What is the pattern that connects the crab to the lobster and the primrose to the orchid, and all of them to me, and me to you?

Gregory Bateson

“All my life, it’s been weird,” George Ewald says before taking us back in time.

He is twelve again, sitting in the backseat of his dad’s car, driving over the George Washington Bridge. 

“What are those ships?” he points at the big, slow machines roving the Hudson River. 

“Those are barges taking the garbage to be dumped into the ocean.”

“Don’t they know that the ocean is a big bathtub?” he thinks. 

Later, George is at his uncle’s house. The garage door is closed when the car starts up. Fumes billowing out everywhere. His uncle fumbles to open up the garage door. As soon as it opens, and the smoke escapes into the open sky, his uncle breathes a sigh of relief. George is horrified. 

“Don’t they realize the earth is one big garage?” 

His observations lead to a final conclusion: Shit. The adults don’t know what they’re doing, and we are all in deep, deep trouble. What can we do? George Ewald decided to spend the rest of his life trying to answer this question. 

The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think.

Gregory Bateson

George graduated with a degree in history, attempting to understand the human condition. Instead, he was confronted with the human record of wars. In 1966, George spent a summer on the Tel Gezer archeological site at the foothill of the Judaean Mountains. Occupied by humans for over five thousand years, the walls of the excavation pits contained layers of ash, a testimony to when the city was burned to the ground. The violent history was folded into the land.

While he was there, the Arab-Israeli conflict was smoldering, to become the Six Day War the following year. What compels humans to destroy each other? What compels them to destroy what they’ve built? Why is this part of the human condition? Holding these questions close, George returned to the United States. 

Facing the Vietnam War, and being opposed to it, George still felt he “had to serve” his country in some way. He wanted to learn more about the military mind, and the concept of nuclear deterrence, the idea that the United States could have such a powerful capacity to destroy, that no one would dare strike first. If this concept was truly effective in creating peace, he thought, then he would support it. 

As a nuclear combat crew commander, he realized quickly that deterrence made no sense. The people on deck with him, he felt, were the ones keeping the whole world together. At the press of a button, the whole world could be destroyed. For what? For whom? How will this end? 

From the time he questioned his father on the trash barges in the Hudson, George persisted in his concern for the environment. When he entered the military, he was worried about the environmental dangers of nuclear power. After four years, he left his position with an ever deepening concern for humanity. The environment would go on, in its own way. We are the ones who will suffer. “This is totally crazy,” he thought, “why do we keep screwing things up?”

George went on to experience these same paradoxical conundrums as a pediatric charge nurse, psychiatric nurse, computer technologist, berry-picker, a construction worker, salesperson, and family man. He had more than sixty addresses to his name, and many moments without an address at all. He believes that his soul is that of a tree, which is why human behavior is so confounding to him, and why, perhaps, he has to spend his whole life trying to unravel the absurdity of  our human ways.

By the time I met him, he had resolved to immerse himself in the call of his inner tree-being: rooting in one place. He tentatively started living with Ruth and Derek Owen on their homestead farm in New Hampshire, becoming a farmer of sorts. It would be more accurate to say that he was a botanist, studying the intricate processes of plants, experimenting and observing their behaviors meticulously. Five summers ago, when he was seventy and I was twenty-two, we bent over the raspberries, pruning. He told me, under a four o’clock August sun, that all systems, ecological and social, operate on the interdependencies of all things. Humans can’t see those interdependencies. Without this understanding, we destroy everything we try to save.

We live in a world that is only made of relationships.

Gregory Bateson

There is a traditional Zen Buddist story in which a Zen master presents his pupils with a “koan”— an unsolvable problem or riddle intended to demonstrate the inadequacy of logical thinking. The master holds out a stick and says: if you say this stick is real, I will beat you. If you say this stick is not real, I will beat you. If you say nothing, I will beat you. It’s hopeless. There’s no way out. 

Welcome to the double-bind. Coined by anthropologist Gregory Bateson in the 1950’s, a double-bind is a dilemma in communication that comes from two or more conflicting messages. The problem isn’t only that we are presented with paradoxes. It is that we can’t actually define the nature of the paradox in which we are caught. It’s impossible to fulfill any demand because the broader context—be it an authority figure or an unspoken rule (the master)—does not allow it. No matter what you do, you get beaten with a stick. What’s more is that double-binds are often accompanied by a deep sense of distrust in oneself and in one’s surroundings. 

