Why would it be that control others is what we want, when we ourselves manage to be free of it?
You have seen it many times, you might even have be the one that acted it out. Expend time, maybe lots of time, not controlling any situation, let alone yours. Being the employee, the lower ranked, the one that takes the instructions, and the orders, from everybody else. Time will pass and if you can bear it you will go up from there, you might even be given (or take) leadership of a group. What will you do first? Give some instructions, of course. Tell somebody what to do, and how to do it. And then checking that they are doing it as you want. Taking control, that is. Exerting control, to be more precise. Exerting control as a way to know that you are not the one under, not any more. Taking control to be sure that you have agency, that you are finally free.
But perhaps we can’t have agency through control. And perhaps that is ok.
Look around you. How much of your life do you actually control? Can you decide the performance of the company that employs you? Can you ensure that the next year so many clients will be ensnared by the PR department? Or could you really influence the course of the next elections? Of the traffic in the highway and your arrival time at your next appointment? And what about global warming, by the way? Can you control that?
You can’t.
You have no control whatsoever of those, neither of so many other matters crucial for your welfare, that is ridiculous to start making a list. It wouldn’t end. And yet, every time you have been given the possibility of controlling something, you have jumped at it, we all have jumped at it. As if that would give us some level of confort, as if knowing that we can actually control something would yield hope of controlling the things that actually matter for each of us. The love of them who love us and their welfare. How many times have we try to control them?
But what if it is the other way around?
How many examples have we seen now of the times that we humans have taken control of something, even if we want to improve it, or steward it, and we have failed so utterly that the thing that we wanted to control ended up destroyed? How many times? Shall we think in the global ecology once more? Can we realize how intensely we have screwed the place where we live in… by trying to control it, to manage it?
Would it no be possible that if we actually relinquish control we would be better off? Would it be possible that relinquishing control we would actually gain some agency?