Forever Becoming

Construction

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Conscious                 -                    Unconscious
Light                   -                    Shadow
Simple                -                  Complex
Mono                -                    Poly
One                   -                    Many
Spotlight                   -                    Floodlight

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In building something, we're always leaving other things out. In choosing these bricks, we forsake others.

But what do we do with those things that we've left out? Where do we put them? Do we keep them in sight or hide them away? Do they threaten our structure; or do they bring a welcome sense of perspective?

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Imagine a pool of infinite size, full of lego bricks. To construct anything with those bricks, from the small to the large, the simple to the complex, you must select certain bricks, and leave others out.

If you want to something of a very definite size and shape then you must use exactly the right number of bricks, and exactly the right kind.

The more specific your goal, the more selective you must be.

This analogy can be applied to any ‘thing’ that we can think of; from the concrete to the abstract. My ‘table’ is hard, and not soft. A ‘Jew’ does not work on the Sabbath. And so on.

From a pool of infinite possibilities, certain bricks are selected and these become the things that populate our world. They are defined as much by the bricks that they are, as by the bricks that they aren’t. Indeed, their definition comes from the interplay between these two realms; between ‘am’ and ‘am not’; ‘inside’ and ‘outside’; ‘self’ and ‘other.’

Construction is, then, defined as much by exclusion as by inclusion.

Our consciousness also works on this principle. We can imagine our conscious mind as a spotlight. Whatever falls within the limited field of its beam we become 'conscious' of. We flash our beam this way and that, lighting first one area, and then another: but always we leave so much in the dark.

Exclusion is written into our way of interpreting the world. We see things by defining them (‘its hard’, ‘its red,’ ‘its hot’), so on the one hand definition is essential - without borders, there would be no distinct things at all; and thus, no world. And yet we can drown in our definitions. As with all things, the challenge is to find a balance between these two states; between ‘too defined’ and ‘not defined enough.’ We could say that our health depends on this balancing act.

How, then, to maintain that balance? If we accept that we’ll always be overlooking something, then one way is to attempt to be aware of those things that are being left out. This means being able to see past - or see through - our structures, to the multiplicity that lies beyond their boundaries.

For instance, one story that we could tell about the recent EU referendum is that it was about those voices that had been ‘left out’ finally having a say. Certain sections of British society had been increasingly marginalised by a culture that did not reflect their views and concerns, and they saw the vote as an opportunity to be heard. In this story, Brexit becomes a rupture in the psyche of the nation: what had been left out - or repressed - finally bursting to the surface.

Its worth noting that in telling this story I am excluding others. A story is a creation, and, as we’ve noted, to create something I must exclude things. My story picks from the complexity and multiplicity of ‘Brexit’ and strings together a specific constellation. But what have I left out? What remains hidden? Is it important? After all, my story is only one among many.

Exclusion becomes repression when we lose sight of, or attempt to deny, those things - those stories - that are excluded. Repression, as we’ve seen, can lead to all manner of unfortunate symptoms and pathologies, including the sort of rupture that I described in my Brexit story.

In constructing ourselves, we also leave much in the dark. This realm is known by some as the shadow, and it contains all of those things that we would rather not see. In pushing these aspects into the dark we fool ourselves into thinking that they do not exist, at least not within us. Thus, when we spot them within others we find it all the more easy to judge and condemn. In doing so we are projecting those elements that we deny within ourselves, and making other people accountable for them.

In seeing through ourselves we become more aware of what it is we are leaving out. It is not that we bring everything into the light - after all, we will always be excluding something - rather, we become more aware of our own potential, of the many voices and possibilities that lurk within us; no matter how ugly they may be.

If psychological health is contingent upon this seeing through, then most tabloid newspapers can be described as utterly pathological. Their stories are, more often than not, various scathing indictments of this thing or that person, urging us to find fault anywhere but at our own doorstep. Almost daily a sacrificial scapegoat is offered up, their blood spilled so that the rest of us can go on with our lives as normal.

One of the values of criticism, and all its various analogues, is that it brings other voices to the conversation and prevents things from becoming too singular. It chips away at the walls of our structures, reminding us that other things exist beyond them; and, indeed, that those walls may not be as solid as we think they are.

We’ve described seeing-through our creations as imperative to our well-being; yet, as with all things, when it is taken to an extreme it can become dysfunctional. It is possible to see too much. When we are too aware of possibilities it can become hard to choose one over another. We can become enamoured of novelty, afraid to sacrifice the many and devote to the few.

