Nobody meets this opposition privately at first. It arrives as a person, and usually as a specific kind: the superior who will not be reasoned with, the family member who controls the money, the colleague who plays for keeps while everyone else plays for position. The native takes the other chair, and is convinced the whole matter is a question of the other party's character. What makes it an opposition rather than bad luck is that the same figure keeps reappearing in new employment, new households and new committees.
The native's own end of the axis is genuinely powerful and genuinely unexamined. There is considerable capacity for control here, exercised through structure rather than force, and it is usually visible to everybody except its owner. Deadlock is the recurring result: two parties who will not move, sustained for months, each waiting for the other to weaken. Work stalls in exactly this way, and the fear underneath it is the fear of being made to submit, which the native will pay almost any price to avoid, including the price of winning nothing.
Holding both ends means conceding that one is also formidable, and that the formidable are frightening to negotiate with. Natives who arrive there make outstanding arbitrators, restructurers and trustees, since they can sit opposite a hard party without either flinching or escalating. Those who do not spend a working life in serial confrontations, each ending in mutual damage and each explained as the fault of a particularly difficult individual. The identical explanation, offered for the fourth time, is the point at which the pattern is usually noticed.
What It Gives
- ◆unflinching before hard parties
- ◆endurance in prolonged negotiation
- ◆clear sight of others' motives
- ◆authority that does not need volume
What It Costs
- ◆deadlocks maintained on principle
- ◆own force invisible to itself
- ◆victory pursued past its value
This is one line of a whole chart. The rest of it — every placement, house and aspect at once — is a birth date away.
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