Social Sevens

The constraints of community

Sevens have a base line of escape for their mode of handling difficulties. This escape may be physical, emotional or chemical. Sometimes they just leave the situation, other times they turn to drugs. Another option is to flee emotionally. They may change jobs or spouse or venue.

But with the social Seven, this general tendency is modulated by a desire to achieve a rank in a community. The community may be family, job situation, club or some kind of community or team. This creates a certain tension within the social Seven and simultaneously provides a discipline. The social Seven needs to do some difficult or unpleasant things that he would routinely not do in order to keep rank or esteem in the community.

The traditional word to describe social Sevens is sacrifice. This refers to their willingness to put aside personal preferences in order to serve the larger community. Many times a social Seven will look like and be mistaken for a Two. The difference is that a Two suffers a sense of loss of self in the act of service, while a Seven does not. The Seven may experience instead a sense of confinement. The community can be, in extreme cases, a kind of prison the Seven feels he must liberate himself from.

If the Seven cannot deal with the constraints of community, she will often become highly irresponsible. Social Sevens may take on community/family obligations, then find them crushing and escape from them in one way or another.

Their desire to be important in the community may engender a sense of idealism. In the service of the community, the social Seven may set aside the chronic desire for change and variety and serve the community with a light-hearted energy. But if the Seven is more entranced, he may become bored with the mantle of service and simply skate out from under them.

In the business world, Sevens are often entrepreneurs who start exciting companies based on their creative vision. One reason so many startup companies fail is that a social Seven will start them, but then cannot establish or maintain the kinds of tedious (to them) structures needed to make the company stable over times. A lovely counter example is Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com. He had a vision and then was able to find people who could build a structure to implement his vision.