And so here we are on our tightrope, caught between too-much and too-little. We must create; we must tell stories; and to do so we must be selective and leave things out. And yet we must also be aware of those things, lest they one day catch us with our back turned.

Well, at least that's one way of looking at it.

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Related posts:-
The Colour Wheel
This, Not That
Projecting a Shadow
Full Spectrum
Step Toward Madness
I'm in Control
Monotheism & Polytheism
Infinite Doorways
Still Waters
Walk a Straight Line
Left Out
Making Connections
Digging Deeper

Repressed

Conscious                 -                    Unconscious
Light                   -                    Shadow
Simple                -                  Complex
Mono                -                    Poly
One                   -                    Many
Spotlight                   -                    Floodlight

Left out - repressed - held under - denied - silenced

The multiplicity of psychic voices can be likened to the multiplicity of cultural voices that are denied and silenced by dominant cultural forces.

As in the individual, the neglected, unheard, repressed, and denied assert their viewpoint and feeling through symptom and pathology.

Thus an archetypal psychologist attuned to psyche in the world would listen for the multiplicity of viewpoints that comprise situations and events.

She would be attentive to the dynamics that prevent certain voices from speaking or from being heard, and work to create situations in which the silenced can come to voice and the silencers can learn the value of listening.

[Mary Watkins]
On Returning to the Soul of the World: Archetypal Psychology and Cultural/Ecological Work, p. 8

The archetype of the Wise Old Man [...] denotes an aspect of wholeness, but striving single-mindedly for wisdom at the expense of, for example, irrational human foolishness, is to miss many of the joys in living.

[The] idealized Madonna is a certain perfect image of the feminine, but the real woman must also accept the whore in herself for the sake of her completeness.

It is in seeking perfection by isolating and exaggerating parts of ourselves that we become neurotic.

[Marion Woodman]
Addiction to Perfection, p. 52

Rejecting or refusing serious discussion of one pole in a polarity diminishes [an] organization's flexibility in responding to [...] problems and seriously cripples its ability to realize its greater potential. Such an organization/individual/group "does not see how it creates its own difficulties” by blocking parts of itself from being expressed. It is unaware of how it "interrupts itself.”

Awareness of the issue as a polarity to manage rather than as a problem to be solved opens the door to the possibility of resolution. Resolution begins with looking honestly and with genuine curiosity at the entire polarity.

As Polster and Polster point out, this awareness allows warring parties to “become allies in the common search for a [positive outcome], rather than uneasy opponents maintaining the split.”

This requires clients to be willing to suspend their deep-seated conviction that anyone who holds a point of view different from their own is the enemy, or that one position is absolutely right and the other is absolutely wrong.

The implication of this theory is that, if the client is to be able to truly stand outside the situation [...] the individual, group or organization must risk identifying with the opposing point of view or views. In other words - and here lies the paradox - to be able to change, a person (or organization) has to want to change badly enough that he, she, it is willing to approach problems in a radically different way: by identifying with the opposing perspective.

[...] true polarities are never really resolved; they can only be managed or balanced. That’s because each pole and its apparent opposite actually depend on one another. "The pairs are involved in an ongoing, balancing process over an extended period of time. They are interdependent. They need each other.”

[Herb Stevenson]
'Paradox: A Gestalt Theory of Change'

To take a position implies discrimination and exclusion, and so no position is unassailable because every position is missing something.

Criticism can serve to remind us of what we are missing.

Meteorologist Edward Lorenz (1963) used a microcomputer to simulate weather patterns in 1960.

While inputting initial starting conditions to the computer, he inadvertently rounded one the numbers to three, instead of six decimal places. The small difference .506 (instead of .506127) produced rapidly divergent simulations of weather patterns. Small differences in initial conditions produced widely different results.

Some meteorologists believed that Lorenz's discovery meant that weather control was just around the corner. Small nonnatural changes could be used to manipulate large weather patterns. Lorenz, however, believed that this was the reason for the failure of long term forecasts.

Any uncontrolled system variable could thwart efforts to control the overall state of the system.

[David S. Walonick]
'General Systems Theory'

Rejected parts of the personality are like children clamouring to be let into a room: they will continue to cause a disturbance until they are admitted.

It is as if even the most infantile aspects of the personality, the aspects of which we should most like to rid ourselves, were endowed with a dynamic energy which demanded that they too should seek expression.

