Welcome to the Double Bind
There are a lot more catches than 22…
I was raised surrounded by double binds. If you don’t know what a double bind is, it’s when you are damned if you do; damned if you don’t. If you think that’s just a cute saying, something you repeat with a little smile and a shrug, you’re either incredibly naive or an abuser yourself.
Lots of otherwise really nice people end up as abusers. These days it’s damn hard to avoid the kind of trauma that leads one down that path….
I spent some fifty years, starting about when I was one; when I had fallen down the basement stairs a second time in a few weeks or months, that detail was never related to me; and lasting until I broke through my chronic depression around age sixty. What I did hear, many times, was the charming family anecdote, repeated with a smile and a chuckle while tenderly touching the scars still visible on my chin and forehead…. I spent some fifty years struggling with depression in large part because it was so hard to believe that those who obviously loved me could have also conspired to infect me with the same crushing debilities that had ruined their lives at equally young ages.
But this essay’s not a chronicle of my woes. It’s about you and your woes.
One more detail about me…. I’ve just recently discovered that a deep trait of mine, being able to immediately sense “accidents” just waiting to happen, is a thing. It’s always bothered me that no one else seemed to notice…. Other than by asking me to chill….
You see, while hyper-awareness has its costs. It also has, well, it’s hard to call them benefits….
It leads to being shunned. One develops a wariness. One cultivates a superficial joking demeanor attempting to warn people of the dangers while not alienating them by making it all seem like a joke. Light fun….
That might get you through your twenties…. At some point the realization that it’s not all a joke is impossible to ignore. The pieces keep fitting together. “Random accidents” neither random nor accidental.
This is all obscured by what we simplistically call, “cause & effect.” Whenever we might question this credo we’re scolded to be more “scientific….” It takes a long time to begin to see that what we’re being asked to do is put blinders on. Everything must be reduced to binaries and then submitted to “quantitative analysis….”
It takes a hell of a long time to begin to see through this.
Then, at some point what had always seemed a great burden, an imposition, a cruel fate, suddenly appears to have been the best possible training for learning how this particular world we find ourselves in works.
As the sages remind us:
What is internal is external.
What is external is internal.
It is all one.
What had appeared to me as a private hell is now, painfully obviously a shared hell. We are all crushed under the burden of cascading double binds. A hellish fractal kaleidoscope of double binds. And it has driving most everyone mad.
It’s painful as well as frustrating to find that everywhere I look I see the results of multi-generational trauma generating ever increasing levels of misery and suffering.
Meanwhile to see that all of our public discourse is stuck at the level of profound denial and that we are all condemned to suffer as a merciless churning after short term advantage appears to be the only acceptable response.
Not a day goes by in which the sinking realization that, “No one wants to hear it.” reduces me to silence.
A lifetime of running the maze of double binds does provide certain advantages if one can avoid breaking down entirely, dividing the self into diametrically opposed “personalities.” Each accepting one side of a bind and rejecting the other. Often this manifests as a “split,” but it can also generate a constellation of fragmented selves. Each an attempt to quiet one pair of irreconcilable opposites.
With great fortune and a surviving sense of self-preservation another avenue does appear. Instead of breaking up the self, what about unifying all those binaries? What keeps them in power? Why do they have to be perceived as independent, yes or no questions? Even when they so conveniently pair themselves in such a way that every “right answer” is wrong” and every “wrong answer” is right – and therefore wrong…?
If there’s a place where one begins to navigate uncertainty, this might just be how we get there.
Now, at this point, a great many insights may appear. A grand unification unleashes grand visions.
OK, let’s rush ahead. I spent a dozen or more years chronicling that phase. Check out Horizons of Significance if any of that is of interest….
At a certain point another grand insight looms, “Understanding how things work just does not in any way lead to finding a ‘solution.’”
Read that one at least twice….
The catch here is that even after spending a long time and lots of effort internalizing another profound insight,
We are in a predicament. These are not ‘problems to be solved.’ This is a predicament to be endured.
This is a tough nut…. It’s easy to see why we tend to slide back into secretly expecting all that effort and all that pain to somehow lead us around and through some back door to a place where, contrary to everything that has been revealed, there will be some magical solution.
So, what does one do when every attempt at communicating such a condition leads us around and back to a place where:
There is nothing one can say that will “meet demand.” That whatever one might say will only leave people further confused, or more likely, turning away while shaking their heads.
Nothing one can say while attempting to steer clear of the limitations in #1 will be in any way true. Nothing that skirts the issue can be anything but toxic. Just adding to the cycle of misery & suffering.
You might notice something here…. There are only two choices on offer….
Before we get into that though, what I was going to say was that at that point, and for a multitude of other reasons – let’s stay out of the trap of a limited sense of cause & effect… – my response was to pursue a form of communication that does not require words. I turned to music.
