Our Addiction to Control Is Enslaving Us

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From Uplift: “As a sustainability philosopher and social engineer, I spend much of my time contemplating the root of our unsustainable culture and civilisation. I believe that war, ecocide, and extreme inequality all result from the felt experience of separation from the Universe and everything else in it . . .

If you feel separate from a purposeless, objective, and deterministic Universe, then you are likely to experience life from a perspective of fear. You probably [feel] that nothing else in the Universe cares whether you exist or not and it is up to you alone to ensure your own survival. Everything else in the Universe is also doing their best to ensure their own survival and what results is a world where survival belongs to the fittest. This is the default worldview of modern society that is reinforced by our government, culture, media, school, medicine, sports, religion, and every other major institution of our time.

Stemming from this fear and the [feeling of] a separate self is the desire to protect ourselves by controlling the external, perceived-to-be-hostile world . . .

When we feel separate from the world, we try to compensate for our lost sense of belonging by owning it. The more of it we own, the more of it we bring under our control, and the more secure we [think we will] feel.

We are addicted to control

We control and dominate our fellow animals ā€“ our brothers and sisters ā€“ mostly to meet human desires. We destroy our forests ā€“ the lungs of our planet ā€“ to make room for our controlled animals to graze. We attempt to control human behavior through a system of laws backed by punishment, even prohibiting under threat of imprisonment what people can put inside their own bodies. It is hoped that by controlling human genes, we will finally have the tools to eradicate disease, to engineer pest and drought resistant monocultures, and possibly even to design the physical and emotional features of your future children . . . All of these attempts to control the world we call ‘progress.’ Left unsaid is the subject of this particular ‘progress,’ which is our quest to control the Universe.

Individually, we also desire to control our immediate surroundings and circumstances to the extent possible. We want to control how other people perceive us. We want to control our childrenā€™s behavior. We want to control our homes and the activities that take place there so we make ‘house rules’ that others must follow. We have a desire to control our appearance to look a certain way. On both the personal and collective levels, control is the tool of the separate self to shape the world in a way that will be perceived to be safer and more secure.

Control creates boredom

. . .Ā Part of the problem with the world weā€™ve created is that we donā€™t even want to arrive where our ‘progress’ is taking us. The unfortunate but practical fact for control-seekers is that the attempts to control both others and ourselves actually lead to a kind of slavery, only in this version we become both the slave and the slave master at the same time . . .

Our insatiable appetite for control is the action that is causing the major sustainability crises of our time. We are attempting to control nature, both external and internal, to satiate our fear that comes from feeling separate . . . and through these attempts at control, we are increasingly limiting the freedom of the world, whether it is the right of the forest to exist in a particular place or it is the freedom of people to roam about their planetary home.”

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2 COMMENTS

  1. Animals are individuals.

    No animal has to read a textbook on how it “should” conduct itself.

    Humans are extremly mixed up creatures who think they are not animals. They think they must fatten their minds with lofty logic to pass as this century’s notion of “a good person”. This is because they are taught that not having intelligence means they are “a dumb animal”.

    Animals do not give a flying fluck about “the universe”, in academic terms. Animals JUST BE. That is how they BECOME the universe.

    Animals stay academically stupid and eschew all “lessons lessons lessons” of any cerebral sort. They accept “no lessons” and they preach “no lessons”. They need no teachings about Oneness. They BE it. By intellectually knowing nothing much about it or about anything.

    Animals cannot tie their shoelaces and yet….

    No animals cause wars.

    Much of the clarion call to bow to a Oneness God, especially over the internet, is a clarion call to bow to the God that Supreme Logic has become to billions.

    When logic is underfed emotions…then logic is like a rifle.

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  2. If you look to animals you will find lots of examples of cultural learning, or complex problem solving, of number counting, ordering, controlling their environment, going to war with one another and other animals, of cultural theft, of oppression, of enslavement of animals by other animals, and none of them being troubled by the universe beyond their environment, and that in itself is their gift and curse.

    Most humans understand that they are indeed animals, that they evolved from some very fundamental life-forms, on this prison of a planet, and that they live lives not that different to all the other creatures: that they must find food, compete, learn, avoid death, join with others, exploit others, develop social bonds, present themselves to others as healthy, and sexually attractive, and procreate, get old, if they are lucky/unlucky, and snuff it.

    “Our insatiable appetite for control is the action that is causing the major sustainability crises of our time. We are attempting to control nature, both external and internal, to satiate our fear that comes from feeling separate . . . and through these attempts at control, we are increasingly limiting the freedom of the world, whether it is the right of the forest to exist in a particular place or it is the freedom of people to roam about their planetary home.ā€

    If we had 7 billion people emancipated from this fear of separation from the universe, emancipated from their need to control and live under the yolk of control, and were freely wandering the Earth, doing as they please, and being at one with the majestic nothingness that ink-spills outwards forever in every infinite direction… putting aside the conflicts, skirmishes, hippy horrors, and new age gnashings, it would be game over for the poor forests, as they’d be rapidly torn down for eco firewood gatherings, and the animals would be driven back, driven away, because of all the nasty smells and diseases and fungal weirdness they’d bring… other than dogs and cats and other cutey-faced acceptables.

    “Animals do not give a flying fluck about ā€œthe universeā€, in academic terms. Animals JUST BE. That is how they BECOME the universe.” Other than physicists, astronauts and suchlike, no-one in their right mind is going to waste time worrying about the universe either. It’s a massively important nothing burger. It is interesting to make words about, with others, necks craning up at those disappointing scatterbrained pin-pricks, and jazz up some horrendously uninspiring cliches about how big and impossible it all this. And then what?

    Fire up the eco-BBQ and throw some roadkill on…

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