Scripts

Alice: I’m about to teach a class on derivatives. What do you recommend?

Bob: I can give you the script of my last calculus class. All you have to do is say the words I said, and you’ll be fine.

Alice: The students won’t like that – what if they ask questions? I won’t be able to answer the questions without going outside of your script.

Bob: Yeah, but at least the students will know that you’re following a set pattern. They can trust that your lecture is not too bad.

Alice: It also won’t be too good! The students want a teacher who’s adaptable, not scripted.

Bob: It doesn’t pay to be too adaptable, either. I remember meeting one teacher who didn’t plan their lesson at all – they just showed up and totally improvised.

Alice: Well that’s not what I’m going to do. I want the students to trust that I’ve thought out my lesson plan and I want to be adaptable.

Bob: Some students will perceive adaptation, any deviations from your lesson plan, as a sign of weakness or disorganization.

Alice: I don’t have to please those students. I think I can be adaptable and trustworthy at the same time. I agree that that can be hard.

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The three rivers – scripts, rescripts, and descripting – suggest three approaches to life. In reality, one purely chooses one of these approaches over the others.

In a scripted approach, we choose a fixed pattern of behavior, often to avert some feared outcome (the students will hate the lecture.)

In an adaptable approach, we allow ourselves to collaborate or renegotiate our scripts – but we remain scripted. This approach is inspired by rescripting.

Scriptlessness means approaching life without a set list of rules – like Jazz improvisation, it means making new choices in each moment rather than following a fixed pattern. This approach is inspired by descripting.

Most people are scripted about some things and adaptable or scriptless about others. A person who is scriptless about everything is a chaotic mess – like the teacher who showed up to class with no lesson plan. A person who is scripted about everything is a mindless conformist – like Alice would be if she exactly duplicated Bob’s lesson. The mindless conformist can be trusted to do certain things, mindlessly, but doesn’t always do the right thing. The purely adaptable person wants to have endless meetings to discuss how to adjust all scripts – including the scripts about how to have the meetings. The chaotic mess person tries to do the appropriate thing in different situations, but not reliably so.

People tend to be more scriptless about topics they know a great deal about. If Alice knows calculus teaching extremely well – and has done it for decades – then she might be able to “wing it.”

One problem happens when we feel that other people should change and get away from their script, while the other person feels that they cannot change and need their script – as matter of survival. This can happen if we belong to different traditions.

For example, suppose one calculus teacher comes from a tradition where students are supposed to ask guided questions in class, leading to an exchange with scripted and unscripted elements: the guidelines are scripted, the questions unscripted. Another calculus teacher has questions that are guided in a different way – the groupwork, rather than the class questions, are guided. Each teacher says to the other: give up your confining scripts! Let go of these narrow rules! Be more like me! But each teacher also says: I need my scripts to survive as a teacher.

There is no easy answer to this situation. Do the teachers really need their scripts to survive? It’s hard to say without knowing more about their situation.

Differing traditions of scriptlessness

Alice: Teaching is the most unscripted profession in the world. You never know what’s going to happen on any given day. One time, a student threw paper airplanes that hit me while I was lecturing!

Carl: That’s nothing! Computer programming, now that’s the most unscripted profession. There are all kinds of bugs you have to deal with. One time, there was a bug that couldn’t be reproduced without running a certain program for two weeks! That was a mess.

Alice: But computer programmers just sit in a chair all day. Scripted! If you’d just stand up and walk around sometimes, you’d do better.

Carl: But teachers just use the same textbook every year. Scripted! If you’d just read more books, like I do, you’d do better.

Alice [getting angrier]: But computer programmers type the same exact commands again and again. “Print, list, DataFrame.” Scripted!

Carl [getting angrier]: But teachers grade on the same curve again and again every year. A, B, C. Scripted!

(Etc.)

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One essential problem, then, comes from people having different traditions of scriptlessness. In each tradition, a balance between scriptedness and scriptlessness is desired, but in each, there is a slightly different setup, and a new set of words has to be learned. A teacher and a computer programmer enact scriptedness and scriptlessness in different ways.

Turning to philosophy, psychology, and religion, we can find the same tension between different traditions. Here is a piece that is, admittedly, a bit unfair toward both Buddhism and psychotherapy, but that reflects some inner turmoil that I’ve felt about reconciling the two traditions in my own life.

