by other motifs.

Forming Own Identity: Solely through Differentiation?

How do I form identity, create an image of myself? Identity is important: knowing who one is, where one comes from, and where one wants to go. Also: how one differs from others. What one does better, differently, sees, or evaluates. Equally important, however, is what one can learn from others, observing them because they do something better, see, or judge. But what if this can only be formulated with a stark enemy image? Not arising from oneself, but because one can only recognize oneself in contrast to the other? Then it is fatal. >>> How to build a "stupid community".

A World Full of Enemies

What image do I have of others? How do I differentiate myself? How do I see my surroundings, my neighbors, everyone I interact with? Do I only see either "friends" or "enemies"? Either black or white? Or can I differentiate and see others as humans, with whom I want to achieve something together, in a positive engagement as partners or "competitors," but not as "enemies"? What do I choose as the means of engagement: conflict and war? Or: cooperation and dialogue? Fundamental differences.

So what can one do? And what role and task can communication take on?

1.) Preventing war, violence as a means of conflict resolution

If violence is allowed as a means to resolve conflicts, then everything else has failed beforehand. We want to overcome this. Also, what comes afterwards? If we don't want to initiate the next wars right away, we must prepare with positive communication, create the conditions for it, and analyze, understand, and counteract the causes that have led to the current situation.

The role of communication: building a foundation for peace

Working on values, excluding violence as an instrument
Working on understanding, on respect for others, empathy, understanding, and the positive image of living with others
Working on one's own image, on positive identity, self-worth, which forms the basis for how one interacts with others.

... So, everything that the Allies prepared for the Germans after the Second World War as measures and instruments (regardless of how they are individually evaluated).

2.) Climate crisis: facing the ultimate threat

The ultimacy of the "climate crisis" demands from its followers, its disciples, equally ultimate measures and corresponding attitudes: ultimate. The sacred purpose, the prevention of catastrophe, of imminent doom, justifies to them any means if it seems suitable to prevent them. The nature of the argument always leaves room for further escalation but shows no limits. And this is fatal for the followers.

What communication can achieve here

Explaining goal/means relationships: No, one must not allow oneself everything if it could help to achieve a great goal. The means itself must meet values, there are limits to it: legal, moral, ethical.
Showing and explaining facts: researching them, supporting in the analysis, promoting their presentation and comprehensibility.
Supporting dialogue: enabling many voices, giving them a hearing and enabling space.
Enabling discourse: promoting expertise and providing education for all to find better decisions, in the best sense of democracy.

3.) Inflation: halting the loss of value

What is truly valuable? What do we need, and what is its real price? Economists know: rising prices and interest rates always go hand in hand with fear of the imminent loss of a current value, that is: with fear of the future.

What communication must convey now: Trust in the future

Confidence = positive visions of the future, a good view of the present, and a clear analysis of how it came to be, thus the past.
Trust = "We can do it!", with clear paths to solutions.

This is something that communication can and should not only convey but also generate from within itself, with a positive view of humanity as its foundation.

4.) Restoring Communication Skills

It's truly noticeable: crises are the heyday of populists. They offer seemingly simple solutions to complex problems, build groups with simplistic commonalities, and sharply delineate them from others. They reward and punish, elevate and degrade. Dialogue is not their method but aggressive conflict resolution: the harder, the better.

Communication: promote!

Strike a balance: Populists drum extremely loudly. It's difficult to give other voices a hearing, but it's possible. Eventually, when the drummers tire and their skins burst, the other voices must be heard more and better, louder and clearer.
Stand firm. Don't grow weary of arguing, showing, and presenting. In every possible way, so that everyone can understand.
Listen carefully. What lies behind the drumming? Why and what do they want? And why do they find an audience? Whose interests do they serve?
Seek conversations. Individually and even when it hurts, one may need to depart from one's own convictions and question them.
Show strength. Under no circumstances with the same means. But with better ones.

What is important for us as communicators now and today

Even if it may seem that every form of dialogue is hopeless because everyone is shouting, hitting, and shooting - especially now, communicators can and must do a lot, in every task, in every job, every project.

Developing and showing positive images, laying the foundation for hopefully a friendly and peaceful coexistence again soon.
Promoting processes of peaceful exchange, in content, form, and style, across all channels and media.
Helping to understand others: providing analysis and showing empathy, with interest, curiosity, and knowledge. Willingness to engage with what may seem foreign. Not rejecting it but accepting it as good.
Promoting education and ensuring transparency: the ability to acquire and process knowledge to gain better understanding. Protecting against deliberate ignorance, even within ourselves.
Promoting values: No War! Living in harmony with the environment and communicating with it, which inherently excludes violence.
Promoting solutions and approaches as possibilities, opportunities.

Never have communicators had a more important job to do than now. The world needs, among many others, very good communicators, with a positive understanding of their own role. So let's get to work.