The Law of the Necessity of Opposites
By Bryan Van der Horst
Practical paradoxes for life, and other notes on the illusion of failure.
Einstein failed his algebra exams. Marilyn Monroe didn’t think she was beautiful. Freud felt uncomfortable making eye contact. Carl Rogers couldn’t stand being told what to do. Was Virginia Satir ever married, and did she have children? Fritz Perls often acted inconsistently. Will Schutz was bored at seminars. Richard Bandler and John Grinder could build rapport with anyone—except…1
When the gods want to send an important message to people, it seems they often choose messengers full of flaws. Maybe it’s their way of making sure people don’t confuse the message with the messenger.
But what’s more irritating than someone who doesn’t practice what they preach? And what’s more enchanting than discovering that a great person is, in fact, a giant with feet of clay? (Translator’s note: The Colossus of Rhodes, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, was a statue with clay feet. The statue collapsed because the clay feet couldn’t support its weight.) What can make us more miserable than facing our own shortcomings?
Oh, imperfect human, be proud of your weakness! I think you’ve been misinformed. We all need our flaws, our limited mental abilities, our insecurities, because all of these play a special role. I call this the Law of Necessary Variety.2
I’m not the first to notice that people teach what they themselves want or need to learn. Who would be interested in teaching, researching, or working in a field they’ve already mastered completely?
There’s a saying: “Those who know, do; those who don’t, teach.” This is a comment on modeling geniuses. How many geniuses have left their talents unstudied and unexplained? One of the eternal refrains in NLP folklore is that when a talented person explains their actions, it usually has little to do with what they actually do. The structure of one’s own mastery is often invisible to its owner.
How many body-oriented therapists have back problems? How many psychiatrists are a little crazy? How many lawyers are criminals? Tongue-tied writers? Sick doctors? Insecure leaders?
According to the Law of the Necessity of Opposites, this is exactly how it should be. Think about it: if you knew absolutely everything about a field, had experienced it all, or were already interested in everything, you’d hardly even know what you know. It would be part of you, like water to a fish or air to a bird. You’d have no motivation to learn anything.
If you were perfectly balanced, you’d never think of studying clinical psychology. If you could communicate flawlessly, you wouldn’t be interested in learning how to communicate better.
At some point in your life, you decided you had a flaw, a shortcoming, something unreliable, a weakness, a missed opportunity, a conflicting desire, or unrequited love. Wonderful! Cherish your flaws! That’s the very experience that points you in the direction you need to go, what you need to learn. Without these milestones, we’d never be able to navigate life, and there would be no thirst for knowledge or creativity.
All the most creative periods in history have one thing in common: the gods were all too human. The Greeks and Romans imagined their creators as limited, cheating, impulsive, and despotic. As soon as people started seeing gods as invisible, all-knowing, all-powerful, and morally infallible—bam, the Dark Ages descended. Renaissance periods are marked by the humanity of characters, their ability to fail, their imperfections, mistakes, and incapacity. The human touch is more of a clumsy groping than a firm grip.
In the last two decades, we’ve seen many gurus toppled because they were deemed mentally unfit. Awareness leader Werner Erhard, Swami Muktananda, Zen master Richard Baker Roshi—even our own fearless NLP founders have been periodically suspected of lacking moral or marital stability.
I’m not excusing any of the above behaviors, nor am I justifying abuse of people’s trust. Personally, I believe violence is unacceptable, but I sometimes lose my temper too. I’m simply addressing the tendency to discredit an entire discipline because a few imperfect people did something wrong.
In life, I’ve learned one thing: you can find flaws in anyone. Somewhere in the world, someone probably thinks the Dalai Lama giggles too much, or Mother Teresa is too picky. Life isn’t about finding flaws, but about finding the good in people or directions—that seems to be the real human task.
Many of us feel like we’re failing at this task. Old-school NLP would call this failure a personal fiction. You’ve probably never heard of a dog failing at being a dog. A cat would never think it could fail at being a cat. There’s probably no plant, single-celled organism, or animal that considers anything in its life a failure. Sure, they experience setbacks and disappointments. But failure? I suspect that in nature, organisms simply accept their world as a continuous feedback loop about what to do next.
I think all our mistakes and flaws work for us in the same way—not just as information about what to do next, but also where to go, what to learn, and even what to do professionally.
Martin Heidegger, the existentialist philosopher, believed that mistakes—or as he called them, “accidents”—are what create reality. His theory of ontology suggests that entities come into being through “unreadiness for something… the gift of powerlessness…” which turns “the opaque into the transparent” in life, breaking down common reality and opening up new breakthroughs.
Please note, I’m not promoting what we call “avoidance strategies.” You can navigate life either toward your goals or away from negative consequences you want to avoid. While it’s true that in NLP we try to guide people toward their goals—toward what exists, not what doesn’t—philosopher-fisherman Eric Hoffer wrote: “You never get enough of what you really don’t want.” If your goal is “not to be poor,” you could have millions and still not get what you don’t want.
