At the bottom of all this lies the principle that the countercultural philosopher of the 1950s and ’60s, Alan Watts, echoing Aldous Huxley, labelled ‘the law of reversed effort’, or the ‘backwards law’: the notion that in all sorts of contexts, from our personal lives to politics, all this trying to make everything right is a big part of what’s wrong.
“trying to make everything right” italicized here
