Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now I'll talk to John Marks, a former investigative journalist who transitioned 40 years ago to the field of conflict resolution. This show once did a series in partnership with his group, Search for Common Ground. In that series, we had guests from opposing points of view on some key issues. They would search for the common ground they might share that could help the people they both cared about even while they disagreed on policy. A classic example from Search for Common Grounds work domestically at that time, was getting supporters and opponents of abortion rights to work together to help prevent unwanted pregnancies but most of Search for Common Grounds work was around the world pursuing conflict resolution in war zones or potential war zones zones. John describes his group as the world's largest peace-building non-profit with offices in 35 countries.

Interestingly, and relevant to the United States right now, a major lane of his work has been in creating common ground media in various countries to combat how adversarial media was dividing people further into camps with violent implications. At this time of several intractable conflicts in the world today, conflicts that are causing so much human suffering. Let's see what we might still learn from John Marks.

His book is built around 11 principles he has applied in his conflict resolution work and yes, I will ask him if any of these can be better applied today than they're being applied in the Russia-Ukraine, Israel-Palestine, or Sudan situations and yes, I will ask about the increasingly tribal culture politics-- tribal culture war politics, I should say, of the United States. He has a new book called From Vision to Action: Remaking the World Through Social Entrepreneurship. John, it's been a minute. Welcome back to WNYC.

John Marks: It's a real pleasure, Brian. Thank you for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Can we define the term in your title first? Social entrepreneurship. People unfamiliar might think, wait a minute, entrepreneurs are out to make money for themselves. Those are business people. Those involved in social work or social justice wouldn't think of themselves as entrepreneurs. Where do the words connect? Social entrepreneur.

John Marks: Well, social entrepreneurs are people who want to create new enterprises, but not for profit, but to make the world a better place. In other words, for the social good. Profit is not on their list. Of course, they need money to do their work, but what they're trying to do is change the world.

Brian Lehrer: Now, tell us some of your story. Before starting Search for Common Ground in the '80s, you had co-authored a notable book of investigative journalism called The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence. You describe in this book confronting CIA director William Colby at a public event in 1974, calling him out for the CIA's role in overthrowing the democratically elected government of Chile.

Before we go on to your main career in conflict resolution, can you talk about that moment of adversarial journalism and what you would like the world to remember about it here on that book's 50th anniversary?

John Marks: Well, I was adversarial to my core. I was opposed to the Vietnam War and then the excesses of the CIA. Colby, the then director of the CIA was speaking in a Washington hotel ballroom in front of 1,000 people and I got up and confronted him about what the CIA had been doing to overthrow the legitimate government in Chile. I was shouted down, but it was a really interesting moment, particularly because about a dozen years later, Colbe was willing to participate in a project I was putting together, which was to bring together Soviets and Americans to fight terrorism, something that was of the common interest.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, Wikipedia says that book was the first book that the federal government of the United States ever went to court to censor before its publication. Your book about the CIA, did Wikipedia get that point right? And if so, how did that turn out?

John Marks: Well, they did get it right. We published with blank spaces, where the CIA insisted that censorship take place and that made it into a bestseller. The New York Times devoted most of its Op Ed page to printing blank spaces with a little text in between. So it was a problem for me, but the blank spaces spoke more eloquently than the actual words.

Brian Lehrer: You write in your new book, and you just use this phrase here, that in those days you were adversarial to your core. What changed that you wound up starting Search for Common Ground in 1982?

John Marks: Well, I saw that the work I was doing was defined by what I was against and I saw that I wanted to do positive things rather than negative things. I wanted to build a new system rather than tear down the old one. Now, that little piece of wisdom that I've just recounted to you took me about three or four years to come up with, but when I finally made that transformation, that transition, I founded search for common ground.

Brian Lehrer: And so the title of your book is from vision to action. How did you start to act? If the vision was to seek win-win solutions to the world's biggest, most dangerous conflicts, how did you start to act on that?

