"D: Go on about Alice and don’t be silly, Daddy.
F: Yes, we were talking about flamingos. The point is the man who wrote Alice was thinking about the same things that we are. And he amused himself with little Alice by imagining a game of croquet that would be all muddle, just absolute muddle. So he said they should use flamingos as mallets because the flamingos would bend their necks so the player wouldn’t know even whether his mallet would hit the ball or how it would hit the ball.
D: Anyhow the ball might walk away of its own accord because it was a hedgehog.
F: That’s right. So that it’s all so muddled that nobody can tell at all what’s going to happen.
D: And the hoops walked around, too, because they were soldiers.
F: That’s right - everything could move and nobody could tell it how to move.
D: Did everything have to be alive so as to make a complete muddle?
F: No - he could have made it a muddle by . . . no I suppose you’re right. That’s interesting. Yes, it had to be that way. Wait a minute. It’s curious but you’re right. Because if he’d muddled things any other way, the players could have learned how to deal with the muddling detail. I mean, suppose the croquet lawn was bumpy or the balls were a funny shape, or the heads of the mallets just wobbly instead of being alive, then the people could still learn and the game would only be more difficult - it wouldn’t be impossible. I wouldn’t have expected that.
D: Wouldn’t you, Daddy? I would have. That seems natural to me.
F: Natural? Sure - natural enough. But I would not have expected it to work that way.
D: Why not? That’s what I would have expected.
F: Yes. But this is the thing I would have expected. That animals, which are themselves able to see things ahead would act on what they think is going to happen - a cat can catch a mouse by jumping to land where the mouse will probably be when she has completed her jump - but it’s just the fact that animals are capable of seeing ahead and learning that makes them the only really nonpredictable things in the world. To think that we try to make laws as though people were quite regular and predictable.
D: Or do they make laws just because people are not predictable, and the people who make the laws wish the other people were predictable?
E: Yes, I suppose so."
Informally excerpted from Gregory Bateson’s “Metalogues”, as they appear in Steps to An Ecology of Mind