"Rather, for all objects and experiences, there is a quantity that has optimum value. Above that quantity, the variable becomes toxic. To fall below that value is to be deprived"
About this Quote
Bateson is smuggling a moral philosophy into a scientist’s sentence: the world isn’t organized around “more is better,” but around thresholds. The line has the cool authority of measurement - “quantity,” “optimum,” “variable” - yet it’s really an argument against the modern habit of treating every good as infinitely scalable. He frames excess and scarcity as symmetrical failures, which quietly rebukes both austerity-as-virtue and abundance-as-progress.
The subtext is ecological and cybernetic. Bateson spent his career thinking in feedback loops: how systems regulate themselves, how they break when signals get distorted, how interventions create unintended consequences. “Toxic” here isn’t just chemical. It’s informational (too much noise), social (too much control), economic (too much extraction), even psychological (too much certainty). He’s warning that systems don’t collapse only from deprivation; they collapse from overload, from pushing a variable past the point where it stops stabilizing and starts destabilizing.
Context matters: mid-20th-century science was enthralled by optimization and control, but Bateson was one of the voices insisting that control has a cost, and that “optimal” isn’t a permanent setting you can impose. It’s contingent, relational, tuned to the whole system. The sentence works because it sounds like a neutral law while aiming at a cultural critique: our era’s default setting is maximization, and Bateson is telling you that maximization is just another kind of illiteracy about limits.
The subtext is ecological and cybernetic. Bateson spent his career thinking in feedback loops: how systems regulate themselves, how they break when signals get distorted, how interventions create unintended consequences. “Toxic” here isn’t just chemical. It’s informational (too much noise), social (too much control), economic (too much extraction), even psychological (too much certainty). He’s warning that systems don’t collapse only from deprivation; they collapse from overload, from pushing a variable past the point where it stops stabilizing and starts destabilizing.
Context matters: mid-20th-century science was enthralled by optimization and control, but Bateson was one of the voices insisting that control has a cost, and that “optimal” isn’t a permanent setting you can impose. It’s contingent, relational, tuned to the whole system. The sentence works because it sounds like a neutral law while aiming at a cultural critique: our era’s default setting is maximization, and Bateson is telling you that maximization is just another kind of illiteracy about limits.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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