“The centre cannot hold,” Yeats warned. The line has been quoted so often it risks becoming a cliché. But the signs are everywhere: climate-fuelled disasters, rising authoritarianism, institutional paralysis, speculative bubbles, breached ecological thresholds, widening inequality, social fabrics fraying. The story seems clear. The centre is collapsing. The peripheries are revolting. The system is coming undone.
Or is it?
Perhaps the real danger is not collapse, but entrapment. That through its own breakdown, the system is tightening. Every step forward pulls us deeper into the quagmire, like walking through soft mud, where resistance and strength only accelerates the sinking. And it feels as if the institutions of the status quo are not faltering but adapting and reinforcing the system’s immunity, just when they seem most exposed.
To understand what holds everything in place (even as things fall apart) the concept of the double bind is a helpful starting point.
The term comes from anthropologist and systems thinker Gregory Bateson. He used it to describe situations where all available choices contradict one another. No matter what you do, you lose. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. You’re punished for acting. You’re punished for not acting. And you’re even punished for noticing the contradiction itself. In a classic double bind, there is no safe way out because the logic of the system loops back on itself. You are trapped by external constraints, but also by the very structure of meaning you’ve internalized. Bateson first explored this in family dynamics and communication, but the pattern extends far beyond psychology.
The current global condition might be called the mother of all double binds. If growth halts, economies stall, jobs disappear, safety nets shrink, unrest spreads. If growth continues, emissions rise, ecosystems unravel, planetary boundaries are breached. Each direction opens into deeper risk. Each attempted solution reinforces the terms of the crisis. The bind tightens.
But it gets worse. Because the moment you try to resolve that ecological-economic contradiction through politics, you hit a third wall: political legitimacy. Ecological limits demand deep change. Economic systems depend on continued growth. Democratic politics punishes those who attempt systemic transformation.
This is the triple bind: three interlocking constraints, each pulling against the others. Pull one strand, and the others pull tighter. Slow down the economy? Unrest spreads. Push too hard on emissions? Growth falters. Bring more long-term thinking into politics? Backlash surges. Trust erodes. And the more you struggle, the tighter the trap becomes.
Let’s look at some examples of triple binds, where ecological limits, economic pressures, and political constraints reinforce one another.
Take carbon offsets. They promise ecological repair while sustaining economic growth and political palatability. But the logic stays the same: emit here, compensate there, keep the system running. The question becomes how to pollute responsibly, not how to change the terms of the relationship.
Or look at forests. In Sweden and elsewhere, they are vital for biodiversity, carbon storage, and cultural meaning, but also for jobs, exports, and regional economies, and for some agrarian political parties. The political risk of regulating the forestry industry is real. So the bind persists: protect too little and ecosystems unravel; protect too much and social contracts fray.
The same pattern appears in climate politics. Propose bold ecological reforms and legitimacy weakens, populist backlash surges, trust erodes, elections are lost. Go slowly to preserve consensus, and the crisis outpaces response. Democratic systems, designed for short-term feedback, struggle to act on long-term risks.
In each case, the more you pull on one strand, the tighter the others become. This is what makes a triple bind so enduring. It erodes meaning, rather than blocking action. Whichever choice you consider, it feels compromised. Every path takes you back into the logic that created the crisis. And the more urgently you try to move, the more entangled you become.
Some would prefer to ease the pressure by ignoring one of the strands. They say the planetary crisis is exaggerated, or that economic growth no longer matters, or that democracy should be put on hold until the other problems are solved. But these are fallacies. Each bind is real, each carries truths that cannot be suspended. Ecological stability, economic security, and democratic legitimacy are all essential, and it is precisely their coexistence that makes this moment so difficult. To weaken or deny one may actually lead to deepening the predicament.
Bateson was clear: the way out of a double or triple bind is not through better choices within the frame, but through stepping outside it. The only way out is not forward, but sideways, into a different frame. Don’t look for a better answer, ask a different kind of question. Shift levels: from problem-solving to pattern-seeing, from trying to win inside the logic to noticing how the logic itself holds the bind in place. A bind loosens when it is seen differently, when we begin to ask, what story is shaping the question?
In this sense, the triple bind cannot be untied by strategy. It softens only when the frame itself is questioned, when the focus shifts from control to relationship.
At some point, the realization sets in that the system cannot be outplayed. It adapts to resistance, and absorbs critique. Báyò Akomolafe puts it like this:
“When it dawns on us, through cracks in the algorithm, that our rage against the machine is an extension of the machine’s operations, we’d have entered a strange place of fugitive excess: neither beyond the machine nor reducible to it. And that, to me, is where new forms of life emerge from.”
That might be the turning point. The bind cannot be solved. But it can be outgrown. Because beneath it all, something stirs. The slow pulse of the undergrowth, where roots tangle, where mycelium weaves, where discarded things begin to compost and nourish what might come next. Or in the words of Daniel Quinn, “a million new beginnings.”
With many thanks to my friend Joe Ross for great conversations on how the double bind doubles down.
Beautiful explication of the problem. Would you give something more concrete about what stepping outside the bind looks like in your next post? Small thing — the reason you are thanking Anders Wijkman got dropped at the end.