"The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change; until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds"
About this Quote
Laing’s sentence is a trap that snaps shut only after you’ve walked into it. It starts with a simple, almost polite observation about limits, then pivots into the more unsettling claim: the real prison isn’t what we don’t know, it’s what we don’t register as missing. That second-order blind spot - failing to notice that we fail to notice - is where the quote gets its bite. He’s not describing ignorance; he’s describing a self-sealing system. The mind edits reality, then hides the fact that it’s editing.
The intent is quietly insurgent. Laing, writing against mid-century psychiatry’s confidence in labels and “objective” diagnoses, was obsessed with how families, institutions, and clinicians mistake their own assumptions for neutral reality. If your categories are invisible to you, they feel like nature. That’s why the line about change lands with such fatalism: you can’t reform a worldview you can’t perceive as a worldview.
Subtext: pay attention to your attention. Laing implies that what we call “choice” is often just behavior routed through unnoticed filters - social scripts, defensive habits, professional orthodoxies. The quote’s recursive structure performs its argument: it makes you loop back, reread, catch yourself missing something, and in that small stumble you experience the point.
Context matters here. Coming out of the anti-psychiatry moment, Laing isn’t offering a self-help mantra; he’s issuing a warning about power. Whoever gets to define what is “noticed” - sanity, normality, disorder - gets to define the limits of other people’s lives.
The intent is quietly insurgent. Laing, writing against mid-century psychiatry’s confidence in labels and “objective” diagnoses, was obsessed with how families, institutions, and clinicians mistake their own assumptions for neutral reality. If your categories are invisible to you, they feel like nature. That’s why the line about change lands with such fatalism: you can’t reform a worldview you can’t perceive as a worldview.
Subtext: pay attention to your attention. Laing implies that what we call “choice” is often just behavior routed through unnoticed filters - social scripts, defensive habits, professional orthodoxies. The quote’s recursive structure performs its argument: it makes you loop back, reread, catch yourself missing something, and in that small stumble you experience the point.
Context matters here. Coming out of the anti-psychiatry moment, Laing isn’t offering a self-help mantra; he’s issuing a warning about power. Whoever gets to define what is “noticed” - sanity, normality, disorder - gets to define the limits of other people’s lives.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
|---|---|
| Source | R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience (1967). Frequently cited source for the line beginning “The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice…”. |
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