The Law of Requisite Contrariety

Practical Paradoxes to Live By, and Other Notes on the Illusion of Failure

by Brian Van der Horst

Einstein flunked algebra. Marilyn Monroe never thought she was beautiful. Freud was uncomfortable looking people in the eye. Carl Rogers could not stand being told what to do. Did Virgina Satir ever marry and have children? Fritz Perls was often inconsistant. Will Schutz got bored in seminars. Richard Bandler and John Grinder can establish and maintain rapport with anyone, except...1

When the gods have important messages to deliver, it seems they often chose rather flawed messengers. Maybe it's their way of trying to insure that we humans won't confuse the message with the messenger.

But what is more vexing than someone who does not practice what they preach? What is more fascinating than discovering a great person has feet of clay? What can make us more unhappy than confronting our own shortcomings?

Oh imperfect human, rejoice in your weaknesses! I think you have been misinformed. We all need our flaws, our incapacities, our incertitudes for a very specific function. I call it the Law of Requisite Contrariety.2

I'm not the first person to remark that people teach what they would learn. What they need to learn. Who would be interested in teaching, researching or working in a domain which they had already mastered?

Consider the folk wisdom: "Those that know, do; those that can't, teach." This is a comment about modelling genius. How many geniuses leave their talents unexamined, transparent? One of the greatest refrains of NLP folklore is that a gifted person's explanation of his talent has little to do with what he actually does-- the structure of one's own skills are frequently invisable to oneself.

How many body therapists have lousy posture?

How many shrinks are crazy?

How many lawyers are criminals? Writers toungue-tied? Doctors sick? Leaders indecisive?

According to the Law of Requisite Contrariety, they would have to be. Look at it this way: if you knew everything about a field, endeavor or interest, you would hardly know what you knew. It would be part of you like water to the fish and air to the fowl. There would be no motivation to learn.

If you were perfectly balanced, you wouldn't think about studying clinical psychology. If you could communicate perfectly, you would not consider studying how to communicate.

Somewhere in your life, you have judged yourself as having some defect, scarcity, insecurity, some impoverishment, lost opportunity, thwarted desire or unrequited love-- wonderful! Cherish your foibles! These are the kind of experiences that point us in the direction of what we need to learn. Without these signposts, we would never have any orientation in our lives, no thirst to learn, or creativity.

The most creative periods in history were marked by gods who were all too human. The Greeks and Romans saw their makers as petty, vain, irrascible, passionate and arbitrary. As soon as people began accepting an invisable, omniscient, omnipotent and impeccably moral god-- wham!-- down came the Dark Ages. Periods of renaissance are characterized by the humanity of the people's spirits. What makes a spirit human? His or her ability to fail. Imperfection. Error. Inability. The human touch is more a fumble than a grasp.

We've seen a lot of gurus bite the dust of moral defectiveness during the past two decades. Conciousness leader Werner Erhard, Swami Muktananda, Zen master Richard Baker Roshi, and even our own fearless NLP founders have been impugned at one time or another for lacking moral or marital fiber.

I'm not condoning any of the behavior of the afore-mentioned, and this is not an apology for abusiveness in any human relationship. I personally find violence intolerable, and I also sometimes lose my temper. I'm just addressing the human tendancy to discredit and invalidate disciplines in toto because of a few wretched acts by imperfect beings.

One thing I've learned in life: you can find fault with anybody. There is probably someone right now in the world who thinks the Dalai Lama giggles too much and Mother Teresa is a nag. Finding fault is not the job of being alive! Finding what is good in people or in a discipline seems to be the real task of living like a human being.

Many of us feel that we are failures in this task. Old NLP hands will recognize that failure is a singularily human invention. You never hear of a dog that is failure at being a dog. A cat would never consider failure possible. There is probably no single plant, protozoa or pachyderm that ever considers anything in its life as a failure. Certainly they perceive loss, blocked outcomes and frustration. But failure? I suspect that in nature, organisms naturally experience their world as a continuing feedback loop of information about what to do next.

I think all our errors and shortcomings function for us in similar manner, but not only as information on what to do next, but where to go, what to study, and even what to do professionally.

Martin Heiddegger, the existentialist philospher thought error, or what he called "breakdowns" was how reality originates. His theory of ontology suggested that things come into existence through "unreadiness at hand... a gift of disability... " that renders "opaque the transparent" in life, which breaks open reality and offers the opportunity for new break-throughs.

Please notice that in this discussion, I am not trying to promote what we call "away-from" strategies. That is to say, you can orient yourself in your life toward your goals; or away-from the negative consequences of life, what you don't want, what you want to exclude from your world. While it is true that we in NLP try to orient people toward their goals, toward what exists rather than what does not exist, as longshoreman-philosopher Eric Hoffer wrote, "You can never get enough of what you really don't want." If your goal is to "not be poor," you can have millions and still not have what you don't want.