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Therapist: The most important thing is to help our clients to develop secure attachment. That’s an unscripted way of interaction in which the client is flexible or adaptable. They can get emotionally closer or farther to others – to meet the needs of the situation. Anxiously attached people are more scripted; they can only approach others, emotionally. Avoidantly attached people only know how to flee others, self-protectively.

Buddhist: How scripted of you! You and your categories: “secure,” “anxious,” “avoidant.” In Buddhism, we’re so unscripted that we don’t even recognize a “self.” The self is just a bundle of scripts, and once those scripts have been released, the self is gone. We call this Anatta or no-self.

Therapist: And why do you want to get to no-self?

Buddhist: To escape the cycle of rebirth and suffering.

Therapist: Oh, so you think life is always suffering! How scripted. In therapy, we recognize a variety of emotions: happy, sad, angry, afraid. It sounds like you’ve decided to focus on the negative emotions as if they alone are the meaning of existence. How limiting!

Buddhist: It’s not limiting, and we don’t focus on the negative. We actually learn that escaping suffering can involve accepting suffering.

[Etc.]

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Here are some examples, some of which I know well and some I don’t. In this case, I am emphasizing the descripting aspect of each tradition, without clearly differentiating scripting from rescripting. I think that descripting rarely makes that distinction; that is, the Tao Te Ching does not clearly distinguish between Legalist scripts (power, fear) and Confucian rescripts (righteousness) – they are both scripts. I wonder if there is a sense for Taoists that if we side wholly with Confucianism (which is closer to us in spirit) then we will simply be absorbed by Confucianism.

I have taken a few examples partly from ChatGPT / the internet, based on no personal experience; specifically: Lacan and Csíkszentmihályi. It’s not necessary to process every entry in this table – just to get a sense of how the scripted / scriptless pattern is everywhere on religion, psychology, and philosophy.

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Tradition / author	“Scriptless / descripting”	“Scripted”	Unscripted experience
Attachment Theory	Secure	Insecure	Relationships
Terror Management Theory	“The Hard Place” – accepting uncertainty	“The Rock” – conformity and status	Meaning
Lacan	The Real	The Symbolic	Desire
Zen Buddhism	Nirvana, No Self	Samsara, clinging	Awareness
Heidegger	Authenticity	The They	Being
Feminism	Liberation / Equality	Patriarchy	Relationships, work
Meisner technique	Improvisation	Scripted theater	Acting
Sartre	Existence	Essence	Freedom. Choice
Martin Buber	I-Thou	I-It	Relationships
Christian mysticism	Agape / grace / spirit	The world / the body	Communion with God
Sarah Peyton	Resonance	Contract	Relationship with Self
Plato	Aporia	Laws	Truth / the good
Chinese philosophy	Taoism	Confucianism	The Tao
Old Testament	Ecclesiastes, Job	Deuteronomy	Communion with God
Musical performance / Csíkszentmihályi	Flow	Anxiety / apathy	Intrinsic reward

In each case you have to learn a language about scriptlessness, and you consider anyone who doesn’t know your language of scriptlessness to be obviously scripted – much as the Buddhist and the therapist focused on each other’s scripts and didn’t recognize one another’s scriptlessness

There is always some mild judgment toward people who are scripted. To take some examples (feel free to consider other examples if you’re unfamiliar with these): attachment theory prefers securely attached people; Lacan doesn’t really like people who live entirely in the scripted “Symbolic” (at least, in my understanding); Feminists don’t like people who are trapped in patriarchy. Martin Buber recognizes that I-It is inescapable – and yet, he seems to prefer people who strive for I-Thou.

But since we have different languages for talking about scriptedness, we may not recognize the scriptlessness in one another, simply because we don’t use the same words. We may feel compelled to “prove” our scriptlessness by explaining our languages to one another – but then these languages are even more likely to become scripts.

In some sense, most of the people we view as “scripted” are people who are following scripts about how to de-script themselves; but their scripts are different from ours. That is, as above, a Buddhist may think that an attachment theorist is scripted, while the attachment theorist thinks the Buddhist is scripted.