Embrace difference. Manage too much charge. Refuse a singularity as a response.
Our current culture seeks consensus and avoids authority. Likes freedom but hates responsibility. Seeks decentralisation and abhors centralisation. Wants rights but refuses different rights to others.
In my years of working with the Principals of Universe – Nature’s laws – as described by my mentor Buckminster Fuller, I have often pondered the Law:
Unity is plural at minimum two.
Consider your hand. The palm of your hand and the back of your hand are different, yet the two make a hand. In is not out. Left foot is not right foot. Yet they go together.
We often think in terms of same – same. Yet the Law of Unity requires complementary pairs. Same – not same.
Synergy means the behaviour of the whole cannot be determined by an examination of the parts separately. No amount of examination of a caterpillar can predict a butterfly. Sodium and chloride are so different, yet together they make salt.
The Law of Unity requires diversity and difference. But no, we want all the same. White on white with no variation of sexuality, race or gender, for example.
Yet we need a positive and negative charge to hold the shape of an atom, cell, or membrane.
Life requires polarity.
When we have too many positives we are going to get an implosion.
Too much niceness, too much politeness, too much political correctness, too much consensus and everything collapses. Nothing gets done, no innovation or creativity happens, and people spend their days walking on eggshells, too afraid to speak up for fear of hurting their over-sensitive selves.
This is not healthy or life-enriching. Instead, there will be a collapse. An outcome made inevitable by the wilful ignorance of Nature’s Laws.
When we have too much of a negative charge, we will get an explosion. Too much hate, too much disagreement, too much nastiness, too much violence. Explosion. Revolution. War. Falling apart. Divorce.
Polarity is required for existence. We need diversity. Tension. The positive to the negative.
At the threshold of the two, we get a dance and vibration. Never equilibrium, which is simply a place to pass through, but rather a push-pull between the positive and negative. A tensegity. This – in the dance between – is where aliveness lives.
Consider our current love affair with decentralised platforms. This love affair is so completely understandable when we observe the world now. The seeming rise of authoritarianism, which in most democracies is not authoritarianism but oligarchy – where a few people with the money hold the politicians to ransom – feels like a threat to our freedom. Our governance systems are backed by social media that manipulates news feeds to suit the platform’s purpose while also brainwashing millions of people as they make billions of dollars off the labour of the participants on the Social Media Platform.
“Let us decentralise!” is an obvious response.
This response fails to consider the complementary pair of decentralisation is centralisation. It is not one or the other. It is both and. Just as good and bad, up and down, rights and responsibilities need each other to exist. This Law is also known as Yin and Yang.
A centralised currency is only partial in its effectiveness. It needs its complementary pair, a decentralised complementary currency to be effective. Both and.
The central currency is the trade currency between nation-states and strangers. The decentralised complementary currency is the trade currency within the community or state, where trust is already established.
When we consider complementarity – decentralised AND centralised – it might make us uncomfortable. You might dislike authority or taking an authority position. You might rage against the regime. Most of our current regimes need to be raged against because they have existed without their polarising pair and, as such, have become corrupted and bloated with power.
When we consider wicked global problems like climate change and pandemics, we need a global response. Not a response from 192 Captains on Spaceship Earth. Yet we are rightly terrified of establishing a global authority. What happens if the Global Authority gets infected with power and goes rogue? How do we prevent power grabs, decisions made minus integrity, outright lies and cheating? How do we ensure wisdom is passed on – it transcends the conditions it arrived in while including the best of what was there when it arrived. How do we prevent corruption?
And how do we select true wisdom leaders able to hold the whole world in their hearts and hands to lead the global authority with transparent integrity?
These questions need to be comprehensively considered.
When designing homes, businesses, partnerships, institutions, states and governance, we must design polarity into the architecture from the beginning.
Complementarity requires difference that, when united, is synergistic.
If we are building a strong team, it is not same-same. Imagine 10 clones of yourself on the team? It would be a disaster.
When creating a beautiful Vintage Champagne, one does not mix all of the best vintages. Instead, some good are combined with some average and with some less than average.
This is the art of creating Synergy. It is an art and skill of curation and design. I call it human relational synergetics.
A Syntropic Steward leader considers this as they build culture, teams and solutions to problems. They often share authority through consensus and self-management yet are not afraid to take authority when it best stewards the Evolutionary Purpose and Source Idea. They know that the structure needs recalibrating if there is too much positive or negative charge.
Embrace difference. Manage too much charge. Refuse a singularity as a response.
Design a Syntropic Enterprise.
