Navigating Conflict -

Naturally antagonists don't have to be explicitly antagonistic.  They might be neutral on the surface and antagonistic under the surface.  They may not be overt, acting antagonists, playing an indirect role only.  They may also be both beneficial in some way and disadvantageous in other ways.  At some deeper level below everyday experience, every interaction is colored with both shades and nobody is purely anything.  We like to think in terms of purity, on both sides, because it keeps things neat.  But the urge to navigate conflict in the previous post isn't necessarily an urge to do so in any actionable manner outside of recognizing reality appropriately.  That we are situated in a mix of people, people who each, individually, follow a strategy for their own goals, goals which may or may not impinge on our personal goals, and goals which are potentially malleable.  The smartest people recognize the most patterns the most accurately and act accordingly.  They are descriptively perfect and prescriptively prescient.  The rest of us are weighted in different ways, different mixes of descriptive and prescriptive, strong actions and no actions, and then we retrofit our memories and emotions according to the our own ego.