Bateson's double-bind

Gregory Bateson was one of the most influential people of his era (1904-1980), though most people have never heard of him. Born in England, he was an anthropologist, married for fourteen years to Margaret Mead, where they studied native New Guinea and Balinese, but he was also a social scientist, linguist, and the father of "cybernetics." In short he was one of those old-school thinkers who couldn't be bothered with categories. He transformed every discipline he entered.

Computer people know him from the field of cybernetics, the understanding of constant feedback cycles of action-reaction-new action based on the reaction. This was one of the Big Ideas of the twentieth century, revolutionizing everything from classroom teaching to warfare to our understanding of animal behavior, all subsumed under what's now called Systems Theory.

Bateson was also a psychologist, and his theory of the "double bind" in communications was both highly influential and easily understood. A friend tells you to "be spontaneous," but if you are spontaneous you're merely doing as you were told. Or a father beats a child while telling them it's because they love them. Or a spouse tells you they need spontaneous affection, but when you bring flowers they say you're only doing it because they asked you to.

It reminds me of Ginsberg's Theorem, which restated the laws of thermodynamics as: You can't win, you can't break even, you can't even leave the game.

A double-bind basically means you're confronted with two opposing messages, and you can't win by choosing either. Bateson argued that such a bind (whether real or imagined) underlay some forms of schizophrenia, an easy connection to make when you think about "gaslighting" or the mental gymnastics required to accept certain religious tenets. Children who grow up in households hearing impossible-to-reconcile messages tend to absorb a great deal of insecurity and guilt.

Of course, the double-bind is a potent political tool as well. Say someone is the target of a vicious smear. How do they respond? If they say nothing, they risk the smear being taken as true; but if they respond, they give the lie publicity. Try to think of a good one-word answer to the question, "Have you stopped beating your wife?"

Without necessarily labelling it as such, women face a double-bind whenever they must choose between being "nice" but ineffectual, or competent but cold. Don't speak and go unnoticed, or speak up and be rejected as too forward. People of color face a similar issue, where they cannot appear to be angry, even though anger is the appropriate response to a situation. Perhaps Black women experience this more than any other group.

But America is awash in every kind of double bind, including many who believe that the only way to save our political system is to demolish it.

I don't claim to understand much of Bateson, but if he were still around and practicing psychology, I'd ask him to study America as he did other native cultures, and prescribe some treatment for our collective schizophrenia.

Cartoon courtesy medium.com.

Bateson photo courtesy Basic Books. For more on Bateson, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Bateson