Adam Kahane and Barry Oshry among others talk about love and power as polarities - the on representing cooperation, community and support while the other represents ambition, individuation and drive. Both are equally valued.
Humberto Maturana, quoted here in Inside Project Red Stripe, addresses the same issue from the most revealing angle:
"When one puts objectivity in parenthesis, all views, all verses in the multiverse are equally valid. Understanding this, you lose the passion for changing the other. One of the results is that you look apathetic to people. Now, those who do not live with objectivity in parentheses have a passion for changing the other. So they have this passion and you do not. For example, at the university where I work, people may say, ‘Humberto is not really interested in anything,’ because I don’t have the passion in the same sense that the person that has objectivity without parentheses. And I think that this is the main difficulty. To other people you may seem too tolerant. However, if the others also put objectivity in parentheses, you discover that disagreements can only be solved by entering a domain of co-inspiration, in which things are done together because the participants want to do them. With objectivity in parentheses, it is easy to do things together because one is not denying the other in the process of doing them."
This idea of losing the passion for changing the other is interesting. It could go in several directions and could be considered in an organisational context (as he begins to in relation to his university). Can we hope to build a successful organisation or business without a passion for changing the other? Can we hope to save our species from itself, or our planet from our species, if we shed our passion for changing the other?
The first answer might be 'no'. But Maturana takes the conversation always in the direction of love and, specifically, the biology of love.
"The new beginning is always in the biology of love."
"When love is interfered with we become ill."
Who will write the sequel to Arie de Geus's The Living Company? Called The Loving Company it will initially face some ridicule but become established as the core organisational text of the early 21st century?