Commitment to sound reasoning exists within a painful paradox. When reasoning attempts to be inclusive of others, logic is more challenging. When successful, outcomes improve. Yet there seems to be a limit. The more dedicated a reasoner (or organization) is to fairness or inclusiveness, the more cumbersome, convoluted, and eventually disorienting the reasoning processes tend to become. The premise of operating in a sane way is brought into question by one’s own (or an organization’s) equanimity.
That should (likely does) trouble you terribly. Lament that sanity is just impish, if you like. Here I’ll articulate the challenge precisely in terms of the Sane Participation Paradox.
In the original discouraging analysis, reasoning and fairness seem, together in the “real world”, to be inherently at odds. (Real world connoting what is present in a shared way, absent imagined or dream-like interpretations.) In short, being close-minded and defense-oriented appears to be the reasonable response when one encounters unfairness.
What makes it a paradox is, by the same logic, reasonable humans are bound to be close-minded and defensive when presented with unfairness-inclusive systems of reason. Including unfairness dashes hopes for creating sane participatory frameworks. Could be said, further, to be an insane wish.
To escape the impish Sane Participation Paradox, where sane amounts to wishful thinking, humans often incant the following belief, often insistently: humans need hierarchies. The tune goes like this. Operating within a social order supports us in resolving the difficulty of reasoning together with others. While we and/or others are in effect “put in our place,” the upshot is we have solid ground on which to proclaim our own sanity.
On another level though, we grasp deeply that sanity based on external approval ties us, for better and at times worse, to pressures to conform. Comformity (misspelled, pun intended) likely and ironically has us insanely clinging to the next “fix,” or worse yet treading morally murky water. Sanity experienced this way is constructed on an illusion of mental buttressing. What we end up facing, quite simply and potentially falsely, is not reality but perceived social order projected onto collective (un)reasonableness.
Doing control-conform dances to reassure ourselves of our own sanity, we may notice that, for a participating individual — sane and yet alone in such a claim — being reasonable is not necessarily grounded in truth. When we touch this more core, uncomfortable awareness, we no longer feel moved by the playful, true tune from which the necessary if also disorienting Sane Participation Paradox issues personal truths. Self-doubt feeds into a vicious cycle with self-righteous social hierarchies.
When we are children developing capacity around continuous play, we might use a simple yet effective approach that works just as well as hierarchies in assuring both reasonableness and fairness. Rock-Paper-Scissors. It’s an approach known the world over by a variety of names and symbol combos. The logically-deducible winner of the random two-player selection process gets say over the choice for the next step. In employing this logic “game,” pairs or groups engaged in continuous play are able to effectively halt incessant reasoning. Fair play is the name of the game.
The approach resolves the Sane Participation Paradox, by disconnecting reasoning from social control-based narration (with its approval and in-my-place limitations). This is the case because it employs pre-specified logic immutable by all who participate. What naturally fills the incessant reasoning vacuum is the easeful reasonableness inherent in fair processes at play. In anticipating the sane participation resolution, in order to distribute the context of the groups’ next play, the winner of bivalent participation where the context is equivalent choices, is granted the fleeting role of participatory center.
First, consider simple bivalent participation given equivalent choices
There’s a more technical and widely applicable way to frame what is happening when we halt reasoning to directly engage participation more widely than game play. What spells participation better than ad nauseam reasoning? Reasonable, fair progress through what can be characterized in OKIC as *unbound, ***generative enaction. It’s the quite (paradoxically) sane participatory process where we’re not in charge of what’s playing out and also not particularly discouraged about that.
Said differently, unbound enaction modulates reasoning and fairness, grounding the experience of participation. As such, paranoia about our own sanity - the tense Sane Participation Paradox - does not run away with our minds. In practical effect, OKIC supports us in relating to reality itself as “playing” (enacting) by logical, grounded constraints even as reality can and sometimes does take on very different, and potentially distorted, proportions than reasonable, fair child’s play.
In modern times, intellectuals following in the footsteps of Iain McGilchrist speak of the Master and his Emissary. I would argue those constructs are identical to a given individual internalizing the functional relationship between Participants A and B (figure above), so in effect, resolving at an individual level the Sane Participation Paradox. Workable, though limited in the same ways naive realism is limited in relation to philosophy.
Collectively, felt in part through navigation of our own logically bivalent — master and emissary style — participatory center, the universe’s cipheric and representational reality quietly tugs each of us internally toward unbound external enaction.
Another word for this is generativity (a word, at present, fraught by such claims in relation to language model technologies).
Unbound enaction includes, first and foremost, our capacity for generative, communicative narration. We are directly informed in our sane participation by it when we are fortunate enough for our direct experiences to be free of distractive noise, ambivalence and disorientation. One choice, then another choice. Simple, and yet not, because of the potential snag that the more participatory we are the more our choices intermingle with those of others. Another way of stating the Sane Participation Paradox with which we began.
At base, as unbound enacters devoted to sane participation, we embody context-sensitive organismal intelligence using intent, logic and perspective to center our participation. Another way to appreciate unbound enaction is as meta-sanity. Sovereignty with rizz.
In the inverse, when bound by distortional information and unresolved ambiguity, intent, logic and perspective get reflected or even amplified through bound dynamics, for example the victim-villain-rescuer triangle universal to interpersonal phenomena.
To return to the example of Rock-Paper-Scissors, no kids need bring themselves to the collective play process with an angel on one shoulder, devil on the other. They are able to reign in any impetus to reasonably fight it out, such that collective sanity prevails. When proceeding with play and perhaps wider enaction by Rock-Paper-Scissors, social hierarchy and conformational fixes are moot. Potentially distorted reasoning is halted; distorted senses of fairness, made moot. Similarly, the hallmark of OKIC unbound enaction is that participation has a chance to proceed sensibly, without fights over reasoning or fairness. A bonus since they take all the fun out of participating anyway!