The Tao of Systems

I.

January. For those in the gloomy northern hemisphere often a time of grim knuckling down. Many of us have made our resolutions - to stop drinking, cut sugar, start a regular squats routine. Maybe we actually started. Maybe our new discipline is already plateauing, if not actually crumbling. The sense of mission creep may already be looming, adding to our bleak January outlook.

Naturally, we want to be better, stronger, more productive, better off, less anxious. We may want our relationships to be better, happier and more fulfilling. It has been said that the tragedy of marriage is that one party does not change while the other does. If only this person would change, we say; if only they would go back to who they once were. Of course, what applies to marriage can apply to any partnership, or society at large, or even ourselves. The things that we don't want to change do, and the things we want to change stay stuck.

So conflict arises. We may try to force the situation. Perhaps if I do this enough times then I will change them, or if I work harder on myself the situation will improve. Invariably, the relationship drifts back to the same tired patterns, or we drift back to ourselves. Success is always out of reach. Soon enough, this leads to blame: We blame the other person. We blame ourselves, and before long we start actively looking for faults, like an itch we can’t resist scratching. And when none of this works, when we find ourselves trapped in the same old ways, the realisation finally hits us: we need to change ourselves. Entirely! New body, new mind. And so we return to our resolutions.

All of which is unnecessary, because all that is really needed is a simple change in perspective. To metaphorically take off our magic glasses and see the world as it is. Because what is really at play here is something we could compare to the ‘traffic delusion’. You know the one: I’m stuck in my car in a crawling traffic jam, cursing all the traffic, while not considering for a moment that I am part of that traffic.  

It is difficult to see ourselves as part of a bigger process. We are aware that we are in a system, of course, but an active part of it? Not so much. Perhaps this illusion of separation is down to language, for instance when we say that we are in a relationship, whereas to say that we are the relationship would be more accurate. I am not stuck in traffic, I am the traffic. We are conditioned to see the world as Things, Events and Stories. It is a quirk of the human brain to see things and not parts of a system. Likewise things that happen one after the other are events and if a few events happen one after the other and are linked in some causal way they become a story, a narrative. 

This is how we learn to make sense of the world. We name things and elicit cause and effects in order to see patterns. We learn. Stories help us make sense of events and give them meaning. This is important. When our stories break down, say our life is disrupted by an unexpected event or trauma, the result can be a loss of identity and sense of direction. This can be both a crisis and an opportunity, because sometimes stories in themselves can become a form of tyranny.

When we see the world as a collection of things and events, at the same time we also see ourselves as things, and our life as a series of cause-and-effect events. We regard ourselves as autonomous individuals responsible for our every success and failure. This can lead to some fairly paradoxical thinking. A friend who once went to therapy after a second divorce was told that the problem must be within them because, after all, they were the common factor! This may have sounded clever but is actually nonsensical because it would have been impossible not to be the common factor.

The culture of individualism leads us into many such traps; we blame individuals for getting sick, or for getting fat, or depressed, or for being poor; we blame couples for breakdowns in their marriage - they didn't try hard enough we say, or people for getting addicted to something, or for their country being invaded, or for the climate changing, and so on. Or conversely we are blamed or feel guilty for not doing enough to help, to stop it all. 

Western culture places a lot of stock in individual responsibility. Our economics is supposedly based on the self-interested individual whose actions lead to the betterment of all, and when the anticipated betterment does not surface we are encouraged to follow the path of individual empowerment. In therapy we are told to look inwards, at our own maladaptive patterns, so that we may find fixes. Wellness culture is replete with talk of personal growth, your journey, self-development. Change, we are reminded, can only come from within. 

But there is another way of seeing the world, radically different, and that is to focus not so much on the things but on the relationship between them, and to see that occurrences, no matter how dramatic, are actually patterns in systems, often building up long before they pop into our awareness. 

Fabulous advances in science and medicine have been facilitated by the breaking down and classification of things, but the real paradigm shifts seem to appear when the relationship between things comes into focus. What is the theory of evolution, if not a description of how living organisms developed in relation to their environment? At the essence of quantum mechanics is the realisation that the tiniest known 'units' of stuff can only really be understood in relation to an observer. Where we once saw history as driven by Great Men (with the odd audacious Woman playing the role of warrior queen or tragic martyr - the only permitted roles it seems) we now see that societies and economies are vastly complex systems bound together by relations: of kinship, or trade, or power. 

The human body is a system, composed of other systems like cells and organs, which is itself ensconced within a social system. The mind is a system which is a part of a wider system of consciousness. Our thoughts themselves may be private - mercifully - but the words and symbols we use to think are public property. Understanding this lets us take off our magic glasses and see reality for what it is - a shared enterprise, an ever changing interaction between things, a continual flux. Events are simply those occurrences in a pattern that we notice, or are brought to our attention. 

For example, let’s say I am struck down with a flu. Classically, I say I caught this off you and now I’m sick! Actually there are any number of causes. Perhaps I have been running myself into the ground with work, building up a deficit of sleep, making myself vulnerable to being ill, and the virus was lurking in my upper respiratory tract for a while before it triggered my immune response. Or we blame a politician for a recession, forgetting that our economic system has inevitable cycles of boom and bust built in. Thinking in systems helps us see past our simplistic delusions of cause and effect. We can see that people are obese not because they eat too much, but eat too much because they are obese, because of hormonal changes driven by being part of a profit-driven food production system. We are not addicted to smartphones, social media is designed to be addictive.

All this being said, there is nothing wrong with self-empowerment, or personal development, or fixing maladaptive patterns in our behaviour, or indeed wanting to change an unjust and iniquitous system. But to do this successfully, it pays to recognise that the self we are wanting to empower is really a process, a relationship, and that the system it is a part of is already changing, often in ways that are not obvious. Likewise there is no harm in self discipline, but if you force yourself, too hard and too often, to do something you don’t like doing then eventually your systems will force back. It’s the same with any system. If we think about our own lives, or look at the world around us, did change come about because we forced it or because the conditions were right, because things came together at the right time, and we were able to go with it? 

Here we see the power in the statement of ‘it is what it is’. To see 'what it is' is to see the play of systems in question, to appreciate that no amount of force, or willpower or even restraint, is going to make it go any differently. But it is only by seeing situations for what they are can the ways through be seen, spaces where we can move. We see the wisdom of ‘less is more’. I once read a book that said that if you want something, then you need to put ten-times the effort you normally put in. The idea itself is quite thrilling, to set the bar so high. But, if the effort you are putting into something is making the system push back (including your own body), then ten times the effort will meet ten times the resistance, and we eventually find ourselves fighting for the sake of fighting, losing sight of our goal. We may even be pushing in the wrong direction, perhaps because we feel we should be doing this. Here again a small amount of effort in the right direction is always going to be better than a lot of effort in the wrong direction.   

So for now I will put my squats routine on hold, have a cup of tea, and have a little think about my New Year's resolutions, which I'll start in February, or maybe April.