design-adventure

Photo: Barry Schwartz

The Young Anthropologists and the Question of Fascism

In 1932, Gregory Bateson met Margaret Mead on the Sepik River in New Guinea. Both were in their late twenties. The world was darkening—Mussolini had been in power for a decade, Hitler was ascending, and the patterns of thought that would consume Europe were already taking hold.

Bateson had been studying the Iatmul people, watching their elaborate rituals of boasting and counter-boasting, dominance and submission. He noticed something troubling: communication could become a runaway process. When one group boasts, the other boasts back louder. When one side dominates, the other submits further, inviting more dominance. He called this schismogenesis—the creation of division through escalating feedback. Left unchecked, it tears societies apart.

Then he and Mead went to Bali. There they found something different. The Balinese practiced what Bateson called "stasis"—their interactions didn't spiral. Competition didn't escalate into arms races; submission didn't deepen into abjection. Somehow, their culture had patterns that absorbed perturbation rather than amplifying it.

The question haunting this work: Could communication be shaped to resist the runaway polarization that feeds totalitarianism?

This wasn't abstract. By the time they returned to America in 1939, war had begun. They turned their anthropological methods toward understanding fascist propaganda, analyzing Nazi films, studying "national character" at a distance. Mead and Bateson even designed a board game—never published—based on the principle that "Democracies and Dictators play by different rules."

But Bateson grew troubled. Using his theories as propaganda tools—even against fascism—felt like participating in the very escalation he had diagnosed. After the war, he largely withdrew from applied social science, turning instead toward cybernetics, ecology, and the question of how living systems learn.

The Pattern That Connects

What emerged from this journey was a different way of seeing. Bateson came to understand mind not as something inside brains, but as a pattern distributed through living systems—families, forests, societies, the relationship between organisms and their environments.

He asked: What is the pattern that connects the crab to the lobster and the orchid to the primrose, and all four of them to me? And me to you?

And he defined information not as data, but as a difference which makes a difference—something relational, something that only exists in the gap between contexts.

Nora Bateson: The Unseen Coalescence

Photo: NAV Sweden

Nora Bateson, Gregory's daughter, has extended this work into new territory. She asks: if "insidious" describes how pathology creeps up through unseen combining processes—racism, addiction, corruption—what is the word for the opposite? For how vitality, healing, and creativity coalesce in ways we cannot see?

She calls this aphanipoiesis (Greek: aphanis = unseen, unnoticed + poiesis = to bring forth).

"The change before the change... what coalesces prior to emergence."

This is not hidden—it is merely out of habituated perception. Like the soil beneath a forest, teeming with relational processes while attention is caught by what stands visible above.

Her key insight: One cannot explicitly change that which is implicit. Direct correctives fail against insidious patterns because those patterns formed in the unseen stitching between contexts—between family and economy, between education and identity, between language and expectation. To touch that realm requires tending the about so that the within can shift.

Warm Data is her term for the kind of information that can hold this complexity: "transcontextual information about the interrelationships that integrate a complex system." Not cold data extracted from context, but living information that shifts within the mutual learning of systems.

Sources