Still Stuck in a Maze of Our Own Making

by Jeff Bloom • October 19, 2025

The serious threat to our democracy is not the existence of foreign totalitarian states. It is the existence within our own personal attitudes and within our own institutions of conditions which have given victory to external authority, discipline, uniformity and dependence upon The Leader in foreign countries. The battlefield is also accordingly here—within ourselves and our institutions. ~ John Dewey[[1]]

This essay is an extension of my last essay, “Living in a World of Ideas: And, What Happens When the Ideas Change and We Don’t See It?” (or on Substack). Since I posted that piece, I’ve talked with a few people about the idea of “ideas” and how they create various versions of our worlds. Some people understood it right away and have continued to elaborate on it. At the same time, others don’t get it or don’t quite get it and its implications. However, I think part of the problem is my varying abilities to express ideas clearly and succinctly. My older son got it immediately and started riffing on the theme. Of course, he’s used to my ways of thinking and talking. But, one of my physicians seemed to get the point to some extent, while seeming to miss it in other ways. He’s an interesting person, but trying to have a conversation is usually challenging, mostly because of his speediness. On this occasion, he had to do a “wonderful” (take that sarcastically) procedure (he’s a urologist…. you can let your imagination ponder those possibilities) and discuss options while trying to keep up with the patient load. So, my babbling in between commentaries on the experiences I was having, was probably just that… babbling. Trying to get to the pithiness of fairly complex ideas can’t usually be done in a hurry. But, that experience also prompted me to think about ways to elaborate that might be easier (hopefully) for some readers to get. 

John Dewey’s warning in the quote at the beginning of this essay points to exactly the issues of living in a world of ideas. Given the conditions of being human, along with the ways in which we think, learn, relate, and communicate, we require creating worlds of ideas. And, that particular situation is, for better or worse, what we have to deal with in order to survive. 

All living things have “ideas” about their worlds and themselves, but the big difference between say an earthworm and a human is that earthworms’ ideas deal with their lives in their immediate surroundings, where they have to be alert for predators, drastic changes to the soil (e.g., too dry, too wet), and for other earthworms and their signals for danger or for their readiness to mutually copulate. Each earthworm is both male and female, so when they have an intimate get-together they fertilize each other’s eggs — I wonder what human social relations would be like if we were both sexes? For earthworms, trees, or fish, their ideas revolve around  immediate sensory input, which includes any internal messages from the nervous[[2]] and hormonal systems, as well as from others of their species and different species and from various aspects of the environment (e.g., temperature, chemical changes in soil and water, etc.). We really are pretty clueless about the actual depth and extent of thinking across the spectrum of living things. However, it is safe to say that thinking of one sort or another is a fundamental characteristic of living things. We do have a bit more extensive understandings of thinking in other primates, dogs, cats, rats, whales and dolphins, other mammals, some birds, octopuses, and a few other invertebrates, but we are only beginning to develop understandings of the nature of such thinking in most organisms. It is probably also safe to say that thinking for all non-humans focuses primarily on relationships[[3]] and survival, which are intimately interdependent ideas. 

Explorations of Ideas and Our Worlds of Ideas

Before we go any further, let’s take a few minutes to explore this notion “ideas.” The following explorations are basically contemplative exercises. Such exercises should start out with relaxing, then feeling your body, your breathing, and sensing your environment. Then, we can engage our imagination into what it would be like to be or be involved with whatever it is we want to explore. 

Take a few minutes to contemplate how various aspects of one’s own life are based on our own ideas as well as on commonly shared ideas of a particular social grouping. You might imagine going to work. What happens during your travel to and from work? What emotions, visual perceptions, interactions, etc. occur while at work? How is each of these interactions, objects used in your work, processes, and so forth a set of ideas? Whose ideas are or were they? Are there clashes of ideas? What would happen if one of those sets of ideas disappeared or was radically changed?

Now, take a few minutes to imagine some other living being. It may help to be sitting somewhere where you can actually see a particular living organism other than a human (e.g., dog, cat, bird, tree, lizard, bee, butterfly, fish), but it’s not necessary. Start trying to imagine that you are in that particular organism’s “body.” If it has eyes, imagining seeing what it sees, what it feels, etc. What sorts of things happen as you (the organism) go about your daily activities? What sorts of ideas are involved in that organism’s life? After doing this for a little while, what ideas did you generate that were similar to those of a human?

From each of the above explorations, can you identify those ideas that dealt with relationships? “Relationships” in its broadest sense has to do with how any particular “thing” is interdependent upon, connected to, affects, or in some way interacts to or with something else. For example, there are a variety of ways in which our clothing is related to various aspects of us (e.g., protection, modesty, glamour/appearance, messaging). 