Personality ultimately seeks realization as a whole, and, however much the ego may seek to reject that which it finds hard to tolerate, the rejected parts will make their appearance somewhere, whether as symptoms or as projections upon other people.

The final aim is the realization of the total personality.

[Anthony Storr]
The Integrity of the Personality, p.92

Short Cuts

Unlimited Perfectibility

Interiors           -                     Exteriors
Conservative         -                     Liberal
Individual        -                     Environment

The typical liberal, recall, does not believe in interior causation, or even in interiors, for that matter.

The typical liberal epistemology (e.g., John Locke) imagines that the mind is a tabula rasa, a blank slate, that is filled with pictures of the external world.

If something is wrong with the interior (if you are suffering), it is because something is first wrong with the exterior (the social institutions)—because your interior comes from the exterior.

This "blank slate" view of the human mind—with its correlates in a psychology of behaviorism and associationism, and an epistemology of empiricism—was adopted by liberalism for many reasons, not least of which that promised the "unlimited perfectibility" of human beings through various types of objective social engineering.

All innate differences, capacities, and structures were summarily rejected, and human beings, born in a state rather akin to a blob of silly putty, could thus be molded by exterior institutions and forces (behaviorism, associationism) into any desired state.

James Mill and his son John Stuart Mill embraced these ideas for a simple reason: "In psychology," John wrote of his father, "his fundamental doctrine was the formation of all human character by circumstances [objective causation], through the universal principle of association, and the consequent unlimited possibility of improving the moral and intellectual condition of mankind…."

This improvement could occur by behavioristic education, where the proper exteriors are imprinted on the interiors; or, especially in later versions, by more aggressive social engineering (which is why behaviorism—no matter how crude and incorrect in most respects—remained the state psychology of the Soviet Union, and it remains the implicit psychology of many forms of traditional liberalism).

"In one of his earliest speeches, [John Stuart] Mill announced that he shared his father's belief in perfectibility; that same faith is no less strongly expressed in the last of Mill's writings.

Innate differences he always rejected out of hand, never more passionately than in his The Subjection of Women (1869), in which he argued that even 'the least contestable differences' between the sexes are such that they may 'very well have been produced by circumstances [objective causation] without any differences of natural capacity [subjective causation]."

Always there is the blank slate, into which a more perfect world will be poured from the outside, with no thought that there might be realities on the interior that need to be addressed as well.

The "blank slate" meant radical social policy. "Associationism, in Mill's eyes, is not merely a psychological hypothesis, to be candidly examined as such: it is the essential presumption of a radical social policy."

[Ken Wilber]
'Some Thoughts on Integral Politics'

We [...] need to abandon the Marxist critique of race, and accept that human beings are fallible creatures who discriminate and pre-judge and sometimes fall below the standards required of the anti-racist lobby;

and that it is impossible to create a society based on the assumption that people are perfectible.

[Ed West]
The Diversity Illusion, p. 239

If we can make men happier, it does not matter if we make them poorer, it does not matter if we make them less productive, it does not matter if we make them less progressive, in the sense of merely changing their life without increasing their liking for it.

[G. K. Chesterton]

The Outline of Sanity, p. 125

Frozen in time

Life           -              Death
Solid             -                      Liquid
Permanence       -                     Change

Heathcliff, make the world stop right here. Make everything stop and stand still and never move again. Make the moors never change and you and I never change.

[Emily Brontë]
Wuthering Heights

Romantic love hopes to ‘freeze’ a beautiful moment.

It’s a summer’s evening, after dinner, Werther is walking in the woods with his beloved. He wants it to be always like this: so he feel they should get married, have a house together, have children. Though, in reality, marriage will be nothing at all like the lovely June night.

There’ll be exhaustion, bills to pay, squabbles and a sense of confinement. By comparison with the extreme hopes of Romanticism, real love is always necessarily a terrible disappointment.

'Johann Wolfgang von Goethe'

The fact that change is never going to stop renders the very notion of a blueprint for the good society nonsensical, for even if society became like the blueprint it would instantly begin to depart from it.

So not only are ideal societies unattainable because they are ideal, they are unattainable because, to correspond to any sort of blueprint at all, they would have to be static, fixed, unchanging; and no foreseeable society is going to be those things.

[Bryan Magee]
Popper, p. 106

[…] if the lessons of complex dynamical systems apply to human beings, attempting to design fail-safe social systems (whether legal, educational, penal, or other type) that never go wrong is a hopeless task, for several reasons.