I am trying to promote a certain compassion and understanding for people who don't always walk their talk. Including you. Certainly including me. We all seem to judge ourselves too harshly. We could also use some compassion for the national organization for NLP. The Law of Requisite Contrariety (LRC) states that the most dis-organized people end up running organizations.

Ilya Prigogine, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist stated in his "Theory of Dissapative Systems" that all living (dissapating energy) systems tend to come to points of chaos, and almost break down before jumping to a new order of organization.

There is an onerous corollary to the LRC. In spiritual traditions they say, "See it and be it." What can give us more glee than detecting our own weaknesses in others?

If you see someone else behaving badly, watch out. Did you ever notice that when you criticize someone for doing something, you find yourself doing the same thing about 30 minutes later? This is physics: if you haven't had a little experience with a given abomination, you can't notice it in another. It is literally incomprehensible. I'm not trying to moralize, I'm trying to suggest a new way to look at our individual "defects."

I myself don't quite know how to apply the Law of Requisite Contrariety to organizations yet, but I have thought about how it applies to more limited human relationships. Like falling in love. I humbly submit my first musings about how the LRC applies to intimate relationships.

#1 The Prime Security Indicator

How you know when you have made it with someone else? How do you know if the person with who you are going out finds you acceptable? You know s/he feels secure when s/he tries to destroy or undermine exactly that quality in you which attracted him or her to you in the first place.

#2 The Nature of Behavioral Change

You will get what you want from your beloved. They will actually learn to think, feel and act differently. Your love partner will produce exactly that behavioral change you have always wanted them to make-- from stop picking their nose, to being interested in UFOs, to learning to do fantastic aerobatic kama-sutra numbers-- for his or her next partner.

#3 The Rule of Behavioral Immunity and the Karma Korrelative

"They will never do that to me." Sure they will. You picked her up at a party at which she ditched her date? That's how she'll leave you. When someone tells you they are really a bad person, believe them. Not that they are bad, but beleive that they have behaviors that they will repeat again and again. They know themselves better than you do.

#4 The Paradox of Attractional Imprints

You marry or mate with those that ressemble your disliked mother or father. You probably act like them, too. And vice-versa with your significant other. My buddy Marie asked her boyfriend, "Did you have problems with your mother?" "Yes," he told her, "And you are just like her!"

#5 The Law of Maximum Aversion

You produce exactly what you think you don't ever want in someone else. You don't want someone who yells at you. "Could you speak a little louder?" Guess what?

#6 The Continum of Mutal Interests

Long after you have broken up with someone, you get interested in what you found boring in her or him while you were invovled. If s/he was an astrologer, in a few years you develop an interest in astrology, painting if s/he was a painter, existential philosphy, if she was an existentialist.

My negative friends tell me all the time, "I don't want to have any negative thoughts." There are a lot of people in NLP whom I irritate grieviously because they feel we should be doggedly optimistic about everything. They have beliefs that flaws, errors and failure do not exist.

My opinion is that they do, and for very good reasons. Without being able to think about what does not exist, be it what we want to avoid, or what we can't do, or what we are not, we could never have a future. Structurally you need the same kind of thinking to be able to distort all our past and present experience and transform it into a hallucination -- or mission, or vision, if you prefer -- of what we want to do next.

Maybe this is just all as simple and yin and yang. You need the shadow to see the light. If everything is dark, you can't see anything. If it's all white light, there is no picture either. "Every picture has its shadow, every portrait has its point of light, " as Joni Mitchell sings.

Yes, I am talking finally about an aesthetic quality, something like that which the Japanese call "wabi," which has been translated as "a flawed detail that creates an elegant whole."

"To many people who see the world through modern sensibilities, beauty is represented by the kind of technological sleekness, smoothness, symmetry, and mass-produced perfection that is usually associated with a sports car or a skyscraper, " writes Howard Rheingold in his book, "They Have A Word for It.

"A highly prized Japanese teacup, which might fetch tens of thousands of dollars from a collector, might be very simple, roughly fashioned, asymmetrical and plainly colored. It would not be uncommon to find a crack. The crack -- the beautiful, distinctive, aesthetic flaw that distinguishes the spirit of the moment in which this object was created from all other moments in eternity-- might indeed be the very feature that would cause a connoisseur to remark; 'This pot has wabi.'"

Cherish your flaws, for each of us, I submit, hold great wabi.

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1 Freud created a therapy where he didn't HAVE to look people in the eyes; they lay on a couch. Carl Rogers originated "Person-Centered Therapy" which gave minimal advice to clients, asking patients to decide on their own objectives. Virgina Satir is a pre-eminent family therapist. Fritz Perls, the father of Gestalt Psychotherapy advocated integrity and coherence. Will Schutz invented the California Encounter Group.

2 The Law of Requisite Variety is a rule in electronics and information science that states that the element in a system that has the most choices controls the rest of the system. In NLP it is a presuppostition that choice is better than no choice.