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Mythic Thinking & the Double Bind
I’ve been doing a good deal of thinking about double binds. As I was falling asleep last night, I got caught in some kind of subconscious one as my mind kept trying to work them out and I just wanted to go to sleep. We compromised by falling asleep and waking up again and again with vague and impossible to remember realizations on the subject. So I’ll do my best to reconstruct them, or at least trigger another round of them before I go asleep again tonight…
In their most simplest form, double binds seem to be basically the mental equivalent of the Chinese finger trap. You put your fingers in there and then start pulling, and all of a sudden, the trap gets tighter and tighter, and there seems to be no way out. The slightly more technical definition has to do with communication between two or more people. One website defines it as: “one person demands a response to a message containing mutually contradictory signals, while the other person is unable either to comment on the incongruity or to escape from the situation.”
Of course, the theory surrounding it and the social implications get a lot more complicated the more you think about it. The concept itself, in fact, seems to be sort of a double bind - once you start to understand what it is, you can start to see them everywhere. Or at least I do. And it may just be projection on my part, since this idea has caught my fancy. Or it may point towards something intrinsic in the human thought process.
I keep coming back to this quote by anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, who probed deeply the structure of myths:
How does myth think? Myth thinks by providing “a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction.” Since this is an impossible achievement, myth “grows spiral-wise until the intellectual impulse which has produced it is exhausted.
Sounds a lot like the double bind, doesn’t it? Both at their core are trying to resolve a conflict, contradiction or paradox. One of the fundamental elements of the double bind is that the person caught in it is not able to simply just “walk away” from whatever the paradox is. The problem won’t just go away, but neither can it be solved. So what seems to happen is you start building rationalizations to explain or reconcile the paradox, and instead you get caught in an endless recursive loop.
A really great example of how this works within a mythological perspective comes up in the topic of theodicy - or the question of how does a God of goodness allow evil to exist in a world. There are as many answers to this question as there are religions in the world (or close to it anyway). Some of the more popular examples are: (1) God allows bad things to happen to punish people who are bad; (2) God is not actually in charge of this world at all, so it’s not his fault (either Satan is in charge, an insane Demiurge, or it runs according to Natural Laws) ; (3) God has both negative and positive aspects; (4) God is just plain evil, doesn’t exist or doesn’t care.
Each of the above explanations seems to address the observations which anyone can make in life that both good and bad things happen. Making sense of this huge dichotomy or conflict causes us to launch into all kinds of explanations, mythic story-systems and rationalizations to “make sense” of it all. It’s like somebody said to us “1=2″ and we weren’t allowed to tell them they were wrong, we had to come up with arcane reasons why they might be right. When it comes to this kind of thinking, nobody in my opinion exemplifies this better than Philip K. Dick. It seems that the entire body of his writing works on this fundamental myth-building double bind formula - especially his work after he had his mystical experiences, and tried one theory after another to explain them:
God said “Over a period of six and a half years you have developed theory after theory to explain 2-3-74. Each night when you go to bed you think, “At last I found it. I tried out theory after theory until now, finally, I have the right one.’ And then the next morning you wake up and said, “There is one fact not explained by that theory. I will have to think up another theory.’ And so you do. By now it is evident to you that you are going to think up an infinite number of theories, limited only by your lifespan, not limited by your creative imagination. Each theory gives rise to a subsequent theory, inevitably.” […] And your theories are infinite, so I am there. Without realizing it, the very infinitude of your theories pointed to the solution; they pointed to me and none but me.
In his case, he seems to have so relentlessly worked on his double binds that he snapped the Chinese finger trap - least for a while, until he would fall back into a new one. The thing that he ultimately seemed to realize was that this problem was somehow at the bedrock of human thinking. He would push down towards it again and again, almost escape it and then get flung back into theorizing and myth-building to explain what happened to him. It seems as though he realized that this dynamic energy unleashed by paradoxes and contradictions was perhaps the well-spring from which human creative thought and energy flowed. Or at least, that’s what I see in his work, looking at in the context of these twin notions of the double bind and mythic thinking.
Is there anything in life or human culture which doesn’t have some kind double binds reaching out towards us? Maybe the base one is the observation that inert matter can have some kind of vivifying soul or essence animating it at one point, and departing at the next. Maybe the double bind at our core is that force that binds cell to cell and atom to atom, rather than having them fly apart from one another.
More on this tomorrow when I have a clearer head and more time to untangle these threads.
March 22nd, 2006 at 3:50 am
Well, it sounds like what you’re (kind of) getting at is that life itself is kind of a double bind. You’re dropped here into life and there’s really no solid explanation of why you’re here or what you’re supposed to do. But still, here you are and you’ve got to do something. At any given moment, you can never feel completely assured that you’re doing the thing you’re supposed to do. Or if there’s anything that you’re supposed to do at all. The only certainty is doubt.
