When people argue, they go on the attack against the person that they are arguing with. People are hard wired to fight. The problem is that there has to be a winner and a loser in a fight.
People will fight to the point of dysfunction to avoid being the loser in a fight.
People need to learn to attack the problem instead of the person.
There is an oriental philosophy of “saving face” This is widely practiced in oriental culture. It is the notion that you show respect for everyone and that you would never ever consider doing anything that would cause anyone embarrassment, humiliation or becoming socially uncomfortable. It is essentiall the “Golden Rule” on steroids. This is something that we should practice in our Western culture.
Instead we are loud and abrasive and opinionated and it is all about I, me, mine.
We are known as Ugly Americans in other cultures with good reason. This practice is the reason that we have a 50% divorce rate in this country.
In JapanJapan divorce rate is approximately 27%. One in every four marriages ends up to divorce. According to Reuters, The number of divorces annually has almost doubled since 1990, with 264,000 couples formally breaking up in 2000. From 2000 to 2004, there is a little bit drop in the divorce rate in Japan.
So we see that our so called civilized culture has nearly double the divorce rates of other cultures. How civilized our we?
As a western society we have embraced the disposable lifestyle. We discard kids, families, for the immediate gratification. As a result of this disposable mentality with our kids, we are far down on high school graduation rates as this chart indicates.
We need to do better as a society.