Personal and Interpersonal Polarity Dynamics
I have offered a broad portrait of the way in which polarities play out in our life and society and have just presented a graphic portrayal of the swing between the world of S² (Home) and O² (Quest). I will now provide several more concrete portraits of several S² (Home) and O² (Quest) related dynamics. I examine the lenses that two hypothetical actors bring to their search for the Essence of Trust.
Susan
Our first person to face polarities lives in a nice suburb community on the outskirts of Cleveland Ohio. Susan dwells in a daily life of routine. She also lives in something of an informational silo. Her selection of news shows to watch and Internal messages to download is quite limited. She is highly selective in her admission of information about the world that is in any way “disturbing.” Kevin Weitz and I (Weitz and Bergquist, 2024) have devoted an entire book to the description of “bubbles of belief” such as can be found surrounding Susan.
The lens that Susan brings to her world is rather “old-fashioned.” Life for Susan in the suburban is not unlike that lived during the 19th and early 20th Century by a majority of Americans. The life of these rural Americans consisted mostly of farming while Susan’s life consists of working as a receptionist in an office building near her home. Yet, there were many ways in which Susan’s daily life resembles that of the farm family. Susan has many friends in her neighborhood and has been engaged to a loving man whom she has known for more than ten years. He was introduced to her by one of her friends. Susan is enamored with the history of her local community and is religious about attending the county fair each year. The song “Country roads take me home” is one of her favorites, even though she rarely sees a country road and is already firmly ensconced in her home. Trust prevails everywhere in her life. Susan trusts the intentions of her boyfriend and her neighbors, finds that her boyfriend is competent in fixing broken appliances in her home, and feels confident that all members of her community perceive, think and feel much like she does. It would seem that Susan’s entire community lives in a shared bubble of belief.
Susan may be living in a world of distorted Serenity. This is a destination that I have described in a previous essay in this series (Bergquist, 2024a). She seems to be frozen in place and feels ill-equipped to address the challenges of a VUCA-Plus world. For Susan, the “shelter” is critical. She needs a seemingly unchanging community, unchanging relationships with her boyfriend, and an unchanging job as receptionist. Still, something is stirring in Susan. She loves her boyfriend—yet they are still not married. Susan is pretty much satisfied with her job as a receptionist but wonders if there is something more that she as a woman can do.
A couple of weeks ago, Susan stumbled on a program where Mika Brzezinski and a couple of other women were talking about an upcoming international conference where women were speaking about “knowing their value” as competent, ambitious human beings. Susan wondered about her own “value.” Were her abilities being fully realized in her daily routine for many years as a receptionist. Shouldn’t she have been given a chance to do something more challenging at her office? Was her competence as a receptionist making her “indispensable” – and therefore preventing her from being offered a new, higher-paying and more-prestigious job? A bit of frustration was welling up in Susan. Should she look elsewhere for a job? Could she really “trust” the intentions of her boss? Was he actually interested in her welfare?
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