See below my desperate attempts to analyse the riddle:
At 7:42 PM -0500 5/2/07, Jerry Monaco wrote:
>Wikipedia has a nice paraphrase of Bateson's idea of a situation of a
>Double Bind....
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_bind
>
>
>"1. The situation involves two or more persons, one of whom is
>designated, for the purposes of definition, as the "victim". The
>others are people who are in some way in a higher position to the
>victim, for example a figure of authority such as a parent whom the
>victim respects.
>
>"2. Repeated experience. The double bind is a recurrent theme in the
>experience of the victim and as such cannot be constituted as a single
>traumatic experience.
>
>"3. A _primary injunction_ is imposed upon the victim by the other
>person in one of two forms: (a) Do "X", or I will punish you. (b) Do
>not do "X", or I will punish you.
>
>"4. The punishment is assumed to be either the withdrawing of love,
>the expression of hate and anger, or abandonment resulting from the
>authority figure's expression of extreme helplessness.
>
>"5. A _secondary injunction_ is imposed upon the victim that conflicts
>with the first at a higher and more abstract level. For example, "Do
>what I told you but only do it because you want to." However, it is
>not necessary that this injunction be expressed verbally.
>
>"6. If necessary, a tertiary injunction is imposed upon the victim to
>prevent them from escaping the dilemma.
What dilemma? I don't get it.
>"7. Finally, Bateson states that the complete list of the previous
>requirements may be unnecessary in the event that the victim is
>already viewing their world in double bind patterns. Bateson goes on
>to give the general characteristics of such a relationship:
>
>
>"a. When the individual is involved in an intense relationship; that
>is, a relationship in which he feels it is vitally important that he
>discriminate accurately what sort of message is being communicated so
>that he may respond appropriately.
>
>"b. And, the individual is caught in a situation in which the other
>person in the relationship is expressing two orders of message and one
>of these denies the other.
>
>"c. And, the individual is unable to comment on the messages being
>expressed to correct his discrimination of what order of message to
>respond to, i.e., he cannot make a metacommunicative statement. "
The puzzle is why an injunction to only obey an instruction if you want to, makes for a dilemma (and how this could conceivably make you a victim). It seems to me this obviates any possible dilemma, rather than making it more likely. I'm missing something here. But that aside, if the "victim" doesn't understand instructions and is unable to clarify instructions, how is there any dilemma? If you don't know what you are supposed to do then you can't do it, no dilemma. Problem maybe, but no "dilemma" in the sense that you don't have any options.
>This is all set out very clearly, and amusingly in Bateson's
>collection of essays, "Steps Towards an Ecology of Mind." Also, the
>inspiration of Russell's Paradox and its non-solution by way of
>logical typing is discussed. (Ravi, you might like to know that
>Bateson wrote the papers illustrating "Double Binds" while house
>philosopher-anthropologist at Bell Labs, working there at the same
>time as Claude Shannon. )
Nice work if you can get it. Better than an honest job anyhow.
>Change some of the terms, and delete the psycho-babble, substitute
>state relations and modes of domination for the interpersonal terms,
>and it seems, to me that Russell's Paradox as instantiated in a Double
>Bind is exactly the position most "Southern" countries are in when
>they confront the rules of GATT, and other injunctions of "free" trade
>capitalism and neo-liberalism.
Indeed, the position of the people of "Northern" countries is a seeming dilemma in that upsetting the market with liberal reforms would only makes things worse for them too. However, the dilemma is only apparent if you refuse to look outside the market capitalist box. That is, consider economic strategies (socialism) that don't involve markets. It isn't a true dilemma, just a wilful blindness. So it isn't a true "dilemma" and isn't even an exclusively "Southern" non- dilemma.
But I fail to see what this Bateson's riddle has to do with that, or with dilemmas. Help me out.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas