Small Arcs of Larger Circles: Framing through Other Patterns

by Nora Bateson

Does that make every person who pressures and manipulates a rapist? Is every partner who receives that treatment a victim?

Consenting adults do not always want to consent, and the yes/no binary does not take into account the larger equations of home, family, finance, and reputation. These are complicated contingencies that bear upon consent in qualitatively transformative ways. Consent can be given with resentment, even hatred.

we were as prepared as anyone could be to address context. Culture is a context.

The truth is, we do not know how to hold such conversations yet, especially across cultures.

a healthy sexual interaction. Her response was this: One where both individuals are able to explore their desires in a context where curiosity, discovery and respect is at a premium. It is more about the context within which the erotic happens rather than a particular form of the erotic.

When both sides think they are right, we get misunderstandings; when they see another possibility, we get the cognitive dissonance of mutual learning and the confusion it opens. There are no bystanders. Every conversation counts. Everywhere.

When we want to redirect our ill-drawn cards or diagnoses, we usually do so with the implicit hope of maintaining the status quo. Therein lies the sabotage of our efforts.

Both tarot cards and scientific laboratories are illustrations of the many creative capacities of humanity.

most marriages require (and seek to avoid) similar evolutionary jumps over time, as do organizations, and by the clock of life on earth, even species, landscapes and entire ecosystems go through a complete overhaul.

Evolution is what happens when patterns that used to define survival become deadly.

valuation of life

It will not be long, in ecological time, before the larger patterns of the system overtake the attempt to keep sameness in place.

Preparing for a life that will come after death or divorce, or the fall of civilization, though perhaps pessimistic in tone, offers another sort of vista on resilience. This process activates another ecology of patterns.

Using this kind of ‘pre-hindsight,’ different directions for our actions may become imperative, and for very different reasons than we might expect.

i.e. Staying with the trouble...

So, for example, our strategy thus far has been not to disrupt the many stabilizing interdependencies that permit the continuation of the web of industries that generate distrust and exploitation.

Actions that appear at first to be benevolent often turn out to be destructive.

What is the road back from hell paved with? Another version of hope.

Apocalypse is a linear idea, and we do not live in a linear world.

Framing the questions in this way we set new patterns into play.

How can nations address global issues when policy is national?

How can we use knowledge of complexity in a practical way? I am often asked this question. I am confused by it.

Consequently, we see, in workshops, lectures, conferences, and universities, an insatiable appetite for prêt-à-porter improvement programs.

The price of short cuts is consequences and their echoes.

The unspeakable beauty of those interdependencies exactly matches the horror.

The beauty lies in the ever-forming symmetries and asymmetries that evolve into unimaginable grace, and the horror in the sense that there is so much uncertainty and so little control.

The goal is not to crack the code, but rather to catch the rhythm.

our attempts at control, no matter how often they have been verified by quantitative methods, are not working.

We cannot know the systems, but we can know more. We cannot perfect the systems, but we can do better.

At the edges of the given patterns, there are liminal zones. The boundaries. This is where interaction takes place.

“Treasure your exceptions.” In unseen banal moments, a visiting unreasonable notion can come along and unwrite the limits of our thinking.

Play with the edges.

Right now, not later, is the time to begin to find a way to confront racism and bigotry when they occur in public.

every single incident of bigotry needs to be fished out of the pool of human interaction like so many turds.

The latter hesitated, looked the Muslim woman over and then moved to a seat in the next subway car.

As I watched this insult unfold on the subway that day, I found that I did not know what to say or do.

I always wondered how it could have possibly happened that the people of Germany in the late 1920s and early 1930s could have allowed the escalation of public sentiment that became the concentration camps. In my naiveté I assumed that world had learned a lesson.

There seem to be layers of unseen, unspoken, and unbreakable protocols around causing a public scene.

I have never seen anyone in an informal situation effectively address someone who has made a statement (physical or verbal) of homophobia, racism, misogyny, verbal abuse, or other cross-cultural bigotry.

But mostly I have seen ‘bystanders’ say nothing at all.

the double bind remains. The task here is to find a way, in relatively little time, to take the interaction up a level.

In a sense, I have no right to say anything at all. Simultaneously I have every responsibility to do everything I possibly can to address and heal the pain that history has left for us.

I got angry at the old woman, at myself, at the politicians and publications that have seeded this lack of decency in the public sphere. My anger is not the kind to soothe away; it is the anger that holds in its fist the tenderness to want other people to be treated with respect. It is an anger whose fire burns away numbness.

Diffused adjustments are more effective in complex systems.

i.e. desire driven...

Indirect is much more effective, though impossible to prescribe.

There was an oversight somewhere, and I began a hunt to find it.

e.g. the holocaust denial arguments, also

I underestimated the refinement and complexity of the rhetoric that the extreme right was using. Somehow I expected that only a narrow-minded, bigoted reductionism could hold such destructive binaries. On both of these counts I was mistaken.

see a sickening similarity between the ecologists’ description of the earth’s systems interacting, and the neo-Nazi description of why purity of culture is necessary.

Both are founded on the idea that the world is made of parts and wholes that should remain intact in order to keep the social or environmental system functioning.

If the vocabulary of systems gets hijacked by the extreme right, it will be difficult to get it back, or it could be impossible to replace.

These scientists and professionals have embraced uncertainty;