Tao Te Ching
Steps to an Ecology of the Mind
Seminal foundation for the advent of family therapy and the increasing realization of mental illness as contextual rather than isolated individual disease; handbook for evolutionists, cyberneticians, psychologists, and social scientists; and insightful look into the worlds of fish, mammals, schizophrenics, and the CA State Board of Education; this collection of Bateson essays describes the ways we create the worlds we perceive and confine our beliefs to this distorted reality. His chronicle of the conflicting dissonance between these beliefs and the way things really are has become more apparent and critical now than it was when written almost 50 years ago.
Quotes from Steps to an Ecology of the Mind
“A little hypocrisy and a little compromise oils the wheels of social life”
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“But the myth of power is, of course, a very powerful myth, and probably most people in this world more or less believe in it. It is a myth, which, if everybody believes in it, becomes to that extent self-validating. But it is still epistemological lunacy and leads inevitably to various sorts of disaster.”
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“For a man to change the basic beliefs that determine his perception - his epistemological premises - he must first become aware that reality is not necessarily as he believes it to be.”
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“For a man to change the basic beliefs that determine his perception—his epistemological premises—he must first become aware that reality is not necessarily as he believes it to be.”
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“If a man achieves or suffers change in premises which are deeply embedded in his mind, he will surely find that the results of that change will ramify throughout his whole universe.”
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“Perhaps there is no such thing as unilateral power. After all, the man 'in power' depends on receiving information all the time from outside. He responds to that information just as much as he 'causes' things to happen... it is an interaction, and not a lineal situation.”
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“the distribution of flexibility among the many variables of a system is a matter of very great importance. The healthy system... may be compared to an acrobat on a high wire... he must be free to move from one position of instability to another... If his arms are fixed or paralyzed (isolated from communication), he must fall.”
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“We create the world that we perceive, not because there is no reality outside our heads, but because we select and edit the reality we see to conform to our beliefs about what sort of world we live in.”
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“What is true is that the idea of power corrupts. Power corrupts most rapidly those who believe in it, and it is they who will want it most. Obviously, our democratic system tends to give power to those who hunger for it and gives every opportunity to those who don’t want power to avoid getting it. Not a very satisfactory arrangement if power corrupts those who believe in it and want it.”
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