Polarization Is the Engine of Progress

It’s late afternoon in Madrid, and the heat feels wrong for September.
The stones in Sol hold the sun like an oven, radiating it back into the crowd. Sweat rolls down faces painted with flags.

On one side of the square, Palestinian banners ripple in the dry breeze. Voices chant in rhythm, fists raised, the heat fueling their urgency. Across the space, a smaller group lifts Israeli flags, their chants colliding, overlapping, refusing to give way.

Between them, a thin line of police shifts uneasily, scanning the edges for tension about to break. Around the square, tourists slow their pace, lift phones, then quickly retreat into the cooler shade of side streets.

Watching it, I feel the weight of repetition. The conflict feels endless, a loop without resolution. Two narratives locked in collision, neither yielding, both demanding to be heard. From a distance, it looks like division. Up close, it feels like something else: the noise and heat of a society rehearsing its fractures again and again, as if progress can only emerge through exhaustion.

And maybe that’s the truth we try hardest to avoid: conflict rarely disappears. It lingers, repeats, reopens, until new stories make it possible to imagine something different. That’s why polarization feels unbearable, but it’s also why it matters. Friction isn’t the failure of society; it’s the raw material of transformation.

This is as true for nations as it is for brands. In The Mentor Brand, I argue that identity only becomes meaningful when it is tested. A brand that never encounters resistance, never faces its critics, remains shallow. The same is true of people, communities, and movements.

The Human Psychology of Conflict

Cognitive dissonance, the tension of holding two contradictory truths, is painful. But it’s also how humans grow. Every time our assumptions collide with something that doesn’t fit, we face a choice: either revise our story or double down on it.

You can see this in miniature in teenage language. My kids invent words faster than I can learn them. Yesterday’s slang becomes today’s cringe the second I try to use it. They’re not rejecting me, they’re defining themselves. Language is their frontier, and I’m not invited inside the walls.

Brands, communities, even nations do the same thing. They draw lines in the sand because meaning lives at the border. We know who we are by who we are not. Without friction, there is no identity. Without tension, no transformation.

What This Means for Brands

Most companies treat polarization like a fire hazard: keep away, avoid sparks, say as little as possible. But in a world of rising division, silence doesn’t look safe anymore; it looks absent.

Some brands understand this.

• Nike didn’t manufacture the Colin Kaepernick debate; it stepped into it with a story that matched its DNA: courage, sacrifice, ambition. The ad wasn’t universally loved, some people burned their sneakers on camera, but the backlash only reinforced the point. If you stand for sacrifice, being willing to sacrifice sales is proof.
• Ben & Jerry’s has built decades of cultural capital by stepping deliberately into issues from climate justice to refugee rights. They don’t win every battle. But the consistency of their moral stance has created a brand people trust to speak when it matters.
• Oatly has turned polarization into an art form. Its ads tell you to ditch milk, disrupt dairy farmers, and embrace “wow, no cow.” Farmers protest outside their offices. Legislators push back. And yet, Oatly leans in, because its moral isn’t dairy neutrality, it’s environmental urgency. Love it or hate it, the brand thrives on being the lightning rod.

The pattern is clear: polarization is only powerful if it connects to your moral center. Without that anchor, you’re either invisible or inauthentic.

The Discipline of Purposeful Conflict

Engaging with polarization doesn’t mean picking fights for the sake of virality. It means holding tension in a way that illuminates what matters.

• Anchor in your moral. Speak where your values give you authority, not where the algorithm tempts you.
• Frame the conflict. Don’t reduce complexity to a hashtag. Tell the deeper story: what’s really at stake, and who stands to gain or lose.
• Accept the cost. Taking a stand will alienate some. That’s not failure, that’s the evidence your story means something.

When Stories Make the Impossible Inevitable

Every great leap forward begins as an impossible story.

A century ago, the idea that women should vote was dismissed as dangerous, even laughable. The story was that politics was a man’s world. But suffragettes kept telling another story, one where democracy without women’s voices was a lie. The protests were polarizing. The story won.

In the 1960s, the civil rights movement was branded as disruptive, unpatriotic, even radical. The prevailing story said segregation was “just the way things are.” March by march, sermon by sermon, a new story took root: that America could not call itself free while denying freedom to millions of its own citizens. That story shifted the moral center of a nation.

More recently, LGBTQ+ rights moved from taboo to legislation in a single generation. What began as a fight at the cultural margins became a mainstream narrative of love, dignity, and equality. The story that once split society eventually remade it.

That’s the hidden power of polarization. It creates the stage on which new stories are tested. And when those stories resonate deeply enough, what was once unthinkable becomes inevitable.

The Moral

Standing in Sol, under heat that feels borrowed from July, it’s tempting to wish the protest away, for quiet, for unity, for consensus. But polarization is how culture breathes. It’s noisy, uncomfortable, sometimes unbearable. And yet, time and again, it’s the spark that pushes societies forward.

Brands are not exempt from this law of change. Polarization is not the enemy of progress. Indifference is.

Keep the Story Going

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