Take some further time to imagine being some of the major players in this situation, such as, Trump, Stephen Miller (the zombie commander), JFK Jr (a malignant tumor from the Kennedy genome)., Kristi… No-one-Home, I mean Noem, Pete Hogshit… I mean Hegseth, Marco Rubicon… I mean Rubio, Pam Bandit… I mean Bondi, Howard Lugnuts… I mean Lutnick, and others. — Please excuse my petty name-calling; sometimes I just need to vent in ways that may be potentially humorous. If you feel the same way, we could have more fun generating names for this crew of treasonous lunatics! (Add to Comments below). Be careful, you may not want to imagine being these people for very long. It may be dangerous for one’s mental health. — But, try to sketch out their “ideas,” their plans, their visions for this country. Now, explore how various media personnel and non-MAGA politicians are viewing the current situation and how to deal with it. How do these people’s ideas compare and contrast with one another? It might help to pretend you’re a member of an advanced civilization observing our national and international dynamics from invisible observatories, like those depicted in an excellent episode of Star Trek: Next Generation. 

Please share your thoughts and insights in the Comments below. This is the real “meat” of this unpleasant meal. 

Double Binds

Gregory Bateson and a few of his colleagues introduced a description and explanation for particularly sticky and nasty problems that arose from observations of schizophrenics, as well as various other social and cultural dynamics. They referred to this set of problematic dynamics as “double binds.”[[4]] The major characteristics of double binds include: (a) one or more contexts that set up “demands” or “messages” that contradict or conflict with one another; (b) these demands or messages are of significant importance to one’s psychological and/or physical wellbeing; (c) any attempt to satisfy one or another of the conflicting demands only puts oneself into deeper conflicts; and (d) there is no readily apparent solution or way out of this trap of conflicting demands. Double binds have often been compared to the notions of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situations or “Catch-22.”[[5]] People often confuse double binds with dilemmas, but dilemmas don’t usually involve threats to one’s wellbeing. Double binds are not really “choices” between alternatives, since all alternatives result in dire consequences. I’ve had some students suggest that “it’s like when my parents say if I don’t get good grades, we won’t pay for your tuition, room, and board.” That particular situation may be unpleasant, but you can choose not to go to university and get a job, live at home, or whatever. The alternatives may not be what you want or be particularly pleasant, but they are viable. A more simplistic version of a double bind set of contexts is where a teenager never gets any positive feedback or attention and is always at fault. Every time this child comes home, the mother’s greeting is some version of “why are you always late?!” And, the father’s greeting might be some version of “can’t you ever do anything right?!” All communications are negative, as in these two negative questions, which can’t be answered without being either defensive, where are wrong and must defend yourself, or just blatantly wrong. These types of communications are not just occasional occurrences, but are characteristics of all interactions. There is nothing the teenager can do to please the parents. The child may think that buying his parents a gift would help, but when the gift is presented, the parents respond with a snide “Thanks, but I already have one” or “Thanks, but why did you spend your money of this?” And, you find that the parents may often say things that are supposed to show their love and affection, but do so while communicating complete disinterest and insincerity in voice and body language. All of the contexts of life at home are toxic and there’s no apparent way out. 

If you haven’t figured it out, we are all living in increasingly intense sets of double binds. Now media and politicians who want to “resolve” our current political situation are telling people (the voters) to get out and protest. “It’s up to you, you have the power!” Meanwhile, we put ourselves at risk if we protest. Or, we’ll feel guilty for not protesting. And, all the while the politicians and journalists keep talking, while sitting in their offices or talking at an audience. We also may even be living in layers of double binds in our personal, familial, or occupational situations, which may involve the contexts of health, workplace dynamics, increasing debt, etc. At this moment in time, I suspect most of us are living in intertwined layers of double binds of varying degrees of intensity. 

Double binds can manifest in all sorts of situations. We can even create our own double binds in which we create the conflicting contexts that trap us in cognitive—emotional double binds. Beyond family and small social groups, double binds occur in workplaces (from schools to factories to offices to hospitals and so forth), religious and spiritual groups, and the whole array of other organizations. Within nations, we can be caught in multiple double binds arising from various manifestations and combinations of politics, economics, law enforcement and judicial systems, and so forth. And, it seems we are almost always caught up in double binds among nations. And, at an even larger level of scale, we are increasingly caught in major ecological double binds that affect every living creature on the planet. I’m not sure that we are ever “free” of double binds, but the nature, dynamics, and our personal relationship to our double binds vary across contexts and time. Some double binds are more intense and others are the sort of slow-burn situations that percolate below the surface. But, they all can drive us crazy in different ways and to different extents.[[6]]

Getting out of or escaping double binds is not at all easy, since every response or action reinforces the bind or trap. As long as we try to work within the “logic” of the double binding contexts, we cannot escape. And, this problem leads us to another way of understanding the situation of “living in a world of ideas.” 

