CONTROL

Humans are obsessed with control. We say we want to “keep things under control”. We try to “control” inflation, erosion, traffic, crowds, development, and even our selves. Much of our efforts are spent in trying to control the forces of nature. But we have been successful enough that we sometimes think we have control.

However, it is impossible to control anything, if we refuse to identify, and set, the limits of the extremes. So while we use the word, we have no real intent. If one cannot limit the cause, one cannot limit the effect. And humans refuse to limit spending, borrowing, cars, houses, or just about anything else, even ourselves. We wish to control the forces of nature, but not limit human nature.

For whatever reason, humans have taken control mostly through violent means. How much of our society depends on explosions? We use the concept in mines, building highways, weapons, inside internal combustion engines, even fighting fires. And wherever there is energy there is always the risk of explosion. We even experience “boom and bust” economic cycles. The industrial revolution could be called the explosion revolution.

When something is very complex we generally assume there must be some single cause. Early scientists discovered a law that for every action there must be an opposite and equal reaction. While this appears to be true, it has led mankind to believe that there must always be central control. In fact, in nature, control is almost always decentralized. But humans have difficulty seeing how order can arise spontaneously from disorder, even though it appears to happen over and over again.

Thus we continuously try to control the world with central control, when all of nature testifies that it is not possible. Nature and human nature are not the same thing.