Science Quote by Gregory Bateson

Everyday speech pretends relationships are simple, linear, and one-directional. Bateson’s line is a small warning label on the whole project of “clear communication”: language pushes us to describe interactions as if one person acts and the other merely receives. Subject-verb-object grammar is built for causation stories - “She provoked him,” “He persuaded her,” “They made me angry” - where responsibility and agency can be pinned like a badge. But real interaction is circular, recursive, and co-produced. People respond to responses; signals change meaning once they’re interpreted; the “cause” is often the system.

Bateson, coming out of mid-century cybernetics, anthropology, and systems thinking, is taking aim at the hidden politics of description. If we can only easily say one side, we end up treating feedback loops as moral verdicts. Couples become prosecutor and defendant. Institutions talk about “bad actors” rather than incentives and contagion. Mental illness gets narrated as a trait in a person instead of a pattern across a family, a workplace, a culture.

The subtext is methodological: beware the sentence that flatters your certainty. Language doesn’t just report interaction; it edits it, turning mutual influence into a tidy plot. Bateson isn’t claiming words are useless, but that they’re biased toward blaming, crediting, and isolating, which is exactly what a systems view tries to undo. The quote works because it exposes a cognitive trap hidden in plain grammar: the world is relational; our nouns keep trying to make it solitary.