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Opposition promotes creativity or transcendence in finding solutions, which leads to progress from the existing position. It can be heated, but ultimately both/all parties adhere to the common goal of finding a way to advance together. Democracy was founded on this basis.
Conflict, meanwhile, promotes degeneration. It's used to destroy the structure of something existing so it can be rebuilt differently. Each party wants to be in the power position, to annihilate the threat of the other in order to promote their own survival/advance own interests.
Conflict has its time and place - it's a necessary response to a genuine threat to one's survival - but there's so much unnecessary & endlessly circular conflict now, so much unconscious reaction rather than conscious action, based on perceived, as opposed to real, threats.
A lot of what we perceive as threats to our physical, emotional, and mental survival are essentially threats to our identity & ideas rather than to our actual life. And our identity is crafted from the stories we tell ourselves about how the world is and our unique place in it...
We create our personal beliefs about the world & ourselves in order to have a secure position from which to operate on a daily basis, then find ourselves fighting against anyone who believes differently. Because no one belief, no one interpretation, no one narrative is the truth.
The whole process seems only to serve to drag us all down to this base level of unleashing our emotional energy on whoever we've identified as an appropriate enemy target, when we could be putting that energy into more fruitful activity toward identifying & pursing common goals.