I’m trying to encourage compassion and understanding for people who don’t always practice what they preach—including you. And definitely including me. It seems we all judge ourselves too harshly. Maybe we can also show some compassion to national NLP organizations. The Law of the Necessity of Opposites (LNO) says: the most disorganized people end up running organizations.
Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ilya Prigogine claims in his “Theory of Dissipative Systems” that all living (energy-dissipating) systems tend to approach a point of chaos and breakdown before leaping to a new level of organization.
The Law of the Necessity of Opposites has complex consequences. In spiritual traditions, you might hear: “See it and be it.” What could bring us more joy than discovering our own weakness in others?
If you notice someone behaving badly, be careful. Have you ever noticed that when you criticize someone, you suddenly find yourself doing the same thing 30 minutes later? It’s physics: if you have no experience with what disgusts you, you can’t notice it in others. It’s completely inexplicable. I’m not trying to moralize, but to offer a new way to look at our personal “defects.”
I’m not entirely sure how to apply the Law of the Necessity of Opposites to organizations, but I do know how it applies to more limited human relationships. For example, how people fall in love. I humbly offer my thoughts on applying the law to personal relationships:
#1 The First Safety Indicator
How do you know you’re safe in a relationship? You know the other person feels safe when they start to destroy or downplay the very qualities in you that first attracted them.
#2 The Nature of Behavioral Change
You’ll get what you want from your beloved. He or she will learn to think, feel, and act differently. Your lover will make exactly the behavioral changes you always wanted: from stopping nose-picking to developing an interest in UFOs or practicing Kama Sutra techniques—with their next partner.
#3 The Rule of Behavioral Immunity and Corresponding Karma
“They’ll never do that to me.” Oh yes, they will. Did you meet her at a party where she was looking to meet someone? That’s probably how you’ll break up. If someone tells you they’re a bad person, believe them. It’s not that they’re truly bad, just believe they have behaviors that will repeat. They know themselves better than you do.
#4 The Paradox of Attraction Imprints
You marry someone who reminds you of the mother or father you didn’t love. You’ll probably act the same way and do the opposite with someone else who matters to you. My friend Marie asked her boyfriend, “Did you ever have problems with your mother?” “Yes,” he said. “You’re just like her!”
#5 The Law of Maximum Disgust
You display in yourself exactly what you don’t want to see in others. You hate when someone yells at you: “Could you speak up a little?” Guess what happens next?
#6 The Series of Mutual Interests
Long after you break up with someone, you start to get interested in what used to annoy you about them. If your partner was into astrology, years later you might suddenly get interested in astrology or painting if they were an artist, or existential philosophy if that was their thing.
My false friends always told me, “I don’t want to have negative thoughts.” There are plenty of NLPers who find me irritating because they think we should always be optimistic about everything. They believe flaws, mistakes, and failures don’t exist.
In my opinion, they do exist and are very useful. If we couldn’t think about what doesn’t exist, or about situations we want to avoid, we’d never move toward the future. You need this kind of thinking to transform your past and present experience into something imagined—a mission, a vision, and so on, in other words, what you want to do next.
Maybe it’s as simple as Yin and Yang. To see the light, you need shadow. If everything is dark, you see nothing. If everything is flooded with white light, you also see nothing. “Every picture has its shadow, every portrait is a play of light and shade,” sings Joni Mitchell.
In conclusion, let me mention the Japanese aesthetic quality called “wabi,” which translates as “a flaw that creates an elegant whole.”
“For many people who see the world through modern ideas of emotion, beauty is perceived as technological gloss, smoothness, symmetry, perfection, mass-produced, usually associated with a sports car or skyscraper,” writes Howard Rheingold in his book They Have a World for It.
“Highly valued Japanese tea cups, which can fetch tens of thousands of dollars from collectors, may be very simple, roughly made, asymmetrical, or primitively painted. It’s not unusual to find a crack in them. The crack is a beautiful, distinctive, aesthetic flaw, capturing the spirit of the moment when the object was created, setting it apart from all other moments in eternity. Maybe that’s the very feature that makes a collector exclaim: ‘This cup has wabi!’”
Cherish your flaws: I believe each of us has our own great wabi.
1Freud created a therapy where he didn’t have to look people in the eye: they lay on a couch. Carl Rogers started “Client-Centered Therapy,” giving clients minimal advice and asking them to make decisions from their own reality. Virginia Satir was a famous family therapist. Fritz Perls, founder of Gestalt therapy, advocated for wholeness and logic. Will Schutz created the “California Encounter” group (Alcoholics Anonymous).
2The Law of Necessary Variety is a rule in electronics and automation stating that the most flexible element of a system controls the whole system. In NLP, it’s the presupposition that having choices is better than having none.