Gregory Bateson on Pathology - Context and Relation

Posted by DanielS on Wednesday, 20 August 2014 22:42.

“I don’t have to tell you about the tyranny of patterns - that is the rubric under which we meet. What you may not know is that you have to accept them.”
- Gregory Bateson, Paradigmatic Conservatism.

“When you breach a holistic structure, and say, or do without saying, I’m only going to attend to this end of a relationship - I’m going to study the role of the doctor - role - r-o-l-e”..[or in our case, the role of Jews, one other race, or our own people] ..“now a role is a half-assed relationship, you know. It’s one end of a relationship. And you cannot study one end of a relationship and make any sense. What you will make is disaster.”

Grantchester, said to have world’s highest concentration of Nobel Prize winners, most of these presumably being current or retired academics from the nearby Cambridge.

“The healthy system, dreamed above, may be compared to an acrobat on a high wire. To maintain the ongoing truth of his basic premise (“I am on the wire”), he must be free to move from one position of instability to another; certain variables such as the position of his arms and the rate of movement of his arms, have great flexibility, which he uses to maintain the stability of other more fundamental and general characteristics. If his arms are fixed or paralyzed (isolated from communication), he must fall.

In this connection it is interesting to consider the ecology of our legal system. For obvious reasons, it is difficult to control by law those ethical and abstract principles upon which the social system depends. Indeed, historically, The United States was founded upon the premise of freedom of religion and freedom of thought - - the separation of Church and State being the classic example.

On the other hand, it is rather easy to write laws which will fix the more episodic and superficial details of human behavior. In other words, as our acrobat is progressively limited in his arm movement but is given free permission to fall off the wire.

Note, in passing, that the analogy of the acrobat can be apropos at a higher level. During the period when the acrobat is learning to move his arms in an appropriate way, it is necessary to have a safety net under him, i.e., precisely to give him freedom to fall off the wire. Freedom and flexibility in regard-to the most basic variables may be necessary during the process of learning and creating a new system by social change:

These parades of order and disorder the ecological analyst must weigh.

It is at least arguable that the trend of social change in the last one hundred years, especially in The USA, has been toward an inappropriate distribution of flexibility among variables of civilization. Those variables which should be flexible have been pegged, while those which should be comparatively steady, changing only slowly, have been cast loose.

Even so, the law is surely not the appropriate method for stabilizing the fundamental variables. This should be done by the process of education and character formation - those parts of our system which are currently and expectably undergoing maximum perturbation.” Steps, p.503

“The ignominious bullying of Naven Ritual Rites of passage produced harsh, overcompensating males.”

Tags: Activism, Anthropology, Anti-racism, Conservatism, Education, Environmentalism & Climate Change, Ethnicity and Ethnic Genetic Interests, Genetics & Human Bio-Diversity, Globalisation, White Nationalism

Comments:

Posted by DanielS on Thu, 21 Aug 2014 07:20 | #

In considering these statements of Bateson, particularly this one:

“Those variables which should be flexible have been pegged, while those which should be comparatively steady, changing only slowly, have been cast loose.”

It seems to me that the appropriate application of what should be fairly “flexible” would be individual liberties and community differences, experimentation. While what should be “comparatively steady, changing only slowly” should be the borders of the nation (nation defined both geographically and of an evolved human ecology).

Thus I would take some exception to this statement of his concluding the passage:

“Even so, the law is surely not the appropriate method for stabilizing the fundamental variables. This should be done by the process of education and character formation - those parts of our system which are currently and expectably undergoing maximum perturbation.”

To use the Schmittian “exception”, that the legal system ought to be invoked particularly regarding borders.

This would allow the healing of “the educational system”, to recover in particular from scientistic and Jewish abuses of European education.

And to recover from the onslaught of episodic “learning” resulting from the tumult of modernity’s disregard for patterns.

Primitivism emerges common sense in that context, as Naven Ritual Rite of Passage, wherein ignominious bullying of initiators produced harsh, overcompensating males.

As Kenneth Burke argued, this is not “enriching.”

“Rather than being fulfilling, primitivism is emptying.”

Posted by Dude on Wed, 27 Aug 2014 21:42 | #

So what happened to the MR interviews being set-up and the proposed outreach to Salter?

Posted by DanielS on Wed, 27 Aug 2014 22:17 | #

An interview with Salter is sought for MR.

GW is working-out an essay in preparation for the occasion.

Much direction is awaiting that event.

* While an interview with Salter may have been/ may be straight away in the offing, GW has been warned (contrary to your advice, which I believe to be correct, by the way) by a colleague, that he would advise Salter to stay away from Majority Rights. Which I believe is wrong advice, especially given our new platform.

Posted by Guest Blogger on Mon, 01 Sep 2014 09:44 | #

“Wise men see outlines and therefore they draw them”

D: Don’t be silly. I can’t draw a conversation. I mean things.

F: Yes—I was trying to find out just what you meant. Do you mean “Why do we give things outlines when we draw them?” or do you mean that the things have out-lines whether we draw them or not?

D: I don’t know, Daddy. You tell me. Which do I mean?

F: I don’t know, my dear. There was a very angry artist once who scribbled all sorts of things down, and after he was dead they looked in his books and in one place they found he’d written “Wise men see outlines and therefore they draw them” but in another place he’d written “Mad men see outlines and therefore they draw them.”

D: But which does he mean? I don’t understand.

F: Well, William Blake—that was his name—was a great artist and a very angry man. And sometimes he rolled up his ideas into little spitballs so that he could throw them at people.

D: But what was he mad about, Daddy?

F: But what was he mad about? Oh, I see—you mean “angry.” We have to keep those two meanings of “mad” clear if we are going to talk about Blake. Because a lot of people thought he was mad—really mad—crazy. And that was one of the things he was mad-angry about. And then he was mad-angry, too, about some artists who painted pictures as though things didn’t have out-lines. He called them “the slobbering school.”

D: He wasn’t very tolerant, was he, Daddy?

F: Tolerant? Oh, God. Yes, I know—that’s what they drum into you at school. No, Blake was not very tolerant. He didn’t even think tolerance was a good thing. It was just more slobbering. He thought it blurred all the outlines and muddled everything—that it made all cats gray. So that nobody would be able to see anything clearly and sharply.

D: Yes, Daddy.

F: No, that’s not the answer. I mean “Yes, Daddy” is not the answer. All that says is that you don’t know what your opinion is—and you don’t give a damn what I say or what Blake says and that the school has so befuddled you with talk about tolerance that you can-not tell the difference between anything and anything else.