John Marks: Well, to be a pure visionary is useful if you're going to start a new religion or write a philosophy textbook but it's not particularly useful if you want to make a specific difference in the world and so I founded an organization which was to make my vision real. My vision, as you pointed out, was to go from win-lose to win-win in the world and I wanted to resolve conflicts, starting with the US-Soviet conflict, which threatened to blow up the world.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, and you already referred to the irony, if that's the right word, of 15 years after you confronted CIA director William Colby in 1974. At that event in 1989, 15 years later at a different event, you were working with Colby and a former leader of the Soviet Union spy agency the KGB on a project you had organized to promote Soviet-American cooperation against terror.

Maybe describe that project briefly as an example of your work. 1989 was an interesting year for that because the Soviet Union was collapsing right then and the Cold War was ending.

John Marks: Well, it's always easier to ride a horse in the direction it's going. At that point, the world was going in our direction of finding common ground between America and the Soviet Union. We were doing something that was ahead of the curve, but not that far ahead of the curve. In other words, we were about six months or a year in front of where the governments were acting.

Once I had a former director of the CIA participating, we went back to the Soviets and said we'd like somebody of equal protocol rank and they gave us two KGB generals who came to America and worked out, under our auspices, ways of exchanging information to prevent terrorism. It was a bit of a triumph. It also put our organization on the map. That from my perspective, was quite useful and it was very-- it wasnt quite funny. It was a bit funny.

The KGB general who was coming, his bag never arrived in Los Angeles where we were holding the meeting. We blamed-- everybody thought it was the CIA saying welcome to America, so we had to take him to the Sears in Santa Monica and buy him new toiletry and clothes but he was a good sport and he kept participating.

Brian Lehrer: Your book is organized around 11 principles of social entrepreneurship, each with its own chapter. Things like start from vision, keep showing up, enroll credible supporters, and develop effective metaphors. I want to focus with you in the time we have on two of your 11 principles. Make yes-able propositions and practice aikido with some examples from your career and maybe lessons for today's awful wars, which we will definitely get to.

So practice Aikido. It's a great concept from that Japanese martial art, aikido. Would you explain it?

John Marks: Well, aikido is one of the more modern Japanese martial arts. First to tell you what it's not. In boxing, if an attacker comes at you, you try to knock them backwards, reverse their energy flow by 180 degrees. That is probably not a good way to be a conflict resolver, to be a peace builder because it doesn't work very well just to confront the conflict and try to stop it.

With aikido, what you do is you accept the energy of the attacker, and you try to divert it by 10 or 20 degrees. In other words, you blend with the conflict and you find a way to make both of you safe. What we would try to do is find smaller ways to move forward in the conflict resolution. As much as I would've loved to stop the overall conflict, I never had that kind of power.

By finding a small way forward, by understanding the differences, and acting on the commonalities, you sometimes could make a big difference, as we did with the anti-terrorism project, which you just described.

Brian Lehrer: Sounds like this would be good not just for people in international relations, but for people in our everyday relationships that could turn adversarial and reactive with our families or people we work with or our neighbors, whatever. Yes?

John Marks: Yes. If you want your marriage to work, and I know I was-- I'm a once divorced man, you can't probably get away with being adversarial. You have to do it on a win-win basis, it seems to me or the whole thing cracks up.

Brian Lehrer: What's an example from your career of applying that aikido principle in a high-conflict situation? Pick any country or situation you worked in.

John Marks: In the Congo, which was known at least informally, as the rape capital of the world, we had a Country Director named Lena Slachmuijlder, who was able to find ways to find people within the Congolese army who wanted to change because the army was probably the prime instigator of rape. What she was able to do after three or four years of looking and investigating and trying, she was able to find people, a general, particularly, who were willing to set up a training program for the army in not being abusers of human rights, or of women.

In that way, by not directly confronting them, but finding, let's just say, an alternate way out, we wound up retraining the entire Congolese army in not being rapists. Now, we don't know how many women were saved by that, but I think it was probably in the tens of thousands and we had over 100,000 soldiers in our programs at one point. That was applied aikido.

Brian Lehrer: My head is exploding from this concept of having to train a nation's army not to be rapists. Listener writes aikido, is called the non-martial martial art. That's a nice term, the non-martial martial art. Listeners, any questions for John Marks, founder of Search for Common Ground on his life's work in or the general pursuit of mediation and conflict resolution?

We'll get to some more examples from him. What questions do you have? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Call or text or on being any other kind of social entrepreneur, for that matter, as his new book is called, From Vision to Action: Remaking the World through Social Entrepreneurship. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. John, now to your chapter, Make Yesable Propositions. The main example in that chapter is actually the one you just cited with respect to aikido, and that is your work in Congo.

Can I ask you to define a yesable proposition in the context of violent conflict zones, or is that too obvious a question to even ask?

John Marks: Well, it is an obvious question, but it's a very important question, and I appreciate your asking it. What the concept is that when you make a proposition to someone, a proposal, you want them to say yes. Now, that's always true with people, but what we don't usually do, or many people don't usually do, is think ahead to what the other person may want. The idea is to find something that both parties can say yes to and that is not so easy.

I mean, small children are very good at it, but adults seem to get away from it. You want to make win-win propositions, not win-lose. If you ask somebody to do something they don't want to do, they're going to say no. That's a knowable proposition and you want them to be a yesable proposition, but it has to reflect the interest of both parties.

Brian Lehrer: One major branch of your work has been common ground media, both radio and television, also theater. It's not all public affairs shows, as people might assume. You write, for example, about a radio series you made in Congo built around a fictional villain. Is that a good example of how you've used media to ask you to ask you to describe?

John Marks: It is indeed. In fact, we started at this very WNYC studio with a 10 part series for public television, which was called, of all things, Search for Common Ground in your old building, not here. We expanded from there to the point where we made television series and radio series in over 25 countries. Always, we were looking for ways to put ideas of tolerance, of respect into a culture.

Our premier series was called the team and it was about-- In every country we worked but two, it was about a fictional soccer team, football, as the rest of the world would call it and on that team in each country were players who reflected the diversity of the country. In Kenya, everybody came from the different tribes, in Morocco, there were urban and rural people and in the DRC, which is the Congo, it was all girls and the problem was preventing sexual violence. That was the core. We did 350 episodes of that series, soap opera for social change in 18 countries.

Brian Lehrer: How did you measure the success of that radio series or any radio series in any country or television series?

John Marks: Well, we would do survey research. In other words, we would do ratings and in most of the countries where we worked, they didn't have official ratings but in Burundi, which you're citing, we were getting 90% of the country listening to our soap opera, which was about a Hutu family and a Tutsi family, and they had problems and their kids had problems, and there was violence all around them.

By the end of the half an hour episode, they had solved their problems, only to start again a few days later. It was on twice a week, and altogether, we did over 700 episodes. It really got into the national consciousness, and that was an important part. We were trying to change attitudes and behaviors on a mass scale.

Brian Lehrer: Stephanie in Manhattan, you're on WNYC with John Marks, who for more than 30 years ran the international conflict resolution group called Search for Common Ground and is now the author of From Vision to Action: Remaking the World through Social Entrepreneurship. Hi, Stephanie.

Stephanie: Hi. Thank you for taking my call. Quick question, and we could tie it back into the previous segment. What do you do when the predicate of common ground requires a shared set of facts? What used to be called facts? I'm using the term empirical data. We could use--

Brian Lehrer: I know your reference to tying it into the previous segment. Is that what happens when people just deny science with respect to vaccines? That's what you said to our screener, right?

Stephanie: Correct. And sadly, we have many, many other examples in the last few years. What do you [unintelligible 00:19:28] party refuses to accept what we used to know as empirical data from subject matter experts.

Brian Lehrer: Stephanie. Thank you, John.

John Marks: It's never going to happen that two parties or multiple parties in a conflict have the same set of facts. That's just a fact. What one needs to do as a peace builder, as a conflict resolver, is find some areas where they agree and they're probably going to agree for different reasons. I've never seen or often seen two parties agree for the same reasons. They each have their own thing, and you need to work with the way it is, not the way you would want it to be.

It would be wonderful if everybody had the same set of facts, but it just doesn't happen that way, particularly in our polarized world these days.

Brian Lehrer: Stacey and South Orange, you're on WNYC. Hi, Stacey.

Stacey: Oh, hi. Let's see, what I wanted to ask you about was if rotary, the Rotary clubs, you had ever used them as a resource for volunteer work. They're 2 million around the world.