This wasn’t my first foray into a wordless art. I’ve painted for over forty years. And, at least when I got started, it was still possible to enter into “the Visual Arts” without paying one’s highest allegiance to “Words on the Wall.”
A painting exists as a radically mute object. Whatever else it may have or do; it does not “say” anything. Of course in the horror vacuii of our “Marketplace of Ideas” things cannot be left at that. Whole “Industries-of-placing-one-word-after-another” were launched. All, now about to be plowed under in the just-desserts of being subsumed into that bright new frontier ushered in by “AI….”
Painting, as an activity, does have one unavoidable outcome. Since the result has to be the co-creation of an object. Co-creation because unlike the way it is told in all the “Myths of Lone Genius,” a painter enters into relationship with the object and what results, if it is to be anything beyond a willful destruction of perfectly good raw materials, comes out of that dialogue.
Music is free of an object. At least in this one particular way, if one can set aside the need for instruments and a means of sharing what is co-created in this field of art with others. Of course, this is not immediately apparent when one is first entering the endeavor….
This may be a good time to get back to that question a few paragraphs back, Why are there always just these limited choices? Why does it have to be one thing or another?
Of course, this should bring us back to the very first possible insight into double binds. They always present as clearly defined oppositional choices. You can’t be damned if you do; damned if you don’t; outside of an acceptance of this “rule.”
How does Life resist this demand?
To put it in radically simple terms, it overwhelms the “chess-board” of simplistic logic through sheer abundance. It never finds a niche that, given enough time – a very important consideration in our greater Predicament – it cannot fill. Every apparent contradiction is “answered” by a thousand, a million, a zillion! entities that just ignore the demand for “consistency” and persevere.
I’m brought back to who I was when I was left to fall down the cellar stairs. Not once, but twice. What was I? Who was I?
I was a budding toddler. The world was a grand mystery and all my energies were absorbed attempting to discover more of it. To see what might be around the corner. What might be “down there….”
I was hurt. Pretty badly. It could have been much worse. There was a concrete floor at the bottom. There was stack of 3/4” steel pipes down there acting as my backstop….
Did it stop me?
No.
Coda:
Double binds often hide within the bait & switch.
Substack is certainly a better option than the older paradigms of online “content-creation and dissemination.” But it is still functioning within a deeply broken system that reaches the unbelievably dominant level of having created an Edifice of Thought that drives it and maintains its security at all costs. No matter what that might mean for our individual and collective survival. While Substack allows the “content’s creator” to take a more “fair” cut of the proceeds; it still maintains the fiction that we must operate within a “Fee for Service” model of how life must be lived.
We could enter into a dialogue into what other ways of organizing our lives might look like; but we can’t. Not so long as we refuse to acknowledge how deep our Predicament is and how trapped we are in this edifice built of double binds.
All our actions are complicit in maintaining this edifice at the cost of the World.
Everything we can do. Everything we can imagine – at least at this place where we find ourselves right now – is contaminated by this complicity.
The only truly honest thing we can say is that the foundations that have supported and maintain our lives are corrupt. Irremediably corrupt.
We stand on a shifting, collapsing, cracked and failing bank above a precipice.
If we can admit this. If we can face this. We still cannot “solve” anything.
Yet, by entering into this kind of relationship with what-is. With the truth, we can begin to chip away at our complicity. Step back from the urgency that drives us to this edge and adds our weight to its instability.
We can chose to side with Life.
This puts too dramatic a spin on it….
We can live.
Second Coda:
Online we are obsessed with Likes and Follows and perhaps the oft dreamed for and rarely achieved “Successful Monetization.”
Let’s say that those are merely stand-ins, verging on toxic-simulacra to what, paraphrasing what a good friend has recently called, “The drip, drip of an ongoing reciprocity.”
We are not isolated castles of individuality. We are also not simply cogs in any imagined collective. We often say, “We are social animals….” This doesn’t quite capture it either.
We are buds of awareness. We strike out, as soon as we are mobile, looking to connect and relate with other buds of awareness. While they appear to us to be exceedingly rare we are immersed in a sea of awareness, from what we consider to be the most brute inanimate matter throughout the vast panoply of Life we grew up within. Awareness most likely fills and possibly forms the Universe.
We need, and we lack, connections. What we might call meaningful connections.
What I can remember from a very young age and what I only came to understand in its deepest implications after reading James Baldwin’s work, witnessing his life. His struggles. His triumphs. His losses. Was that what I’ve always been looking for is that look passed between any two people, living under the oppression of Whiteness without succumbing to its desire to obliterate any and every sign of life. This look, this acknowledgement of sharing a predicament and remaining alive, I now recognize as the closest any of us can come to fulfillment on this Earth in this day.
Let’s sit with this a while….