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Maybe you've heard of metacognition – thinking about thinking, wondering about how you wonder. The term "meta-" originally meant "after”. Aristotle's metaphysics was the book that his followers cataloged as coming after his physics. Nowadays, "meta-" implies recursion, as in metacognition. It means basically “about itself.” By this definition, meta-anxiety would be feeling anxious about feeling anxious, meta-lying would be lying about your lying, meta-singing would be singing about singing, meta-introspection would be introspecting about how you introspect, meta-hypocrisy would be being hypocritical about one’s hypocrisy, and meta-arguing would be arguing about arguing.
Recursion is fun, funny, useful, absurd, and dangerous. Gaining skills in managing meta’s, I’d argue, is the fastest path to practical wisdom, the ability to track the levels as they fly by in thought in conversation. For example, try this multi-level debate:
Six levels and you can easily track the debate(s). Managing meta’s means getting better at marking the levels as they fly by in thought and conversation, for example, counting the six levels here in a debate about debating. People talk about “going meta” as upleveling, stepping out of something to observe it, typically because there’s something unresolved at the lower level. Going meta- on a conversation with a partner would be talking together about how you talk together – basically processing as in this family illustration.
Processing can get tricky. When people say they want to process, you might get wary and understandably so. There are two reasons for that wariness and they’re opposites. First, when someone is about to go meta-, they may be about to pull rank, claiming neutral, last-word authority on what's true about how you're talking, as in, "Stepping out of our interactions to analyze them neutrally and without personal bias, I can see that you’re obviously bullying me."
The other reason is that going meta can feel like the opposite of a last word, like you’re opening not a can of authoritative whup-ass but a can of worms, or rather an infinite Russian doll, hall of mirrors, can of worms. That’s because you can always go meta on anything meta. For example, you can think about thinking but you can also think about thinking about thinking and beyond, upleveling with no limit. With going meta, there is no last word. So, for example, suppose you want to process with a partner and you tell them that you think they’re being a bully. Your partner can then uplevel on your upleveling: “well, stepping outside your accusation that I'm a bully I can see that you're a manipulator.”
Where does it end? Going meta, it doesn’t.
Both are perils with going meta, the sense that someone can get the last word, and the sense that there is no last word because you can always go meta on what you just went meta about. We can get lost or at least very disoriented when going meta. That’s the hall of mirrors effect. You might, therefore, think it’s best to stay at the ground level: Don't process, don't talk about how you're talking, keep it real, keep it grounded. You've probably experienced a tug-of-war in which one person wants to process, to go meta-, to talk about how you're talking and the other wants to stick to the basics.
But which basics? That’s often the conflict that makes someone want to go meta in the first place. In that debate above, someone could add a seventh level pulling rank by saying, “Shame on us (from the outside)! We’re all over the map. Let’s get back to ground zero.
At this point, the debate would turn to debating which level is the ground level. Each box represents a meta-level, and by the end, who can say which level is the nub, the heart of the conflict? Actually all of the parties can. They can all say “let’s stick to the basics” defined as whatever level they want to talk about.
From within a conflict, the hall of mirrors effect can be maddening. Standing outside the conflict, it can be amusing. Going meta is the heart of comedy, everything from the tickle a toddler gets from “peekaboo” (in, not in) to “who’s on first” where who is both the name and about the name, to the dance in most comedy of shifting between public persona and private confession. Or this classic from Monty Python with its arguments about arguments about whether they’re arguing.
Going meta is neither just frustrating nor amusing but life-threatening when it becomes the know-it-all tyrants way of claiming the last word on everything. It’s one thing to engage in hypocrisy. Everyone does it from time to time. To become an absolute hypocrite is simple: Just become meta-hypocritical, a hypocrite about your hypocrisy. “My opponents are all hypocrites. I’m not like them.”
Likewise, we all suffer from confirmation bias, the tendency to dismiss all evidence that doesn’t confirm our assumptions. The wise work to counter their confirmation bias. Tyrants do the opposite, they commit to meta-confirmation bias: "All evidence (I choose to accept) suggests that I don't suffer from confirmation bias like other people. Evidence that I suffer from confirmation bias is just fake news.”
Going meta is a human thing. Lacking language, other organisms can’t do it. Language gives us a way to label levels and talk about them. For example, if you’re having a debate that gets frustrating, you can label it at “our debate” and then talk about it, as in “Our debate is going nowhere.”
From this word-powered capacity of ours, I’ve coined what I call the “Last Word Paradox”: Words afford us way too many possible levels to choose from and thus compel us to claim last words that words make impossible to get.
We’d all like the last word on the “real ground level” that we can’t get because for every last word anyone ever declares, someone else can always uplevel to say what’s wrong with that supposed last word.
This has profound implications for ethics. Though many people try to declare a once-and-for-all last word on what people should do, it can’t be had.
I’m a psycho-proctologist. My ethical research is on what people should never do: Be a butthead. I seek an objective definition of butthead to counter the subjective sense that a butthead is just anyone you happen to butt heads with.
I know that, given the last word paradox, I can’t get to a last word objective definition of a butthead. Still, I think of trying to get one is a fruitful exercise in futility. That’s ironic and meant to be. Irony is a way of signaling that you understand the last-word paradox of being human, that no matter what bedrock you find, the bedrock can, by going meta pull the rug out from under itself. The social scientists I appreciate most tap into irony. It’s a sign to me that they have mad meta skills.
