Beyond zero sum: integrating polarities

Learning to live in the tension and possibility of a world beyond black and white

sky or water or… both?

I want to write today about a concept I’ve been pursuing my whole life, which I only recently found language for. The concept of “polarities” for me offers powerful potential to get us unstuck, to liberate our imaginations and creative capacities, and to transform conflict.

My own experience of non-belonging nearly always returns to this: I refuse to choose between the poles, and insist on having both. And those who have chosen the comfort of one pole (and the sacrifice of foregoing the other) see me in the middle and say: you don’t belong.

But I know I do. And I know I’m not alone, here in the liminal space, between worlds. I believe a better world is possible, where the choice is not between two necessities, but how best to combine them, to alchemize them into something new. It’s not just yin and yang: it’s both, and… something else that we don’t yet have language for.

Here’s what this post boils down to (TL;DR): Binaries are paralyzing; understanding them instead as polarities opens our imagination to new possibilities. Polarities cannot be solved; only integrated (it is not autonomy or belonging, but autonomy AND belonging that we seek). And many other things besides. The goal is to meet everyone’s needs: to create a world where everyone — and everything — belongs. That aspiration assumes that it is possible: that we need not privilege one at the expense of another.

Because there are no solutions (or better-stated: there are many solutions), we must develop the capacity to live in the tension: to learn when to hold on and when to let go, understanding that the answer is always context-dependent.

Binaries are a prison for our imagination

This post is an update and extension of a core theme that I’ve been exploring my entire life, and that sits at the heart of this newsletter (writing on transcending binaries here, and the concept of “bridging” here). Gloria Anzaldúa, my favorite writer/practitioner on these themes, put it this way:

It is not enough to stand on the opposite river bank, shouting questions, challenging patriarchal, white conventions. A counter stance locks one into a duel of oppressor and oppressed… All reaction is limited by, and dependent on, what it is reacting against.

This is an argument about efficacy (it won’t work), and it’s more than that: it’s about liberating ourselves, and our imaginations. This is how colonization operates: it takes root within us, so that we never think to check whether the prison door is locked, or realize that perhaps we ourselves hold the key. As poet Diane di Prima warns us:

The ultimate famine is the starvation of the imagination.

I developed this particular theme more fully here, inspired by Michelle Alexander’s brilliant piece on the limitations of resistance:

Resistance is a reactive state of mind. While it can be necessary for survival and to prevent catastrophic harm, it can also tempt us to set our sights too low… Another world is possible, but we can’t achieve it through resistance alone.

From binaries to polarities: from either/or to both/and

I’ve spent my whole life rejecting binaries, and trying to find ways to transcend or integrate them. For as long as I can remember, I’ve yearned for both/and rather than either/or. I’ve finally found a framework that helps me make sense of this longing: Barry Johnson’s pathbreaking work on “polarity thinking.” He distinguishes problems from polarities, as Stephen Anderson explains:

Problems give us two ideas that are directly opposed and in conflict.
Polarities give us two ideas that are complementary and interdependent.

A problem is something that can have a right — or best — answer. A solution exists… Polarities are not a problem to be solved, but rather a paradox to be balanced.

Like most concepts, it’s easiest to understand through examples. Take this list of polarities put together by Leaders for Leaders:

As with breath, it’s not a question of inhale or exhale: it’s both. An adaptation of a line attributed to Niels Bohr puts it this way:

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.

Or as Tasha Eurich put it:

Happiness stems from accepting the existence of life’s two polarities—sadness and joy; failure and success; good and evil—as well as understanding their profound interconnection.

If you want more on polarities, I highly recommend this two-part podcast series with Barry; I also like this 5-minute animated explainer from Sue Borchardt.

From solving to integrating

Polarities cannot be solved; they can only be navigated. And the way we navigate is not by choosing between, but by integrating both. Barry Johnson developed the concept of polarity mapping, which I’ve found truly liberating in its application to so many places where I (or we, or the world) feel stuck. It’s a simple but delightful 2x2 matrix. Choose your favorite binary (now properly understood as a polarity), and give it a try — I find it useful to start with Me and We, which is the building block for so many polarities: team and company, country and world, capitalism and socialism, etc.