Originally, Bateson articulated the double-bind in relation to defining schizophrenia not as an inherent mental illness but as a learned confusion in thinking and communication. Eighteen years before post-traumatic stress disorder was defined, he began studying the “schizophrenic” behaviors of WWII veterans who were hospitalized. He observed how the “nonsense” of patients’s behaviors made sense in the context of their war experiences. In addition to being traumatized in the field, the veterans were expected to live within the American delusion of the heroism of war while carrying a profound pain from their experience. What is the impact of not being able to comment or point out perceived discrepancies? Is it even possible to learn to trust part of your experience while denying another part of it? The internalized confusion itself, observed by Bateson and his team, became a pillar of the double-bind theory and modern therapy. 

The double-bind then expanded to family therapy, being used to address the dynamics between couples, parental figures, and children as webs of miscommunication, and often manipulation. It spilled over into developmental psychology, interpersonal abuse recovery, substance abuse recovery. 

Eventually, Bateson and his collaborators extended the concept of double-binds to the environment and the economy. We are confronted with our own existential threat: a bathtub full of trash and a garage full of smoke. We can also call this “climate change.” On one hand, we want to preserve the environment and maintain clean air and forests and save endangered species. On the other, everything we do to grow our economy and preserve our “standard of living” disrupts the natural environment and our relationship with it. It is an inevitable double-bind that haunts us and leaves us paralyzed. But the pressure is on. As comedian George Carlin puts it, “the planet isn’t going anywhere—we are!” 

Bateson concluded that we need to get out of the double bind of linear thinking in order to conceive of the interconnectedness in things. Without that, we’re stuck. Our limited knowledge, our media, our systems leave us in double binds because we can’t actually define the situation we’re in. We have information coming at us from a million different sources saying different sources dictating what we must do to “protect” the environment, and then we also hear that it’s not a real phenomenon. We hear the planet will be uninhabitable in X years and then we hear that that statement isn’t true.

We create systems, like those that support nuclear deterrence, that become dangerous to themselves. We are unable to hold all of this information and make sense of it. It’s as if the rules of the game are impossible to understand, and yet we have to keep playing. But if we keep playing, it will lead to war and our own destruction. We end up becoming what George saw at Tel Gezer: layers of ash.

Our ability to conceive of alternatives is diminished by the acceptance and reinforcement of the “rules” and limits of the game which has no clear process. It is a paradox in which we aren’t only given opposing options, we are also confused about the terms. That is the double-bind.

They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.

R.D. Laing

According to Bateson, the first step in tackling a double-bind is to recognize it as such. Similarly, the purpose of a koan in Zen Buddhism is to unravel the greater truths that exist beyond the double-binds which are figments of our logical reasoning. These “positive” double-binds, little riddles to chew on, force the pupils to move beyond perceived impossibilities and into enlightenment.  

In the Zen story, one pupil walks up to the teacher, grabs the stick and breaks it, destroying the illusion of the double bind.

George was in his mid-thirties and ready for a new experience again. He shuffled off to North Carolina where he decided to live out in a primitive cabin without heat, stove, or bathroom. He didn’t have a lot of money and thought it would be fun (which it was, until it got cold). He found his way to a big maple tree, sitting by it,  asking himself the age-old question, “what do we do?” when he heard an answer: 

Fewer people, more forests.

The big maple tree

“I know it sounds crazy, but this is my experience,” George shared, as he bit into a Cortland apple. The answer the tree whispered to him was quite simple. All the younger trees around the big tree laughed saying “they can never do it, they can never do it!” 

From that moment on, George wanted to see if those saplings were right. He changed his question from “what can we do?” to “can we do it?”

Fifty years, a deep dive into so-called sustainable agriculture, and many technologies later, George finds that there are no answers anymore. We are all facing this gloom, whether we like it or not. He notes the reality of our values:

“We value our own family before we value the community. We value our own community before we value other communities. We value our own nation before we value other nations and our own color before other colors. It’s not about the wider community in any way. In no way is it about the community. It’s about each individual and then the ring of associations beyond the individual.”

If we challenged those values, and placed the “community” or the “environment” above the individual, what would that look like? The moment we think we have clarity on the new, more evolved, direction, we will hit a wall with a new set of double-binds. 

