There is no doubt that describing someone as a balanced person is a compliment acknowledging some aspect of their perspective, mentality, or temperament. The overwhelming negativity associated with the opposite of balanced is perhaps the best evidence of the widespread reverence for the concept. The seeming universal approval for balance may explain the need in some situations for a restoration of balance, with balanced individuals often among the top candidates for taking on the task. But I think there is a certain problem with assuming that a balanced individual is also the right person to restore the same quality to a situation or a group. This isn't meant to suggest that I disagree with the intuition of the idea - who better to find balance than someone who can see both sides? - but as I work out the details of this concept, I cannot help but notice a few issues.
Let's suppose there is a dispute about spending money - one side wants to spend, the other side wants to save. The balanced person brought into this situation could be tasked with deciding the best course of action, and indeed a decision could be reached that is satisfactory to all parties. But the problem is that the three parties - saver, spender, and balanced thinker - can't really relate to each other at all, both before and after the dispute. The saver always saves and the spender always spends, but the balanced thinker doesn't really consider either of those two perspectives whenever he or she makes a decision; the balanced approach means spending for reasons entirely unrelated to the "always spend" or "always save" worldviews held by the opposing sides. The arbitration process is helpful in reaching a decision, and perhaps there is a time and place for prioritizing a resolution simply to allow life to keep moving forward. However, it's important to remember that everyone involved in this process will wake up the next morning with their perspectives intact, and the underlying cause of the dispute will therefore remain unresolved, a fact that will be all too obvious when a new situation once again puts the two sides on opposing sides of the issue.
In other words, just because two sides shook hands and moved on doesn't rule out the recurrence of the same conflict the next time they encounter a similarly divisive decision. It's like expecting kindling to resist a new flame for the fact that a fire was put out last week; equilibrium is not always the same thing as balance. The question of how to avoid the inevitable return of previously settled conflicts points to the difference in the way balance works for individuals and groups - the individual finds balance by avoiding conflict while the group finds balance by resolving conflict. If this difference is accepted, then it points to a contradiction in the common way two sides will seek a balanced mediator to help resolve their conflicts. At the most basic level, the balanced person simply has no relevant experience at the task because - as an individual - balance has always meant avoiding conflict rather than resolving it. It's possible that a balanced person can overcome this issue and grow into the responsibility, but it remains the case that for a balanced individual it will be a significant task to relate to the extreme perspectives on both sides of a given question.
The challenge that opposing sides must face, together, is establishing a process for resolving the inevitable conflicts that emerge whenever multiple perspectives are brought together under the banner of a single group. The impulse to call in a third-party is a form of procrastination for the way it postpones the crucial task of working together for the sake of ensuring the arbitration process is executed correctly. I think this issue is exacerbated by the way arbitrary determinations by a third-party always result in a form of majority. There is a sense that a democratic process means groups move forward by respecting the unquestioned sanctity afforded to the principle of majority rule, but the closer I look at the American system the more I see evidence that democracy is less about majorities and more about amplifying the minority voice (in the strict sense of being in the minority of a voting proportion). If two sides in conflict over any issue came together to resolve the problem, it would require at least an acknowledgment of the various perspectives as a starting point. The alternative of involving some kind of arbitrator doesn't necessarily rule out this outcome, but I suspect in most cases the third-party eventually stifles the perspectives that will not be aligned with the eventual decision.
There is an extension that follows from this thinking which I considered removing from this post, partly because I suspected it was dangerous but mostly because I feared it was useless, yet I think it's potentially important enough for a brief consideration - is the balanced person the unlikely culprit for disrupting an otherwise stable group? I mean this in the sense that a pitch-black evening has a destabilizing effect on two people using a see-saw. It may be helpful to think back to the earlier example about a spending dispute. The balanced person examining the situation will likely conclude that the two sides need to meet somewhere "in the middle", perhaps demonstrated by spending more than would be preferred by the savers while also falling short of the target demanded by the spenders. So where does this leave us? I would imagine the savers would have some disappointment about being forced to open the checkbook while the spenders would lament that the outlay falls short of a critical threshold, but the most important result in my mind would be the inevitable resentment that would accumulate on both sides, with most of it directed at the opponent. If the spending analogy is unclear, let's think of it in a generalized way - essentially, there is a dispute regarding whether to prioritize the present or the future, and an arbitrator has arrived on the scene to kick the can down the road. The problem is that while this can bounces along the pavement each side is becoming increasingly resentful of the other, with both citing the opponent as the sole cause for a specific set of grievances. When the next arbitrator comes along to reassess the situation, the escalating nature of the dispute will increase the temptation to once again delay the inevitable, and the cycle will repeat itself.
This leaves me wondering what role, if any, the balanced thinker can play in a group setting. I think the answer has something to do with generating trust, which I admit is a disappointingly vague response. The trust I'm thinking about would enable opponents in any dispute to find a resolution through conversation and cooperation without resorting to the transactional nature of negotiation. It would define advancement as one smooth, shared stride onward rather than the volatile progress resulting from taking one step backward for every two paces forward. This may seem like a trivial distinction on the surface, but I think the accumulating costs of this volatility - felt in various temporary forms of regression, stagnation, and anxious uncertainty - is no longer justifying the gains from the occasional burst of rapid advancement. The sting of stepping back is negating the joy of moving forward, which you can feel if you listen closely to that lamenting minority voice, or note the urgent tone that returns the moment it finds itself once more on the collapsing crest of the majority.
Whether the trust problem is one best suited to the balanced thinker is of course impossible for me to know, but it's clear that addressing this issue is perhaps the most urgent of short-term challenges. No collective problem can be solved without trust, but we are running a deficit of this necessary ingredient. There is something simmering beneath what I once dismissed as meaningless labeling - the accusations of fascism, censorship, socialism, corruption, cancel culture, rigged elections, totalitarianism, groupthink, and so on. The simmer is the way labels can be used to hide a specific grievance within the ambiguity of multiple interpretations, like how knowing the water temperature alone is not enough to determine if the pot is going on or off the boil. I think these labels are intended to identify difference, but these days I am noticing cases where the label is used to mark an existential threat, and I think these instances are becoming common enough to regard as an urgent concern. The breaking point in a group is when disputes are resolved by eliminating a perspective rather than reconciling differences, and the idea of this playing out on a larger scale doesn't seem so far-fetched to me as it would have even a few years ago.
The first step, then, for whoever tries to balance a group must be to reintroduce enough trust such that the group can see its various perspectives as differences rather than threats. There may be a seat at the table for the balanced thinker, after all, because it plays to the tendency of avoiding conflict without being forced into the thinly-veiled farce of creating majorities. The ideal permanent situation for the group is one where it can resolve its own conflicts rather than relying on a third-party or its dictates, which is in a sense a version of meeting in the middle, but without that outside presence waiting there to welcome the arriving parties. This isn't a likely condition until there is enough trust within the group to take those first steps to the center. The problem of employing the balanced thinker as someone who can see both sides isn't an obvious obstacle to this goal, but if you think about it having someone doing the work for the group makes the group less capable of doing its own work. The best fit for the balanced thinker may indeed resemble something of a central role in the end, but it would always be with the intent to step aside at the key moment - when both sides come close enough that they can finally see the other and acknowledge that a difference is never an existential threat.
