“The history of our species is the history of mistaking the limits of our imagination for the limits of the possible.” -Maria Popovo
“Information that does not take into account the full scope of interrelationality in a system is likely to inspire misguided decision-making, which compounds already ‘wicked’ problems.” -Nora Bateson
We all make mistakes. It is part of being human and fallible. Yet if we don’t recognize the patterns in how we make mistakes and learn (and unlearn) from them, it’s like building a castle of high hopes on a faulty foundation. This precarious and disappointing situation occurs when the parts needed to build the castle become disconnected from the proposed castle. Unfortunately, this is common behavior in our society and the root of many of our social and environmental problems. We have become accustomed to accepting mistakes based on fragmented information and specialized institutions that have little respect for the essence of our total existence.
Why is this of concern in our culture? Few would argue that the fragmentation of services and knowledge is a major factor in the polarization in our country. Being exclusive in groups can foster fear and anxiety in others. When the parts of a complex system or country do not work together, the system becomes dysfunctional. This is like a clock with some bent gears still ticking, but telling the wrong time.
From my anthropological background and as a therapist, I have seen many such situations that create isolation in human interactions. When we are not tending to the total needs of all harmoniously, we can easily become victims of anger and discrimination for not abiding by specialized interests. One becomes labeled as a “pain” when expressing frustration about outcomes that fail to meet specific needs. We tend to deprive ourselves of the beauty of who we are and the environment we interact with.
Most definitions of “problems” imply a relationship to conflict, framed as something that needs to be addressed and overcome. The consequence of this way of thinking is a major influence on institutions that educate and serve, including schools, business, media, politics, and medicine. This framework erases the context in question, allowing problems to be separated from related issues and opens the door to blaming those in need. It creates a dependency on questionable content rooted in oppositional energy. This doesn’t focus on resolution; it sets an objective to vanquish what, in essence, is an unresolved conflict that can recur. It sets up a self-fulfilling prophecy that leads us to make mistakes about how we work within nature and in relationships with others.
However, we have a choice: to pause and reflect on how we would like to view our relationships with others and our environment. This liminal opportunity is the source and place where the seeds of change can grow, and mistakes can be avoided. The danger here is being drawn back to business as usual, a mistake of viewing the world as consisting of opposites. Nature abhors being viewed as consisting of opposites. It exists within patterns of inevitable differences that are constantly interdependent in maintaining a unified symbiosis.
This is not to say that there aren’t conflicts or problems in nature. However, this ecological process of the whole, being recognized as more than the sum of its parts, offers an optimal path for adjustment. It allows us to see that “problems” are information about what is or is not happening in our relationships. This is where solutions emerge as possibilities to improve the context in question. That doesn’t mean nature is not struggling with human encroachment, short-sightedness, greed, or insensitivity to how she functions. It is a mistake not to recognize this process of patterns connecting in our lives.
In practice, we often struggle to understand how to achieve harmony. The confusion lies in the fact that life is full of contradictions or paradoxes. That is the source of creativity. They are meant to be temporary differences, full of information about artistic gems to come to fruition. For instance, love and hatred can be seen as two sides of the same yin/yang emotion seeking agreement. A sunny day is the other side of a stormy one.
These paradoxes are not meant to continue beyond creating some very comedic moments. Abbott and Costello’s creative skit “Who’s on First?” (for those much younger than I, you can Google it) is hilarious, but if not resolved or dismissed, it can cause havoc for a baseball team. How about if I say, “Everything I am telling you is a lie.”
This could mistakenly be the beginning of runaway results of uncontrollable opposition. It can cause family horrors as well as wars and destruction.
Conflict or repetitive mistakes are perpetuated by differences not allowed to harmonize. They can be seen in two ways. One is like the arms race, where one country has ten bombs, and the other country retaliates by making eleven bombs, and so on. In another instance, a series of ongoing mistakes can lead to domino effects, such as when DDT was sprayed on crops, which eventually found their way up the biological chain into human mothers’ milk.
The second form of conflict occurs when one person or entity establishes a dominant/submissive relationship with another through power or mistaken beliefs. In either example, the result is the creation of a “double bind” where there is a stuckness between a rock and a hard place.
So how do we avoid the “damn if you do or damn if you don’t” scenarios, whether with interpersonal, group, environmental, or international relationships? It starts by celebrating small one-to-one and many-to-many relationship forums that involve learning from each other in a win-win sharing that integrates our inherent complexities. It becomes a dialogue of narratives, freeing us to explore how we can interface with other contexts, such as family, religion, labor, health, technology, and medicine (see reference below on Warm Data) in collaborative ways. It underscores what anthropologist Gregory Bateson would describe as a “transcontextual” perspective, and so on.
Here are some prompts to encourage you to form small groups to mutually share and learn from each other through improvisational dialogue to avoid mistakes:
How can you describe the differences between how you would like your learning of new experiences to occur and how it is currently occurring?
What mistakes have you made in the past regarding learning to learn?
How is your life continuing within the contexts of the media, economics, and the environment? How have you made mistakes dealing with these different institutions?
In what ways do you feel children (yours and/ or other children) are influenced by their schooling, media, and international issues? How can their be collaboration amongst these institutions to avoid making mistakes with the interfacing of these contexts?
Do the existing mistakes and polarization hinder your interaction of threading through all of the contexts of your employment, family, and political environment?
