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Disagreement is a very useful tool in life to drive improvement and progress.
Yet disagreement is seen as an unpleasant state of affairs by most people and the media as well and therefor it is often suppressed as much as possible and as long as possible. People rather bite their tongue than to express disagreement and that leads to a lot of unexpressed disagreement that keeps building up steam under the surface.
On all things in life where there is agreement or there is unexpressed disagreement, improvement is zero.
Expressing disagreement is vastly better than not expressing it. Agreeing to disagree is an agreeable method to more pleasantly deal with disagreement because the disagreement is at least aired and there is not the requirement that the disagreement is eliminated by insisting to settle on compromise. The disagreeing party has at least expressed the points of disagreement so that the other party at least knows that there is in fact disagreement and can now evaluate the issues that are causing the disagreement and perhaps improve the situation by making some changes.
Ageeing to disagree does not require the very nasty confrontations that are created by those that insist that there must be agreement on all issues at all times and that they will forcefeed their point of view without the consideration on issues that agreeing to disagree allows for. My way or the highway attitudes are not part of agreeing to disagree.
The consequences of unexpressed disagreement
The consequences of unexpressed disagreement are far-reaching and poorly understood by the vast majority. Most of unexpressed disagreement leads to an accumulation of many small unexpressed disagreements into very powerful large disagreements of explosive proportion. That method of not dealing with small disagreements leads to lawsuits, bussiness breakups, divorce and even angry acts of violence.
Agreeing to disagree does not at all propose agreement on a force-fed compromise. On the contrary, it proposes that there be a forum for all disagreement so that it can be aired and be known to the other parties for their evaluation, but without the requirement or need for ultimate agreement.
Agreeing to disagree can be seen as a method of being able to air opposing views without the intolerant insistence on agreement.
The concept of agreeing to disagree is a hard thing to "sell" because human nature is very insistent on the popular methods of wanting to appear pleasant not wanting to be disagreeable and wanting to save all disagreement to a point where it attains critical mass to a point where the smallest spark will cause a catastrophic explosion.
Appeasement, compromise, pleasant appearances, unexpressed resentment and the like are all the methods preferred by most that then result in larger disagreements that are too complicated to overcome without a "war".
In Holland they have a saying: "Weak doctors create festering wounds". This means that if a person is unwilling to deal with cleaning a small scrape wound for fear of causing more pain, that this small wound may grow into a festering one if not properly dealt with right away.
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