Legibility and creating reality
There is a novel by Ursula Le Guin in which the protagonist has horrible dreams only to see them come true the next day. He comes to the conclusion that he is creating the horrible reality by dreaming it and convinces himself that he must stay awake at all costs to avoid more terrible things happening. I have a parallel sense.
I write these blogs and I discuss with colleagues how bad things are getting, and they simply get worse. My most damning intuitions turn out to be right and reality exceeds even them. In discussing this with Philip he points out that the correlation in those observations is not causation. It can simply be that by explicating, by making things legible, it becomes clearer where things are heading. And by making things clearer, it can accelerate the trashing process itself.
Even that is one step too grand. It’s not the explication, it’s the nature of the situation. Once the situation becomes sufficiently legible, it’s approaching the point where more and more people will, subtly and subconsciously, change their behaviour in response. It’s this that can accelerate the process.
Legibility is often a problem. James Scott rehearses how the legibility needed for taxation of land can destroy the social organisation of agricultural production and result in destitution where there was none. In Against the Grain, Scott argues that the inherent measurability and legibility of grain as a commodity has been part of a process of making people subservient to a ruling class. I find it interesting to say the least that grain is at the same time a political disaster, a nutritional disaster, and an ecological disaster. None of which stops it being the dominant agricultural product.
Legibility gives us some access to what the future may be. The colonisation of that legibility can easily lead to a sort of self-fulfilling property. This is akin to the management dictum that you get what you measure. As social systems, we get what we learn to read into them.
Identity
I have moved from the south-east, just outside the M25, to a remote part of North Wales. My wife and I now live with one of my daughters and her young family. We have a flock of hens and look forward to more animals and birds as we get organised. We pay more attention to the weather than to the non-existent traffic. On Sunday we will meet all of our 80 new neighbours at a harvest gathering Sunday lunch. There is an infinite amount of hard physical labour to do, and an infinite set of things to observe about the natural environment and the local culture.
For this blog, the significance of this is that I can watch my identity change and my values change. We expect continuity in these things apart from so called life events: the serious illness, the death of close relatives, natural disasters. Without any of the imposed trauma, I now need to be a different person and indeed have changed nearly all the patterns that define my character. I have to cope practically with the invasion of a neighbour’s young bullocks, three times already, and with the prospect of being cut off by snow and ice. And we are now remote from the Westminster bubble and the London myopia and self-importance.
It is worth pausing to look at what life looks like for one of our neighbours. He has I think, three school caretaker and groundsman sort of roles and his ambition is to have more and sub-contract some of the work. He owns some sheep for part of their life, although they are looked after by someone else. That makes him a farmer able to claim certain grants. He finds ways to get further grants for fencing and hedging. His wife works as a teaching assistant and his young teenage daughter works weekends doing holiday-rental changeovers. All this with massive good humour and energy and he will help in any way he can. Legibility is precisely what this way of living does NOT have.[1]
One further cameo. As you can imagine I needed fencing stakes and wire fencing and barbed wire. I went with my son-in-law, who is seriously muscled and strong, to load them in the truck. Firstly, there is the agricultural supplies, the country store, and the garden centre — all owned by the same company but with a price differential between them of maybe a factor of four each time. I haven’t seen parallel economies like that since I was in Brazil. Anyway, we had a find a member of staff, who turned out to be a slip of a girl. She told us to drive into the yard and she would load up. She knew exactly what we needed and zoomed around in a forklift assembling it. She was stronger than either of us throwing things in the truck.
The identities of these people and therefore of myself are not at all what you might think, and categories that I am used to are not helpful. It is from there that I need to reassess the task we have set ourselves to regenerate the land we now own. And my first observation is that most of what I took note of when we were thinking of buying seems to be wrong or changed out of all recognition.
False consciousness
Our identity is not what we think it is. That statement is a bit like thinking genetic editing can give us better babies. Heaven protect us.
My colleague Patrick Hoverstadt taught a course on VSM at Manchester Business School. One of the MBA students he taught approached him for help in his first job. The company he worked for was pursuing a £1.5bn acquisition. His boss was responsible for the deal and had never done an acquisition before. Most consultants and maybe investors know that very few M&A deals result in net value, leading to the VSM question about what their POSIWID actually is. This is a story in my mind about a lack of understanding about identity: about what it takes to get two or more business entities to work productively together. Of course, it gives the lie to any management idea about command and control.
Throughout the inflation of the seventies, the constant devaluation of assets meant swathes of bad and criminal practice went undetected because it was hidden in the flow of funds. I knew a company that produced mobile network design tools. It was leveraged by becoming a partner in many mobile provider companies around the world. The flow of profits from that strategic move meant that their supposedly core function became dysfunctional and unable to deliver. They came to have meetings to decide what the meetings would do that would lead to the meetings that would decide what to do next.
