Learning Lessons From Waco: When Parties Bring Their Gods to the Negotiation Table

"This book by Jayne Docherty was written a few years afterwards. It’s got quite a lot of sociological jargon in it, but it’s absolutely fascinating. One of the reasons Waco is such an interesting case study is that we have transcripts of the many, many hours of conversations between the FBI and the religious community, the Branch Davidians, in the compound. We see how these negotiations went on and on and on, and just never went anywhere. She does a great job of analyzing why. The FBI negotiators were highly trained, they’d read books and done training courses and had experience of negotiation, but they just weren’t able to make it work. “Another key to productive disagreement is that you have to be honest” Her analysis of it is super interesting. She talks about what happens when two parties bring a completely different set of values to the table. Furthermore, they haven’t recognized that that is the issue. They haven’t fully acknowledged that the other side has a legitimate set of values that are different from their own. Until you do that, the substantive negotiation is just going to misfire and go completely the wrong way. The FBI saw it as a rational, analytical problem, and they had a very secular worldview: ‘We just need to find a way for you to disarm and then come out of this compound, so everybody gets saved.’ The Davidians thought, first of all, that the government was intruding on their freedoms. There was a basic political difference that was never acknowledged by the FBI. Then there was a secondary religious narrative, which was that the Davidians were in an apocalyptic scenario. They had a completely different worldview from the FBI. And because they could never reconcile those two views, they just talked across and over each other. They did actually make a little bit of progress quite late on in the negotiations, they realized that they needed to understand the Davidians on their own terms, and perhaps talk to them in terms of a Biblical narrative, rather than a secular one. Two religious scholars had volunteered because they’d seen what was happening on TV, and said to the FBI, ‘you just don’t understand where these guys are coming from. They’re seeing everything through the lens of Revelations, everything is a Biblical story here. Let us talk to them—because we can persuade them what the right thing to do is through Biblical narrative and Biblical imagery.’ And they talked to David Koresh, and they made some progress. But it came at the end of the process, and the FBI were getting very impatient. There was huge political pressure to just do something and, of course, that ended in disaster. I found it really interesting in itself, but also as an analogy for a lot of our worst disagreements, as a culture and politically. There’s one group, often a highly educated group, who think they are being the rational ones, because they are in command of the facts and the evidence. And then there’s them , the great unwashed, who are just emotional and irrational and full of crazy ideas and lies and illusions. And if only we can just bring more facts and information to this debate, and reason our way towards the answer, then we can make progress. And, of course, we just keep getting reminded again and again that this analytical way to see the world is not the way that everybody sees the world. In fact, it’s quite a minority of people. I borrowed from Joseph Henrich’s book–although it wasn’t a book at the time when I wrote the book, it was a paper—where he talks about Western industrialized, The WEIRDest People in the World . I see the FBI and Waco as a good analogy for that kind of misfiring, of miscommunication."