First, since we carry our history on our backs we can never begin from scratch, either personally or as societies. Second, perfection allows no room for improvement. Plato was one of the few thinkers who understood that if a freshly minted utopia were ever to be successfully established, the only direction in which it could change would be downhill.

Stasis and isolation are therefore essential to maintaining the alleged perfection, not only of Plato's Republic, but of most other utopias as well.

The noumenal self that Kant postulates as the seat of moral choice and free will is likewise not part of this world. The possibility of perfection requires isolation and has nowhere to go but downward.

[Alicia Juarrero]

Dynamics in Action, p. 257

We can see it, for example, in thousands of novels, in which are left with a man and a woman, just married, and really beginning of their life together. Yet the situation is often treated marriage itself had solved everything satisfactorily: as if they were at the end of their task.

Another point important to realize is that love by does not settle everything. There are all kinds of love, and it is better to rely upon work, interest, and cooperation to solve the problems of marriage.

[Alfred Adler]
What Life Could Mean to You, Chap. XII ‘Love and Marriage’

[…] ideas of Romantic love and marriage were much more acceptable to women than to men […] and were embraced by the middle class, but not, to any great extent, by other classes.

The theory, like so much of the middle-class outlook, originated among the medieval heresies, such as Manichaeism (as the Swiss writer Denis de Rougemont has shown), and was thus from the same tradition that saw the rise of the bourgeois outlook in the Middle Ages and its reinforcement by the closely associated Puritan movement of modern times.

The Romantic theory of love was spread through the middle class by incidental factors, such as that the bourgeoisie were the only social class that read much, and Romantic love was basically a literary convention in its propagation whatever it may have been in its origins. It made no real impression on the other social classes in European society, such as the peasants, the nobility, or the urban working craftsmen.

Strangely enough, Romantic love, accepted as a theory and ideal by the bourgeoisie, had little influence on middle-class marriages in practice, since these were usually based on middle-class values of economic security and material status rather than on love. More accurately, middle-class marriages were based on these material considerations in fact, while everyone concerned pretended that they were based on Romantic love. Any subsequent recognition of this clash between fact and theory often gave a severe jolt and has sometimes been a subject for literary examination, as in the first volume of John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga.

Opposed to this Romantic theory of love and marriage, and almost equally opposed to the bourgeois practice of “sensible” marriage, was what we may call the Western idea of love and marriage. This assumes that personalities are dynamic and flexible things formed largely by experiences in the past. Love and marriage between such personalities are, like everything in the Western outlook, diverse, imperfect, adjustable, creative, cooperative, and changeable. The Western idea assumes that a couple come together for many reasons (sex, loneliness, common interests, similar background, economic and social cooperation, reciprocal admiration of character traits, and other reasons).

It further assumes that their whole relationship will be a slow process of getting to know each other and of mutual adjustment—a process that may never end. The need for constant adjustment shows the Western recognition that nothing, even love, is final or perfect.

This is also shown by recognition that love and marriage are never total and all-absorbing, that each partner remains an independent personality with the right to an independent life. (This is found throughout the Western tradition and goes back to the Christian belief that each person is a separate soul with its own, ultimately separate, fate.)

Thus there appeared in Western society at least three kinds of marriage, which we may call Romantic, bourgeois, and Western. The last, without being much discussed (except in modern books on love and marriage), is probably the most numerous of the three, and the other two, if they prove successful, do so by gradually developing into this third kind.

Romantic marriage, based on the “shock of recognition,” has in fact come to be based very largely on sexual attraction, since this is the chief form that love at first sight can take. Such marriages often fail, since even sex requires practice and mutual adjustment and is too momentary a human relationship to sustain a permanent union unless many other common interests accumulate around it.

Even when this occurs and the marriage becomes a success, in the sense that it persists, it is never total, and the Romantic delusion that marriage should be totally absorbing of the time, attention, and energies of its partners, still expected by many women brought up on the Romantic idea, merely means that the marriage becomes an enslaving relationship to the husbands and a source of disappointment and frustration to the wives.

[Carroll Quigley]
Tragedy and Hope, ‘The Future in Perspective,’ p.796

Maturity
Taking the Rough with the Smooth

State / Process

The Romantic Attitude

Construction

Repressed

Unlimited Perfectibility

Frozen in time

Search Forever Becoming

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