If we imagine self at left and collective at right: positive self regard leaves us healthy, grounded, and able to act. Unintended consequences of an over-focus on self is egotism, selfishness, harm to the collective. A positive focus on the collective leads to better outcomes for everyone, an ethos of service and communal care. An over-focus on the collective can be flattening, erasing (or sacrificing) individuals for collective gain.

Other versions of this map talk about ‘values’ and ‘fears’ rather than ‘benefits’ and ‘unintended consequences’: this might be helpful thinking of the liberal/conservative polarity (which can be reframed as change/stability).

Polarity thinking is an antidote to polarization: it seeks to recognize the virtues of each. This is the promise of integration. Here’s the rub: the shift to polarity thinking in a polarized context (welcome to our world) is a vulnerable and potentially dangerous move. The formula I’ve come to understand is as follows (this applies at every level, whether with your intimate partner or in diplomatic relations between nations):

1. Acknowledge the upside of the other pole (the one you find yourself in conflict with: this helps your interlocutor feel “seen”). Paraphrasing Paul Thoresen: “Those who value X will not see the upside to Y until their views on X are recognized and valued.”

2. Acknowledge the downside of your pole (this helps your interlocutor believe that you see what they see, and promotes trust).

3. Then invite your interlocutor to do the same (to acknowledge the virtues of your pole, and acknowledge the risks/limitations of theirs).

4. Then: move to integration, to finding the sweet spot that optimizes for both upsides while addressing both downsides.

The risk, of course, is that your interlocutor won’t reciprocate, and they’ll seize on your acknowledgement as a concession to their point of view. This is the risk of bridging: you get walked on. But without the bridge… we remain stuck.

Integration is an act of creation

Seeking a way out of the paralyzing polarity of capitalism and communism at the height of the Cold War, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. explained:

Communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social, and the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both.

This is key: it’s not just a question of balancing. It’s not just yin and yang. It’s a higher synthesis: a different plane, a third point. And this to me is both the promise and the limitation of polarity thinking. The way I see it (and I think the way Barry sees it), a polarity is not a spectrum, a bridge between two fixed points. Rather it’s multidimensional, and the solution space is too.

Mary Parker Follet — an early proponent of the idea of “power with” rather than “power over” — coined the term “plusvalents” to describe this concept. My friend Laureen Golden framed it this way: Follet believed opposed interests are not necessarily incompatible interests, and rather than dominate (getting the upside of one, at expense of the other) or compromise (giving up the plus of both), we can “integrate interests without choosing between them.”) This is different from mere balancing of competing interests. As Follet explains in Creative Experience:

By integrating these interests you get the increment of the unifying… this is creating.

Miki Kashtan reaches a similar conclusion in her beautiful new book on convergent facilitation, as illustrated in this simple graphic:

One more concept to introduce here that hopefully will help this idea land. So much of my learning these days I source from nature; one of my favorite illustrations of this principle is an “ecotone”, which Wikipedia defines as:

A transition area between two biological communities, where two communities meet and integrate.

Think where water meets land: where amphibious species thrive. What I love about it is it contains characteristics of each… and new possibilities that couldn’t exist in either. Costa Rica is such a place: where the continents of North and South America collide, a burgeoning arena of diverse lifeforms: it contains 6% of the world’s biodiversity on just .03% of global landmass. It is in this liminal space that creation is possible. This sort of “creative remix” is what Eric Berlow (an ecologist) and Sean Gourley (a physicist) have called “one of the hallmarks of innovation.”

From polarities to multiplicities

Polarity thinking is a transformative tool for navigating conflict. And: I’m not sure it goes far enough. I fear it still accepts the very binary frame that it seeks to transcend, by setting up complementary pairs that risk locking us forever into a 2x2 grid. We are not two-dimensional; we contain multitudes.

