Chapter 7, Page 1

Chapter 7

Magnetic Thinking

We seek stability. All our lives, we seek the security, comfort, and peace of stability. We don’t like uncertainty. We want things to be settled, to be definite, to stay in place. The Dialectic, however, is dynamic and is the only appropriate response to a dynamic world of uncertainty. There is a special class of relationships where we tend to claim certainty: things that we see as opposites, where we stand on one side or the other, where there is a distinct right and wrong, true and false, black and white, with no space between, no gray areas. We feel we must choose one pole or the other. I call this a bipolar tension. It’s a special form of the Dialectic: the Dialectic of bipolarity.

Definition

I use Dialectic in a broader and more inclusive sense than many others, but I use bipolarity in a narrower, more particular sense. In this chapter, I give it specific definition: It is a relationship between two seemingly incompatible opposites, a relationship in which neither pole is true by itself. It is not, as many say, a relationship of opposites in which both poles are paradoxically true. The poles are true only in the dialectical tension between them. Truth always lies somewhere between the poles, never at the pole. Sometimes, it is almost indistinguishable from a polar position, but still unpolarized, still in tension with the other pole.

Both or Neither?

So much for an attempt at definition. What am I talking about? The simplest approach to understanding bipolarity is to picture a magnet. We know that each pole of the magnet is