John Marks: First, I would say that I grew up in South Orange, New Jersey, so I'm very pleased to answer your question. We worked with individuals who came out of the rotary programs. They had fellowship programs for young people, but we never specifically did a project with them but they were really good people and we liked them a lot.

Brian Lehrer: All right, Stacey. Thank you very much. So let me get your take, John, on some of today's main conflict zones. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict obviously has been going on for 75 years or more than a century, depending on where one starts the clock. They came close to, yes, in the '90s, but look how thoroughly it's fallen apart. Is there anywhere you would start to move toward conflict resolution that respects both peoples that any honest broker isn't already trying?

John Marks: Unfortunately, once the shooting starts, it's almost impossible to do conflict resolution. You want to do it before it breaks out and the Middle East has gotten so violent that it's very difficult. I'm going to say that I don't really have anything, but I would try to find areas where the two sides could agree but right now-- or the multiple sides. Everybody is so angry at everybody else that you probably couldn't even get them to come to a meeting.

Its not an easy time, but the kind of work I've done over the years is not applicable in every situation and I'm talking as somebody who's worked in the Middle East for 25 years. It's gotten worse, not better. We've had successes, but they haven't had the impact we would like them to have had.

Brian Lehrer: I think still on this topic. Our next caller, Ikhmil in Queens. You're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in.

Ikhmil: Salam alaykum. Shalom. So I run a program that brings Jews and Muslims together and with individuals, it's very successful but what we have found is that the leadership of organizations seem to be invested in maintaining conflicts and are very resistant to these programs and either try solutions that never work or want to maintain and don't want to bring a people together. The question I have for you is that do you have suggestions to overcome the resistance of the leadership of these organizations?

John Marks: Well, that's a very difficult prospect because the conflict brings in contributions. Now, I assume we're talking about American groups. Conflict causes people to support them, and by fighting, they tend to do better and sometimes in their leadership. What I would do and have done is organize processes which include them and listen and try to get past that need for conflict but it's an unfortunate part of our society, and our country is a very polarized place.

There's a consensus that Israelis or Palestinians or Hutus and Tutsis should find common ground, but there's no consensus that Americans should.

Brian Lehrer: Let's talk about this country. Based on your experience around the world, I'll ask you this question, what do you think the chances are that the United States is headed toward an actual civil war?

John Marks: No, I don't think it will go that far. I think there's restraint, and most people don't want that. There are some people who are talking about it. I mean, we're reading the same stuff about it, but I don't think that this country will go that far but then I'm an optimist. You don't found an organization called Search for Common Ground if you're not an optimist, but I believe in the general goodwill of people in this country.

Brian Lehrer: But given what social media and cable television even have done to polarize media in this country and your media productions countering that in other countries, do you have any suggestions for the US in that respect?

John Marks: Well, I think the media here causes big problems and social media extenuates it because it's not Walter Cronkite speaking to the whole country anymore, it's all these individual voices, and that democratizes the media but on the other hand, there's a large cost to it. I think Americans need to do things, there are organizations that are doing them. My old organization Search for Common Ground has domestic programs at this point. There are quite a few organizations working in anti-polarization but right now, the overwhelming trend seems to be in the other direction.

Brian Lehrer: Last question and we just have about a minute left. Is the world any less full of conflict than when you started Search for Common Ground in 1982? You've done your best to reduce it, but the human impetus to war is bigger than one social entrepreneurial organization can solve. Has humanity made progress in any larger sense, or is it still a game of conflict resolution whack-a-mole in situation by situation?

John Marks: It is conflict resolution whack-a-mole. I think that consciousness on a global level still is advancing in positive ways. I remember as a kid, there was segregation all over the country, there was no environmental movement and the like. All those things have changed, but they haven't changed as quickly or as fast as I would like them to, or most people would like them to but I'm an optimist. I think history is going in positive directions. Unfortunately, the line is ups and downs. It's not a straight line of progress.

Brian Lehrer: John Marks, founder of the group Search for Common Ground, now the author of from Vision to Action: Remaking the World Through Social Entrepreneurship. John, thanks a lot for coming on and sharing it with us.

John Marks: My pleasure. Thanks, Brian.

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