Nonsensical Psychological Messages
We have — as a culture — a huge fondness for nonsensical psychological messages — we can’t seem to get enough of them, and this is odd because they don’t do us any good at all. We’re banjaxing ourselves with fine-sounding pseudo-psychological memes…
A typical example of what we’re talking about here would be the following: “Embrace problems as opportunities”. This is a perfect example of a nonsensical psychological message. It looks good on the surface — which is why we like it — but actually the message is totally stupid, totally absurd. It’s just so much hot air.
The message is absurd because it takes it for granted that this is something we can actually go ahead and do and it isn’t. What’s the point in giving an instruction that no one can obey? It isn’t hard to see why this is a nonsensical message — we just have to try it the next time a sizeable problem comes our way. There are only two things that can happen when we try to put this instruction into effect — either we will find out that we’re not able to put the instruction into practice, or we will somehow manage to fool ourselves that we are able to do this little stuff. Generally, it’s the first possibility that we find ourselves up against — we find ourselves up against the impossibility of ‘doing what we’re supposed to be doing’. It sounds good on paper, but it doesn’t translate into reality.
This rarely opens our eyes to the double bind that we have been put in, however. If it did then that would be fine, if it did then we’d simply laugh and move on. We wouldn’t get caught up in it. What usually happens, however, is that we don’t see the double bind and so we can’t move on, what almost always happens is that we get well and truly stuck — we can’t enact the instructions but we feel that we should be able to do so and so we’re caught. All we can do is keep on trying and keep on failing and blaming ourselves for this failure as we do this.
The reason the situation that we’ve just described is a ‘double bind’ is simply because if we try to follow the instruction and fail (which we inevitably will do) then we will feel bad about ourselves, but if we don’t try then it it’s as if we’re not making any effort to help ourselves, and so we’re culpable this way too. There’s no way out of this trap — we’re damned if we do and we’re damned if we don’t! If we try to utilize the solution, the strategy, the method, and then it’s going to rebound painfully on us and if we don’t make the attempt to utilise the method that’s been given to us then we are deserving of blame precisely because we’re not trying, precisely because we’re not making the effort. Getting ‘caught’ in this way is what double binds are all about.
The question everyone’s going to ask is of course “But why is the solution, the strategy, the method, guaranteed to rebound on us? The example we originally gave, which was the suggestion that it would be helpful to us to learn to see the problem that’s giving us such a hard time as an opportunity (an opportunity for growth) comes across as being wise, after all; it sounds like wise advice but it isn’t and the reason it isn’t is because we’re trying to turn what can only happen spontaneously (or naturally) into something that we can do on purpose, something that can be made to happen ‘to order’ (because we know that it’s the ‘right’ thing to do) and when we try to do this we get stuck — getting stuck is the only thing that can happen when we try to make something happen on purpose that can only happen by itself. Essentially, we’re trying to ‘exploit a spontaneous process’ and this just isn’t going to work out for us. We’re trying to ‘turn source into resource’, as James Carse puts it.
We are culturally blind to this glitch, however. We’re blind in a big way — we assume that we can force anything if we know how, we assume that if we have the correct means and the tropical proper technical knowledge then we can get our own way in everything, just because we want to. Personal will is God to us. We’re suffering from hubris, in other words — we don’t know our own limitations. Change is paradoxical however, just as the Gestalt psychotherapists say, and this is why the hubris of the rational-purposeful mind is our downfall. Change happens all by itself, which means that it happens when we stop trying to make it happen. Counterintuitively, change occurs when we step out of our own way, when we let go of our desire to change and ‘letting go of our desire for things to be otherwise’ turns out to be the one thing we can’t ever do. We can’t desire to have no desire (or -rather — we can but it won’t get us anywhere).
‘Inner change’ — which is needed for us to start seeing a problem as an opportunity instead of a problem — only happens when it happens all by itself, without us hamfistedly interfering in the matter, without the attempt of the rational mind to guide the process to ‘go where it’s supposed to go’. We have absolutely no role to play in this, save for the need to actually be in the situation that we’re in (which is of course completely out of our hands anyway). This information is utterly confounding for the rational ego, which cannot help but think that it has some kind of vital role in the proceedings. Without the validation of having a vital role to play the purposeful self wouldn’t know what to do with itself; without the illusion of agency the rational ego or purposeful self is literally nothing. Without this illusion is will disappear in a puff of smoke, like some sort of conjuring trick. It’s only there in the first place because it thinks it has volition.
When we’re in our usual, ‘directed’ (or ‘purposeful’) mode of existence and we hear saying some kind of message saying that we should ‘accept unconditionally’, or ‘drop our resistance to the situation we’re in’, or ‘feel gratitude for stuff’, or ‘have compassion for ourselves’, or ‘embrace uncertainty’, or ‘refrain from judging’ — or anything like that — we can’t help believing that this is something we can ‘deliberately do’. That’s the implication, after all. Nothing could be further from the truth, however — the attempt to copy or instigate what is essentially a spontaneous process straight away involves us in paradox, or self-contradiction. It ties us up in knots from the word ‘GO’. This will screw things up every time…
If — for example — I try to refrain from judging then this is only because I have judged ‘judging’ to be an undesirable thing, and I am trying to do away with it on this account. Or if I’m trying to be accepting then this is only because I am refusing to accept my own non-acceptance (as Alan Watts says somewhere) and so — without seeing it — I am stuck in a very basic self-contradiction. It is impossible for the thinking mind to ‘unconditionally accept its situation’ (no matter what that situation might be) because this would mean that it isn’t actually doing anything. Unconditional acceptance means ‘not getting involved oneself’ (or ‘allowing things to be exactly as they already are’ and this just happens to be the one thing that the thinking mind (or rational ego, which is the same thing) cannot do. It has to interfere, as we have already said ; it has to think that the situation has something to do with it or else it can’t continue to ‘believe in itself’. Spontaneity is the sworn enemy of the rational / purposeful self….
Implicit in this business of ‘passing on supposedly helpful psychological messages’ is the assumption that the everyday thinking mind can effectively carry them out, can effectively enact them. What’s happening here therefore is that the spontaneous (or ungoverned) activity of the psyche is being hijacked by thought, hijacked by the rational module (or ‘executive center’) which loves to get its own way, which loves to be in charge of everything. To have an understanding of the process whereby the spontaneous or ungoverned process gets ‘hijacked by thought’ would constitute genuine psychological insight on our part, but this is the one thing that we absolutely don’t have any insight into. Instead, we persist in believing that we can coerce or bully the psyche to do what we want it to do with our clever tricks and techniques, with our so-called ‘psychological knowledge’. We — in our hubris — persist in believing that the psyche needs to be ruled by the rational mind. We can’t bear to learn that the psyche doesn’t need us to be micro-managing it, that it doesn’t actually need our input at all…