This is Dreyfus again, understanding that the pinnacle of human achievement is being able to act in the moment when the context is uncertain and potentially novel. Method and book knowledge are potentially worse than useless. We need to keep our bearings. If the context is new, then we had better be on our toes with wide awareness of the implications of the actions open to us. It is simply never true that someone who seems to be successful necessarily knows what they are doing.[2]
The self isn’t a thing; it’s a process — one that enacts an “I” and in which the “I” is no different from the process itself, rather like the way dancing is a process that enacts a dance and in which the dance is no different from the dancing. From this “enactive” perspective, although meaning and the self have no absolute foundation, neither are they complete illusions or nonexistent; they’re brought forth in how we act and live our lives. — Evan Thompson
From the perspective of a changing identity, I can see legibility and meaning change. Without the triangulation of moving from one identity to another, I suffer from the illusion that what I read in a situation is what IS, what is real and unavoidable. Which is exactly what people who want to colonise legibility want me to think.[3]
So, when people (especially business people) talk about innovation and creativity, I just sigh. It is like asking “why don’t you change?” Until you change who you are you don’t know how the world can shift. You don’t know what can be different because you don’t know what it is like to be different yourself. The self, as Evan Thompson says, is brought forth in how we act and live. If we act differently, we will quickly read different things into the world and our actions will change further. If we ask ourselves how we can see the world anew we are likely to be disappointed and stymied.[4]
Who we are and how we read the world are two sides of the same coin. When we see politicians spouting their nonsense our reaction should really be one of pity, pity that these people are so entrenched and stuck. Ursula LeGuin’s novel charts the exact opposite: the person who cannot stabilise their identity and therefore whose world will not stay still.
Mental health
There is a mental health crisis. There is no doubt there is a mental health crisis and, at one end of it, people commit suicide because they don’t want to live — more and more people of all ages and backgrounds decide they don’t want to live. In the middle ground are vast swathes of people who don’t fit with their lives. I don’t want to use any of the psychiatric labels because I think they don’t help us understand what is going on.
Many of these people are prescribed supposed psychiatric medications, the science behind which is terribly dubious. And a highly contested proportion of those people are further damaged by the drugs and experience terrible problems when they try to come off them.[5] The establishment still uses the language of “chemical imbalance” to medicalise the problems despite it being shown that there is no such thing. Experts typically refuse to accept any responsibility for being part of the problem, in society and in their profession. I am stuck as a person, with no expertise and no direct experience, with a belief both that the drugs are useless and that they are dangerous.
Probably more significant as an indicator of a gap between personal identity and society is the use of drugs that we have chosen to make illegal. The prevalence of people who need to change their reality in this way is a direct indication of the gap. That and the way society takes no responsibility for the setting up the problem. Gregory Bateson’s model of alcoholism is useful in understanding this, and of course Ronnie Laing’s detailed and practical work does show directly that society is every bit the location of madness as the individual exhibiting symptoms.
Living with a toddler and a baby now, my context is full of questions about the environment in which children develop. Winnicott said there is no such thing as a baby because there is no possibility of understanding a baby in the absence of the baby’s bond especially with its mother. Nothing the mother does or does not do is not part of the environment in which children develop their identities and their beliefs about the world. It is simply not possible. We have distorted that beyond measure by thinking that children need to learn “facts” about the world.
The roots of mental illness lie in peoples’ inability to accommodate successfully to the madness of society. At the level of this blog we would want to ask whether that difficulty does not contain the roots of a genuine solution to many of our crises. If people with “mental illness” are a set of coal mine canaries, why are we still mining the coal? What is it that we want to do, beyond getting all those dead canaries out of our awareness? How can the madness stop?
[1] Contrast this with the legibility of a city-dweller who holds a single job. The entire UK income tax system is geared so that almost everything is known in advance, with tax deducted at source, so much so that relatively few people even need to submit a tax return.
[2] And even if they do know what they are doing, they may not be able to articulate it, and the situation will have moved on so that their articulated approach likely no longer applies.
[3] The word “is” is itself problematic. Bourland/Korzybski’s E-Prime seeks to increase clarity of thought by eliminating most forms of “to be”. Korzybski observed a marked improvement in students’ grades for those who adopted this practice.
[4] “It is easier to act yourself into a new way of thinking, than it is to think yourself into a new way of acting.”
[5] For a good set of case studies, look to the stories told in Scott Alexander’s post Against Against Pseudo-Addiction: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/16/against-against-pseudoaddiction/