Let’s start with the simple idea of an object, such as a tree, that is growing nearby. The moment we perceive that tree, that perception or receipt of lightwaves in our retinas becomes a cognitive representation of the tree in our brains or wherever that information is stored. When we close our eyes and recall that image, what we see is not the tree, but is a representation or abstraction (i.e., “idea”) of that tree. We can call this a level one abstraction. We can then close our eyes and imagine two trees, one of which can be a different sort of tree that shares the “patterns” of being a tree, but is different from our original tree abstraction. This could be a level 2 abstraction, as could a forest of the original tree. These sorts of “levels of abstraction” were discussed in depth by Alfred Korzybski.[[7]] This idea is more commonly referred to as “the map is not the territory.” Maps are our representations of some territory, but they are not the same thing. And, maps can be used at different levels of abstraction, where one might be a map of some city, another a map of bus routes, another a map of political allegiances among the population, and another could be a map of flu occurrences in the city. Each leap in level of abstraction can allow us to see representations of the territory from very different perspectives. Here, we have returned to a more comprehensive view of “living in a world of ideas.” 

A Brief Divergence

As I wrote this section, it struck me that this whole idea of abstraction may be what early and contemporary Buddhists referred to as our worlds being illusory. Certainly, illusions are abstractions, but are abstractions illusions? Are they equivalent concepts or is one of them at a higher level of abstraction. Is one a subset of the other? In other words, are all illusions abstractions? I’d suggest that they are. But, are all abstractions illusions? Hmmm… 

We’re Rats in Mazes

Double binds are sort of like mazes, but there are no exits. We can try moving in all sorts of directions, but no matter what we do, we can’t find a way out. The rules of ordinary mazes don’t work. You can try going one way only to find a dead end. We can even remember not to go that way again, but with each effort you end up in dead end. You can scream, cry, curse, plead, throw a fit, but nothing changes, except that the maze seems to get more claustrophobic.

But, the maze is a creation of ideas that we’ve bought into. The only possibility for escape is to leap up one or more levels of abstraction. In the maze, we see each dead end, each wall, each pathway as the “rules” of the context we’re in. The whole experience can be claustrophobic, frightening, frustrating. Or, we can just give up and wander aimlessly, accepting that this is where and how we have to live. But, if we take a leap up a level, we can see the whole situation in completely different ways. We can take a leap from one context to another higher level of context or metacontext. I cannot say what we’ll see, but it will be from entirely different perspectives. And, these perspectives pulsate with creative possibilities. The rules of the maze no longer apply. Everything can become more malleable, more workable. 

In our current situation in the U.S, we see almost everyone with a political position (elected or appointed), including Congress, the Executive Branch, the Judicial Branch, as well as the military and law enforcement (especially at the federal level) reinforcing the walls and creating new dead ends in the maze of fascist autocracy. Those who oppose these actions are the ones screaming, crying, pleading, complaining, while telling the rest of us, it’s our responsibility to fight what’s going on. But, the “fight,” the “opposition,” the “screaming,” all play into the rules of the maze. The pathways can be squeezed. The walls can be crumbled while crushing others, but with new walls already present to enclose the collapsed walls. If we take the leap in abstraction, we see other ways to respond that circumvent the logic and rules of the maze. The creative protests in Portland, Oregon, are almost there. They’ve jumped high enough to see over the top maze walls. The inflatable costumes, music, dancing, singing, and mocking the maze and its creators, helps us see the absurdity. But, maybe more importantly, the Portland protests are giving us glimpse of another level of abstraction. 

Postscript

I really don’t enjoy writing essays like this one. Writing this essay was like pulling teeth with no anesthesia. Just straight up pain. Usually when given the option for medical procedures, such as colonoscopies, of anesthesia or no anesthesia, I opt for “no anesthesia.” It’s just periodic and temporary physical pain, with the benefit of returning to normal activities immediately afterwards. And, it has the benefit of seeing the inside of your body, and what is or isn’t happening. The problem with writing this and similar essays is that it’s enduring pain that is neither physical nor short-term. It’s also feeling the pain of millions of others, while feeling quite helpless or even hopeless. Although, if it were truly hopeless it wouldn’t be worth writing about. 

I’d much rather be exploring and writing about my passions and interests that include learning, thinking, relationships, the sciences, the arts, photography, dogs, cats, fish, etc. I’d also like to write about the big complex wicked problems we face that are not totally wrapped up in this nonsensical, ego-driven, physically and psychologically violent, destructive, cruel, ignorant, petty, ugly, zombie-like fascist authoritarian bullshit. We really need to address the complex, wicked and intertwined problems of ecological degradation and collapse, population growth, economic alternatives, relationships on all levels, healthcare and wellbeing, and ways of creating a level of sanity within and between cultures, societies, nations, and the whole array of beliefs and worldviews. And, these issues involve the relationships and interdependencies between education, medicine, social welfare, economics, politics, psychology and psychopathologies, social relations and dynamics, and so forth. And, addressing such wicked problems has no singular solutions. Actions can’t be mandated by authorities. As many of us (living human beings) have to work together to save our species. 