“Fewer people”—as the trees suggested to George—means decreasing the population. We either have to collectively agree to stop reproducing, or, more likely, it would have to be enforced. A mission like this could push humanity to the murderous ideology of ecofascism, which would require individuals to sacrifice their own interests for the sake of “nature”. Ecofascism leans on eugenics, nationalism, and violence to impose environmental protections.

The idea of ecofascism itself was synthesized by Nazism, convincing the nation to protect its mystical connection to the land. Reducing the population does not guarantee conservation in any meaningful way. The concept has been used, like many other dogmas and religions, as a way to justify ideological goals with a seemingly “simple” solution. Does the questionable outcome (conserving the environment) justify the means (brutal eugenic population control)?

The added challenge of having “more forests” means coming to a collective agreement to allow huge expanses of land to develop their life over two hundred years with no human contact. 

Perhaps humans can try to find other ways to mitigate ecological disasters without population control or tanking the economy: new technologies and new policies. But these also come to a head with their own double-binds, their slow progressions, their resources, and their environmental and socioeconomic risks. 

“Almost everything that makes us who we are is also part of the problem. We would have to change so much, and we would each have to sacrifice so much for the community’s sake. We’d have to sacrifice everything that we think and hold dear, which is to say the part about valuing family before someone who is not family. Even valuing the individual life that we think is so precious to save. It gets you totally crazy if you think about it. We are so used to valuing each individual.”

As George recounted his life as a series of double-binds to us in Derek Owen’s greenhouse in October, he gave me the gift of articulating my own confusion. Every day, we are confronted with realities that feel big: the pandemic, the climate crisis, the government, the caste system, violence, food. We are confronted with realities that are interpersonal: deciding to hug someone, wanting to feel a sense of belonging, seeking comfort, difficult conversations with family members, a creepy interaction at the grocery store. 

Each of these realities is woven into another with such intricacy, that the moment we try to take one away from the whole, the whole quilt shrivels. And yet, we can’t look at the full mass because it’s too interconnected and complex. When there are a million conflicting messages milling about, it’s unclear what actions to take, what should be prioritized, what is “right”. 

So, who is the master and what is the stick? 

We, as a human society, are our own masters and we make our own sticks. 

We, as a collective, need to approach this moment as an opportunity to think creatively, not about our material technology, but about our communication with each other. 

The pathology of our times lies in the systems which we are all privy to, in which we recognize “wrong”, blame others, expect them to change, and think that that is enough. It’s also not enough for our own individual selves to change—this is a fallacy that has been weaved into our thinking. It has allowed us to be content with small changes that in reality perpetuate the greater confusion (recycling, for example). 

The way we build communities, define them, communicate within them and beyond them, identify ourselves with them has all led to this moment. As Gregory Bateson has said, the way nature works is paradoxical to the way people think. We can’t get out of these double-binds with the same level of consciousness that made them. To break the stick, we have to break everything we think we know. We have to be willing to learn from each other, horizontally, in new ways. 

The reality is that there are no simple solutions. If anyone claims a simple solution, it is most likely a gigantic oversight or a manipulation. At this juncture where we are most desperate for answers, it is important to recognize how intertwined our situation is, and to be observant and critical of what appears to be “simple.”  

As the doom and gloom washed over our faces, George told us that he has “begun to have compassion for those things that are creating the catastrophe.” Maybe doom and gloom is where we have to be in order to really be pushed to revolutionize communication, to reprogram our thinking, to learn the interconnectedness that we can’t interpret in this moment.

“All we have control of is what we have control of, which is our spirit. I mean, we can be gloomy about what’s going to happen. But in the present time, why would we not want to share love?”

A mammoth thank you to George Ewald for your conversation, all the follow up emails, the beautiful photos, and openness to sharing your life experiences. Thank you to Jason Kimball for taking part in the interview and freezing your tush off while also being hungry when we went longer than expected. An excerpt of George’s interview will be present on Jason and my upcoming album “Old Growth”, which is set to come out in early 2021. Many of you have asked why I’ve stopped writing for a time during the pandemic. The truth is in the double-bind: I honestly couldn’t get anything out. I was so confused and sort of in limbic mode. I’m still there, but speaking with George got me thinking about why I felt so confused. I strongly recommend reading up on Gregory Bateson, as his thinking has helped me through the last month immensely. I would love to hear any/all feedback in the truest sense of the word: a two-sided, continuing conversation in which we both grow!