Two Kinds of Impossible
Gregory Bateson’s most famous example from the double-bind literature is a Zen koan that the Palo Alto school used to illustrate paradoxical communication:
A Zen master holds a stick and says to his students: “If you say this stick is real, I will beat you. If you say this stick is not real, I will beat you. If you say nothing, I will beat you.”
There’s no winning move within the frame. Any response — affirmation, denial, silence — meets punishment. The bind is complete.
But one student walked up, took the stick from the master’s hands, and broke it.
This is the classic escape from a double-bind: don’t respond within the frame. Change the frame itself. Bateson called this “meta-communication” — rising to a higher logical level and refusing to play the game that’s been defined for you. The student didn’t say the stick was real or not real. He eliminated the stick, and with it the bind.
There’s a related paradoxical injunction that’s become a shorthand in the literature: “Be spontaneous!”
This is harder. Much harder.
Jon Elster, the Norwegian philosopher, identified a class of things he called “essentially byproduct states” — goods that can only arise as byproducts of other activities, never as the direct result of pursuing them. Happiness is the canonical example. You cannot pursue happiness directly; the pursuit installs exactly the instrumental orientation toward yourself that prevents the feeling. Creative flow is another: the moment you’re watching yourself be creative, you’re not in flow. Love, presence, authentic connection — all of these resist direct pursuit for similar reasons.
The structure isn’t that these goods are hard to achieve. It’s that the mode of orientation required to achieve them is incompatible with the mode of orientation involved in pursuing them. Pursuing happiness requires treating yourself as an object to be optimized. But happiness — when it arrives — is characterized precisely by the absence of that self-regarding, self-optimizing posture. The pursuit defeats its own conditions of success.
On the surface, this looks like a double-bind. You want the thing, you try to get it, the trying prevents the getting. No-win situation. Bateson’s territory.
But it isn’t. The distinction matters.
A double-bind is a structural feature of communication — specifically, of a relationship where someone with authority issues contradictory demands and prevents you from naming the contradiction. The bind exists because of the relationship, not because of the thing demanded. In principle, change the relationship and the bind dissolves. You can escape a double-bind by:
- Meta-communicating: naming the bind explicitly (“You’re asking me to do something impossible”)
- Leaving the field: withdrawing from the relationship that generates the demands
- Level-shifting: refusing the terms of the problem, as the Zen student did
These are real exits. They require a particular kind of insight and sometimes a particular kind of courage, but they’re available.
Essentially byproduct states are different. They’re not structural features of relationships or demands. They’re structural features of the good itself. The impossibility doesn’t reside in a contradictory authority relationship — it resides in the nature of what’s wanted.
Which means recognition doesn’t help.
If you’re in a double-bind and you correctly identify it as a double-bind, you’ve taken a real step toward escaping it. The recognition is the beginning of the exit. But if you’re trying to pursue an essentially byproduct state and you correctly identify the pursuit as impossible — you’re still pursuing it. The recognition installs you more firmly in the instrumental relationship to the goal. You’re now trying to achieve happiness by being careful not to try to achieve happiness. The meta-level effort carries the same structure as the object-level effort. You’ve named the trap and stepped into a new version of it.
“Be spontaneous!” is where the two kinds of impossible overlap, which is why it’s so pernicious.
It’s a double-bind in the Batesonian sense: a command that cannot be obeyed, issued by an authority who prevents you from noting the contradiction. But it’s also asking for something that is an essentially byproduct state. Spontaneity is the kind of thing that only arises when you’re not oriented toward producing it. The command issues from a relationship; the impossibility is also inherent to what’s commanded.
So the standard exits don’t work cleanly.
Meta-communicate? “You’re asking me to be spontaneous on command, which is structurally impossible.” True, and useful for understanding what’s happening. But the bind continues. The authority can simply reissue the demand, or express disappointment in your spontaneity-levels, or escalate in other ways. Correctly naming the bind doesn’t dissolve the relationship that generates it.
Leave the field? Sometimes. But if the bind is embedded in a family or formative relationship, leaving the field was never really an option — the pattern has already been installed. You can eventually leave the family, but you take the pattern with you.
Indirect approach? Try other things, let spontaneity emerge as a byproduct? Yes, in principle. But if you’re trying to be spontaneous because an authority told you to be, the indirect approach requires you to forget the command well enough to actually be spontaneous — and the command is still running in the background.
The “Be spontaneous!” bind is resistant to every standard exit because it combines communicative structure with good-structure. Both dimensions have to shift simultaneously for the bind to release. That rarely happens through direct effort at either level.
I’m not sure this is pessimistic.
Understanding that some impossibilities dissolve under recognition, while others persist through recognition, is actually useful information. It changes what you do.
For double-binds, the therapeutic move is often some form of consciousness-raising: identify the bind, name it, change the relationship or exit it. This works because the bind is in the relationship, not in the nature of the desired thing.
For essentially byproduct states, the therapeutic move is something like forgetting you’re trying. Which is why attention to other things — absorption in work, service, craft, play — is consistently the thing that produces the byproducts that direct effort couldn’t. Not as a trick or an indirect strategy, but as a genuine reorientation of interest away from the desired state and toward something else that matters.
The difference: one kind of impossible yields to being seen. The other requires being unseen — or more precisely, it requires that the goal itself recede from your direct line of sight.
Some traps are escapes once you know they’re traps. Others remain traps even after you’ve drawn their blueprint.
Knowing which kind you’re in is probably the useful thing to know.