Why total strangers can't quarrel

The fiercest conflicts do not happen between people who couldn’t care less about each other. They happen between people who are too alike in what matters and too different in the specifics. Complete strangers will not even notice each other. Real tension is born where there is a common nature and a difference in how that nature shows itself.

This is more than an everyday observation. It follows directly from one of the oldest principles in philosophy, applied to a systems view of how processes work. And it has a practical edge for anyone selling into Russia from abroad, because a foreign company entering the market meets this principle in three places at once: inside its own mixed team, with local partners, and with buyers who compare it against domestic alternatives.

Unity and struggle of opposites

The second law of dialectics is stated briefly: the unity and struggle of opposites. Read through a systems lens, it becomes a hard axiom of motion. Objects that are absolutely opposed do not interact at all. They have no channel, no zone of overlap through which anything could pass. Motion, process, emotion and conflict are possible only where there is a difference of potential while a common nature is preserved.

Put differently, two poles can interact only if they differ and belong to one whole at the same time. Remove the difference, and there is nothing left to interact: everything collapses into a single point. Remove the common nature, and there is nobody left to interact: the channel disappears.

A note for readers who know this vocabulary from elsewhere. In the Soviet Union, dialectics was a compulsory part of university education, and older managers you sit across from in Russia may well have met these laws as students. You do not need to quote Hegel in a meeting. It helps to know that the idea of productive contradiction will not sound exotic to a Russian counterpart, even if the word itself carries some old ideological weight.

Why a bigger contrast means a stronger process

From here comes a direct consequence, familiar from the idea of contrast as such. The bigger the difference while the channel holds, the more intense the process. These are not two separate rules. They are one rule seen from two sides. Contrast gives the difference of potential its size. The second law explains why that size can turn into anything at all: behind the difference stands one shared nature, which makes the two objects permeable to each other.

That is why the strongest reactions, emotional, communicative or conflictual, do not arise between the most different parties. They arise between those who have a great deal in common and at the same time one sharp disagreement at a specific point.

Marketers see this in the competitive field without naming it. A brand rarely feels real hostility towards companies in a different category. It argues with the nearest rival, the one who sells to the same buyer with a slightly different promise. For a company coming into Russia, the nearest rival is usually a local player whose product does the same job. Buyers will hold the two of you side by side and look for the one point where you diverge. That point is where all the energy of the comparison goes.

Example: an argument inside a team

Take a situation from working life. Two specialists on the same team argue about how to approach a task: harshly, emotionally, barely holding back irritation. Yet they never argue like that with someone from an entirely different department whose work they know almost nothing about. There is simply nothing to argue about there, no shared zone where opinions could diverge so sharply.

The paradox is that the force of a conflict inside a team does not mean the people are strangers to each other. It means they share a nature: a common goal and a common professional identity. The sharp disagreement arose inside that shared space. Remove the common nature completely, move them to separate projects with no overlap, and the conflict disappears. It does not get resolved. The channel for it goes away together with what they had in common.

Foreign companies opening a Russian office often meet this in its purest form. A head-office marketer and a local marketer clash over the launch plan, and from the outside it looks like a culture problem. Usually it is the opposite. Both care about the same launch, both consider themselves responsible for it, and they disagree on how the Russian buyer will react. The heat is a sign of the shared stake. If one of them stops caring, the arguments will end, and so will the useful information the argument was carrying.

There is a cultural layer on top. In Russian business communication, open disagreement in a meeting is common and rarely means the relationship is in trouble. A Russian colleague who pushes back hard on your plan is often showing that they take it seriously. Teams used to a more cushioned style sometimes read this as hostility and respond by pulling back. By the logic of the second law, pulling back is exactly the wrong move: it narrows the channel while leaving the difference unresolved.

The practical turn: look for the channel, not for fewer differences

The practical conclusion is often misread. When trying to defuse a conflict, the instinct is to smooth out the difference: to convince both sides they do not really disagree that much. Following the logic of the second law, the difference itself is not the problem. Difference is necessary for any interaction. The question is whether there is still a channel, a common nature that makes it worth going through the friction.

So conflict work goes better when it strengthens the visibility of the common nature (“you both want the same result, you are just taking different roads to it”) than when it devalues the difference (“you don’t really disagree that much”). The contrast stays. It has to stay, or there will be no movement. But the channel gets stronger, and the energy of the disagreement starts working for the shared result rather than against it.

The same move works outside the team. With a Russian distributor who disputes your pricing, the useful conversation is about the end customer you both depend on, not about how small the gap between your numbers really is. With a buyer weighing you against a local brand, the useful message names the problem you both solve and then shows the one point where you solve it differently. If you hide the difference, the buyer has no reason to choose you. If you hide the common ground, you look like something from another category, and there is no channel for a comparison to happen at all.

This is where foreign brands most often go wrong in Russia. Some lean so hard on being international that the local buyer stops seeing them as an option for their own situation: the shared nature is lost. Others adapt so thoroughly that they become indistinguishable from domestic players: the difference is lost. Both mistakes kill the interaction from opposite ends. Finding the right balance starts with knowing what your Russian buyer actually considers the common ground of the category, which is a question for customer research, not for guesswork from head office.

What this means for everyday communication

The applied meaning is simple. If a conversation with someone keeps ending in raised voices, that is not always a signal to step away. Sometimes it is a signal that you have too much in common with this person in what matters to ignore the difference in details. The work is not to remove the friction entirely, because removing it would mean destroying the channel. The work is to keep the common nature visible while the contrast does its job.

For a company working in Russia, this gives a reading rule for difficult relationships. A partner who argues is still connected to you. A critic who writes a long angry review is close enough to the category to care about it. A local hire who fights your plan is invested in its success. The relationship to worry about is the one that has gone quiet, where the other side has stopped arguing because it no longer shares anything with you worth arguing over. When you build a brand position for the Russian market, the same rule applies: state the shared ground plainly, keep the difference sharp, and expect the friction to come from those closest to you.

Total strangers do not quarrel. They simply drift apart without noticing each other. Real tension appears only where there is something to hold on to together, and that is what makes it worth going through rather than avoiding.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Russian version of this article on belokrylovo.ru: Почему полностью чужие люди не способны поссориться