Communities get along – even in conflict zones — so what are we losing by tolerating bad leadership…

I realized something in a taxi in Harare twenty years ago that I haven’t been able to unsee since.

The driver and I were stuck in traffic. Zimbabwe was just seeing its currency collapse—182% inflation in a single day. At the time, Somalia had no functioning government, Ethiopia began fighting again with its neighbors, the internally displaced situation was worsening, and child and maternal mortality was crippling Sub-Saharan Africa. I’d been working across the continent for years, moving between countries that couldn’t have looked more different on paper: different governments, different conflicts, different crises.

“What’s the number one problem?” I asked him. He didn’t hesitate. “Leadership.”

That has followed me through two decades of work in global health, environment, finance, and now behavioral science. Because everywhere I’ve looked since—from rural Nigeria to corporate America to international climate negotiations—I keep finding the same pattern: communities’ function remarkably well until vertical power structures intervene to create the friction which ends up justifying their continued relevance.

We don’t talk about it this way. We should.

In 2018, farmer-herder conflicts in Nigeria killed six times more people than Boko Haram. More than 1,300 deaths in six months. The International Crisis Group documented it. Foreign Affairs called it “the deadliest conflict you’ve never heard of.”

Here’s what the coverage missed: for decades, these same communities—nomadic Fulani herders and sedentary farmers—had coexisted peacefully through local mediation. They worked out grazing routes. They traded. They resolved disputes at the community level.

What changed wasn’t the communities. What changed was climate pressure shrinking resources and government failure creating a vacuum that militias and politicians exploited.

The Interfaith Mediation Centre in Nigeria—created by an Imam and a Pastor who had been on opposite sides—has mediated farmer-herder conflicts for thirty years using community-based early warning systems.

Research on “zones of peace” and “non-war communities” shows this pattern globally: communities in active war zones—Colombia, El Salvador, the Democratic Republic of Congo—successfully remove themselves from broader conflicts through local governance structures. They create peace committees. They mediate resource disputes. They function.

San José de Apartadó in Colombia maintained a peace zone for decades despite being surrounded by paramilitaries, guerrillas, and drug trade routes. El Salvador has 140-180 communities under the Coordinadora umbrella with zero gang violence for over a decade.

Maybe the friction isn’t organic. It’s manufactured.

Meanwhile, at the geopolitical level, we’re spending $20 trillion annually on violence and its consequences.

That’s not a typo. The Institute for Economics & Peace calculated the global economic impact of violence in 2024 at $19.97 trillion—11.6% of global GDP, or $2,455 per person on Earth. Nearly half of that ($9 trillion) is military expenditure. Another $5.7 trillion is internal security. We spend 100 times more responding to conflicts than preventing them.

Let’s go deeper.

Political polarization alone costs measurable economic damage: corporate investment drops 4.8 percentage points in election years in polarized countries. Mergers between politically divergent firms have virtually disappeared. Studies across 75 countries show polarization reduces capital investment, human capital development, and total factor productivity.

The opportunity cost of manufactured friction shows up in every sector: slower growth, policy gridlock, distorted economic decisions, talent flight.

Here’s the insight that changes the game: friction isn’t a bug. It’s the feature.

Leaders need problems to solve. The political class remains relevant in direct proportion to how much friction exists. If communities got along, made their own decisions, allocated their own resources, and resolved their own disputes—which history and science shows we’re entirely capable of doing—what do we need expensive intermediaries for?

This isn’t cynicism. It’s observation.

This isn’t complicated. And it’s efficient.

This isn’t radical or disobedient; it’s natural – and self-determined.

It’s anti-fragile. In OUR best interests.      

Am I being a conspiracy theorist? All forms of research show human beings as being a peaceable species, writ large, and at the cellular level. What began as survival purposes, getting along is well-functioning, becomes social cohesion which equals peaceful. There is a strong measure of trust that runs through communities that get things done together, just as there is in those that don’t agree.

As we’re out here studying trust, and living in polarization and mistruth, I’m wondering whether or not there’s a giant conspiracy on us, as a matter of fact. And has been for generations.

If we are a peaceable – which is not to say non-violent or not extreme or un-opinionated or sheep – if we are peaceable, the friction and turmoil and polarization is a result of something else.

I argue here we have been suppressed, centralized, verticalized, and hierarchically wired to think we can’t get along and require management.  Special interests have had the same incentive – to keep us under invested at the cellular level, dismissed by change, disinterested and/or dependent.

It does line up. And should make us think and work together knowing we can architect a restorative consciousness community by community.

We’re moving into an age of decentralization and disintermediation whether we’re ready or not. Technology and environmental pressures are forcing it.

Communities can coordinate horizontally now in ways that bypass traditional power structures. The question isn’t whether this transition happens. The question is whether we acknowledge what communities already know: that trust predicts behavior better than any top-down intervention ever built.

We’ve spent years developing a behavioral prediction architecture (RFUTR & Community Intelligence) that delivers incredible accuracy. How? Because it listens to what communities actually want – it sees them react to what it is being imposed, it senses what they actually need. 

We call all this Behavioral Reality. It’s not revolutionary. It’s just honest.

The taxi driver in Abuja was right: Leadership is our biggest global problem—not because leaders are uniquely corrupt or incompetent, but because the incentive structure rewards friction over function. Every dollar spent managing polarization that shouldn’t exist (without manufactured division) is money not going to solve real problems.

Opportunity Cost again and again

Every policy fight over phantom threats is time not spent on climate adaptation, pandemic preparedness, or economic resilience.

In case you too wonder about the opportunity costs in all this:

“Friction Economics”: The global cost of violence could fund universal healthcare, decarbonize the energy grid, and eliminate extreme poverty with trillions left over. Recent UC Berkeley research shows ending extreme poverty worldwide would cost $318 billion per year—less than 2% of what we spend on violence. The International Energy Agency calculates we need $4.5 trillion annually by 2030 to limit global warming to 1.5°C. Combined, that’s under $5 trillion per year—one quarter of what we currently spend on conflict, military expenditure, and managing the friction of manufactured division.

We spend 100 times more responding to conflicts than preventing them.

Through it all, we pay the leadership tax: the premium communities worldwide pay for tolerating power structures that create problems to justify their own existence.

Communities from Colombia to Congo to Chicago already know how to keep the peace. They’ve been doing it for centuries. My neighborhood does it today. 

I’m just saying it’s time we stop treating that as the exception and build systems assuming it as the rule.

KJS 3.26