First, a confession: I went into this book with very little information, thinking it was about interpersonal conflict. It is not; rather, it mostly discusses the organizational and societal aspects of disagreement. This is a book clearly born from Facebook flame wars and Silicon Valley breakout groups, not hissed arguments between spouses behind closed doors while the kids are asleep. In fact, aside from a brief account of an argument with his wife and a rather precious anecdote about his son's favorite pink train, there are very few examples that touch on familial, pragmatic, one-on-one conflict resolution skills. Conversely, a large part of the author's premise is that approaching conflict with a goal of resolving it is fundamentally mistaken. Although he largely (not completely) succeeds in making his case, this case was not the one I was interested in reading about, and therefore I can't in good conscience give it more than three stars. (I'm committing to giving books honest reviews about my subjective experiences in reading them, rather than judging them on totally imaginary "objective" metrics as I've fallen into doing, in 2020, but I digress).
The author is a clear stylist who effectively builds a persuasive argument for curiosity as against certainty, for accepting anxiety around our beliefs rather than avoiding or suppressing it, and for tolerance versus fanaticism. This last bit fails at times, as Benson falls into individualist, neoliberal tech-bro tropes. Still, he unflinchingly addresses racism and Islamophobia to a greater extent than is usually even attempted in this type of organizational psych/social science pop tome. However, there were moments when I had to roll my eyes, most notably when he compared the deplatforming of figures such as Alex Jones and Milo Yannopolis (sp? can't be bothered to Google the prat) to the martyrdom of Jesus, Socrates, and Giordano Bruno (made sure to Google that one, though). Then again, that might just be my "voice of power" trying to avoid a disagreement between viewpoints which might be better settled by curious exploration and open-ended questioning. I doubt it, but thanks to this book I took the time to think about it, which goes a long way to show how thought-provoking it is. It is a good-faith plea for a more open-minded, tolerant society which never resorts to punching down or devil's advocacy, which is refreshing.
The book is well-researched, decently original, and wide-ranging with a bibliography full of great sources. It is also fundamentally utopian, which is a tough pill to swallow in a world on fire, but its frequent flashes of realism, confrontation of privilege, and bravery in engaging in an imperfect world make it at least a partial success, although ultimately I would have preferred to listen to a TED Talk on the subject instead. I'd recommend it to anyone who likes popular psychology and who has an interest in organizational psychology, cognitive biases, media (social and otherwise), rhetoric, and/or decision making. The infographics throughout were cute (he uses emojis to map data points) and got basic points across clearly, but they fell somewhat short of the level of quantification I prefer--if you're going to have charts and graphs, they should indicate real information including numbers, not just general sweeps. Illustrations and three-panel stick figure comics were fine and even clever at times, corny at others, and 99% of them could have been omitted without any loss of understanding or meaning.