The ‘Steersman Paradox’
Our perception of the world is almost entirely ‘thought-based’. It’s not that we’re aware that the world which we are relating to on a daily basis is ‘a representation created by thought’; on the contrary, we aren’t aware of the involvement of the thinking mind at all — very naively, we take our understanding of the world to be just ‘the thing way things are’. As David Bohm says, thought participates in the picture of the world that we are presented with and then hides all evidence of its involvement. The middleman is invisible, in other words; it is working away diligently off-stage but this isn’t to be taken as meaning that it isn’t causing us problems. It is ideally situated to cause problems, in fact…
The core problem that thought causes for us is the problem of redundancy — which basically means that we keep on thinking that we’re saying something new (or doing something new) when we’re not. Or we could say that the problem thought causes for us is the problem of disguised tautology, — ‘tautology’ meaning that ‘where we are going’ was already contained in ‘where we came from’. Redundancy and tautology are equivalent terms therefore — saying that ‘thinking we’re doing or saying something new when we’re not’ is the same thing as ‘thinking we’re getting somewhere new when this isn’t true’ (which is of course inevitably going to be the case when our destination is already present in our starting-off point).
There are two questions we could ask at this point: [1] Why does thought produce redundancy (or tautology) and [2] Why is this a problem? The first question is possibly the easiest to answer (we have actually answered it already) — the operation of thought inevitably results in the production of redundancy precisely because it can’t help treating its conclusions as if they were not already contained in its premise. The thinking mind treats its outputs as if it were something radically different to the input, something that was not inherent in its starting-off point and out of this error comes our ‘imagined freedom’ (which is to say, our supposed freedom to think something new, say something new, do something new). This is a type of freedom that’s strictly virtual in nature however — it never translates into anything real. It doesn’t count for anything…
In more psychological terms, we can say that when we live exclusively on the basis of thought then this means that we are wholly enclosed within a world that is made up of our own projections. The meaning we perceive as belonging to this Projected World is meaning of the extrinsic variety — it’s the meaning that our thoughts have given it, in other words. This — if we don’t see it, if we aren’t aware of it — traps us very neatly. Thought is now the only show in town and that’s a recipe for tautology, that’s a recipe for runaway self-referentiality. We don’t have a look at things in this way since we never stopped to consider that there is any self-referentiality going on to us, it’s just ‘the world being the world’, which is the ‘naïve view’ that we were talking about earlier. We don’t spot the projection and so — as a result — our fate is to be subsumed within a self-referential reality-bubble.
We imagine that we’re ‘on the outside of our thinking’ when actually we’re ‘on the inside’. We naively take it to be the case that we ourselves aren’t a thought (just like everything in the presented world inevitably is), which isn’t true. What we aren’t seeing here is that if we’re putting all our trust in thought to tell us ‘what things are’ (which is what always are doing) then this means that thought is telling us ‘who we are’, too. When we relate to the world of our thoughts it isn’t ‘us’ doing the relating therefore but ‘thought’s construct of us’. So ‘the idea of me’ is relating to ‘the idea of the world’ and there is the naïve assumption that these are two entirely different things when they aren’t. When thought’s construct of ‘who I am’ relates to ‘thought’s construct of the world’ then this is pure, unadulterated redundancy. There is no ‘relating’ going on, just our idea of it. There’s no genuine interaction going on here, just a thing supposedly ‘interacting’ with itself — which is no interaction at all since nothing changes as a result. There’s no ‘interaction’ because nothing actually happened…
If we want to look at this in terms of ‘the mechanism of reflection’ then we could say that ‘the one doing the projecting is also a projection’. When we live exclusively in the Projected World then it has to be the case that we are constructing ourselves exclusively in terms of this world — the world is a reflection of me, and I am a reflection of the world (and this is a classic tautology). I have an aim (which is my projection) and I make sense of myself in terms of that aim (I’m the one who has the aim, I’m the one who is seeking to obtain the aim). This is particularly easy to talk about to see when we talk in terms of games — the game is a construct (all games are constructs and all constructs are games) and when we play a game then we necessarily define ourselves in terms of it. The game — we might say — is ‘us trying to define ourselves in a favourable way rather an unfavourable one. Firstly, ‘I define the game’, and then secondly, ‘the game defines me’. Either it defines me as ‘a winner’ or it defines me as ‘a loser’ — in the first case I feel good and in the second case I feel bad, but however I might feel it’s just me responding to my own projections, it’s still just a meaningless tautology, it’s still ‘a null situation’.
So that’s the answer to the first question — that’s why thought gives rise to tautological realms, to never-ending ‘Mobius loops’. The second question doesn’t take too much effort to answer it either — from a purely logical point of view, self-referentiality as an action is problematic in that it necessarily embodies an irresolvable paradox or glitch. ‘The road up is the same as the road down,’ (or — as we could also put it — ‘the apparent solution to the problem turns out to be the problem itself, so that every time we go to solve the problem we actually create it’. If we were to visualise an open checkerboard composed of ‘all possible positions’, ‘all possible configurations’, then the problem can be envisaged as a type of ‘knot’ that we chase all over the board with our attempts to fix it. Fixing-type activity perpetuates the knot-like entity rather than getting rid of it (since when as soon as we remedy the situation in one place it simply ‘pops up again’ in another). Subjectively speaking, we are able to feel (however temporarily) that we are ‘succeeding in our efforts’ just as long as we keep the focus of our attention narrow and each treat each manifestation of the glitch as ‘a unique, unconnected event’, but this is of course no more than a convenient form of self-deception (convenient because it allows us to contrive to feel that ‘we’re in control; when we’re not).
