There is a lot going on in the world right now, so much that it is a bit tough to keep up. We’ve been meditating on how the concept of Control is subtly threaded through all of this. Specifically the illusion of control that attracts so many people and destroys so much.
Change
The world is changing, that’s pretty easy to see at the moment, but it’s always happening. Our ego minds protect us from having to directly account for that change using the illusion of control.
We we say “control” here we mean it at essentially any level you can define that word. It’s control of your larger circumstances in life, which you don’t have. It’s control of the people around you, which you don’t have. But it’s also the small things, the illusion that your hand moves because you wanted it to – that’s also a lie you tell yourself.
Brain Mechanisms Underlying Automatic and Unconscious Control of Motor Action. This wonderfully named paper from 2012 showed us the truth, we are not in control. In fact the “decision” to move your hand is made unconsciously, shortly before your ego crafts a conscious lie for why you made that decision.
Maybe you really wanted to read that book so you picked it up right? The study shows that this is categorically un true. No matter how badly you believe it, it is a lie. It is the lie your conscious ego told you to keep you believing that you are in control of your own life.
Circumstance
Another area where it is trivially easy to disprove “control” is in the life circumstances we find ourselves in. No matter what they are, no matter how terrible or how amazing, we will always have a plausible reason for how being in this circumstance was somehow our choice, or the result of choices we made. If we don’t believe either of those than we feel that our circumstances are “not fair” because we didn’t control them.
In a positive circumstance, let’s say you got very lucky and started at a tech company before it went public and then made a ton of money. That’s amazing! You got very lucky… right? You were lucky, we mean you had 0 control of the executive decisions made at the company. You didn’t even know it was for sale until after the sale was announced…
So why does every rich person claim that their circumstance is the result of their hard work, good decision making and determination? So rarely do we get the simple and true “I got lucky” answer.
That’s been studied too, at the University of Irvine. By using a version of Monopoly that had been secretly rigged to choose the winner ahead of time the researchers found that the “winners” would extoll the virtues of their decision making, even though it had no bearing on the outcome.
In many ways we find this pattern to be a special form of the well known Dunning-Kruger effect. The lucky person got wealthy so they assume that they know all there is to know about getting wealthy. The worst part of this is that normal regular people will believe it! They’ll actually listen to the advice of the person who just happened to roll a 12 in monopoly like that advice could possibly help them roll their own dice.
Society
The 3rd main way that this illusion plays out in our world is our desire to control other people. We see this appearing everywhere, entire governments are currently operating on the basis that it is possible to control a segment of the population. It’s not, we already learned that a few times in history, but it seems we must learn it again.
Why does this happen? We talked about the Dunning-Kruger side of this problem where a person lucks their way into some form of success and then believes themselves an expert and starts to assume that they will repeat that luck in everything they try – again because they thought it was skill.
There is another side to this though. People often fall back on control when they are afraid. “Control” is the opposite to “Fear”. We are afraid of things we cannot control, the instant we gain control over the thing we no longer fear it. That’s true of spiders in our house, it’s also true of systemic racism within a society.
So we’re about to see this problem play out on a world wide scale, again. Will 1 person somehow manage to gain absolute control over the entire world and finally stem that nagging fear in the back of their head? Or will the world descend into decades of war again. Spoiler alert, it’s going to be the war thing, it’s always the war thing.
Relationships
We wanted to touch on one final, extra, point on control. You’ve probably heard the therapy term “Control Issues”. This is a way to describe a person who is living in fear and lashing out with control to try and ease that fear.
One way to experiment with this in a relatively safe way is to play a co-operative video game with your other person, maybe tower defense. By the mid-game things will start getting a little tense, that’s the nature of the game after all.
When things get tense in the game – do you start working together and coming up with a plan that both people had input on? Even if it isn’t the best plan, it’s a plan that both people can get behind, ride or die together right? Or… did one person seize control and start making all the decisions for both players to the point you could just hand them your controller and walk away?
If the later is happening then there are control issues in that relationship that should be worked on. They likely appear in other ways that are more damaging and build resentment over time.
A particularly toxic aspect of this behavior pattern is that the person who seized control will need to point out each mistake that the other person makes. This is crucial to prove they deserve to be in control, they must be “better” than the other person. The other side of that is they will fail to notice or admit to any of their own mistakes. This is the ego-reinforced Illusion of Control at play again.
If you are having trouble with that analogy at a personal level, take it back up to the societal level cause it works the same way there. The part of society trying to control the other part is going to mercilessly harp on any error the other side makes and generalize it while explaining away any transgression from their side. This double edged sword is controls favorite weapon.
In reality two people working together will always beat a team where one person has seized absolute control. Two heads are better than one right? Same works at the societal level too, we’re better when we work together.
Excuses
To wrap things up we wanted to go over some of the excuses people use for this behavior. We’ve used these ourselves in the past so it’s nothing bad or weird, this is all completely normal. It’s still up to us to work to rise above it.
If I don’t take control nothing will happen
This excuse is born out of frustration from a situation that appears to be static. As we know from experience, nothing is really static. If we’re perceiving our circumstances in that way, the problem is in the perception.
Taking control and re-arranging things will certainly give you the feeling like “things are happening!”. You might feel better, and in that sense it isn’t always a bad coping mechanism. However if you are in a circumstance with another person make sure you check in with them before assuming your perception of the circumstance is correct.
I’m the only competent one here
Another common trap to fall into. It’s just the Dunnig-Kruger effect manifest in your mind. You are again perceiving the circumstance incorrectly because it isn’t meeting your personal desires.
The other people around you are in fact just as competent as you, if not more so in specific areas. They have different motivations and goals than you do. That’s what you are perceiving as “incompetence”, you desire them to work towards your goals but they aren’t – so obviously they don’t know what they are doing.
Have you checked in with these people? What are their goals? If you can’t truly describe their goals in a way that they would honestly agree with, then what right do you have to assume control over them?
My goals are more important
This is so rarely actually the way you will admit this excuse is being used, but it’s always being used this way. You’ll say something like “My goals are bettering our lives in the future, their goals are just wasting time”. Maybe the other person is playing video games and you are working hard on a project you believe will earn a lot of money.
It’s a perception problem again. It is not the case that your goals are more important, or more likely to bring about a better outcome. As we discussed earlier you have 0 control over the circumstances of your life, so assuming you can somehow use that non-control to better them is foolish.
The other person is not wasting time. Check in with them and try to understand things from their perspective. You might learn something that could help you reach your goals faster.
We’re better when we work together.
The Illusion of Control
So there we have it, a brief dive into the idea of control and why you should never seek it out. This world is changing and there is nothing you can do about it. Annica, or impermanence, is the Buddhas first teaching, that wasn’t an accident.
The next time you try to stop something from changing with “control”, maybe consider why you thought that was going to work? Because it is not going to work, and it’s probably going to hurt you or someone else.
Leave a Reply