“The map is not the territory, and the name is not the thing named.” — Gregory Bateson, "Every Schoolboy Knows," Mind and Nature
#QOTD #GregoryBateson #Quotation #MapNotTerritory #Quotes #Names
https://yahooeysblog.wordpress.com/2025/12/06/quote-of-the-day-5361/
Two types of human systems
When looking for similar feedback loops in human interactions, Bateson saw that they didn’t always exist, or operate in the way they should. As a result, he recognized that there were two kinds of systems: ones that relied on feedback to create stability, and others that tended to escalate and create runaway trends.
~ Ted Gioia, from Why Gregory Bateson Matters
slip:4uhopy1.
I will admit this is the first I’ve ever heard of Bateson, and based on Gioia’s article, I seriously considered buying his Steps to an Ecology of Mind. I definitely recommend reading Gioia’s article.
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Today in Labor History March 25, 1957: U.S. Customs seized copies of Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl" on obscenity grounds. Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and City Lights manager, Shigeyoshi Murao, were arrested on obscenity charges for publishing and distributing the poem. Howl was inspired, in part, by a terrifying peyote vision Ginsberg had in which the façade of the Sir Francis Drake Hotel, in San Francisco, appeared as the monstrous face of a child-eating demon. The obscenity charges stemmed from homophobic responses to his explicit references to homosexuality. Ginsberg’s first experience with LSD, as well as Kerouac’s and Burroughs’s, was with acid provided by the anthropologist Gregory Bateson, one-time husband of and long-time collaborator with Margaret Mead. You can read more about Bateson and Mead’s early experimentation with, and promotion of, psychedelics (and their collaboration with the CIA) in the recent book, “Tripping on Utopia.”
#workingclass #LaborHistory #poetry #howl #lgbtq #allenginsburg #homophobia #lawrenceferlinghetti #citylights #obscenity #censorship #bannedbooks #kerouac #williamburoughs #lsd #peyote #margaretmead #gregorybateson #psycheldelics #books #writer #author #poet @bookstadon
Hier, intervention dans un de Master à Sup de Pub, Paris (groupe Omnes Éducation) :
« Management systémique et projets inclusifs » — approche complexe et systémique des enjeux décisionnels, éthiques, déontologiques, relationnels et posturaux dans l'organisation du travail et la conduite de projets.
#CabinetJVL #JVL #consulting #formation #visioseance #visio #superviseur #système #systemie #sexualite #safeplace #paloalto #gregorybateson #uneunitesacree #complexite #PenseeComplexe #EdgarMorin
Journée d'écriture et de séances et dernières lignes droite pour le livre que l'on écrit.
Sans m'avancer, je crois qu'il nous tarde maintenant de vous partager le fruit de notre travail ! Patience... plus que quelques semaines maintenant !
#CabinetJVL #JVL #therapie #sexotherapie #consulting #formation #supervision #visioseance #visio #superviseur #paca #systèmie #sexualite #safeplace #paloalto #gregorybateson #uneunitesacree #complexite #PenseeComplexe
photo : Romain Jacquot
". . . [P]eople’s tendency to define themselves against one another. Imagine two people getting into an argument about some minor political disagreement but, after an hour, ending up taking positions so intransigent that they find themselves on completely opposite sides of some ideological divide — even taking extreme positions they would never embrace under ordinary circumstances, just to show how much they completely reject the other’s points. They start out as moderate social democrats of slightly different flavors; before a few heated hours are over, one has somehow become a Leninist, the other an advocate of the ideas of Milton Friedman. We know this kind of thing can happen in arguments. Bateson suggested such processes can become institutionalized on a cultural level as well. How, he asked, do boys and girls in Papua New Guinea come to behave differently, despite the fact that no one ever explicitly instructs them about how boys and girls are supposed to behave? It’s not just by imitating their elders; it’s also because boys and girls each learn to find the behaviour of the opposite sex distasteful and try to be as little like them as possible. What start as minor learned differences become exaggerated until women come to think of themselves as, and then increasingly actually become, everything that men are not. And, of course, men do the same thing towards women.
Bateson was interested in the psychological processes within societies, but there’s every reason to believe something similar happens between societies as well. People come to define themselves against their neighbours. Urbanites thus become urbane, as barbarians become more barbarous. If ‘national character’ can really be said to exist, it can only be as a result of such schismogenic processes: English people trying to become as little as possible like French, French people as little like Germans, and so on. If nothing else, they will all definitely exaggerate their differences in arguing with one another."
