The delusion of control

One of my realisations this year has been that many people, suffer from the delusion that life is under control. I first pondered this observing the community reaction to the Victorian bushfires of Black Saturday earlier this year. After the usual process of shock, understanding what happened, grief, mourning, mass donations and preparation for rebuilding, (all of which are perfectly logical,) I was struck by the fervent and collective effort that has been put into 'making sure it doesn't happen again'. There is of course the extensive royal commission that is examining all areas of bushfire preparation and management. This has been watched closely by the media looking for someone, anyone, to hold responsible. Vindictive headlines are to be expected but I sense there is something deeper underneath. A belief that if we find the person or the system that let us down then we can fix it then all will be okay and we can go on believing that such a disaster won't befall us again. If we can identify where we lost control then we can regain it without awakening from our delusion.

The truth is, I believe, that there were no significant system failures contributing to this disaster (though we are right to search for them). We have a good system and set of protocols for dealing with fires operated by competent people and they were in action on the days in question. No matter how good our system and our people are though, there will always a come a fire that is beyond their control. Furthermore we should do ourselves a favour and accept this as the way the world is.

Similar community reactions can be seen to a range of other events this past year. For example the attacks on Indian students, the increase of drunken violence in the CBD, the economic crisis. The news reports of all these events all carry an underlying assumption - that the relevant authorities or experts have let the situation get out of their control, resulting in a situation bad enough to make it newsworthy. Various solutions are then proposed by a range of players that would assist to bring the situation within back within our control. The same approach is taken with almost every issue whether it's climate change, terrorism, interest rates or traffic accidents. The solutions are all talked about in terms of eradicating bushfires, terrorism, traffic accidents, economic instability and preventing climate change, when in fact all these things are as good as inevitable and all of them are more than likely to claim human life.

We live in a world of independent actors, this includes not just other people who are beyond both our individual and collective control but also animals, plants and the planet and it's climate (not to mention other celestial bodies like the moon and sun over which we have absolutely no control and upon which we are entirely dependent). In fact I would go so far as to say that control as a concept is really a myth, all we have are degrees of influence. Even our own bodies and minds do things that we don't want them to so how can we say we control them. The reason this can seem a ludicrous concept is that for most of us we are used to having very high degrees of influence over a wide range of things. We also naturally focus our energies on what is easy to influence and work with what we can't easily influence from the back of our minds as much as possible, thus lulling ourselves into the delusion of control.

What's interesting is to consider the origin of this delusion. I can't imagine the peasants of feudal times suffering from it. They must have been well used to kings and barons riding through on a whim or the effects that unpredictable whether and climate would have on their work in the fields. Writing this from Kolkata I imagine the poor of India don't suffer from it either. However I'm sure that neither group would focus their energy fretting about what they can't control or even influence. Instead I imagine they focus on gradually expanding their spheres' of influence in a way that would be analogous to the spheres of the 17th + 18th century colonial powers in the far east. At some point we even invented gods who were very powerful and could control or influence the things humans couldn't but who we hoped and prayed would be influenced by us. So I believe that this delusion has emerged sometime during the process of 'development' since the industrial revolution. In that time we in the west have achieved significantly higher levels of wealth and education and thus dramatically increased our individual influence in terms of both degree and range. We also invented and implemented a thing called democracy - literally 'rule [control?] by the people'. Rule of what exactly? This seems to have given rise to the expectation that politicians can and will fix everything for fear that if they don't we will 'fix' (unelect) them. One could argue that all we really rule is the politicians and then we decide on an interaction by interaction basis how much we let them rule us. And of course we've developed a mass media to perpetuate this mind set that results in occasional 'panic' and sells newspapers etc. Interestingly some of us have done away with gods realising that they don't actually add to our influence.

The irony is that as our individual levels of influence and freedom increase, the world actually becomes more anarchic. This is because there are a greater number of more influential actors which even governments find difficult to control. Thus we are having more frequent debates about security versus civil rights. This is compounded by population growth (which creates yet more independent influential actors) and at the global level the rapid development of the 'third world' leading to an increase in influence for many governments and millions of individuals. Both these forms of growth also place increased strain on resources, ie. fuel, water, land, food etc meaning that over time we will individually need more influence to obtain the same amount of resources. But I digress.

The key question is 'so what if we do suffer from this delusion? what can we do about it?' Well the simple answer is wake up to it and accept it. It doesn't matter that we don't control everything, we never have and never will. The empowered thing to do is to accept it, make appropriate preparations for both foreseeable and unforeseeable uncontrollable situations and get on with everything else. More importantly when some uncontrollable event does affect you don't jump up and down asking 'why didn't anyone warn me?' ' why didn't someone (the government) do something?'. Simply find a way to work through or around or with it, with whatever help you can garnish.

It's okay to be out of control as long as you're not deluded otherwise.