Another way of talking about paradox is to say that it is the psychological situation where things are continuously ‘going against us’ (or ‘turning against us’). Things ought to be working out straightforwardly (so we think) but — unaccountably — everything keeps messing up on us. Something there is acting against us, but we can’t see what it is; We’re up against an invisible foe who — trickster-like — keeps ‘up-ending’ all our best-laid plans. What’s dogging us in this way isn’t some extraneous factor that we stand a chance of beating however — it’s our own blindness, our own ‘one-sidedness’ (as Jung says). Due to the limitations inherent in thought we can’t see that what we’re ‘doing’ is also what we’re ‘undoing’; We can’t see that ‘fixing the problem’ is actually ‘creating the problem’. Everything thought does is conflict, Krishnamurti declares, wherever we project our will (or desire) there conflict is. The only end to this conflict is when we stop measuring everything, when we stop allowing the thinking mind to run everything. Everything that is conditioned is in a state of conflict, Krishnamurti tells us. Thought — upon which we base everything — actually contains the problem (or — as we all could also say — ‘the state of polarity upon which thought depends’ contains the problem). Polarity is ‘inherently problematic’ since it contains both <yes> and <no> at the same time.
Everything that happens in the Realm of Polarity (which is the same thing as the Conditioned Realm) has to happen between two limits — the limit of <yes> and the limit of <no>, the limit of <up> and the limit of <down>, and so on. The root of the Cybernetic Paradox (the ‘Steersman’s paradox’, as we might also call it) is to be found in the proximity of these two limits to each other. Following Gregory Bateson, Alan Watts explains this paradox by saying that it is as if we are steering a boat — a barge perhaps — down the canal that has become very narrow. At a certain point, a sort of ‘cybernetic glitch’ sets in, such that as soon as we correct to the left then we straightaway have to correct to the right to make up for it. When ‘correcting to the left’ immediately necessitates us ‘correcting to the right’ then we have a fully-fledged paradox on our hands, a paradox that can be expressed in the form ‘turning left equals turning right’. This is a ‘paradox in control’, meaning that — for all practical purposes — ‘control’ goes out of the window and all we are left with is a crazy out-of-control oscillation. We’re locked into a never-ending, self-contradicting, yes / no cycle…
We can apply the principle of the Cybernetic Paradox to thinking by saying that when the two sides of the canal that we’re trying to steer between are <yes> and <no>, <positive> and <negative>. The automatic assumption is that there is space between these two limits, that there is ample leeway so that we aren’t going to be hitting off one side and then the other the whole time. Given the existence of this space, this leeway, control becomes a viable proposition; effective guidance becomes a viable proposition (as opposed to the unhappy state of affairs where we are being controlled by the out-of-control oscillation). This is where things get peculiar, however. The paradoxicality that is inherent in polarity comes about because the two limits that we’re steering between aren’t just ‘close’, they are juxtaposed — they are one and the same thing. There’s no space at all here, in other words. Due to our total lack of perspective on the matter (the lack of perspective that is inherent in the conditioned viewpoint) we see space where there is none, we see ‘an unproblematic straight line’ where really there is a loop (and not just a regular loop either but a self-cancelling Mobius loop). Due to our lack of perspective we don’t see that the solution which we’re working so hard to put in place is actually the very same thing as the problem that we are so optimistically hoping to rid ourselves of.
When we hear about this thing called ‘neurotic conflict’ (which we talk about so very blandly as if it were something straightforward that we can sort out by throwing CBT, or whatever else, at it) it’s the insoluble Cybernetic Paradox that’s been referenced. We’re trying to make it out to be a problem that we can ‘draw a line around’ and then put the appropriate strategies in play so that it can all be ‘tidied up’, so that all the messiness can be ‘ironed out’. Formulating things this way means that we’re ‘playing whack-a-mole’ however — it means that we’re keeping ourselves super-busy chasing the problem all over the board. The problem isn’t the problem, ‘us trying to fix the problem’ is the problem. The problem isn’t something outside of us, something that can be seen objectively and dealt with at a remove, the problem is the System of Thought itself and this problem isn’t something we can get our heads around! Being a bit more precise about this, we can say that the System of Thought isn’t the problem but rather that ‘the profound lack of perspective which we incur when we hand over all our responsibility to it’ is the problem. ‘Handing over all our responsibility to the SOT’ means — [1] Agreeing to look at things exclusively in its way, and [2] Forgetting that we have agreed to anything. The problem isn’t the System of Thought, in other words, the problem is us not seeing it for what it is and mistakenly imagining that it is the Whole of Reality. The construct isn’t ‘the glitch’, the glitch comes into play only when we lose sight of the fact that the construct is only a construct and — as a result — ‘take seriously what we never should have taken seriously’…