- David Graeber & David Wengrow, "The Dawn of Everything"
Gregory Bateson:
CONSCIOUS PURPOSE
(i.e. actions taking the shortest logical or causal path; direct correctives; coupling of conscious thinking with our biological context; design)
+
DUALISTIC THINKING
(i.e. mind/body split; mind vs. matter)
=
HUBRIS
(i.e. pride, overconfidence, arrogance)
Tripping on Utopia - ‘obscure corner of psychedelic history’ [book review]#anthropology #BenjaminBreen #MargaretMead #GregoryBateson #psychedelics https://psychedelicpress.substack.com/p/tripping-utopia
Today in Labor History March 25, 1957: U.S. Customs seized copies of Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl" on obscenity grounds. Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and City Lights manager, Shigeyoshi Murao, were arrested on obscenity charges for publishing and distributing the poem. Howl was inspired, in part, by a terrifying peyote vision Ginsberg had in which the façade of the Sir Francis Drake Hotel, in San Francisco, appeared as the monstrous face of a child-eating demon. The obscenity charges stemmed from homophobic responses to his explicit references to homosexuality. Ginsberg’s first experience with LSD, as well as Kerouac’s and Burroughs’s, was with acid provided by the anthropologist Gregory Bateson, one-time husband of and long-time collaborator with Margaret Mead.
#workingclass #LaborHistory #poetry #howl #lgbtq #allenginsburg #homophobia #lawrenceferlinghetti #citylights #obscenity #censorship #bannedbooks #kerouac #williamburoughs #lsd #peyote #margaretmead #gregorybateson @bookstadon
"…in the aftermath of WWI, as technologies like the radio and automobile began to take hold, #MargarethMead and her husband #GregoryBateson began to formulate a vision for utopia that relied upon plant-based #psychedelics.
"They saw science as responsible for some of the bad things in the world, but also [as] something which could be a tool for fixing the world or healing a sick society."
At long last, a beautiful new edition of Gregory Bateson's 1991 book, A Sacred Unity: Further Steps to an Ecology of Mind, is available in paperback, e-book and PDF versions. This edition, published by the stellar Triarchy Press and facilitated by Bateson Idea Group, features a new introduction by Nora Bateson and Stephen Nachmanovitch.
Highly recommended.
gregory bateson and margaret mead were constantly pioneering new social constructs. here, for example, is a horny jail they made for themselves where if you try to escape you get malaria #hornyjail #gregorybateson #margaretmead #withadaughterseye
Gregory Bateson wrote in 1978 in the very first chapter of mind and nature about how foolish it will always be to try and get a machine to output art thats relevant to humans
#Introduction 2/3
I'm interested in:
#ClimateChange #Ecology #Sustainability
#Complexity #Cybernetics #SystemsThinking
#Epistemology #GregoryBateson #WarmData #TheoryOfChange
#Design #DesignResearch #Ethnography #Innovation #ServiceDesign #StrategicDesign #TransitionDesign #UXdesign
I did it!! I finished With A Daughters Eye and learned the secret I had been wondering - that in fact Cathy Bateson was an uncredited full author of Mind and Nature as she was the one typing up and editing the secrets of the universe that Gregory was rambling away at her while his cancer was briefly in remission. Idk whether to go back thru it for quotations now or to start on A Rap on Race
#withadaughterseye #cathybateson #gregorybateson #pillastorytime #mindandnature
@james #GregoryBateson wrote about this in a lot of different ways as "the sacred," aesthetic sensibility, the pattern which connects, grace, abductive process, etc. ("The Pattern Which Connects", his books Mind and Nature and Angels Fear, "The Moral and Aesthetic Structure of Human Adaptation", "Cultural Relativity and Belief Systems", "Style, Grace, and Information in Primitive Art", among many others).
Andreas Weber wrote a whole book about it: Matter & Desire: An Erotic Ecology.
@tuckerteague
Certainly has a wide range of minds.
It even runs out to the ludicrous Elmo.
Every truly great list has to include a clown!
Thinking I'll start with #GregoryBateson
@walter Interesting article but I get a bit disappointed when I read something on this subject that fails to mention Gregory Bateson. His essays on "ecology of mind" discussed these ideas in depth and provide a lot of the theoretical groundwork before pretty much anyone.
Sadly his work seems to be largely forgotten these days, but I highly recommend "Steps to an Ecology of Mind" (the anthology of his essays) if this subject interests you.
@marcovalente I'm increasingly very suspicious and doubtful about the concept of leverage points in self-organizing dynamical systems. Natural and social systems are stochastic, not mechanical, and thus there's an economy of flexibility (see G. Bateson) that risks being manipulated and threatened when we meddle. We can hardly foresee 1st-order consequences of our actions, to say nothing about 2nd- or nth-order consequences that leverage points attempt to manipulate or catalyze. #GregoryBateson
