Before I start; a general point about my tone. I apologise to anyone who finds me patronising. That's really not my intention, though I obviously have limited control over how people interpret me. I am by nature a rather solitary person and spend more time with books than people. As a result I'm aware I've developed a demeanor than rubs some people the wrong way. However, for the first time in a long time I've reached a stage in my life where I actually quite like myself. And my girlfriend, family and friends all seem to like me too. So I shan't be seeking to change merely because some people resort to personal abuse when I express an opinion.
I wouldn't presume to tell stray -- or anyone else who is driven to such abuse -- how to live their life, but if someone finds my tone problematic, then ignoring me might be a better response than naked aggression. For all our blood-pressures.
Ultimately though it's up to you, and if you feel the need for name-calling then I guess there's little I can do about that, aside from lament it.
Indeed I had intended to ignore stray's boorish and insulting response completely. I posted my views on a particular issue and was greeted with a torrent of personal abuse in reply. I've never found such discussions to be particularly productive.
I was amused, though, to read stray's promise to "stick to political argument in a political field". Given the abusive nature of modern political discourse, that may indeed be appropriate. I was also tickled by the fact that he opened his comment with the claim that he was being "more rational", before quickly descending into an ugly, frothy-mouthed tirade including a somewhat laboured "eye-rolling" theme. Glass houses and all that.
However, I do wish to defend myself against what I see as unjustified and unprovoked attack (someone needs to, and Gregory Bateson's dead). So I'd like to clarify some things. After all, it's possible, even if not very probable, that other readers may be interested in my theories. I will assume that stray has nothing more to say to me on this issue as he himself has already made it abundantly clear that's the case, and I'll take him at his word (from claiming that "discussing my ideas" would cause him physical harm, to his assertion -- halfway through his response, confusingly enough -- that he was "walking away from me", waving).
The first thing to realise is that I'm neither looking at this from a "come the glorious day comrades" sense, nor from a "what's going to happen then?" sense. I am attempting to analyse modern civilisation using the tools of psychoanalysis. I'm far from the first to do this of course, but I believe I may be the first both to carry out such an analysis using Bateson's 'Ecology of Mind' as a starting point; and to identify the 'double bind' as a primary causal factor in the psychosis I believe has gripped our culture. I'm hoping that my thesis is well received, but I'm also aware that it may not be. Nonetheless, if I didn't honestly believe that I was onto something, I wouldn't have been capable of sustaining my research for the past year. Self-belief and self-doubt are both necessary, but the former must outweigh the latter if one is to achieve anything of significance.
Like stray, "complex systems" are also my field. For the best part of a decade I worked in industry as a systems analyst. I was exceptionally good at my job. In my case I was working on large industrial systems; optimising multi-site production and distribution; rather than computer systems. Though there are similarities between the two disciplines, one must factor human psychology (both individual and group) into industrial systems analysis to a greater extent than one would with IT systems analysis (though obviously it is not entirely absent there either). I brought many lessons from that experience back into academia with me. One of the most significant was a practical understanding of group psychodynamics. During the past year of research and study at Trinity (including tutelage from some of the acknowledged experts in the field) I have added a great deal of theory to that practical knowledge.
So despite stray's insistence to the contrary, I am confident that I'm well qualified to understand and discuss the psychodynamics of large groups. This does not make my theories correct, but it does mean they do not come from a position of unqualified ignorance. To suggest otherwise may be satisfying to a name-caller, but is quite wrong.
stray wrote: Yeah, the market is a mess because our underlying pyschology and society are fucked.
I'd like to make it clear that despite stray's claim that this statement is "sophistry" (given the context, I think he may be confusing "sophistry" with "tautology", as it's perfectly possible to argue against sophistry... indeed sophistry positively invites rebuttal), it is neither sophistry nor tautology. In fact, it isn't even close to what I was trying to say and misses my point entirely.
The market is not a mess because "our underlying pyschology and society are fucked". My claim is that the market is an active component of our group psyche (in Freudian terms it represents a collective pleasure principle). So in the language of group psychodynamics, the quoted statement would translate as "our collective pleasure principle is a mess because our underlying psychology and collective mind are fucked". That's not a tautology, it's just nonsensical and it comes close to being the opposite of what I'm actually saying, which is that we are suffering a psychosis, in part because our collective pleasure principle is largely unrestrained (it is not sufficiently modified by a collective reality principle).
My criticism of the proposed US financial bail-out, therefore, is based upon the belief that such a bail-out is actively feeding that psychosis. It is - in Batesonian terms - reinforcing a double bind.
I won't explain the double bind theory of schizophrenia here, as it's extremely complex and would take more than a few paragraphs. The important thing to know is that it involves a disruption to the mechanisms by which individuals or groups process new information and occurs when the individual or group is exposed over a prolonged period to contradictory information at differing levels of communication.*
That's not the extent of it, of course. And it doesn't begin to answer the question of how this situation has developed (where is our double bind?). As Bateson points out in "Bali: The Value System of a Steady State", many -- perhaps most -- human cultures develop healthy reality principles (note: he does not use that particular Freudian term, though his 'ecology of mind' is not incompatible with the Freudian topography). Which, in very simplistic terms, allows them to remain in rough equilibrium with their environment. This is itself a tad misleading as the ecology of mind refutes the idea that a culture can be viewed as being separate from its environment; the claim that it is "in equilibrium" with its environment is a convenient shorthand to express something in an easily comprehensible fashion despite being technically questionable.
But as Bateson also remarked; "nature is a dirty, double-binding bitch". The question is less about where our double bind might be, and more about why we were susceptible to it, and how we may go about remedying our susceptibility and reversing the effects (if indeed that's possible). Given the fact that "the double bind is endemic to human life", there is no question of removing it, only of removing our tendency to be damaged by it. The first step in that process, however, must be to cease reinforcing it.
* To those already familiar with Bateson's double bind (and this will make no sense to anyone else, I'm afraid) I'd liken the proposed bail-out to the visit of the schizophrenogenic mother who cautioned her psychotic son against being afraid of his feelings, but only after she had communicated the opposite message to him through her response to his embrace.
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