I joined an interview recently for Jason Rogers’ Mandate Letter, where he asked about how we might transcend the masculine/feminine polarity. I don’t know, but I suspect part of the answer is by expanding it. I find myself increasingly drawn to indigenous ways of being (which Tyson Yunkaporta reminds us are really just human ways of being). We are more than masculine and feminine, eros and logos. What of our bodies? What of our relationship to nature? I think it can be helpful to think about mind, heart, body, and spirit, and do our best to cultivate different capacities in each dimension. I want more expansive visions, ones that move beyond binaries and invite us into our full selves.

Tom Atlee recently put it this way:

Ultimately we need to move beyond systems that incentivize adversarial polarities — pro/anti, left/right, black/white, rich/poor, etc. — to co-create strategies that address the deep needs and aspirations of all people, in all our unique complexity... This especially involves moving beyond majoritarian winner-take-all approaches as we promote deep dialogue and creative, informed deliberation among broad spectrums of diverse people in search of what works for all and for the world at large.

Yes. That is the world I long for. A shift from “e pluribus unum” to “un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos”: from colonization to re-indigenization (subject of a future post).

I love the sheer audacity of the way Daniel Schmachtenberger frames the goal, a world where everything belongs and where needs and interests are by definition aligned (what is good for the individual is good for the whole, since they are inseparable and interdependent, like cells in a body):

A system that is defined by making sure that the incentive of every agent, and the wellbeing of every other agent and the commons is perfectly aligned with no externalities... the system is defined by systemic advantage for the whole.

Learning to hold — and navigate — the tension

This is perhaps the defining skillset of our times. Anti-racism educator Shelly Tochluk calls this “living in the tension.” It’s difficult: we like answers, clarity, resolution, direction. Unfortunately, we live in an increasingly VUCA world (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous). The skillsets we’ve been socialized into by dominant culture are increasingly inadequate to the moment… and we can sense it.

There are no solutions to polarities, only different ways of navigating the inherent tensions: it is an artform. Esther Perel described this as the promise of poetry (no accident that we turn to art for guidance):

Poetry just states the problems beautifully and lets us see the dilemma and the complexity of life, but it doesn't offer a solution. I feel a small relief in knowing that sometimes there is no solution; there’s just holding space for the hurt.

But which hurt? There is destructive conflict and generative conflict: part of the art is knowing the difference. Is this breakdown or breakthrough? As Sam Shepard reportedly said:

Right smack in the center of a contradiction, that's the place to be. That's where the energy is, that's where the heat is.

Yes. A blacksmith requires heat to forge new possibilities out of cold steel. Transformation is a dynamic act, and the direction of that transformation depends on our choices, on our agency. One tension we all sit with that I think is instructive is the inherent contradiction of being complicit in perpetuating the very systems of oppression that we decry. As Vu Le recently put it:

Our livelihoods depend on the existence of inequity. Our ability to feed our families, pay the mortgage, etc., relies on the continuation of awful things. This means all of us are personally conflicted.

This tension is unavoidable: it’s the harsh reality of living under late stage capitalism. But what we do with that tension is still hugely important. This is what I was getting at in my post about dissonance: turning toward the dissonance is the necessary first step toward transformation: it’s feeling the heat that enables transformation. Vaclav Havel famously called this “refusing to live within the lie.” This is the “power of the powerless”: one person living within the truth exposes the lie which in turn exposes the system for what it is… and gives others the courage to act on their own inner knowing.

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To me this is why a focus on belonging is so powerful: it gives us a North Star to continually attune to. We know, deeply and intuitively, when, where, and whether we belong. To belong is to be in right relationship: with yourself, each other, and the world.

While it may be difficult to know the “right” thing to do to change the world, I think we have a good intuitive sense of what small steps we can take to move closer to belonging. To that end, let me close with an invitation here. This week (April 7 western hemisphere, April 8 eastern) Building Belonging is hosting the next in our curated series of Conversations on Transformation, on the topic of how we can cultivate belonging at every scale. To some extent this is the entire theory of action for Building Belonging… I’m excited by the group we’ve brought together to wade into this topic. You can register by clicking the image below; I hope some of you choose to join us!