All of religion, mythology, philosophy etc has been an ongoing project to find that final solution to the double bind of life. And all of entertainment and the like has been an ongoing attempt to distract us from the double bind, or relieve us from the fatigue of it.
Myth kind of does both jobs, though. Now that I think about it. Myth gives us the momentary satisfaction of a somewhat reasonable explanation, while also engaging our minds for a little while so that we can take a break from the panic of existential uncertainty.
March 22nd, 2006 at 9:10 am
This idea of double binds is admittedly quite new to me and rather fascinating to think about. In reading your series of posts (and this one especially), I’m reminded of an NPR interview with anthropologist Wade Davis (about vodoun) in which he discusses finite explinations and the meaning they can confer upon a people.
I’m only a novice when it comes to PKD, but I want to say that him (and most of us) seem to have grown up outside such a tradition and probably feel compelled to search, search, search for the one answer/theory to explain everything. Maybe getting caught up in the idea that there exists a single absolute solution is what tightens the finger trap?
March 22nd, 2006 at 12:14 pm
Wow, these are great comments. This has been a very fruitful line of thought for me so far.
I hate to sound like a broken record, but this calls back to mind that awesome David Lynch quote:
http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2005/11/19/david-lynch-quotes/
March 22nd, 2006 at 1:51 pm
I have to say I fall into a very dualist double-binded category myself, in my own identity and the way I think about things. I try to put things into a one-answer scientific decision for the sake of argument, but then go on to muse what it also COULD be, playing the devil’s advocate and feeding my own apparent need to add some extra sense to a situation. For me it’s an underlying sense of correlating all possible variables to a specific moment, regardless of if they’re “scientific” or not, let alone even valid.
March 22nd, 2006 at 7:07 pm
“More on this tomorrow when I have a clearer head and more time to untangle these threads.”
Not to be a dick, but it sounds like thinking about double-binds is putting you in a double, triple, perhaps quadruple bind.
I am guilty of this often. I think of something a friend told me once in re: his college years. “The best way to get an intellectual riled up is to to flatly contradict what they know to be true, without cause or proof.”
A double-bind is the equivalent of being blatantly contradicted, and the intellectual mind goes crazy trying to wrap its head around it. Simpletons tend to ignore these double-binds: in a sense, that’s the message of Forrest Gump, a movie that I have mixed feelings about.
Politically, the Democrats are being bound multiple times over by the current Administration. Day after day, I read leftie blogs and sites that are flabbergasted about Bush’s lies and chicanery, because it defies their personal logic. “How can he get away with this?” they ask themselves. “They impeached Clinton over less– why isn’t Bush in jail?”
The Bushies seem to me to be master double-binders. That’s because they’re evil mindfuckers (IMO) and get off on playing shell games with the media and the public.
March 22nd, 2006 at 7:13 pm
Well, yeah thats my goal, is to put myself in it really hard, so I can experience it as fully as possible. But to do so in sort of a “safe” environment, built for exploration, keeping my wits about me. The double bind of double binds, rather than one that somebody else built which I get emotionally invested of and lose track of what’s going on.
You’re right and that’s a totally awesome quote.
March 23rd, 2006 at 2:06 pm
[…] icated, and I’d like to expand on those ideas a little, by way of our old friend the double bind. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, it […]
March 25th, 2006 at 9:48 pm
Tim: The double bind of double binds, rather than one that somebody else built which I get emotionally invested of and lose track of what’s going on.
I’m inclined to think of double binds as being life and death situations, comparable to the movie Sophie’s Choice when she has to choose which one of her children she’s going to pass over to the Nazis in order to (hopefully) save her other children. In these moments you know that you are absolutely fucked — there is no way to win. It’s been years since I saw the movie but if I recall correctly her mind snapped and she was never the same again.
Essentially, this is what a koan also does — you turn it over so many times in your head until eventually the mind snaps because there is no way out. Therein lies the paradox because the “out” is actually found in the act of losing the mind. But it’s a risky bit of business to play with.
As for the discussion related to schizophrenia, I would still define it as ego collapse although perhaps that’s only true with some forms of schizophrenia/psychosis.
March 27th, 2006 at 5:27 am
[…] In fact, it is perfect! It is indeed another of our “double-binds” which have consumed Tim so lately. This sentence, as it pretends to c […]
July 26th, 2006 at 3:21 pm
[…] Maybe though, on some other deeper level, that really was the desired effect: teach people overtly to honor and respect police, while simultaneously training them to unconsciously identify with the criminals. It is a delicate and powerful double-bind to program into a group of people. […]