So, I’m going to attempt to not write much about our present crisis. But, I do hope people will push the media and politicians and whomever else actually has the networks and power to leap up a level or four from our seeming entrapment in this nightmarish maze of fascism and autocracy, and take decisive, creative, and effective action. But, even more importantly, if we can escape, we must get ongoing feedback from all citizens and residents about how to fix what was our democracy, It’s needs to be flattened (hierarchically), all personal and external money completely removed from politics (this is a hard one since everyone is deeply embedded in other people’s pockets), alternative ways to select judges and Supreme Court justices, terms limits for everyone, demolish the Electoral College, distribute Senators by regional population, hold all politicians, justices/judges, and law enforcement to much, much higher explicit standards of knowledge, ethics, and morality, with immediate removal from office for any breach of these standards. Without such followup actions, we’ll just continue to spin out of control. 

A Few Quotes to Ponder

A writer goes about his task today with the extra satisfaction which comes from knowing that he will be the first to have his head lopped off-even before the political dandies. In my own case this is a double satisfaction, for if freedom were denied me by force of earthly circumstance, I am the same as dead and would infinitely prefer to go into fascism without my head than with it, having no use for it any more and not wishing to be saddled with so heavy an encumbrance.[[8]]

With the rise of Fascism, the lust for power . and the conviction of its right has reached new heights. Millions are impressed by the victories of power and take it for the sign of strength. To be sure, power over people is an expression of superior strength in a purely material sense. If I have the power over another person to kill him, I am "stronger" than he is. But in a psychological sense, the lust for power is not rooted in strength but in weakness. It is the expression of the inability of the individual self to stand alone and live. It is the desperate attempt to gain secondary strength where genuine strength is lacking.[[9]]

The task education must accomplish, if free societies are to continue to exist, is the re-creation of the sense of individual responsibility—which means the re-establishment of the belief of men in man. Fascism is only another name for the sickness and desperation which overcome a society when it loses its sense of responsibility for its own life and surrenders its will to a tyrant it, and it alone, has invented.[[10]]

NOTES

[[1]] From page 49 in Dewey (1939/1963); also quoted on page 20 in Fromm (1941/1969). 

[[2]] Trees do not have nervous systems as we know of them, but do have ways for transmitting information to various parts of their “bodies.” See Tuhin (2025) for more information.

[[3]] By “relationships,” I am referring not only to relationships between individuals of the same species, but also to other organisms in their environments, as well as to a variety of features in their environments, such as sources of nourishment and water, places or items needed for shelter, and so forth.

[[4]] There’s an extensive literature on double binds, but the following source is a good start in developing a foundational understanding: a definition on pages 206—208 along with elaborations in that chapter in Bateson, G. (1972/2000).   

[[5]] “Catch-22” is a phrase often used to describe double binds, but there are arguments about its equivalence. This phrase comes from a novel with the same name by Joseph Heller (1961).  

[[6]] Gibney (2006)

[[7]] Korzybski (1994) and Bateson, G. (1972/2000)

[[8]] From “One Man’s Meat” (1940), excerpted on pages 479—480 in White (1964) 

[[9]] From pages 183—184 in Fromm (1941/1969)

[[10]] From “Freedom Is the Right to Choose” (1951) excerpted on page 190 in MacLeish (1964)

REFERENCES

Bateson, G. (1972/2000). Steps to an ecology of mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 

Dewey, J. (1939/1963). Freedom and Culture. New York: Capricorn Books.

Fromm, E. (1941/1969). Escape from freedom. New York: Discus Books/Avon Publishing.

Gibney, P. (2006). The double bind theory: Still crazy-making after all these years. Psychotherapy in Australia, 12(3), 48–55.

Heller, J. (1961/1996). Catch-22. New York: Simon & Schuster. 

Korzybski, A. (1994). Science and sanity: An introduction to non-Aristotelian systems and general semantics (5th ed.). New York: Institute of General Semantics.

MacLeish, A. (1964). Humanism and the belief in man. In V. E. Amend & L. T. Hendrick (eds.), Ten contemporary thinker (pp.176—218). New York: Free Press. 

Tuhin, M. (2025, April 5). How plants communicate: The hidden network blow our feet. Science News Today. https://www.sciencenewstoday.org/how-plants-communicate-the-hidden-network-below-our-feet 

White, E. B. (1964). Freedom. In V. E. Amend & L. T. Hendrick (eds.), Ten contemporary thinkers (pp.474—480). New York: Free Press. 

© 2025 by Jeffrey W Bloom

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